No, it’s not a description of how we are all feeling as we plough on through the seventy third day of January, but a headline from the front page of the Orkney Herald of 18th January 1955.
It’s a wild day here today as the tail end of Storm Éowyn arrived
last night; some staff have commented that matchsticks might be needed to keep
eyes open after a restless night worrying about roof tiles and being woken by actual
real scaredy cats (and dogs!). We are
very lucky here though to be north of the worst of this ‘once in a generation
storm’ and spare a thought for our friends ‘sooth’ who have borne the brunt of
it.
In our current archive display we turned our minds back
to some other extreme winter weather. Being
so far north, many expect Orkney to be cold and snowy in winter, but our
maritime climate and the impact of the gulf stream means that we don’t often
get our sledges out. The toboggans
would have been well used seventy years ago though when Orkney was paralysed by
wintry storms. A blizzard in mid-January
1955, followed by another a month later, trapped the county beneath snow which
drifted to ten feet deep. The islands
were brought to a standstill for ten days on each occasion.
On Wednesday January 12th heavy snow fell all day, driven by 70mph winds. By early afternoon, almost every road was blocked, cars were abandoned in deep drifts and over 100 schoolchildren were trapped at schools across the county. The The Orkney Herald on Tuesday 18th January 1955 painted a bleak picture:
“The general picture is one of isolation; town and country are separated from each other by deep drifts of frozen snow, and hundreds of farms have become completely detached units…
The paper reported that six snow-ploughs and 150 men
struggled in vain to open the mainland roads.
The Stromness to Kirkwall road was cleared for one hour on Saturday 15th
January allowing stranded schoolchildren to return home, before being filled
again with drifts.
“First contact between Kirkwall and Stromness in two days was established by two men on Friday who foot-slogged it through the deep snow. They set out from Stromness on Thursday afternoon and reached Kirkwall 24 hours later…
…They walked right over one van without at first realising it was there. The snow rang strangely hollow beneath their feet and on investigating they found they were on top of a Post Office van…
…The two foot-sloggers did their good turn too when they pulled to safety sheep which were smothering in drifts.”
In some areas, supplies were air-dropped by the RAF and the lifeboats were also put to good use taking people to hospital and work, and transporting supplies to areas which had been cut off by the snow. The Stromness lifeboat was called out on Tuesday 18th January to transport provisions to Sandwick in the West Mainland, which had been completely isolated for 6 days, and four men rowed out in two small boats from Skaill to meet it.
Freddie Isbister and Jim Linklater collect supplies from the Lifeboat
L4095/4 614
One of the lovely things about working in the archive is the
satisfaction gained when we tie threads together and although we held several photos
of this event in our Copy Collection, we had no information about them. By using the local newspapers and a school
project from 1990 about the local shop (D70/12/2 Fereday Project, 80 Years of
Isbister Bros by Erin Davidson) we now have the date and the names of the hardy
rowers - Freddie Isbister, Jim Linklater Senior, Jim Linklater Junior and Tommy Spence.
Another chance comment helped us to gather more information about the day the first blizzard hit:
The Orcadian,
Thursday 20th January 1955
One of the Archive’s regular users and volunteers, Patricia Long, saw the display and reminisced about her mother’s experience. Kathleen Leask was one of the passengers on this bus but wasn’t named in the newspaper report above. We are very fortunate that Kathleen’s memories were recorded by her daughter, and serialised in Living Orkney magazine.
“There was no sign of any snow until we were past Finstown but the sky over Stromness was jet black. I’ve never seen a sky like it. We came into the snow then and by the time we were passing Tormiston it was so thick that we couldn’t see the telegraph poles at the side of the road. Then, right at the foot of the kirk road, the bus got stuck in a drift.
“I think there were seven of us on the bus: me, John Garson, Archie Bevan, Isa Robertson, two commercial travellers and an old wife on her way home from hospital. She wasn’t going to be able to walk through the snow so two of the men walked over the field to the farm of Barnhouse and two of the servant-men there came with a blanket and carried her to the farmhouse,
“The rest of us followed and were welcomed into the house by Andrew Rendall and his housekeeper Mrs Scollay. They gave us tea, made us comfortable in the sitting-room and were making arrangements for the night when my cousin, Jean Muir at the Stenness Post Office, rang saying she had two spare beds, because her daughters, along with all the other country bairns at the academy, were stuck in Stromness.”
Kathleen’s husband-to-be, Peter Leith, walked the half-mile down the hill to the Stenness shop and Jean sent him to Barnhouse to collect Kathleen. The snow had stopped falling by then so they managed the quarter-mile walk through the drifts in the early evening without much difficulty. Archive Bevan decided to walk with them and then kept going to Stromness, arriving home very late that night.
The snow plough didn’t get through until Saturday and the bus passengers weren’t the only travellers marooned in Stenness. A cartload of wedding guests spent a couple of days at Tormiston, on their way home from waving Robbie and Elsie Sutherland off at the airport and Mrs Heywood took in a lorry load of council workmen at the Stenness Hotel.
The snow lingered for weeks and Stromness was completely cut off, as the road was thoroughly blocked at the junction where the Sandwick road meets the Kirkwall-Stromness road. A fishing boat carried passengers and supplies between Stromness and Scapa and that’s how Kathleen got back to work some days later.
From Living Orkney, ‘A peep into the past’, Part 3
Pages 33-34, Issue 54, May 2010
Tying together the newspaper snippet with Kathleen’s
reminiscences gives a much fuller picture of the event. It would be lovely if we could also name the
poor lady returning from hospital too! The stranded wedding guests were also mentioned in the local papers:
We are hoping to gather more information about these blizzards from people who remember the events or have been told stories from parents and grandparents through the years. If you would like to contribute then you can reminisce below or send us your story on archives@orkney.gov.uk and we’ll add it to our display.
Stay safe and warm out there, and don't forget to tether your trampolines and barricade your wheelie bins!
