TULLIMENTAN

I've just been to the Radio Orkney studio to take part in Tullimentan's Book Group. Tullimentan is Radio Orkney's monthly arts programme and will be broadcast tomorrow night locally. If you are on Facebook you can click the link above to see more of what they do.

The group is presented by Fionn McArthur and run by local writer Morag MacInnes and today we discussed Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O'Sullivan.

It's the autobiography of the author's years growing up on the Great Blasket, the largest of the Blasket Islands of the south west coast of Ireland.

It is a charming account - in the way only an account by a native Gael can be - with prose that reads like poetry flowing and undulating like the islands themselves. 

'Be up at the chirp of the sparrow, so,' they say to one another if they need to be up early for some ploy. Like catching rabbits or puffins, or stealing off to the Ventry Races in defiance of their parents' wishes.

Every adventure has an epic quality and it's easy to imagine it being told and retold round the fire till it rings like the myths and stories of old Ireland. 

And it captures a way of life that was disappearing even by the time the author was in his teens, for his sisters and friends were all heading off for America, leaving behind their ageing parents:

'The chief livelihood - that's the fishing - is gone under foot, and when the fishing is gone under foot the Blasket is gone under foot, for all the boys and girls who have any vigour in them will go over the sea ... Suppose now that we stayed at home to care for [our parents], maybe we would be threescore years of age before we would lay the last clod on them in Ventry churchyard, and then we would be too old to go anywhere and who would lay the clod on ourselves?'

This is Maurice's account of a conversation with one of the girls still on the island. A couple of years later he is gone himself to Dublin.

So it's an elegy for a lost way of life, beautifully written and as immediate as if it had just happened. These are stories that have gained, not lost in the retelling - stories of encounters with whales that might overset the curragh and drown all the men in it; of curragh races; of hunting for rabbits and thrushes and seabirds to eat; of the beauty of the light on the island and the flowers and bird life.

And even the routine brutality of schoolmistresses and masters described near the beginning takes on a humourous, lightsome quality through the lilting language, though it can't have been experienced like that.

It puts me in mind of Seamus Heaney's poem, Senior Infants from District and Circle:

'...Well, for Jesus' sake', cried Duffy, coming at me

with his stick in the air and two wide open arms,

'For Jesus' sake! D'you mind the sally rod?'

This was the willow wand the infants' teacher used to 'cut the legs off' them, remembered seventy years later as soon as Duffy clapped eyes on his old classmate, Seamus. But it has the same lightness and humour that O'Sullivan uses in his book. Maybe it is a strong strand in Irish literary tradition, because Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt has a similar way of expressing unimaginable horrors with a touch that makes it bearable. It could be we have to turn to John McGahern to get the other side of it.

But made light of or no, the stories in Twenty Years A-Growing are as vivid now as when they were lived and that's no mean feat.

On the very last page the author describes returning after two years in Dublin:

'There was a great change in two years - green grass growing on the paths for lack of walking; five or six houses shut up and the people gone out to the mainland; fields which had once had fine stone walls around them left to ruin; the big red patches on the Sandhills made by the feet of the boys and girls dancing - there was not a trace of them now.'

It's an experience islanders will recognise. Certainly there were many echoes for those of us who grew up in Orkney.

Morag led a good discussion today with Caroline Wickam-Jones, Jack MacInnes and me. If you miss it on Radio Orkney tomorrow night, you will be able to hear it on Sound Cloud from Thursday. Meantime, here's a link to the February edition of Tullimentan.

AND HERE IS THE LINK TO THE MARCH TULLIMENTAN ON SOUND CLOUD

Betty's Reading Room

The other day at the Radio Orkney studio, Fionn McArthur asked me if I'd been to Betty's Reading Room yet. I hadn't, though I'd seen Fionn's report on BBC Scotland News and was intrigued.

Well, it was a beautiful day for a drive out the West Mainland to Tingwall Jetty, so I seized the moment.

I wasn't disappointed. Crammed with books and strategically placed sofas, with all sorts of quirky and interesting objects round about, Betty's Reading Room is a place you could easily lose yourself and shed the stresses of the world for an hour or two.

The Reading Room came into being when Craig Mollison and Jane Spiers lost a good friend, Betty Prictor. What could they do, they wondered to commemorate her life and spirit.

They renovated an old cottage at Tingwall, donated to them by the farmer who owned it, and turned it into a truly inspirational tribute to their old friend.

                                               

Boats and books, hares and books, cows and cats and hares and books, lamps and pictures and books  ...

And outside hens pecking about in the grass.

Here's reading to you, Betty! Thank you Jane and Craig for a lovely place to take time out.

In the Tardis with Orkney Photographic Archive

It's impossible to spend only a day in the Photographic Archives at Orkney Library & Archive and get to grips with what an amazing place it is and what a resource for the community.

Only the other day on Radio Orkney, I heard a piece about the Westray Heritage Trust who are mounting an exhibition of photographs by Robert Heddle Robertson from 100 years ago, and inviting today's islanders to take photographs of the same locations, in the same seasons. It will give a fascinating insight into how Westray folk lived then and how they live now.

Many of the photographs by RH Robertson came from Orkney Photographic Archives which holds over 2,500 of his glass plates. 

Senior archivist, David Mackie, manages the archive and Colin Rendall looks after it and does the printing of negatives for members of the public. He is passionate about the value of them as an historic collection and as a resource for Orkney, the islands they depict through the ages.

Colin gave me a tour of the archives. First, he invited me into his Tardis, a cylindrical division between the public office and the dark room, where he time-travels regularly back to far off days in Orkney. Well, at least as far back as photography goes.

He told me that the earliest dated photographic print held here is this one from 1863 of the Channel Fleet in Kirkwall Bay. It came as a surprise to me to think of photography being around at the same time as a naval fleet made up of sailing ships. There are possibly earlier photographs too among the collection, but with no dates on them, that can't be verified.

Waving in the Light

While I was there, Colin was dealing with a customer who wanted a print of an aerial photograph of East Road in Kirkwall. In the dark room, he showed me the process he goes through to create a negative from the existing print and then develop it. 

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed Colin waving his fingers above the developing photograph. This, he tells me, is how you control how much light gets through, so that more detail will show up on dark areas of the print. And sure enough, suddenly the dark shadows at the edges lifted to reveal bushes and plants. 

To an amateur like me whose only experience of manipulating photographs has been in the digital age through Photoshop, this was fun!


Equipped to Develop

I'm used to the slick-looking tools of the digital era, so the machinery housed in the back rooms of the archives look like museum pieces. And in a sense they are. Except that equipment like this which will develop film, is increasingly hard to come by. As Archive Technician, it is Colin's job to keep the machines in good working order, so that they will continue to provide prints of the thousands of glass plates and film negatives stored by the archive. 

Negative to Print

Colin looked out an example of a glass plate and the print that was made from it so that I could photograph them - with my little digital camera! - for the blog.

Glass plate negative

The print from the negative

This is a Tom Kent photograph of two little girls standing in Dundas Crescent, Kirkwall, taken between 1898 and 1936, the period covering his work, but clearly, going by the style of the clothes, dating from the earlier years of the 20th century if not the end of the 19th. The details, the 'nowness' of the instant captured, with the long shadows cast by that day's sun, are astonishing.

Tom Kent

The Drowned & Stony Road to Conservation

Colin is quite convinced that digital photography will never match film for the quality of light and detail, so it is in all our interests to preserve what we have in Orkney Photographic Archive and guard it with our lives. 

But there has been many a blood-curdling mishap in the process of collecting and safeguarding the work of our early photographers. In the 1930s two young boys came across some dirty old pieces of glass down a lane off Broad Street in Kirkwall. They lined them up against a wall and threw stones at them. What lay in smithereens at their feet when they'd finished were some of Tom Kent's plates. 

RH Robertson

A truck load of the glass plates of RH Robertson was intercepted on its way to be dumped in a quarry in Westray. 

And a diver diving in Stromness harbour found some funny looking pieces of glass with dark markings on them. They turned out to be the photographic plates of William Hourston.

William Hourston

Luckily, the archives still hold 4,830 of Tom Kent's plates, 2,917 of RH Robertson's and 1,045 of William Hourston's, as well as many images by other photographers. Between 1867 and 1914, forty two photographers were listed as working in Orkney.

I asked Colin what message he'd like to get across to people in Orkney about the archives. In the mildest, gentlest tones possible, difficult to convey in the bold type necessary to make it stand out, he said,

'Don't throw away old photos or negatives. I've had folk saying to me, I wish I'd known this place was here, I wouldn't have burnt my granny's old photos. I didn't think they would be of any interest. 

'Please let us be the judge of that. Take them here and we can make copies of them and give you back the originals. Or we can keep them here and preserve them. Family photographs can be valuable social documents, showing how work, culture, customs, clothes, buildings or even scenery in the background have changed over time in Orkney.'  

Connections

I had to work quite hard to extract permission from Colin to show the photo above. A talented photographer himself, though modest to the point of self-effacement, he took this picture in February 1978. It looks so like the big seas we've had in Orkney in the past few days, it seemed an apt image to end with. My digital photo of the print doesn't nearly do it justice.

Dougie Shearer

Colin learned his photography from another notable Orkney practitioner, Dougie Shearer, who was also his fiddle teacher. He taught Colin how to process negatives and how to alter the appearance of a print while it was in the developing fluid by lifting out a bit you wanted lighter, and splashing bits you wanted darker. An even earlier version of waving your fingers over the developing print! Colin told me that Dougie was so particular and careful that he passed on a deep and serious knowledge of the processes of photography that has stayed with him ever since.

Thank you to Colin Rendall, David Mackie and Bobby Leslie for the information in this blog. And thank you to David for permission to use information from a paper he produced for the New Orkney Antiquarian Journal Volume 5, entitled, The Orkney Photographic Archive.

Look out for the next blog for more images and information about the different photographers.