Whenever the poet George Mackay Brown reorganised his library, getting rid of some of the overspill, some books from younger years would always remain. There was the first Penguin book from 1935, a biography of Shelley by André Maurois; and Penguin number 3, Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater. And there was also a book on [...]
With the second edition of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women soon to be published, notable Orkney women were the subject of all six One O’Clock Toasts at the daily lunches of Orkney fare at the Peedie Kirk in this year’s Orkney International Science Festival. And as Jocelyn Rendall pointed out in her toast, the [...]
The lunches of Orkney fare at the Peedie Kirk are among the highlights of the Festival each year, with the One O’Clock Toast to a notable Orcadian. For this year Harvey Johnston went back two centuries to a lady in Stromness who was visited by Sir Walter Scott. She lived on Brinkies Brae and sold [...]
Archie Bevan’s tribute to Robert Shaw was broadcast on BBC Radio Orkney in August 1978 following the actor’s death. It was read by Archie’s son Graham as a One O’Clock Toast in the Peedie Kirk Hall in the 2016 Orkney International Science Festival, and by a very happy coincidence Robert Shaw’s brother and sister and [...]
Gunnie was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1941. Later Gunnie Moberg would say she would like to be remembered as a Swedish Orcadian. And it is that embedding of Orkney into the identity of Gunnie and the symbiotic nature of that relationship between artist and place that I would like to draw you to today. [...]
Among the people commemorated in the One O’Clock Toast at the Peedie Kirk this year was Jim Robertson, maths teacher and musician, remembered by one of his former pupils, Howie Firth. It was around 1959 when I remember reading in the Stromness and Round About column in The Orcadian about changes in the maths department [...]
The writer Ann Scott-Moncrieff was the subject of one of the One O’Clock Toasts in the 2015 Orkney International Science Festival. As a young reporter for The Orcadian, her account of flying across the Pentland Firth – as the first Orcadian to do so – created a climate of interest in Orkney in the development [...]
He was born in Tankerness and worked at The Orkney Herald, and he went to America in search of opportunity. And when he died in 1912, his funeral in New York was attended by many leading names in the film industry. He had become a leading name himself by creating a weekly magazine that was [...]
The death of Gerald “Gerry” Meyer, former editor of Britain’s first wartime forces newspaper, severed one of the last remaining links between Orkney and the vast garrison stationed in the islands during the Second World War. After The Orkney Blast, Gerry went on to edit The Orcadian, the local newspaper, for 36 years during which [...]
The writings of T. Ratcliffe Barnett appear from time to time on our pages, through his atmospheric descriptions of travels through Scotland, visiting places like Cromarty, the birthplace of the geologist Hugh Miller. His own story is that of a man with great abilities and warm humanity, as Christine Muir describes. Although I knew that [...]
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