Attitudes to incomers in Barra, Vatersay, Falkland, and King...

Original Track ID

SA1986.162

Original Tape ID

SA1986.162

Summary

Attitudes to incomers in Barra, Vatersay, Falkland, and Kingskettle.

Flora Brown told Ray Fisher that she had a hard time on Vatersay after she married an Englishman. Morag Fisher doesn't remember any hostility to incomers when she was young, but thinks it might have arisen in the 1960s or 1970s. People in Kingskettle were pleasant to the Fishers, but people in Falkland didn't like incomers. In Vatersay people want houses that are left empty by depopulation to go to people whose forebears are from Vatersay or Barra, nowhere else, not even one of the other islands. Ray mentions a builder from Kirkcaldy who had worked on Barra for twenty years but was only able to buy a house from an incomer, who herself only had the house because she taught at the school.

Ray talks about buying her cottage on Barra. She was accepted because she had connections with the MacDonalds through her mother and grandmother (who was an important person on Vatersay), and with the Galbraiths through her father. People now talk of her cottage as the Fishers' house. They at first thought Colin [Ross, her husband] was Archie [her brother]. When Cilla Fisher and Artie [Trezise] started performing together people thought he was her brother or husband.

Recording Location

Item Location

Language

English

Genre

Information

Collection

SoSS

Source Type

Reel to reel

Audio Quality

Good