Busy Rascals

Good lord, we are busy in nearly every possible way today. Not only have I had approximately 199,777,446 Fereday project researchers through the doors before lunch, but SEVENTY EIGHT people have visited this blog in the last three hours.

Our usual daily average is about 15 and I think that the staff of Orkney Library and Archive probably account for most of that.

Is the blog coming up high on a google search? When it became known that our gorgeous staff had a photo session yesterday, did Orcadians rush to their computers to gaze upon our pulchritudinous perfection?

Fame at last

Pity the poor photographer who today had to prise reluctant Orkney Library and Archive staff from behind stacks and desks and artfully arrange us around a leather sofa for a group photo.

We resembled a group of gurny teenagers as, ever so slowly and reluctantly, we shuffled our way towards the man with the camera and took up our positions.

The purpose of said photo is an upcoming article for Living Orkney which will finally reveal what truly goes on in this place. Prepare to be amazed.

Lethal drizzle

It has been pretty busy the last two days. Yesterday there were queues of people! This maybe does not seem that outrageous considering that we are open to the public but, in the winter time, most of our customer service is conducted by email, letter or telephone.

It is Fereday time though, so a lot of kids have been in as well as parents and I suppose the ice and snow had been keeping some eager researchers trapped in their homes.

I was delighted to read last night that 'the Turkey Lady' finally made it back home. Yes indeed, it is drizzly, damp and dark again and everything is back to normal.

Heroes

" At four o'clock on the morning of Friday 19 January 1912, the Norwegian barque Adele with eleven of a crew, and bound for Hull with a cargo of pit props, struck a rock-bound point of the island lying open to the full fury of the North Sea. Such was the strength of the gale and the state of the sea at the time that only a few waves were required to shatter in pieces and render unrecognisable all that was left of the ship. On the coming of daylight, the position of matters was clearly revealed - a portion of the after-deck, to which the crew were hanging for dear life, was all that could be seen of the wreck from the land... Providentially the part of the wreck on which the men were had gradually swung in to the south side of the point of rocks on which the vessel had first struck, thus presenting the vague possibility of a rescue being attempted from the shore.

After hours of waiting, and seas continually sweeping over them, four of the men plunged into the sea on the chance of reaching the land; two of them miraculously reached the shore, the other two were either killed or drowned.

At this juncture, Skipper William Sinclair, Constable James Cruickshank and William Wards, fisherman, volunteered to make the attempt to rescue the men still on the piece of wreck. A small open boat was obtained, and carried to the best position, from which it was resolved to make the attempt and from which the three men started.

The danger was not only from the breakers, but also from the great mass of cargo and wreckage which was being tossed hither and thither. They, however, reached the wreck to which seven of the men were still clinging. The getting of them into the boat was no easy matter, owing to the enormous seas and the frenzied haste of the shipwrecked sailors, but this was managed successfully after a time, when, watching their chance of a 'smooth' at imminent risk to their now overloaded boat, they made for the rocks from which they started and arrived there is safety."

The three brave rescuers received Bronze Medallions and £20 each from the Carnegie Hero fund which was founded in 1908. The image above shows their entries in the Carnegie Roll of Honour. The book is kept in the Andrew Carnegie birthplace museum in Dunfermline and contains over 6000 names. The medallion is the trust's highest honour and less than 200 have been awarded to date. This Andrew Carnegie is the same man who helped build libraries all over the world including the Orkney Library and Archive's previous home in Laing Street.

Information taken from Orkney Archive reference D1/980

Yeah!!!!!!!

At long last, the sun has re-appeared and we can see our colleagues' faces once more. There were a couple of days last week that literally didn't ever get light and it felt like we were all doing the night-shift.

In fact, we are a little giddy with this unexpected sun light and some mirth has been experienced despite some of us having to do some quite complicated sums to work out the volume of archives that we hold.

Working out statistics is an important part of archive work. We calculate visitor statistics, photocopying statistics, spatial statistics, volume of requests per customer, type of archive requested, daily requests, monthly requests, yearly requests etc. etc. etc. Consequently, administration is also a large part of the job.

The Wind in the Willows

It is pretty blustery today in Orkney and there are therefore some very creepy noises to be heard in our wind-trap of a building. The strongrooms can be particularly terrifying as the windows are fitted with wooden blocks to keep the sunlight out. This seems to create a strange semi-vacuum that can suddenly erupt right next to you as you peacefully file away the archives.

This is nothing, however, compared to the devastation that greeted Orcadians on the morning of 15th January 1952. The pictures above show the sort of damage that the 135m/ph 'hurricane' left in it's wake. Shops were razed to the ground, doors and roofs were whipped off, never to be seen again and the thriving Orkney egg business was badly damaged with entire coops of hens being swept away with their inhabitants still inside.

The destruction was no surprise to anyone as it had been impossible to sleep through a storm of such violence. Some had been shaken from their beds and one Sanday man was forced to flee his house in just his pants, tee hee.

Unfortunately, this was just one storm in a run of terrible weather for Orkney. The previous year, a storm had pulled down electricity lines; in 1953 another terrible storm battered sea fronts and exposed water pipes plus there were floods in both 1953 and 1954.

Inspiration!

Pictured above is an excerpt from the dialect poem 'The New Year's Ba' of Auchty-Twa' (By the way, should I have put an apostrophe at the end of Ba? Apparently it is not necessary if you view Orcadian as a stand-alone dialect rather than an incorrect form of English. For example, Kirkwall was originally 'Kirkwa' as derived from Kirkjuvagr, but it was thought by English cartographers that this was an Orcadian way of saying Kirkwall!)

These verses appeared in the Orcadian and are sung to the tune of 'Bailie Nicol Jarvis' Dream.'

The words paint a very potent picture of the character of the ba'. I particularly like the lines:

'And faces hashed,

And noses bashed,

And legs were smashed,

And windows crashed,

And wa's were knockit doon man!'

Year of Orkney Dialect

2010, according to the Orkney Heritage Society, is to be the year of Orkney Dialect. This celebration of local voices kicked off with a poetry reading at the Lynnfield hotel and continues with an Orkney Dialect Poetry Competition.

Entry forms for the competition can be picked up in the archive and you can read about it here. Whilst in the archive, prospective poets may want to gain inspiration from the many books of Orkney literature and Orcadian dictionaries in the Orkney Room or listen to recordings of poets such as Robert Rendall reading their dialect poems. You can also read the various writings we hold that discuss the use of dialect.

Robert Rendall himself believed that the 'kailyard' could be escaped if dialect was used in a contemporary and non-sentimental manner. He was also wary of 'Lallans', a 'synthetic Scots' blend of various types of words; archaic, contemporary, lowlands, North East which he regarded as a type of Scottish Esperanto i.e. self-concious and unnatural. He felt that the magic of dialect derived from its localness.

Another great Orcadian poet, Edwin Muir, thought that to make their mark and to become 'complete' as authors then Scottish poets had to write their work in English.

The use of dialect is still going strong, however, see Morag MacInnes' 2008 poetry sequence on Orcadian sailor Isobel Gunn, 'Alias Isobel', for example.

There will also be a related exhibit of relevant documents in the archive from the start of next week.

Information taken from:
An Island Shore, selected writings of Robert Rendall edited by Neil Dickson
Edwin Muir - Poet, Critic and Novelist by Marjory McCulloch
D27/2/7 - Robert Rendall papers - 'Notes on the Use of Dialect.'

Fereday strikes again...

This is the time of year when our clientele gets a little younger-looking. The Fereday Prize, which this year is being entered by students from both Stromness Academy and Kirkwall Grammar, is due sometime around the end of this month. We expect to see most of the kids on the last Saturday of the month as it was ever thus.

We have more staff on at weekends in January in order to provide for Fereday students as they are unlikely to have time to visit us during the week.

Part of the Fereday mandate, however, is for the projects to bring new material into the archive. Interviews, personal photographs and chats with family members are therefore just as valuable as information from books, archives and websites.

Each year we are amazed anew at how eager some parents are to *ahem* help their children. In my day, you had to do your homework yourself...

New Year Song update

Thanks to Lynn (see comment below)for pointing out that you can listen to the New Year Song we posted yesterday on the wonderful Big Orkney Song Project website.

The Big Orkney Song Project is an effort to collect Orcadian songs either by research (here in the library and archive) or by sharing orally through the Song Share events that have been taking place over the last year or so. The project has received money from the Heritage Lottery Fund and is being overseen by Sarah Jane Gibbon ( a former archive employee), Amy Leonard and Emily Turton who, together, perform as the Songshop Trio.

The Wonderful World of 1940s Adverts (Part 4.)

Surely if you looked like this, which brand of shaving cream you used would be the least of your problems.

Anyway, it has been very quiet in the archives so far this year. The roads are still like mirrors and it is so cold that you want to lie down and cry on your walk to work.

It is good that we have not been busy, however, as one staff member was trapped South by snow and another has been struck by the flu leaving our numbers much depleted.

We don't even have glitzy Christmas decs to lift our spirits! Where's the love, as Hanson once sang?

Happy New Year!

Finally, we can access the blog again! (Technical difficulties were experienced)

A very happy New Year from the Orkney Archive. Are you saying 'twenty ten' or 'two thousand and ten'? David Hockney says that we should be saying the first one, so I'll follow him.

Pictured above is a copy of the words and music for the New Year Song which was (is?) sung in Orkney and Shetland each New Year. There are slightly different versions for each parish but all seem to refer to 'Queen Mary'. Ernest Walker Marwick and Stanley Cursiter believed that this might not be a reference to any Royal Queen such as Mary Queen of Scots, but to the Virgin Mary.

The pavements have thawed slightly, so we are no longer slithering to work but these sub-zero temperatures are hard to take! We are lucky compared to many in the South, however. Roll on Spring...

The document and information is taken from the Ernest Walker Marwick collection and has the reference D31/1/2/5

Festive Opening Hours

Christmas do, come on and do the conga...

Here you go. As promised, photos from our Friday night shindig. I think you'll agree that it was a glitzy, sophisticated and surprisingly star-studded event. Leo brought some lovely home-made mince pies and Oprah was a right laugh.

Winter Solstice

Today is the shortest day of the year and, under this heavy grey sky, it certainly feels like it. We've had our first big snowfall of the winter and the few people outside are either scurrying past in swathes of wool and Berghaus or shovelling snow and spreading salt in reflective jackets.

A lucky group of people will be spending sunset (which will occur at 3.15pm according to The Orcadian website) in Maeshowe, Stenness.

This Neolithic tomb, consisting of entrance passage and mound-like burial chamber, is thought to date back to around 3000BC. On the shortest days of the year, the final rays of the setting sun spread down the entrance passage and project a golden door shape onto the back wall of the chamber. The event can be seen on this live web-feed: http://www.maeshowe.co.uk/.

Pictured is the illustration accompanying our signed copy of George Mackay Brown's beautiful poem Maeshowe Winter. The page is decorated with silver glitter and the words lighten up this short dark little day.

'Children sing under a street lamp, their voices like leaves of light.'