Doors Open Orkney 2024

 It is that time of year when buildings, organisations, artists and many other interesting people throw open their doors and bid a hearty welcome to the public. This year, the theme is Routes, Networks and Connections and we thought that this called for a presentation on The Churchill Barriers using photographs and sound archives from our collection:

Hoorah for Volunteers!

 

It is volunteers week and this gives us a chance to celebrate our wonderful band of helpers without whom, the archives would be so much poorer.

The Orkney Archive is heaving at the seams with historical data and yet a collections catalogue and dewey decimal sorted photographic archive can sometimes only scratch the surface for a researcher. The archive staff only really have time to give an idea of what a document can contain. It takes time, lots and lots of time, to really squeeze all the infomation out of each document.

This is where our volunteers step in.

For example: many of our visitors are looking for information about parents, grandparents or other relatives who spent part of their military service in Orkney. We do not hold any war diaries or individual military records (these are held at the National Archives), but we do have issues of the Orkney Blast which detail engagements, sporting events and other little mentions of folk, some snap shots taken of service personnel during their down time, grocery credit lists etc.

So we set up our Service Personel Database, in which our volunteers enter the name, rank and any other information about anyone they find mentioned in items dating from either World War.

Our beautiful Service Personnel Database 

This means that if your great grandfather came third in a darts competition at Ness battery or your granny got engaged at a New Years party at HMS Tern in 1942, then there may be a record of it in our SPD!

Another project which several volunteers are working on is the Photo Index database. This involves entering detailed information about each photo we hold such as people in it, location, objects and date (if we have them). This makes it much easier for visitors to search for individual images as we were restricted to searching by subject matter before.

The exquisite Photo Identification Database

But fear not! It is not all endless databasing - our own Balfour Blogger is a longstanding volunteer who has spent many hours of her life sorting, dating and, more importantly, identifying blogable snippets for us from the enormous Balfour collection:

We have a few volunteers helping to work through this collection.

These are just a few examples of the many projects volunteers have assisted with over the years and we are extremely grateful for all of their hours spent sorting, numbering, transcribing, summarising and compiling.

Our volunteers are not paid but we do make sure to try and feed them tea and cake now and then with coffee morning/afternoons to keep up their strength and to express our gratitude for their diligent work.

Three cheers for volunteers!

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Snapshot on Orphir

A recent addition to our collection is this little booklet all about the parish of Orphir. It was made to accompany a photographic exhibition in June 1992 in Orphir Church, but actually stands on its own with its interesting facts and figures. Topics covered are: Churches; Transport from Horse to Aeroplane; Picnics and Parties; Schools and continuing Education; People; Events; Buildings and Shops; Horses and Ploughing; Island of Cava; Orphir at Work; Orphir at Play; Orphir at War; and Organisations.

Drawing "The Round Church from North East in 1889" Showing remains of old houses of the Bu on the North, now demolished. From a sketch by C. S. S. Johnston

Click on each picture to enlarge the image. 

Orkney Archive Advent Calendar - Christmas On - Duty

Christmas Day 1943 at RAF Skeabrae. The band played throughout the meal.

Images taken from the Gregor Lamb collection.

Shock Symbol

There have been a few articles on the history of the swastika symbol and its appropriation by Nazi Germany recently including this on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29644591 and an interesting programme on Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lsxh5




We were shocked to find it in a copy of a local newspaper in 1939: http://orkneyarchive.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/at-least-its-neat.html

Get Het Up About Hetty...

If you have time, take a look at this wonderful blog by Highland Archives Service. It is called Caithness At War and tells the story of WW2 in real time, starting from August 1939 this past August and, presumably,  continuing into 1940 when the new year arrives.

The weekly articles are illustrated by newspaper clippings and several excerpts from Henrietta 'Hetty' Munro's war time diary which we also hold here at the Orkney Archive. Have a look, do! Do! Go on! Do!

The Aftermath...

Orkney Library and Archive was a shameful sight yesterday morning. The corridors were strewn with burst balloon skins, torn streamers and empty wine bottles, two members of staff were discovered passed out amongst the Mills and Boons and a sad pair of underpants swung slowly from a light fitting.

At least that would be the case if we were not nerdy librarian/archivists who did most of their tidying up on Saturday night. It was Alison's leaving do and the staff gathered to eat, drink and make merry. Homebakes were produced, speeches were made and gifts were presented.

It was a very pleasant, if emotional, evening. Anyone who claims they didn't feel a little moist around the eyes during Alison's speech was either crying a river inside, has a heart of cold, cold steel or is a liar.

Plenty of pictures were taken on the night but it is yet to be established whether they can ever be shown in public. Instead, this post is illustrated with two photos of a staff leaving do which took place just after the Second World War. These pictures were taken when the catering facilities at Lyness were closing so it was a leaving do for all of the staff.

It looks pretty similar to Saturday night's do except we didn't have any hats and they don't seem to have limbo dancing dogs as waiters.

Photographed by: J.W. Sinclair.

Finally Proof (as if we needed it), that it was really chewing gum which got us through the war...

Click to Enlarge.

Click to Enlarge.

Taken from October and November 1940 editions of The Orcadian.

A Confession...

We get a lot of visitors each year who are researching family members who were stationed in Orkney during war time. Although we hold some interesting books and documents which illustrate the general themes and feelings of the time, we do not hold service records or specific information about military or naval personnel.

The place to go for that kind of thing is the National Archives at Kew, Surrey. This page shows the sort of information that is available there.

I thought that it would be useful to point this out as quite a lot of visitors are disappointed by the lack of personal information that we hold on the many men and women who spent their wars on the islands.

We do make up for the lack of cold, hard fact with lots of pictures of jolly parties though, look:

Stanger Head, Flotta, 1st World War.

Hatston Camp, Christmas 1947

Navy Camp at Yesnaby, 1943.

UPDATE: We are working to correct this. Some years ago we started a database and gathered a group of volunteers together to compile it. They painstakingly trawled through our archive items and if they spotted any service personnel mentioned, they added the information to the database. So, we may not have troop movements or know exactly they were based in Orkney, but we may know if they won a boxing match, appeared in a photo or starred in a play. (Dusty, 2024)

Wardrobe Woe

In these days of bargain filled clothes stores where you can pick up three t-shirts for under £5 or a pair of shoes for not much more, most people have an awful lot of clothes. Thanks to the handy invention of child labour, women up and down the country can wail "I have nothing to wear" in front of increasingly bulging wardrobes.

Pictured below is Minna Reid of Rousay's clothing card which ran out on the 31st of May 1942.

On the reverse of the card, there is a list of the number of tokens needed for each item of clothing. When this rationing was sneakily introduced (the original clothing rations were initially labelled 'margarine' to prevent shops being inundated) in 1941, the amount of coupons per adult, per year was 66. This meant that over the course of an entire year, a woman could buy only one coat, one dress, one blouse, one jumper, one skirt, pajamas, one pair of shoes, a scarf, a pair of gloves and but two pairs of pants.

The different colours of tickets were, again, to stop people exchanging all their tokens at once. You could not use a colour until it had been announced by the government.

In 1942, the annual allowance of coupons was cut to 48 so it's not unreasonable to assume that most people spent their war years either knickerless or constantly rinsing out their drawers.

Reference: D1/979/1

Battle Without Honour or Humanity

Okay, our twitter page, lovingly wrought by Stewart, has over 500 followers now. We made an agreement some time ago that we would force the twitter followers to battle the blog followers at Maeshowe on midsummer's eve. Hope that's okay.

The library lot shall wear spectacles and cardigans and shall be armed with hard backed Mills & Boons and specially customised 'loser' stamps to mark their kills. Archive blog followers, you may be few and some of you will have to fly hundreds of miles to join us, but there is a lot of smelly, dusty, old stuff that we can brandish and  loads of scary moths and caterpillars too, so don't worry, there is hope. I thought that you could wear archivists' gloves and 2B pencils tucked behind your ears.

We can probably rope in some volunteers if things get really desperate but all library and archive staff shall be watching from recliners on top of Maeshowe whilst barking strategies through a loud hailer.

The victors shall take home the weird smelly plant which keeps on growing even though we stopped watering it at Christmas. If you think about it, one plant between 12 is better than one shared between 500.

According to a newspaper article I found in the Ernest Walker Marwick collection, we may have company as, up until WW2, black magic rituals took place at the Stones of Stenness


"About 60 people were there" an RAF officer told the Empire News. " all their faces were hooded and wearing blankets. They held candles and incense was burning and it was so packed that some of them couldn't get in. One man with an Orkney accent read the Black mass. And they all chanted, and I swear I can't remember it happening, but certainly there was this brand mark on my leg - a burn- but not painful at all."

Hmmmm, they don't sound like they'll be much of a laugh but we'll see. Book your flights/trains/ferries now!

Information taken from reference: D31/47/3/29