In his book of 1967,
focusing yet again upon the Western Isles, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (1899–1970)
devotes two chapters to the “Uncrowned
King of Barra.” These are vignettes collected by the author over many
visits and over several years when on various trips to the Isle of Barra. The
following vignettes and anecdotes recited by ‘The Coddie’, and noted down by
the author, reflect the storyteller’s art of which he had in great abundance
and also his personality shines through. It does little to dispel the fact that
‘The Coddie’ when the mood would take him could hold on to any audience in the
palm of his hand:
NEVER THROUGHOUT the length and breadth of the
Hebrides was there anybody more widely known than was the Coddie. For everyone
who could distinguish him as John MacPherson (the name one was obliged to use
when referring to him officially), hundreds recognised him only by his
nickname. Indeed, his baptismal name would have conveyed nothing to most
people. As the Coddie, however, or simply as Coddie, he was renowned far beyond
the confines even of Scotland. All his days, except for the few he spent each
year somewhere or other on the Scottish mainland, were lived at Northbay, in
the Isle of Barra.
Of his nickname the Coddie was proud. He once
told me how he came by it. “I got that title in school when, one day―I remember
the day well―I was seen sitting forlorn, with my mouth gaping like a cod-fish.
A lot of us received by-names the day I got mine; and every one of them has
stuck. I soon recognised the aptness of my own, and that, if ever I went into
business, it would stand me in good stead. And, indeed, it has! You can see that for yourself!”
It was the Coddie’s appreciation of this,
quite early in life, that gave him his unbounded self-confidence, his
imperturbable self-assurance. He sometimes confided to the more intimate of his
friends just where and how he acquired these qualities. The historic spot―assuredly
a historic one in the Coddie’s crowded life―lies by a burn bisecting the road
between Northbay and Castlebay, rather than between Castlebay and Northbay, as
might seem the more usual. The Coddie was travelling on foot from Northbay to
Castlebay the day he made the first serious resolution of his life. “Says I to
myself, ‘Coddie, you can sell fish as good as anyone. There’s no reason
whatever why you should be shy about it’. So I went on my way to Castlebay on
my bare feet with my fish, feeling that I was as good as any body else on the
island, and a bittie better than many a one I knew. I never felt awkward with
my fish-basket after that, nor about anything else for that matter. Nowadays,
when I go to Castlebay, it’s not on my bare feet, but in my cash―in my two cars. And, when I come to the historic
burn, I says to myself, ‘Coddie, do you mind the day you sat there with your
fish, awful worried, wondering if anybody in Castlebay would be wanting to buy
them? Well, Coddie, you’ve never looked back since that day. You’ve gone from
strength to strength, Coddie; and now you’re crossing the burn on rubber
cushions with the best o’ them.’”
* * *
It was indicative of the Coddie’s importance
to society that nobody ever needed to memorise his telephone number. This he
found very gratifying. Anyone picking up a receiver anywhere in the Hebrides,
and asking the exchange for the Coddie, was put through in a gliff. To this
day, several years after his death, every telephonist in the Isles, and
possibly also in centres like Oban and Mallaig, Inverness and Fort William, has
his number by heart―his numbers, I ought to say, since Coddie indulged in JUST
one little extravagance: he had two telephone numbers. When one of these was
not immediately available, the telephonist rang the other. These numbers his
son, Angus, has inherited. Angus Coddie now reigns prosperously at Northbay in
his father’s stead.
“Telegraphic or telephonic address the very
soul of brevity!” the Coddie used to declare. “Two words―Coddie/Barra―will find me
from any part of the world!”
The extent to which this interesting and
unusual mortal put his nickname to capital account may be judged from the sheet
of his headed notepaper lying before me. On this sheet he penned for me,
shortly before his death in 1955, at the age of 79, some fragments of Hebridean
lore, a field in which he was well versed. It is headed:
TIGH A’ CHODDIE
NORTHBAY
ISLE OF BARRA
The top line signifies House of the Coddie.
The last word of that line is duly aspirated in accordance with Gaelic
orthographical requirements to denote the genitive or possessive case.
* * *
Who was the Coddie? you may ask. What did he
do? What office or offices did he fill? What functions did he perform? The
answers to these questions necessitate a catalogue of at least a dozen of his
interests and activities. Among much else a little difficult to tabulate, he
was―
(1)
Merchant
(2)
Postmaster at Northbay, in his native Isle of
Barra
(3)
General Storekeeper there
(4)
Member of lnverness-shire County Council
(5)
Boarding-housekeeper
(6)
Life and Soul of the northern half of his
native Isle, where he reigned omnipotent and omniscient for more than fifty
years
(7)
Unrivalled raconteur
(8)
Repository of ancient legends and traditions
(9)
Deplorer of the way in which the printed word
and wireless had displaced the seannachie’s oral art of storytelling
(10)
Staunch upholder of the Roman Catholic Church
in the more southerly of the Outer Hebrides (the remaining population being
almost exclusively Protestant―Presbyterian)
(11)
Sweet Singer of traditional Gaelic Songs
(12)
Perfervid Jacobite who believed he had a
special mission to acclaim the excellence of the Old and the Young Chevalier, and
to foster an interest in all that pertained to them.
Let us make a baker’s dozen by recalling how
resourceful he was as representative in Barra of British European Airways. With
the Coddie you could have booked your flight “from Barra’s Cockle Shore to
America―-or to Australia―if you like,” as he himself was swift to impress upon any
who appeared to be dubious as to how important a personage he was in the sphere
of civil aviation, particularly in its pioneering days under the auspices of
the original Scottish Airways. His car, usually driven by his son, Angus,
awaited all aircraft alighting on the sands of the famed Cockle Shore, ready to
transport passengers to any corner of his native isle served by a road or even
a cart-track. In response to a telephone call, and in payment of twenty good
shillings, Angus will still pick you up at Castlebay, motor you past his late
father’s doorstep at Northbay, and deposit you a few minutes later on the
fringe of the Great Cockle Shore as the drone of the approaching plane is heard
in the heavens. Angus times his transport to a nicety.
* * *
I mentioned the Coddie’s having been, inter alia, a boarding-housekeeper. His
enterprise in this capacity seen gained favour with guests from the mainland,
who, accustomed to laid-on water, hot and cold, were attracted to accommodation
in the Hebrides where even a modicum of it might be guaranteed. In this
connection the Coddie was, indeed, far-seeing. This brings to mind the
hostility generated in my own very conservative Hebridean cousins when, some
years ago, I suggested our installing a bath in the family home, situated within
a couple of miles of Stornoway―a home to which I had hoped to return each
summer. “Your grandfather never had a bath in his life!” said Mairi MacDonald,
scornfully, before proceeding to extol our MacDonald and MacGregor lineages
with a view to showing how contemporary and pre-contemporary relatives had
lived to great ages without any nonsense of that kind! A bath, forsooth! What
next? I could not have suggested anything less necessary, anything more
effeminate.
* * *
The Coddie was the person every traveller in
those parts realised he must meet sooner or later―the man to whom every author
and journalist encountering him, if for but the matter of a few seconds, felt
constrained to assign some space. No writer ever met the Coddie without making
something of him. He was “copy” at all times, proof whereof is seen in the
number of books and magazine articles written during the last forty years or
so, containing references to him. Barra and the Coddie were as inseparable as
Hamlet and the Prince of Denmark. So integral a part of his native isle did he
become that one had―and, in fact, still has―difficulty in visualising it
without him. By the same token one finds it hard to imagine the Coddie divorced
from Barra, for so seldom did he leave it for any length of time during his
eight decades of earthly existence that things seemed to be completely in
abeyance there when he was absent even for a day or two.
The Coddie never had any desire to quit his
native isle. He was all too satisfactorily and remuneratively engrossed there
to be attracted to pastures new. “Barra is my Paradise until I attain the
Heavenly One,” was his reply to the suggestion made to him more than once that
he should transfer himself and his family to the mainland, where material
prospects were so much greater for anyone of his shrewdness and intelligence. ‘As
provider of accommodation for visitors at Northbay in his small boarding-house,
the Coddie brought himself into amiable contact with all manner of travellers
among the Isles. In his capacity as merchant, he dealt in every marketable
commodity under the sun. “Everything from a handful o’ haddies to a ton o’
coal. Anything from a needle to a haystack,” were his own picturesque ways of
describing the range of things in which he specialised. When you saw a puffer
unloading coal by the jetty at Northbay, you knew that such a cargo had come
all the way from some Firth of Clyde port, consigned to the Coddie. “Coal
galore for Barra, to the Coddie’s orders!” as he himself might have been heard
saying when the puffer’s siren announced her arrival in Northbay waters.
* * *
In all the Isle of Barra there existed not a
pie in which the Coddie did not have a finger or two. He had an eye to the very
minutest of pics, and could make his finger feel at home in any one of them.
There never was a pie too small and unpromising in its beginnings to be
unworthy of his detailed direction and supervision, until at length he became
the whole, big pie himself. The Coddie’s performances in the field of local
transport were always matters of satisfaction to him. He was the first person
in Barra to avail himself of the thrilling advantages of internal combustion.
When it came to the hiring of his cars, it was all the same to him whether he
placed them at the disposal of those arriving at Castlebay by the mail-boat, or
of those descending from the skies upon the Cockle Strand. Given a few minutes
in which to turn situations over in his mind, he could arrange water transport
too. Anyone desirous of crossing the Sound of Barra to Eriskay or to South Uist
were wise to apply to him in the first instance. Likewise with geologists,
botanists, zoologists, ornithologists, and archaeologists bent on exploring
Fuday or Fiary, Gighay or Hellisay, Fuiary or Flodday, or any of the other
fifty uninhabited isles and islets lying off Northbay. All persons intent upon
setting foot on any of these knew how necessary it was to enlist the help of
the resourceful Coddie. Otherwise, the prospect of their achieving any such
objective remained slender.
“There’s on the island, too, an old Norse
fort called the Dunan Ruadh,” he once remarked as we discussed Fuday, one of
the more interesting of the lesser isles off the north-east of Barra. “I
ferried a―What do you call you chaps who go about the country looking at old
ruins and the like?”
“Archaeologists?” I asked.
“Yes! Archaeologists! Well, I ferried a
famous archaeologist from Edinburgh to Fuday in 1914. He made a bee-line for
the Dunan Ruadh with a small shovel; and he counted himself very fortunate, for
he struck the midden of the dun; and after a whilie he came back to myself with
two bone needles of which he was very proud. He remarked that he would have got
more, only for the hurried orders I gave him to return quickly to the boat to
catch the tide. A rowing-boat we had. No motor-boats in the Isles in those days, my boy! I was on my way to
Pollachar at the time, and sailed by way of Fuday to please him. He was very
keen to land there. At Pollachar he became very interested in the
standing-stone yonder, a few yards from the beach. And this is what he said to
myself: ‘Admiral Jellicoe,’ says he, ‘and Admiral Beatty are famous men today
in the British Navy; but below this stone lies the remain [sic] of a more famous man in his day than either of them.’ That’s
what he said to myself, whatever.”
“Who was he?” I enquired.
“That he didn’t tell me. But, by the way he
spoke, he seemed to know that he was a great seaman of long ago. I think he
knew his name too, though he didn’t divulge it to myself.”
* * *
When pedalling quietly past the post-office
door at Northbay one autumn day some years ago, I observed the Coddie seated on
a box well inside, but not so far removed as to render him unable to see whomsoever
went by, and to catch any snatch of conversation in which passers-by might be
engaged. Hardly anyone fared this way who hadn’t business of some kind or other
to transact with the Coddie at one time or other; and no one travelled through
Northbay unnoticed by this lynx-eyed islander.
“Will you be looking for myself?” he asked
from his doorstep, having by this time quitted his perch to come into the
daylight as would a sentry charged with seeing that no unauthorised person
slipped unchallenged through Northbay. Alighting from my bicycle, I retreated
but a few steps in order to satisfy his ardent curiosity, as well as to amplify
my own.
“Have I seen you here before? Yes, I think I
must have! Let me see now! You’ll be Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, searching the
islands the way you were doing when last I saw you here at Northbay, twenty
year ago. You were staying with old William MacGillivray at the time, over at
Eoligarry yonder. I heard you were in the place right enough. You were seen
crossing the Cockle Strand on a bicycle the other day there, going over to see
Donald Campbell, the schoolmaster. And did Donald make music for you?”
I replied, in the brief moment allowed me,
that Donald did.
“Man! but Donald’s the boy for the music! The
Barramen have a lot of music in them, as yourself knows; but Donald, och! he’s full
o’ music. Ay, full to overflowing. They tell me that, when he was teaching in
Eriskay over, they never heard such fine singing. No, not even in Father
Allan’s time.
“Yes,” proceeded the Coddie in a change of
vein, “I see you’re eyeing the casks.”
By his doorstep stood three casks of cured
herrings―three full half-casks, I
should say. From their lids I saw that they had come from Fraserburgh.
“Ay, I know fine what’s in your mind,” Coddie
continued.
“Twenty year ago, as yourself will remember,
Castlebay was still a centre of the herring-fishing industry; and we did much
curing ourselves. Och, ay! We were sending our barrelled herrings away by the
ten-thousand every year, all over the world, even to the great New York. And
now devil a herring gets cured in our midst. We have to import them now, just
like yourself in London, even for our own consumption. The fishermen and their
boats is all gone from Castlebay, and from Northbay too. But the rings is in
the rocks yet, and will be there for many a day. A sad reminder of more
prosperous times.”
In the Coddie’s view the decay of Castlebay
as a fishing-port was due to mismanagement and―But here intervened another
theme, as he cocked his ear to the heavens. I thought at first he had detected the
drone of a plane about to land on the Great Cockle Shore. But it wasn’t a
plane. I was thinking that I was hearing the first of the barnacles―the
barnacle geese-on their way to winter with us,” he remarked. “But no! It’s a
bittie early for them yet. They don’t arrive usually in these parts until
October; and they will be staying among us until April or May. Then a fine day
comes, and all the barnacles assemble on Fuday over. At a given signal from
their commandos, up they rise in the sky in one tremendous flock, and off they
go, Arctic-wards, in wedge-shaped formation, their commandos leading them. Man!
but it’s a grand sight. Surely, a grand sight. Well, now, we’ll be expecting
the barnacles back before long? Will yourself be with us when they come? You’ve
seen them before. I know that fine. But stay a whilie longer with us in Barra
this time; and maybe myself and Alasdair Alpin MacGregor will be doing a trip
to Fuday when the barnacles are congregating there.”
Here the Coddie interrupted his discourse to
offer me a pinch of snuff from his mull. “I know you don’t touch it [alcohol]
yourself in any shape or form; and I know you don’t smoke either. But a wee grain
or two of the Coddie’s snuff never did a man like yourself any harm
In October the barnacle geese come to all the
uninhabited isles lying to the north and northeast of Barra―to Hellisay and
Gighay, to Flodday, Fuiary, and Fuday, particularly to the last mentioned
because of the richness of its pasture. “There’s splendid grazing for the
barnacles on Fuday,” the Coddie added. “It carries eighty to ninety head o’
cattle all the year round; and they don’t get one straw of wintering, for so
good is the grass there.”
Fuday is remarkable for the variety of its
wild flowers as well as for its barnacles. The Coddie seldom missed an
opportunity of reminding one of the professor of botany, in whose company he
once landed on this island. As they reclined on the grass, “the professor says
to myself, says he, that, ‘though I’ve been round and round the world, I’ve
never seen such a variety of wild flowers in so small a space as that lying
about us this day”.
At this juncture he paused to inform me in
muted tones that his box wasn’t working too well. “Sometimes my box works
better than at other times,” he proceeded, indicating his head as being his
box. “You’ll be knowing that yourself, I’m sure. So let me think a minute What
else I should be telling you.’”
It soon became apparent that his mind was
still on Fuday. “Well, I’ll tell you another one about Fuday. About seventy
year ago―roughly about that time, anyway―a great gale came which swept some of
the sand-dunes on the island, and exposed five stone chambers, and the skeleton
of a corpse in each of them. He was a herd on the island, the man who made the
discovery. Using a spade, he filled in the sand, and closed the graves, the
same as what they were before the storm. He told me all this, the man
himself-the man who saw them in their stone-lined tombs. Seventy years ago, boy,
since that happened!
This by no means exhausted all the Coddie had
to say about Fuday. He was always anxious to include in any survey of this
island his account of how, in the olden time, the MacNeil of Barra and the
Norsemen came to blows there, and fought until the latter were vanquished―indeed,
until they became extinct, as the
Coddie put it with some emphasis. The heads of the vanquished were cast into
the well on Fuday, which to this day is known as the Tobar nan Ceann, the Well of the Heads.
* * *
Fuday, according to the omniscient Coddie,
has its ghost. A few years ago, while some crofters were arranging in bundles
the rushes they had cut on the island, this ghost made himself known to one of
them, and in so doing passed on to him a traditional secret concerning the
family to which they both belonged. The person to whom the ghost communicated this
secret was one of the Coddie’s schoolmates.
There are others in Barra, the Coddie assured
me, who know all about this strange visitation; and among them is Miss Annie Johnstone,
the folklorist and collector of Gaelic folk-music, who lives at Castlebay. To
Annie, whom I have known throughout the greater part of my life, Marjory
Kennedy-Fraser acknowledged much material that went into The Songs of the Hebrides.
While Fuday has its ghost, the neighbouring
isle of Fuiary has its faery washerwoman, the only one of her kind to have been
seen in this locality in recent years. When last she made her appearance, according
to the Coddie, she was wringing somebody’s death-shroud in the burn descending
to the shore from the island’s highest part.
“There now!” the Coddie observed with a degree
of self-animation. “That’s a ghost and a faery washerwoman for you! Both on Iand,
my boy! Both on land! You must make a
note of that now. And there’s another one I could mention while we’re ashore
meanwhile―the each-uisge, the dreaded
water-horse. But yourself will be knowing all about him, as myself saw in one
of your books. So we’ll leave the each-uisge
in the loch, and proceed to sea. Let me get my box to work about a terrific
creature in the sea that my father saw when fishing for lobsters on the west
side of Barra. The men that was in the boat with him saw it too. It was a
sea-monster; and they were all greatly troubled. They were saying their prayers
all right that day, my boy!
“Well, my father―he was a young man at the
time―was fishing lobsters off Borve Point, with three other men. Lo and behold!
What did they see coming near the boat but a very strange thing? ‘Och,’ they
said to themselves, ‘that’s nothing but a heap of herring nets drifting with
the tide.’ They could tell, the way they were lying in the water, with the
glass floats keeping them from sinking out of sight. So they waited to see.
Maybe, they would be able to take them aboard when they got close.
“Then they saw two humps going up and down,
like the Loch Ness monster. And they said to themselves, ‘We must make our own
conclusions about this, and the dangerous situation we’re in, if it turns out
to be a sea-monster’.
“To be sure, a sea-monster it was for certain!
Not nets and bobbing boats at all. A real monster it was, of tremendous
dimensions! They couldn’t wait to take his measurements in the small boat they
were in; and so they rowed for the shore before he would be capsizing hem into
the sea.
“There they were, rowing for dear life, muttering
their prayers for Holy Mother Mary to intercede for them, afraid all the time
to look up in case it would tell them how short a space of time they had on
this earth before being devoured. As they got to land, they had a look; and all
they could see was a bit of the monster. Down he went to the bottom while they
were looking at him. And that’s the last time a sea-monster put fear and
trembling on the lobster-men of Barra.”
When the Coddie had finished, I noticed that
he had been through some little inward disturbance. Beads of perspiration
covered his cheeks and forehead. These had been generated by his reciting all
this rather too subjectively. One felt that the monster of his story, like that
described by Virgil in The Aeneid,
was fearful and hideous, vast and ageless.
* * *
“What can you tell me, Coddie, about any of
the other islands out there, in the Sound of Barra, between us and South Uist?”
I asked him some years ago, after we had discussed Fuday and the barnacles.
“As much as you can find time to listen to,”
came the prompt reply. “I can tell you about a ghost over at Hellisay too, if
you like. I got it from a schoolmate of my own. So I know it’s in every respect
reliable. You were yourself in Hellisay; and I should have told you to look for
the ghost when you were there. She’s a fine specimen of a lady, the ghost. Only
my schoolmate ever saw her―him and an Eriskay woman long dead. But I’ll tell
you about that the next time you visit the Coddie. You’ll be staying a whilie
on the island yet, I’m sure. The one I’ll mention to you now was also in
Hellisay. Another ghost, my boy! The Devil Himself it was! And he terrifying
the people that landed there and wanted to remove a plank to make a coffin. You
would be wondering what took the Devil to Hellisay when there wasn’t a living
soul staying any more on the island.”
The faeries dwelling on Hellisay were yet
another of the Coddie’s interests. He first came to hear of them from a man
born in 1840 on that isle. “It was at the time of the Potato Famine, as Angus
MacNeil would be telling.”
Hellisay, according to the Coddie, was
infested with faeries in olden days. So much was this the case that the
crofters then residing there had to be very careful not to offend them in any
way. They therefore made a habit of placing on a particular stone a bowl of
milk to propitiate them. Omission to do so, as the crofters implicitly
believed, involved them in all kinds of awkward and irksome situations. They
would find their livestock loose among the corn, for instance, or driven off to
some corner of the island., from which it was sometimes difficult to retrieve
them.
Angus MacNeil, the Coddie added, had actually
witnessed a faery wedding on his native Hellisay. Standing at the gable-end of
his cottage one evening, he observed a multitude of The Little People emerge in
pairs from an adjacent knoll. So exquisitely attired were they that he hadn’t
the slightest doubt about their being guests at a faery wedding. “And the music
the faeries were playing, boy!” the Coddie added. "Angus himself told me
that he never heard the likes of it all the years he remained on the late of
this world, although, he said. the whole ceremony was over in the time it would
take a passing whiff of wind to put a wave through the corn.”
* * *
The Coddie, when storytelling, liked to have
in his hand the long, bamboo stick still occupying a place of prominence and
privilege in his home at Northbay. Often he would interrupt his narration to fetch
this magic wand, as he called it, believing that his holding it bestowed upon
him clarity of mind and fluency of tongue. It mattered not whether he was
delivering himself in English or in Gaelic, so long as he held in his hand this
inspiring heirloom. It functioned equally well in either case, he declared. He
used to tell one how eloquent it would be if ever it acquired the power of
speech. In the days of the Highland Clearances it belonged to the landlord
occupying Eoligarry and the lands impinging upon it, at the north end of Barra.
The landlord, wheresoe’er he went, carried it as an emblem of his authority. To
the Coddie, therefore, it was the emblem of past injustices. The photograph
facing page 193 of my book, The Western
Isles (one of the volumes I contributed to Robert Hale’s County Books
Series) shows the Coddie with his magic wand, which he insisted should be
photographed with him.
“Tell me something really intimate about
yourself!” I said to him one day as we chatted by his doorstep. “Something you
might like posterity to know about you.”
Wait a minute till I get my magic wand!” he
responded. “The likes of the Coddie didn’t grow on every tree, Alasdair Alpin! You
know that yourself! The likes of yourself,
my boy, didn’t grow on every tree either.”
Such were the words with which he resumed
conversation when, a few seconds later, he again took up a position by his
doorstep with his wand, now inspired by it, as he declared, to discuss
unreservedly his many unusual qualities. “I can spin a yarn or two about myself
whenever my magic wand dictates,” he continued; “but I’m not fond of doing it.
Anyhow, I’ve nothing in view concerning myself at the moment. But I know you’re
very fond of Eoligarry; and so I must tell you a story about it before you go.”
Here, then, follows that story, precisely as the Coddie related it with the aid
of his magic wand:
“One time there was a village over at Kilbar,
or Eoligarry, as it is today. It was the most prosperous township in all Barra.
At the time of the Clearances, Colonel Gordon of Cluny, his factor, and his
ground-officers made a clearance of it. After the poor crofters had gone, the
ruins became an eyesore to the Colonel and his staff. So they decided to put
all the stones of the old houses into the sea. There was a prophet who lived in
Barra many years prior to this; and he predicted that the day would come when
all the stones of the houses at Kilbar would be cast into the sea, and that
years and years later they would be retrieved. At the time of the prophesying,
that was a very unlikely thing to happen. He also predicted that the famous
Kisimul Castle would become the home of the sea-otter and the sea-birds. For
this prediction MacNeil of Barra banished him to the island of Muldoanich,
supplying him solely with a creel and a spade to provide for himself. I’m sure,
Alasdair Alpin, it would be a blunt spade too! That yourself can believe. To this very day, you can see a great
patch on the west side of Muldoanich called the Goirtean mhic a’ Chreachadair [the Arable Patch of the Raider’s
Son]. MacNeiI removed him from Muldoanich after a while, taking him ashore
again because his father was MacNeil’s principal raider. MacNeil, you
understand, couldn’t do without a good raider to be bringing him what he
wanted. Kisimul Castle is a ruin, as yourself well knows; and it’s the home of
the sea-otter and the sea-birds.
“Now, the old Board of Agriculture bought the
farm and lands of Eoligarry, and divided the place into smallholdings. An
energetic crofter―he would likely be about the first of the new settlers to
build a proper house there―who knew nothing at all, at all, about the prophecy,
started to carry the stones ashore and build a comfortable house for himself.
Hence the prophecy of Mac a’ Chreachadair―the
prophecy of the Raider’s Son―-came true.”
* * *
When settled with the Coddie round his ample
peatfire at Northbay, one often had difficulty in keeping him to the matter in
hand. On the flimsiest of pretexts he would turn the conversation in the direction
of Bonnie Prince Charlie, or of Flora MacDonald, or of Malcolm MacNeil, the Prince’s
pilot, a native of Gigha, in Argyll. It was Malcolm who brought La Doutelle into the bay at Eriskay, but
a few miles from the Coddie’s own threshold, and got Charlie ashore at the
Prince’s Strand.
“Let us now get on to the Prince!” was one of
the Coddie’s welll-known opening gambits when his interest in the matter under
discussion flagged. The Prince and his attendants, he proceeded to tell one,
celebrated their landing at Eriskay with a big spread. 0n the very spot where
they had their spread, the Drambuie, the famous drink of The Forty-five, was
consumed for the first time on Scottish soil, while Malcolm MacNeil stood by,
playing the pipes. The secret of the Drambuie, the Coddie declared, came with
the Prince from France; and this secret was left in the Isle of Skye by one of
his followers. According to the inexhaustible Coddie, the descendants of those
to whom the secret was confided still carry on the Drambuie business in
Edinburgh. The Coddie, a few years before his death, as he was proud to relate,
wrote to tell them what they had not known hitherto about their historic
Drambuie.
“Let me hear a little more about the Prince’s
pilot, Malcolm MacNeil,” I interposed, remembering that the Coddie’s mother was
a MacNeil, and that he himself bore a striking resemblance to old General
MacNeil, “the second-best looking man on the battlefield of Waterloo,” as the
Coddie seldom failed to add. The General, born in 1788, died in 1863. He was
the last of the MacNeils of Barra to reside in the island of his ancestors. He
lived in old Eoligarry House, set down amid rounded pastures at the northern
end of Barra.
“Several years after the Prince landed in Eriskay,”
the Coddie continued, “Malcolm MacNeil fought alongside MacNeil of Barra on the
Heights of Abraham. Barra was wounded; and Malcolm stood by him for the long
period of seven weeks, acting as piper and butler until he recovered. After the
war was over, they both came home to Barra. Malcolm had seven sons, and decided
to emigrate to Cape Breton Island. He settled down at a place called Beavers’
Cove, where his successors are today very numerous.”
If anywhere one could have learnt of Prince
Charles Edward as though he had landed in the Hebrides but yesterday, it was
assuredly round the Coddie’s peatfire of an evening, when he liked to lay aside
the distractions of his manifold enterprises. One might have imagined, indeed,
that the Prince, under cover of darkness, had knocked at the Coddie’s door the
night before, seeking food and shelter, confidence and fidelity. The Coddie
always spoke of Prince Charlie as though the two of them had been intimate
contemporaries.
A second chapter
devoted to ‘The Coddie’ emphasis his storyteller already alluded to in the
previous chapter:
WE HAVE strayed a little from the Coddie,
though not entirely irrelevantly. Here one should record that, even during his
busiest moments, he permitted no consideration of cash and commerce to take
precedence of the Jacobites’ claim to be remembered and revered. Little wonder,
then, that old William MacGillivray, the last to farm Eoligarry before it was
divided up into smallholdings in the nineteen-twenties, entrusted to him the
solemn duty of conveying to safe custody, on the mainland of Scotland, that
ancient set of bagpipes said to have been played at Culloden!
“William sent for myself when he decided to
part with them,” the Coddie wrote me in response to my enquiring of him how these
pipes found their way from Eoligarry to the West Highland Museum three years
before the donor’s death. “‘I better send them, Coddie, to people who can look
after them, though I admit that I very much will forever miss them.’”
The Coddie, acting upon William
MacGillivray’s instruction, took the precious pipes across the Minch to Roy
Bridge. There he handed them over to Mrs. Ryan, daughter of the late D. P.
MacDonald, of Long John Whisky fame. At that time Mrs. Ryan was the sole
survivor of those who had helped the late Victor Hodgson to found at Fort
William, in 1926, the West Highland Museum. She had a unique knowledge of
Celtic Scotland. Nobody had a greater store of Highland lore and tradition than
she; and in matters of Highland history her memory was astonishing. It was
seemly, therefore, that the donor should have wished that the pipes be handed
over personally by her to the West Highland Museum.
On the last occasion upon which I had a ceilidh with the Coddie, I persuaded him
to relate to me in detail just how it came about that he should have been instrumental in conveying the MacGillivray
Pipes from Eoligarry to their new home―from the Hebrides to Lochaber. I
realised, of course, that his own verbal
account of the part he had played in this transaction would amplify in a
picturesque manner what he already had written me.
“Well, as yourself knows,” he began, “William
MacGillivray was the last of the MacGillivray boys; and he says to myself’
‘Coddie, I am worried greatly what will happen to the pipes when myself fades
away. I want you to take them to Mistress Ryan, for the West Highland Museum,
the next time you’ll be going over to a county council meeting. I’m giving them
to Mistress Ryan; and she will see that they get safe and sound to Fort William―to
the West Highland Museum there. You’ll have to go to Glen Roy first, you
understand,’ he says, ‘because Mistress Ryan lives there; and she will see that
the old pipes gets proper care and attention, the way they got here, at Eoligarry,
all these years.’
“And that’s the way myself was introduced
into the picture. Well, the day before I next left for Inverness―that’s where
the county council meets, as you know. Yourself went to school there once upon
a time. So I went over to Eoligarry House. ‘There’s the pipes for you, Coddie!
’ William says. Man, you never set eyes on such a parcel. William had packed
the pipes most beautiful, and sealed the strings all over. ‘Take them! ’ says
he; and I could see the tears were falling from his eyes. ‘Take them, Coddie;
and tell them, over, that they must cherish them the way myself and my family
did for a good century and more.’
“Well, Alasdair Alpin, I did my best for the
pipes, anyhow. I was afraid to leave them in my cabin in the mailboat the night
I went over. So I took the parcel to Captain Robertson; and I said to him:
‘Captain Robertson, it’s myself that would like a favour of you. I’ve something
here, in this fine parcel, that’s very precious and sacred. It mustn’t be left
anywhere about the boat, even in my own cabin. It must spend the night in your
cabin. I’ll come for it myself when we reach port in the morning.’ During the
night I visited him in his cabin to make sure the pipes was all right.
“‘What’s in the grand parcel, Coddie?’ he
says. ‘What’s making you so particular?’
“‘It’s not whisky, whatever, Captain
Robertson!’ I said.
“‘Let us have a look at it, then!’ he said.
By this time he had his knife out to cut the string.
“‘No, Captain! You mustn’t be doing such a
thing!’ I told him. ‘That parcel contains something more sacred than all the
whisky in Scotland.’
“And so I got to Roy Bridge; and I handed
over the pipes to Mistress Ryan with tears in my own eyes the way William had
when he handed me the parcel.”
Some time later, when the Coddie was on his
way to attend another county council meeting he interrupted his journey at.
Fort William to ascertain whether the MacGillivray Pipes were being shown the
respect and prominence they deserved. “And there I met a namesake of your own―a
Miss MacGregor―Miss Edith MacGregor. The famed pipes was hanging on the wall. I
said to her: ‘It’s myself that brought those pipes to Lochaber, all the way
from Barra, from the man who looked after them in his own house for a hundred
years and more. What would he be thinking if he saw them disrespected like that
in Lochaber? They are worthy of a better place than that! In a proper glass
case they should be!’
“A whilie after―maybe a couple of months
after―I called again and found them there, beautiful, in a glass case. But
that’s nor yet the end of my story, Alasdair Alpin. I must be telling you a
bittie more. When the Exhibition was on in Glasgow in 1938, William
MacGillivray got word that the celebrated pipes was to be played on the
wireless by a certain Angus Campbell on a certain day. William sent for myself;
and I had to go to Eoligarry immediately, at William’s command, boy! so that I
could be listening with him. Well, Angus was getting right into the soul of the
pibroch he was playing; and I saw poor William’s eyes getting very wet with the
tune Angus was playing. I knew myself what was going on inside William. He was
leaning on his stick when Angus finished, his eyes full of moisture. But not a
word came out of him for a whilie, not for quite a whilie. Then he said to
myself: ‘Coddie, the old pipes was never in better hands than tonight; and we
must send our heartfelt thanks in the morning to Angus Campbell by telegram.’”
The day the Coddie was entrusted with the
transference of the MacGillivray Pipes was the proudest of his life. He had
felt himself under sacred obligation, committed to discharge a duty he believed
he had been chosen to perform in virtue of his lifelong devotion to all that
concerned Bonnie Prince Charlie.
And how insistent he was that those pipes had
been played at Culloden! I once had the temerity to hint in his hearing that
experts thought them to be of a date more recent than 1746. The Coddie looked
at me scornfully, as though I were giving currency to a dangerous heresy which
might spread like an epidemic throughout the Isles if I were foolish enough―nay,
disloyal enough―to repeat it.
* * *
During one of the evenings I spent on Eriskay
in 1947 in company with Father Iain MacCarmaig, then the island’s priest, the
conversation turned inevitably to the Coddie, of whom I had seen a good deal
some days previously. “Did ever it occur to you,” asked Father Iain, “that
there’s something very unusual―something very exceptional―about the Coddie?
Have you ever noticed how interesting are his eyes? Nobody can be long in the
Coddie’s presence without noticing those eyes of his, those very blue eyes.
They have a quality I’ve never been able to account for. They look at you, and
even through you, in a remarkable way, not in any unpleasant way, you must
understand. There’s something truly remarkable about those eyes of his.”
Father lain, reaching for a book on Barra
published some months earlier, turned to the reproduction from a well-known
portrait of old General MacNeil of Barra. Covering with a sheet of notepaper
the lower part of the General’s face, he handed me the volume, without comment.
I must say I was instantly surprised, if not actually startled. The resemblance
between the forehead, eyes, and nose of the General and those of the Coddie was
quite astonishing.
On my return to London a few weeks later, I
had occasion to write the Coddie for verification of a date I was certain he
knew. To my letter I appended a postscript asking him, in a casual way (though
not forgetting that his own maternal grandmother was a MacNeil), whether he had
ever horn told how much he resembled old General MacNeil. My question was
hardly one which the Coddie would fail to answer. “Regarding my resemblance to
the good-looking General,” he replied, “often the remark has been passed that there
is a striking likeness in features, though not in size. The famous General
stood six feet three. The Coddie‘s only live feet and a bittie. He was five
feet five when in his prime. The best looking man at Waterloo, as myself
reminded you the other day there, was a Cameron.”
I see from my notebooks that I could go on
writing indefinitely upon the scenes, themes, personages, and ordinary folk the
Coddie and I discussed together. It was he who told me that, when Compton
Mackenzie built at Vaslan, on the fringe of the Great Cockle Shore of Barra,
that eyesore of a house which he named Suidheachan, by mason of the faery
mounds at that very spot, he wanted to Christen it Vaslan. But he confided to
the Coddie that he feared his English visitors might dub it Vaseline! It is now
many a year since Compton Mackenzie shook from his sandals the sand-grains of
the Cockle Shore, and listened, enthralled, to the Coddie’s intimate
recollections of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
* * *
Coddie readily grasped any pretext whatsoever
for reminding one of his own ancestral connections with Eoligarry in its
spacious and splendorous days. Ann MacLachlan, his mother, “born on Armistice
Day, just a hundred years after Prince Charles Edward arrived in Eriskay over,”
as he liked to inform one, was the daughter of Robert MacLachlan. Robert, who
had been a gardener at Aros Castle, in the Isle of Mull, came to Eoligarry to
serve General MacNeil in that capacity. It was he―the Coddie’s maternal
grandfather―who laid out at Eoligarry the garden which the MacGillivrays, in
their heyday, were to improve so considerably, but which, today, is a woody and
withered place, a place of sadness and neglect.
“When would that have been?” I asked the
Coddie, anxious to get from him what chronology I could. “When did Robert
MacLachlan come to Barra?”
“Man, but I cannot tell you that. Not
precisely, anyhow,” he answered. “It would be some time after the defeat of Boney
at Waterloo. Let me see now! That was in 1815. Robert was a Protestant when he
reached Barra, of course. But he soon gave up that sort of thing when he
married my Catholic granny, Flora MacPhee. That, my boy, was in 1834! A long,
long time ago! They were married over there at Eoligarry.”
The Coddie was never slow to recite his
family tree to anybody showing genuine interest in him and in his lineage. This
he usually did from the generation of his great-great-grandfather, Iain MacPherson,
who tenanted a holding at Vaslan, but a mile or two from the Coddie’s own
doorstep at Northbay. His MacNeil affiliations, of which he was so proud,
derived from his paternal grandfather’s marriage to Mary MacNeil, a native of
the crofting township of Greian, situated near Barra’s western extremity.
“But that’s just four generations back I’ve
given you. I can go back another ten or twelve, or maybe more, if you like,”
the Coddie assured me, relying upon that branch of folk-memory in which the
Hebrideans, certainly up to the time of his
generation, specialised.
* * *
The Coddie’s inexhaustible fund of stories
relating to the Hebrides, particularly to his own Isle of Barra and its
numerous satellites, included several which had some bearing upon Robert
MacLachlan, his maternal grandfather. That which he recited most frequently
pertained to Robert’s early days as gardener at Eoligarry. “At that time, as
myself heard my mother tell, the old General was keeping up a great style. He
had a footman and a groom, beside [sic]
a headgardener―my grandfather.” Bent on enjoying some of the General’s whisky
unbeknown to him, during his absence from home, all three conspired to enter
one night the old house by the cellar window. As this window looked out on to
the garden, and the garden had to be kept locked at night, the gardener’s collusion
was indispensable if anyone were to ‘taste’ at all. Robert therefore provided
his accomplices with the garden key. He also supplied the ladder enabling them
to reach down to the cellar window. Thrice up the ladder in the dead of night
went the footman, carrying a bucket provided by the groom―a bucket brimful of
The MacNeil’s whisky.
After the ensuing carousel, a great fear took
possession of these evildoers lest their employer, on his return, sought an
explanation for the depleted state of his cellar. But the fear wore off before
the General got back. So footman and groom thought that another bucketful or
two wouldn’t do them any harm. But the Coddie’s grandfather, truly repentant of
his participation in the previous night’s raid upon the cellar, refused them
the garden key.
The Coddie always concluded his account of
this escapade by adding that his mother used to say that her father “was all
his life ashamed of the dirty trick he played old General MacNeil that night”
* * *
Of the innumerable traditional tales the Coddie
recounted over the years he assumed the role of seannachie or raconteur, be
rendered with an especial zest those relating to the doughty MacNeils of Barra.
Though he could relate tales of his own ancestors over a period of at least two
and a half centuries, those appertaining to his great-grandfather, Neil
MacNeil, were in a category quite by themselves, They always had a foreign
flavour about them, since Neil, taken prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars,
managed to escape from captivity in a manner the Coddie was never weary of
describing.
“Well, it was this way, you see!” the Coddie would begin his narration of Neil’s
exploits. Let me now quote from notes I took down some years ago from his own
lips:
“In Napoleonic days men from Barra and Uist
went to the wars, just as yourself did when you went young to the Trenches.
That’s the way the Barramen and the Uisteachs got themselves taken prisoner in
France―the way yourself might have got taken prisoner. Neil MacNeil, my
great-grandfather, was one of them, along with his mate, Iain Campbell, from
South Boisdale. I heard you were there yourself the other day at South
Boisdale. While they were under lock and key in France, they were having a poor
time. They wouldn’t be enjoying themselves at all, at all. The grub was
terrible. Not enough to keep body and soul alive together. Many’s a time they would
be discussing their escape―speaking to one another in the Gaelic, of course.
Only themselves had the Gaelic in the prison-camp. So they could discuss what
they liked in their mother-tongue. Not a soul among the other prisoners would
be understanding a word they spoke; and so they could express their minds freely
to one another. They were thinking that, whatever. Well, now, one day they were
performing a task of some sort in the prison yard, and talking away as usual.
This day they were saying uncomplimentary things about the grub the prisoners
got. Believe it or not, the guard heard and understood every word they were
saying. The ration that day was sawdust mixed with linseed oil. No wonder they
would be complaining!
“Well, the guard went up to them; and says he
to my great-grandfather and his mate, ‘Now, boys, I was hearing every word of
your conversation about the bad grub. I have the Gaelic myself; and I must
admit that what you were saying about it is true’.
“‘What’s your name?’ says the guard, turning
to my great-grandfather.
“‘Neil MacNeil,’ says my great-grandfather.
“‘Agus
co as a thainig sibh? And where do you come from?’
“‘The Island of Barra,’ says Neil.
“’It’s myself that should have known you were
a Barraman, with a name like Neil MacNeil!’ says the guard.
“Then he turned round to ask my great-grandfather’s
mate when he came from. ‘From
Boisdale,’ says Iain Campbell.
“‘Well, now, boys, isn’t that the remarkable
thing?” says he, ‘My own ancestors came from the very same place. They left it
during the Rising to put the Old Chevalier―Prince Charlie’s father―back on the
throne. We keep up the Gaelic in the family, just the some old way; and that’s
how I knew what you were saying about the food. It’s myself that’s very
pleased, indeed, to meet you both. If you‘re wanting to escape, I’ll help you
all I can. This very night you’ll get the prison gate open for you; and I’ll
direct you to the shore myself. If you’re caught, you’re done, you will
understand. If you‘re not, maybe you’ll manage to get back to the Isles in the
long run. If you accept my offer, you’ll have to fend for yourself once you
reach the shore. Get out of France somehow,‘ says he, ‘even if you have to swim
the English Channel.’
“So MacNeil and Campbell went into a
conference; and they decided to take the risk, even at the expense of death if
they were recaptured. ‘Better to perish in the attempt,’ says Neil, ‘than die
of our misery and starvation in the prisoner-of-war place we're in!’ And so
they went to the guard and told him they would be pleased to accept his offer.
“That night, when all was quiet in the
prison, my great-grandfather and his mate made their escape. The gate was left
open for them right enough; and the guard himself met them outside in the dark,
and took them a shortcut to the shore. There they hid themselves, not knowing
how to proceed. At dawn they began creeping along the best way they could. But
good fortune, my boy, was on their side. They saw a port ahead of them, and an
English frigate lying alongside. I don’t mind for the moment the name of the
port they were at, for the Coddie’s box isn’t always working as well as it
should. But it’ll come back to me. Anyhow, they leapt aboard, and began to help
the sailors to spread her sails to the wind, for they were so thankful to find
her, and she preparing to sail away for England that very minute.
“Now, when the captain saw two strange men
working with the sails, he called out to them. MacNeil and Campbell, you see,
had to be questioned and cross-examined to his satisfaction, before he would
allow them touch a thing on the frigate. So they told the captain just where
and when they had been taken prisoner, and just where they were imprisoned, and
for how long. And they told him about the bad grub too, and about their escape,
without letting on a word about the guard that had the Gaelic like themselves.
“When General MacNeil got home to Barra in
1820, he soon heard all about my great-grandfather’s escapades. So he sent for
him, because he wanted to tell him that himself had done his bit at the Battle
of Waterloo. They had a dram together, and exchanged their view on the wars.
The General was so pleased with my great-grandfather’s behaviour that he gave
him a croft over at Greian―one of the best in Barra, it was. There he remained
until the poor Chief had to sell the land to Colonel Gordon of Cluny. The new
landlord wanted the croft for his sheep; and many a dispossessed islander had
to emigrate as a dire consequence of that. But my great-grandfather stayed on
in Barra throughout all this disturbance. He had a family of two sons and six
daughters. One of them was Mary MacNeil, my own granny. She’s buried over at
Eoligarry―at Kilbar, yonder, under one of the stones that came from Iona. I’m
sure yourself saw it more than once when you would be looking at the old
gravestones there.”
If space allowed, I would relate more of the
Coddie’s traditional tales, none of them inferior to that which I have just
related in his own words.
* * *
In 1948, at the age of 72, the Coddie, in a
truly literal sense, was very much in the limelight. “From Ealing Studios,” as
he wrote me in the autumn of that year, “we had lately in Barra 80 or 90,
including film stars and actors. They were with us for twelve weeks, filming
the world-famous Politician. See now
that you don’t laugh too heartily when you see the Coddie in the film, himself
distributing the whisky at the reiteach,
standing by a big and brimming earthen-ware jar with a crate on it! Look up the
issue of The Sphere, and Father
MacMillan and myself in it.”
The reiteach,
I should explain, is the name applied in Celtic Scotland to the espousals―to
the conviviality preceding a wedding, often lasting for several consecutive
days. Refreshments, particularly in the form of “whisky galore”, are always a
prominent feature of any properly conducted reiteach!
The film to which the Coddie referred was, of
course, Whisky Galore, based on
Compton Mackenzie’s novel of the same name, founded upon what followed when, in
1944, the Politician, a British
merchantman of some 12,000 tons, on her way to America with a cargo of the Best
Scotch, went ashore on Calvay, an islet in the Sound of Eriskay, but a few
sea-miles from the Coddie’s threshold.
Even when in his early seventies, the Coddie
with his unusualities could have had Hollywood at his feet, had he sought the
ephemeral and largely meretricious fame of the film star.
* * *
One of the things for which the Coddie will
be remembered in his native isle was his devotion to the Church of St. Barr, at
Northbay. He saw this place of Roman Catholic worship erected in the midst of
the community he had served so vigorously and variously throughout his life.
With St. Barr’s affairs be interested himself right up to the end, even though
cardiac trouble confined him to the house during his last twelvemonth here on
earth.
The summer of 1944 brought him his first
truly deep sorrow. Neil, his second son (the little boy I had known in those
halcyon days when I used to pass by his home on my way to the Great Cockle
Shore, and to William MacGillivray’s, beyond), lost his life while serving with
the Royal Air Force. Eleven years later, after Requiem Mass at St. Barr’s, the
Coddie’s remains were conveyed to Eoligarry, and laid to rest there, in the
ancient sepulchre of Kilbar.
St. Barr, according to legend, arrived in
Barra to find its inhabitants not only pagans, but also cannibals. “They had
just eaten the missionary who preceded him,” the Coddie once told me; “and they
would have made a good meal of St. Barr too, but they didn’t! Maybe they
thought he might be too tough! He was a disciple of Columba, as yourself will
be knowing; and he walked the whole island, looking for a place to build a
church, but found none till he got over as far a the Traigh Mhor [Great Shore]. Casting an eye over the cockle-beds, he
saw the spot where the new Eoligarry school stands―a spot you yourself know,
when you’ll be visiting the schoolmaster yonder. The day came when the saint’s
work in Barra was completed, and he had to leave us. So be assembled all the
inhabitants of the island, and all their beasts too; and he blessed every one
of them separately. Everybody got a blessing that day. Every cow, every
stirkie, every sheep and lamb. And he blessed the rocks-ay, and the sea too, so
that it would always be giving plenty good fish. After he was away a whilie,
they put a statue of him on the altar over at Kilbar’s chapel, with a white
shirt on him. One day it disappeared; and no one ever knew where it went to.”
Just when this statue vanished, the Coddie
wasn’t quite sure. “A great many centuries ago,” was the nearest he could say.
This was not entirely accurate, of course, since he probably was referring to
the object Martin Martin had hoped to see there at the close of the seventeenth
century, and possibly remove. “The natives,” wrote Martin, “have St Barr’s
wooden image standing on the altar, covered with linen in the form of a shirt;
all their greatest asseverations are by this saint. I came very early in the
morning with an intention to see this image, but was disappointed; for the
natives prevented me from carrying it away, lest I might take occasion to
ridicule their superstition, as some Protestants have done formerly; and when I
was gone, it was again exposed on the altar.”
To this very day a native of Barra embarking
on a long journey, or perhaps someone of this island’s lineage returning to a
distance part of the world after a visit to his homeland, sometimes takes away
with him a matchboxful of Kilbar’s consecrated soil. Observing the
centuries-old custom of his ancestors, he will scatter this broadcast upon the
ocean in order to allay any terrifying storm in which his ship may become
involved. In time of danger St. Barr is believed to give, in this wise, the
sort of protection St. Maolrubha affords those journeying from Applecross with
a little quantity of sanctified earth from the precincts of his ancient chapel
there. This they hide among their belongings, or sew into a corner of their
apparel. During my Infancy at Applecross this was certainly a common practice;
and I have known of instances of it even since the Second World War.
* * *
For his stories the Coddie long will be
remembered. The manner of his telling was unique, due largely to his colourful
choice of words and his literal application of them, and to his introduction
here and there of a well-known Gaelic word when there existed no other capable
of giving just that delicate flavour his narration required. His phrasing also
was unique; and nobody ever excelled him in adjusting to his own purpose
popular sayings and figures of speech. Moreover, he brought to his
storytelling, and with an innate sense of its poetic value, “apt Alliteration’s
artful aid”. Whether consciously or accidentally, one never quite knew.
The stories he related best, and best liked
relating, were those he prefaced with an Il
y avait une fois atmosphere. “Once upon a time,” he would begin. Thus he
instantly evoked a nostalgia, sometimes almost unbearable, as when he took one
into his confidence about Prince Charles Edward and his misfortunes. No
storyteller ever endued his listeners with a deeper sense of reverence for
things past than did the Coddie. In the oral and traditional fashion of his
ancestors, he related, alike, the past and the present, as though the written
or the printed word didn’t really count for very much. He may well have been
the last of our Hebridean seannachies.
The last statement is
open to conjecture as not only in Barra itself but also in neighbouring South
Uist as well as beyond, there were still those who could and did recite many of
the old tales and songs, many of whom were collected by Calum Maclean as well
as his contemporaries.
References:
Alasdair
Alpin MacGregor, The Enchanted Isles:
Hebridean Portraits & Memories (London: Michael Joseph, 1967)
Alasdair
Alpin MacGregor, The Western Isles
(London: Robert Hale, 1949)
John
MacPherson, Tales of Barra: Told by the
Coddy, ed. by John Lorne Campbell (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1992)
John
Marshall, ‘Meet the Coddie’, The Scots
Magazine, vol. LIV, no. 6 (1951), pp. 73–77
Images:
Portrait
of ‘The Coddie’ by Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, 1950, seated on the foreshore by
his premises at Northbay, Isle of Barra
Portrait
of ‘The Coddy’, at Northbay, Isle of Barra, c. 1949
MacGillvray
Pipes
