Winter Solstice Poems

George Mackay Brown from his Collected Poems



Margaret Tait Orkney Archive Reference D97/45/3/5/4

Great Tait

There were many exhibitions on Margaret Tait's life and work at the end of last year to celebrate her centenary. We recently received the last archives back from an exhibition at GOMA and they are being unpacked and put back in their boxes, much to the relief of Dusty. (She is the archives' doting mother. If she could make them hot toddys and beat up their bullies, she would)


One of the items is a small photograph album with some rarely-seen images of Margaret as a young women; before she qualified as a doctor, before she began Ancona films with fellow students in Italy and before she became the first Scottish woman to direct a feature film.

Margaret and her brother Maxwell in 1921/2. She would have been about 3.





Age 18 in 1936.

Margaret as a slightly older child

In N. France with a friend, aged around 20.

Portrait, no date.

Looking glam in Dundee, 1940.

Blue Black Permanent was released in 1992 and was nominated for a Scottish Bafta for Best Film.

Margaret Tait 100

Margaret Caroline Tait, Orcadian film maker, poet and medical doctor was born, one hundred years ago tomorrow, on the 11th November 1918 - Armistice Day.

Her family lived in a flat on Broad Street, opposite St Magnus Cathedral and so would have heard the ships honking in the harbour and seen the bunting bedecked streets from their window on that day.

Tait trained as a doctor in Edinburgh after primary schooling in Kirkwall and a secondary education in Edinburgh. She enlisted in 1943 and served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the UK and the Far East where she began to write short stories.

Margaret Tait's Italian Student Matriculation Card with photograph dated 1947.
Orkney Archive Reference D97/1/6

After some time working as a locum doctor (and writing screenplays) in various parts of Britain, Tait travelled to Perugia in 1950 to research a film. She ended up abandoning the proposed film and instead enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia film school in Rome for a two year course. This led to the formation of Ancona films with fellow student Peter Hollander.

Margaret Tait and Peter Hollander
Orkney Archive Reference D97/44/5

For the next 46 years, Tait worked under the banner of Ancona films, largely alone and in various Scottish locations, making short films which were partly funded by her continuing work as a locum. Books of poetry were also produced, short stories and a children's book. She made watercolours, wrote a novel and took photographs.

Watercolour design for film Painted Eightsome.
Orkney Archive Reference D97/44/2

In 1992, Tait finally directed her long gestated feature film Blue Black Permanent at the age of 72.

Continuity polaroids used during the filming of Blue Black Permanent.
Orkney Archive Reference D97/13

When she died at the age of 80 in April 1999, her husband Alec gifted several crates worth of letters, photographs, poems, screenplays, paintings, personal diaries, filming diaries, notebooks and personal documents to the library and archive. 48 boxes worth have been catalogued and are available to view.

Several items are currently on loan to GOMA in Glasgow, Summerhall in Edinburgh and Northlight in Stromness, all of whom are currently hosting exhibitions celebrating Margaret Tait's centenary. There is also a small display in the Orkney Room in the Orkney Library & Archive.

If you are unable to visit us in person, then please see below for more images from our exhibit and click here to watch her films.

Poster and ticket for the 1955 Rose Street Film Festival held in Margaret Tait's Edinburgh flat.
Orkney Archive Reference D97/23/1/19&20 



Storyboard for Blue Black Permanent
Orkney Archive Reference D97/26/8

Orkney Archive Reference D97/13

Happy National Poetry Day

Published poetry collections can be found in the Orkney Room

Regular Radio Orkney listeners will have heard poems by Margaret Tait being read out every day this week in honour of National Poetry Day.




Not heard of Margaret Tait? Simply click here to see our previous blog posts, click here to listen again to Radio Orkney's morning broadcasts and click here to watch her films.


The Orkney Library and Archive hold Margaret Tait's archive of poems, correspondence and working papers and we also keep published copies of her collections of poetry. Those of you who are already fans may wish to read unpublished poems from her collection as well as her many working diaries made during filmshoots and peruse the lovely watercolour paintings which were recently shown at the Pier Arts Centre.

Manuscript of Origins and Elements, Orkney Archive reference D97/46/2/3/1

Manuscript of The Hen and the Bees, Orkney Archive reference D97/46/2/3/2

 

Unpublished writings, Orkney Archive reference D97/46/2/1



D97/44/2/23



75 minutes until sunset...

Above is the view from the archive window today as it is the winter solstice and that means a day of approximately 12 seconds in this Northern hinterland. THE SUN SHALL SET AT 3.15pm TODAY!!!


Of course, our microscopic winter days are eventually replaced by epic Summer nights and today is actually lovely and clear but we do like to complain.

Poem by Margaret Tait. Orkney Archive Reference D97/45/3/4

Don't Talk To Me In That Phone!

We are still cataloguing some of Margaret Tait's papers and. as always, some of the most fascinating pieces have been her journals and notebooks when she just writes about...stuff. What's in the news, what she thinks of it, conversations she's overheard, random thoughts that pop into her head; they are always interesting and quite often rather ahead of their time or still relevant.


The journal I am cataloguing at the moment dates from 1964 and contains notes, sketches and musings. If you substitute the words 'an iphone' with 'a book' in the following excerpts, then you have a pretty accurate depiction of 21st century life:

From box D97/47 - currently closed as being catalogued.

We of course never read our iphones when others are talking to us. Unless we're checking the weather of course. Or looking at cinema times. Or checking our running stats. Or seeing if our baby is still awful on the awful baby app. Or looking for pokemon.


Apart from all those times, we NEVER do it.




P.S.


Let's have a Friday afternoon boogie:








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIK5M1WSxW4

Margaret Tait in Living Colour

The delightful image above is taken from the Margaret Tait collection and is a painting of her wonderful eightsome reel figures which feature in the animated film Painted Eightsome which can be seen here.






We also found the fiddled-diddledy figure's genesis in one of her notebooks:

If you like the film then pop along to the Pier Arts Centre before the 7th of June. Their current exhibition Living Colour celebrates the animation work of several artists including Margaret Tait and a number of films shall be screened.

 Supporting material from the Orkney Archive including copies of Margaret Tait's watercolour sketches plus correspondence about her film making are also part of the exhibition.

If you are not in Orkney, or shall not make it to the exhibition, then you can take a look at one of the films being shown here:



Painting: Orkney Archive Reference D97/44/2
Notebook: Orkney Archive Reference D97/28/15

Missing Home...

We are almost finished cataloguing the Margaret Tait papers... only a couple of boxes to go now.

The last two boxes have been a treasure of unpublished poems and other pieces of writing. There are many gems but this excerpt taken from one handwritten page touched us today.

'I miss Buttquoy. I miss the sun streaming in.
I miss its openness, its airy spaces.
I miss the freedom of the staircase
It had a good feeling in it      not grand, not poky.
The grates were well placed in relation to the doors.
Everything there was pretty well right, in size and placing-
Good fireplaces, where a coal or peat fire heated the room
I liked the height of the rooms, I miss that too.'


(The Tait family home, Buttquoy house was vacated by Tait in 1975. Her colour film, Place Of Work, as well as a black and white companion piece Tailpiece, were filmed in the house in the last few months before her departure.)

One Feels Like Chicken Tonight...

Poor old royals, they must be feeling really ignored poor dears. William wed Kate in a modest little ceremony, barely attended; the Queen's diamond jubilee slipped by with nary a party popper and would it have killed us to let them join in a little with all that Olympics hoop-la?

I do hope that there is something done to mark our Queen's coronation which was 60 years ago today. We shall be eating coronation chicken sandwiches whilst enacting pivotal fight scenes from coronation street but we are very loyal subjects so don't put pressure on yourselves.

These photos of the event, taken by Margaret Tait, were found in the box of her papers currently being catalogued:

As you can see, Tait has noted that the coronation happened on the same day that Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay conquered Mount Everest. This is not strictly true; the summit was reached on the 29th of May 1953 but the news only reached London on the morning of the coronation.

Great Tait #2

Not long until the Orkney Book Festival begins on April 14th. There are two evenings of films and talks devoted to Margaret Tait and we have put together a small exhibition from our collection of Tait's papers in the archive searchroom.

Come and have a look at scripts, photographs, letters and notebooks which show how valued Margaret Tait's work was both within and outside of Orkney.

A Chance For You to See What We've Been Banging On About For So Long...

Films and talks about Margaret Tait?

Films by Margaret Tait?

Yes Please!

See you all there. We'll be the ones at the back with bells on.

Hello, You Fool, I Love You!

This morning, a strange yellow light was detected over the town of Kirkwall. The light had a definite warming quality to it and was all-pervading; penetrating every window, cracks around front doors and the gaps between curtains.

Citizens were alarmed until one of the older folk chuckled wisely and said 'It's chist the sun! Do you no mind the sun?' Ah... the sun, welcome back old friend, we have missed you. We're a bit annoyed at your tardyness, if we're honest, but better late than never I suppose.

Here are some things from our collection which remind us of you. Wait... don't go... come back! We didn't mean to scare you!

A Rousay Picnic, c.1950.

Magnus Spence's notebook on Sun Worship in Orkney D32/3/20

Stromness Swimming Club, 1958

Kirkwall Swimming Gala in the basin.

The Sun newspaper's ridiculous take on Margaret Tait making Blue Black Permanent.





Alice, Margaret and Their Rivers

The St Magnus Festival has drawn to a close once more and, yet again, some fabulously talented performers have thrilled, moved and delighted both Orkney dwellers and visitors alike.

The poet Alice Oswald performed her work in both Stromness and Kirkwall and amazed audiences by reciting lengthy selections from several of her collections FROM MEMORY. With one foot tapping in time with her poetry's rythymn, back-lit by the stained glass sunlight of King Street Halls, she seemed, as a fellow audience member put it, 'a force of nature'.

On Monday, she shared a couple of excerpts from Dart, her T.S. Eliot Prize-winning 2002 poem which follows the River Dart from its source - Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor - to the sea.

This reminded me of Margaret Tait's film Orquil Burn which followed a body of water from the sea in search of its source. When writing about its making, Tait said:

"Strange, strange people asked me why I went from sea to source and not from source to sea. 'Why not' they said, so so puzzled, not the more obvious the more logical direction of source to sea. It was a voyage of discovery. Exploration. They wanted me to know beforehand where it started, what it all is. A river is known in its busy part. You follow it up. Those puzzled people think you know it all, so you can start with the Source, the cause, and demonstrate the issue. All already known." D97/32

Diary of Orquil Burn production, D97/11/2

Transcript of Orquil Burn commentary D97/12/1

Leaflet for Orquil Burn D97/12/1

Still from Orquil Burn - Scottish Screen Archive.