Singing from the song sheet - Labour's manifesto

From my Daily Record column 12/05/17

Analysing the fine detail of Labour's leaked manifesto is missing the point. Manifestos are not a question of content, they are a question of competence.

Enacted in office the Labour document would be the most radical since Clem Atlee's 1945 government gave us the NHS.

Or, for those with shorter memories, the boldest since Gordon Brown imposed a windfall tax on the privatised utilities in 1997 that banked £5 billion for modern apprenticeships.

Nationalising the railways, taxing the rich to pay for the NHS and a living wage of £10 an hour are brilliantly popular policies.

But voters know in their hearts none of them will come to pass. It is because Labour do not meet the tests twin tests of competence and credibility that every opposition in waiting needs to pass muster on. Diane Abbott alone is enough for voters to reach that conclusion.


A manifesto is a not just a prospectus, how many people read them? What is more important is what it represents, a ticket to the future, a vision of the journey you want to take people on.


Four weeks out from the election voters aren't buying it from Labour. While message might chime for many the messenger does not.

Where did it go wrong? A long way back but I reckon if there was a tipping point it was very early on when Corbyn, in his first public engagement as leader of the opposition, did not sing or even mouth the national anthem.

It is a trifling, picky detail yet we expect standards from our leaders that we would not reasonably impose on ourselves.

In politics you are seen as you arrive and people made their judgement on Jeremy Corbyn there and then. It was over before it began.

Comhairle airson a' Chomhairle

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Tha na h-Eileanan an Iar ann an seòrsa de staing 's gun boireannaich sam bith air a' chùis a dhèanamh ann an taghaidhean na comhairle.

Chan eil a' chomhairle ach mar shamhla air mar a bhios na coimhearsnachdan fhèin - fireann agus glas - mur an gabh luchd-poileataigs aire.

Bu chòir sin a bhith ann an inntinn a h-uile comhairliche, sean agus ùr.

Às dèidh dhaibh an stèidheachadh fhèin, bu chòir dhaibh dèanamh cinnteach gu bheil cùisean ann an coimhearsnachd anns an àm ri teachd mar phrìomhachas.

Mar sin feumaidh na fìr fòram a stèidheachadh airson bhoireannach agus coinneachadh riutha ann an seòmar na comhairle gu cunbhalach.

Feumaidh taghadh a bhith ann airson Comhairle na h-Òigridh, gus beachdan an ath ghinealaich a phiobrachadh agus a riochdachadh.

Ann an àm airson an ath thaghaidh, feumaidh e bhith follaiseach gum bi taic ann airson chomhairlichean le clann òg gus cothrom a thoirt do phàrantan.

Gu h-aithghearr, feumaidh na comhairlichean seo oidhirp a dhèanamh iad fhèin a chur à bith.

Feumaidh na h-Eileanan comhairle a tha a' riochdachadh an latha an-diugh, neo bi iad air am fàgail anns an latha an-dè.


Translation

The Western Isles are in kind of a crisis after no women succeeded in the council elections.
It will not be a council but a symbol of how communities will be - male and grey - unless politicians pay attention to the problem.
After they settle themselves councillors ought to make sure the future shape of the island community is a priority.
As such these men need to set up a Women's Forum and meet with it regularly in the council chamber.
There need to be elections for a Youth Council, to encourage and represent the views of the next generation.
In time for the next elections it needs to be clear that there will be support for councillors with young children in order to give parents a chance to serve.
In short, the councillors need to make an effort to put themselves out of existence.
The islands need a council that represents the present day, or they will be left in times past.

Fishing for votes in Scotland's Brexit Corner

Election trail in Banff and Buchan, May 10th 2017


IT is just 7am and Ruth Davidson is already taking the fish wars to the SNP in the noisy Peterhead market.

Most voters are only waking up but the largest daily white fish auction in Europe is in full swing and so is the Scottish Conservative leader.

Davidson is firing off sound bites faster than the merchants can bid for boxes of coley, all while posing for her trademark photo opportunities.

Having ridden buffaloes in previous campaigns Davidson is today willing to share the limelight with a sizable cod, and local Tory candidate David Duguid.

This is the glamour of the election trail but neither the cod nor the candidate get a kiss from Davidson. The photographers are pushing their luck with the can-do politician who thinks she's about to land an election catch.

Across the north east the Conservatives are wooing Brexit-supporting fishermen into their nets with the promise that only Theresa May can deliver a good deal from Europe.

Banff and Buchan, that box of fertile farming land and fishing ports in the top right above Aberdeen, is home to the UK's biggest fishing fleet. It is also Scotland's  Brexit corner.

When the referendum votes were weighed up this was the constituency that definitely voted to leave Europe.

The reason is simple - the hated Common Fisheries Policy. Fishermen on the coast, and farming communities inland, feel control over their livelihood and industries have been ceded to foreign powers for the last 40 years.

The place has been an SNP stronghold ever since Alex Salmond snatched the seat from the late Buchan Bulldog, Tory MP Albert MacQuarrie, back in 1987.

The SNP has prospered over the years from the story of how UK fishing grounds, and Scottish fishing communities, were bargained away by a Tory government as the price of joining the EU in the 1970s.

Sitting MP Eilidh Whitford, who has nursed the seat since taking over from Salmond seven years ago, enters the race on what should be a comfortable 14,000 majority.

But now the Brexit fishermen and the pro-European SNP appear to have fallen out. Conservative polling hopes are borne out by voting in the council elections last week, leaving the SNP on the defensive.

The nationalists welcomed Davidson to Peterhead by leaking a partial account of a letter from UK Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom. It claimed to show that fishing was an expendable Brexit pawn.

The charge has been dismissed out of hand by the fishermen's leaders like Bertie Armstrong who has had the letter for a month and found that far from threatening it delivers the assurances the Scottish Fishermen's Federation were looking for.

Davidson  accuses Nicola Sturgeon of a "grubby" attempt to sink her visit to Peterhead.

In the comfort of the port authority board room she emphasises the message she gave to the market below: "We've got one chance to get a good deal out of Brexit, I'm committed to that and so are the Conservative Ministers and fishermen know that any attempt to take us back into the EU would mean we go straight back into the Common Fisheries policy."

Up in town, and batting for Europe , Eilidh Whiteford has a simple reply for that. She says: "The Tories betrayed the fishermen on the way into Europe and they would betray them on the way out."

The fishermen want all the fish in the sea and all the markets to sell them too. But what would be unacceptable would be for the Common Fishery Policy rules to keep applying after Brexit.

That, Whiteford warns, is what a Tory Brexit would mean - a second sell-out of the fishermen.

She says: "The Leadsom letter couldn't be clearer - the Tories are simply going to translate the CFP into UK law and it is going to be business as usual with the same foreign vessels fishing in our waters but with restrictions on our exporters."

She adds:  "The wise heads in the industry see this, the risks will fall on processors and exporters. You can have much quota as you want but if you don't have a market to sell to no one is winning."

But echoing across the Peterhead market, voices can be heard willing the Conservatives to win.

Jimmy Buchan, the skipper who starred in the popular Trawlermen TV series, now represents the processors onshore through the Scottish Seafoods Association.

"We need a strong Prime Minister in there," he says. "This is is not about completely excluding our European counterparts it is about getting the balance and the share in our favour as the nation that has the fish, that is not unreasonable."

Davidson highlights that the SNP has nothing left  to offer the fishing communities: "The EU fishery commissioner has made it clear, no new entrant to the EU will be able to modify the CFP. You're straight back in that would be a huge disappointment to people here who see the opportunity Brexit gives to their industry."

The North east has been rewarded for its loyalty by the SNP government. Big infrastructure investment in the SNP's favoured corner has transforming the road network but there has been another change of late.

In the council elections Conservatives were ahead in first preference votes in every ward, even SNP strongholds like Fraserburgh.

"There might be people who voted Scottish independence but they voted with even more passion to leave the EU," says Tory hopeful David Duguid.

"I can be a voice for the whole community in the heart of parliament, not just shouting from the sidelines of opposition"

Duguid and Whiteford are politicians unlike Ruth Davidson or Alex Salmond.

Whiteford is no blowhard but the quiet-spoken veteran has a native feel for the communities that make up Banff and Buchan.

There is more to the seat than fishing. On the doorstep she hears a lot about the problems of lay offs in the oil and gas industry, the quiet disaster that has left once wealthy oil workers facing their overstretched credit lines.

She is also still getting a warm response to that other referendum question,  the one on independence.

Like the fishermen Whiteford knows not all fishing expeditions end in success.

She says: "We were returning SNP MPs here when the party was at 14 per cent in national polls.I think a lot of people with the loudest voices don't always represent the common sense of the majority."

For every Corbyn voter crossing the street we have nine going the other way

For my Daily Record column

"FOR every one voter crossing the street to vote Labour because of Corbyn we're getting nine or 10 going the other way because of him," said the despondent candidate.

The dispatches coming back from Labour's frontline in this snap election echo the doom-laden messages of Scotland two years ago.

In Scotland, Labour are, we know, fighting to stay on the map in Ian Murray's Edinburgh South constituency with the forlorn hope that tactical unionist voting kicks in big style for the wave to break any other way.

Labour expect to hang on in the north of England around the Tyne but that band of Brexit seats across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire are danger zones.

Private polls show seats that have been Labour since 1931 going to the Tories with big majorities.

A lot of it is Brexit but most of it, according to activists, is down to the radioactive qualities of Jeremy Corbyn, whose senior aides secretly calculate if Labour come within touching distance of 30 per cent of the vote, as much as Miliband did, then he can stay on.

It leaves you wondering how delusional the Labour leader's office is.

The idea of Corbyn staying on is as fanciful as that 30 per cent showing for Labour is just now.

But remember how Tony Benn had the scent of victory in Labour's catastrophic 1983 defeat because eight and a half million voters had endorsed a socialist manifesto.

It kind of explains why Corbyn is spending time touring constituencies where membership has expanded because of him.

The confrontation between pensioner Malcolm Baker and Tim Farron, one of the rare encounters between a party leader and a voter, rails might have served as a snapshot of the real world election.

As Baker, a Leave voter, berated the Lib Dem leader (who stood up for himself) he was very revealing.

"I've always voted Labour but I will be voting for Theresa May," he said.

Not for the Tories, but willing to make the exception of a lifetime for the Prime Minister who will lead Brexit negotiations.

Focus groups show Labour voters flirting with the idea of backing May but not the still-toxic Tory brand.

It should be in the bag for the Tories but with five weeks to run a campaign can still go off the rails.

The awkward photo-ops and staged soundbites cannot be sustained for that long.

Eventually the opposition, the media, or God forbid, the public will break into the bubble and hold May to some kind of scrutiny.

Anticipating the scenario, the Tories used the symbolism of a Downing Street podium to launch an extraordinary attack on the European Union.

It was a blatant attempt to scoop up Labour voters and homeless Ukippers at the expense of being unfriended by the 27 neighbouring states she hopes to negotiate a smooth Brexit with.

Politics can often be a low calculation, but May has stooped to conquer.

Gunfire in the Palace

My Daily Record dispatch from inside Westminster

Westminster is used to seeing police with guns, and we like them because this place is a number one terrorist target. In that sense we all knew this day would come.

Armed police are routinely deployed around the perimeter of the fortified palace, keeping it safe.

Each morning and evening as we enter and leave they can be seen in pairs at every entrance of the self-proclaimed mother of parliaments. One of them gave his life defending democracy yesterday.

The sound of repeated gunshots signalled that Westminster was under attack and brought parliament to a shuddering, temporary halt.

At 2.40pm, while the Prime Minister was still in the Commons, the loud, unmistakable bang-bang of gunfire could be heard in New Palace Yard, three floors below our Westminster office.

The division bell summoning MPs to go and vote was ringing out at the same time.

Before the shockwave could settle journalists rushed to windows that overlook the open courtyard, sweeping aside the bomb curtains designed to stop explosive fragments flying into the rooms.

On the cobbled road below, in the shadow of Big Ben, two men were lying prone on the ground.

With others I rushed down three flights into the cloisters by Westminster Hall.

Armed police were surging out of the underground car park which houses their armoury.

Orders were barked,  machine guns at the ready policemen took point behind the eroded limestone pillars, as you would see an armed patrol on the streets of an occupied country.

We peeked into the courtyard, the paramedics were already at work as the police moved in. Quickly we were told to go back inside. Parliament was being put on lock-down.

Events unfolded swiftly then as shocked eye witnesses recalled what they had seen.

Like every violent incident people had fragmented memories. Some people heard one gunshot, others more.

Don Brind, a former Labour press officer, spoke to us with his takeaway lunch getting cold in a polystyrene carton.

“I was walking past, I heard some shouting and saw someone running out of the corner of my eye. Very shortly after that there was a shot.” 

“I looked and I saw a figure on the ground with someone standing over him with what I assumed to be a gun. Then I looked and about ten yards away I saw a yellow jacketed person on the ground.”

Sometimes colleagues were the best witnesses. Kevin Schofield, one time Westminster correspondent for this paper, was seated at a window overlooking the Yard.

He said: “I heard a loud bang like a car crash, I looked out and there was lots of shouting and people running around. That was when I looked out and saw a man bust through the security gate and attack the policeman. They both went down, another policeman appeared and the attacker got up and walked towards him with a knife in his hand. I heard gunfire, but I didn’t see the man go down he was just out of sight.”

Everyone spent the rest of the day piecing together what happened in these few seconds of madness.

As police pushed back the cordon, extending it along the road beyond Westminster Abbey in one direction and Embankment station in the other, the paramedics pumped away.  

They could be seen hunched in a group as they fought to save the life of the policeman and his attacker on the floor of the cobbled courtyard in front of Parliament.

Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood was among those who rushed to help. He gave the downed police officer mouth to mouth.

We could see the MP standing, his shirt bloodstained, the officer dead beside him despite his efforts. The other man lay dead with a blanket covering his face for some time.

Quickly the yard flooded with the heavy duty police, tooled up with machine guns, body armour and grey kevlar helmets. They were the CTSFO, counter-terrorist specialist firearm officers, a police unit set up to deal with just such an incident. 

A room by room search of the vast palace, still going on as I write, ensued. MPs were locked in the Commons, the sitting suspended.

Thousands of pictures were taken, many of them will become police evidence, but the strict rules on taking photos within the palace stopped us broadcasting out the images.

The shock spread throughout the vast building and from end to end of the country as people began messaging for reassurance.There were plenty who needed to told.

Wednesday is the busiest day at Westminster, Prime Minister’s Questions pulls in a full house and many MPs bring in constituents from all parts to see the spectacle of Britain’s vibrant political life.

Theresa May was in the division lobby, preparing to cast a vote,  the ultimate symbol of peaceful politics, when she was whisked away by plain clothes police officers.

Locked in our rooms, we were safe enough inside the citadel. But on Westminster bridge, fear and blood mingled on the pavement. You could feel that as the sirens mixed with the sound of helicopter rotors.

The images showed carnage on one of the busiest tourist thoroughfares in Britain. We could do nothing, and felt helpless.

Westminster has been under attack before. New Palace Yard is where the INLA detonated their tilt bomb and blew up Airey Neave as he drove up the ramp of the carpark in March 1979. 

London has been here before, rocked back on its heels by the 7/7 attacks of 2005. Brussels took a worse beating from terror on this day last year, and it goes on.

This was another futile assault on a way of life, for you cannot kill a city or the symbol of a country’s democracy. That policeman lying on the ground below showed people will die fighting to defend it.

Inside the Palace, as police began debriefing hundreds of witnesses, people shook off their bewilderment, regained confidence. 

A London Underground roundel with  “we are not afraid”  instead of the familiar station names quickly gained currency online.

It was smart, defiant move. But  at the moment when gunshots rang out across Westminster that sentiment was certainly not true.

Feuch faclan Granaidh -geama ùr air-loidhne

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Tha gu leòr spòrs ri fhaighinn air fòn-làimhe - bho Pokemon gu Instagram, faodaidh sibh ur corragan a chaitheamh le dibhearsain.

Ach tha an t-altaire Alasdair Stephen air geama ùr a chur air-loidhne.

Bho chionn còrr is fichead bliadhna air ais, shuidh Alasadair sìos le sheanmhair anns an Eilean Sgitheanach agus sgrìobh e sìos na mìltean de dh'abairtean agus gnàthasan-cainnt.

'S e boireannach foghlaimte a bh' ann an Seasaidh Hume Robasdan - tè à Slèite a thug a-mach ceum an Oilthigh Glaschu ann an Gàidhlig, Beurla is Laideann.

Bha sin mar a bha, gus an do lorg Alasdair an app "Quizlet", a cruthaicheas cairtean-ionnsachaidh ann an cànan sam bith.

Tha còrr is trì mìle abairtean, le eadar-theangachadh Beurla, air "Scottish Gaelic - Gran's Gaelic 1" air Quizlet a-nis.

Chan e guth Gran a tha dol le na faclan ach Gaidhlig ghlan Eilein Ratharsair aig Fearchar Mac Gill-Fhinnein.

Ach chan e guth Fhearchair a tha mise a' cluinntinn ach guth mo mhàthar agus na ceudan de shean fhaclan nach eil sinn a' cleachdach a-nis a' tighinn air ais thugam anns an stòras.

Tha e an-asgaidh agus tha e èibhinn. Feuch faclan Granaidh.



Translation

There is enough fun to be had on a mobile phone - from Pokemon to Instagram you can wear out your fingers with diversions.

But the architect Alasdair Stephen has put a new game online.

Over 20 years ago Alasdair sat down with his grandmother on the Isle of Skye and wrote down thousands of sayings and phrases.

Jessie Hume Robertson was an educated woman - one from Sleat who graduated from Glasgow University in Gaelic, English and Latin.

That was that, until Alasdair found the Quizlet app that makes learners' flash cards in any language.

There are now more than 3000 phrases, with English translations, on "Scottish Gaelic - Gran's Gaelic 1" on Quizlet.

It isn't Gran's voice that accompanies the words by the crystal clear Gaelic of Rassay's Farquhar MacLennan,

But it isn't Fraquhar's voice I hear but that of my mother's as the hundreds of old words that we no longer use come back to me from this treasure trove.

It is free and it is fun. Try Granny's Gaelic.

Memories of Raasay's WWI German POWs

A brilliant piece on Raasay by David Hayes of Inside Story - the island at the centre of the world - linked to an article I wrote many years ago about the German prisoners held on the island during WWI. 

It was a remarkable story, I had forgotten many of the details, and I don't think there is an electronic archive in the Sunday Herald going back to 2004 so I am grateful to Hayes for finding and recovering the piece.

Re-reading the interviews I think it is the incredible humanity and compassion of the islanders that shines through, particularly Jessie Ferguson, who risked being ostracised to feed the young Germans in the hope that someone would do the same for her sons imprisoned in Europe.  

Fragments of war History Forgot - Sunday Herald 07 November 2004

Locals on Raasay in the Hebrides risked their lives to aid suffering German POWs held in their midst. So why is their struggle barely remembered? By Torcuil Crichton


IN a shallow valley, in the middle of a dense English forest, they lie beneath neat rows of blue granite headstones, 5000 dead from two world wars.

Colin Lee has been tending the lines of heather-fringed gravestones for the past 20 years. “People living less than five miles away don't know this is here,” says Lee,drawing on a quiet afternoon cigar and scanning the rows stretching up either side of the slope.

It should be no surprise then that few have heard of the Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof, the German war cemetery, at Cannock Chase, Staffordshire. 

Shrouded in birch, pine and larch, the remains of the German dead from both wars were collected from churchyards throughout Britain and re-buried in the purpose-built cemetery in the 1960s.

Each stone marks four graves, with two names on either side. There are no regimental markings to distinguish or disgrace the dead.

Many of the names are the common Saxon surnames of Britain and Germany, such as Brown (Braun) and Miller (Muller). Most of these were internees, innocent Germans who lived in Britain and were locked up on the outbreak of hostilities. The internierter” inscription on their graves lends a guilty air to the woodland clearing.

After conferring with his gothic-scripted ledger, Lee walks through the grass avenues to plot number 457. The shared headstone bears the names of Georg Kagerer and Paul Sosinka. The sight of those inscribed names closes a circle that has run from Staffordshire to Bavaria and to the Inner Hebrides.

The names that share the Cannock grave are also carved on a headstone on Raasay, where these first world war German prisoners spent their last days.

Raasay, a long sliver of an island in the lee of the Isle of Skye, was the location of one of the most unlikely prisoner of war camps ever and the setting for a remarkable story of how, away from the slaughter of the trenches, the spirit of human kindness triumphed over enmity.

High above the village of Inverarish, the only settlement of any size on Raasay, and tucked behind another copse of trees, is the cemetery. There are few visitors to the massive carved boulder that bears the names of the two German soldiers, but there are plenty of other reminders of the presence of almost 300 of their wartime comrades on the island.

The iron ore deposits on the island of Raasay were first identified just before the outbreaks of hostilities in 1914, and William Baird, the iron and mining company, opened a site, complete with a railway, a crusher, firing kilns and a huge pier.

With war came massive demand for shells and the iron ore to produce them, and, of course, a lack of civilian manpower to work the Raasay mines. In 1916, Baird arranged for the operation to be run under the ministry of munitions with the labour of German prisoners. This contravened the Hague Conventions, a shameful act which the British government later attempted to cover up by destroying most of the records in 1920.

It was only when the wage differential between island workers in the mines and the imported mainland labour led to a strike, that the illegal use of German POWs as strike-breakers became an issue. The story was taken up in the national press and raised in the House of Commons. A young Winston Churchill, minister for munitions, had to respond with embarrassing half-truths.

Hidden by the British government, mentioned in passing by most chronicles of the Hebrides and confined to the past with the last generation, the history of the Raasay POWs is fragmented.

The enormous concrete supports for the railway viaduct that carried ore from the mines to the pier head remain. They will last forever, but the story behind them has almost slipped through the fingers of time.

John Ferguson sits in his front room, wedged in between an upright piano and the welcoming fireplace. In his hands he is tumbling what looks like an aged white porcelain tube.

Hollow, about six inches tall, it has an intricate raised rose stem crafted on one side. Only the splayed base reveals that this vase is made not from fine clay but beef bone, carved by one of the German prisoners whose name appears in raised letters on the reverse.

It is an amazing piece of work, grotesque and beautiful at the same time, and Ferguson rolls it through his hands over and over again, summoning up the past.

“"You see, they were very skilled craftsmen, the Germans,”" he says, sifting through his memory for stories his father told him. "They were chosen for the work because of their trades. They could make anything from a needle toan anchor, and I've seen both on this island.”"

They also, he continues, made exquisite lacquered wooden jewel boxes. “And they made the jewellery to go inside them. "From a sovereign they could make a ring that would fit your finger beautifully.”"

Ferguson’'s house and mind are a treasure trove of artefacts and island stories. His late father, John Archie Ferguson, worked with the German POWs as a 14-year-old mining apprentice.

“"All that generation worked with the Germans,”" says John Ferguson. "“My father got on with them very well and he could speak German until his dying day. I think he looked on them as elder brothers."

There was a reason that the apprentice Ferguson and the prisoners developed a symbiotic attachment. One of his brothers was also a POW, in Germany, and because of that his mother was determined to keep the Germans boys on her doorstep, starving on half rations, alive.

Jessie Ferguson (née MacDonald) from Applecross must have been some woman. A widow with seven children, she had lost a young daughter to appendicitis when her two eldest sons went to war in 1914. Kenneth and Fergie were with the Broadford and Raasay B company of the Camerons infantry regiment.

Fergie, who lied about his age to join up with his brother, was captured fighting
in a rearguard action in France. He was the only survivor dragged out of a group of 30 dead and wounded soldiers by a German officer, his nephew recalls.

For three years Fergie Ferguson languished in a German prison camp, during which time his mother on Raasay made a deal with herself to feed the German prisoners in the hope that someone would deliver the same providence to her son.

“Everyone was living with the stress of waiting for a telegram coming through the door,” says John Ferguson. "She got sneers that she was feeding these dirty Germans and she put up with a lot, but she always used to say these are some mother’s children, and so I hope that someone will be looking after mine’.”"

More than 280 German prisoners worked the Raasay mine for a two-year period. There is one contemporaneous account by a rather stunned Australian serviceman, on leave in the land of his forefathers, coming across German uniforms he had last encountered on the Western Front, but the people who rescued the history were two oceanographers who stumbled across the disused Raasay mine workings in the 1980s.

Focusing on the technical challenge of the mine workings, Laurence and Pamela Draper managed to gather enough material for a slim but timely book on the subject in 1990. They collected first-hand accounts from islanders who are now dead, archive photos and superb surveys of the extensive mine workings.

Architecturally, Inverarish is a Highland village. Two rows of miner’s cottages, built by Baird, are now occupied by most of the 200 or so inhabitants of the island. During the first world war half of it was a prison camp surrounded by barbed wire. In the top section were the Germans, and in the bottom their military guard and British mine workers.

IN each corner there was a watchtower, just like you see in the films, says John Ferguson, and everyone was searched coming in and going out. And, just like the films, Ferguson’s father had long sausage-shaped sacks, sewn from flour bags, suspended inside his baggy trousers to smuggle oatmeal and flour into the camp for the Germans.

Separated from a military supply chain by miles of sea and rail, the Germans survived, barely, on half rations which arrived on a steam packet every three days. Life was not all bad, though. One photo depicts the Germans in celebratory mood in leder hosen and hunting caps, with costumes and instruments they must have made on the island. Apart from what they fashioned for sale, the Germans traded the contents of their Red Cross parcels. Prison tobacco and small luxuries became valuable commodities on an island suffering the privations of war.

“"As far as I can gather there was very little animosity towards the Germans,"
”says Norrie Gillies, whose house is a stone’s throw from the site of the former prison camp hall, now the island fire station. “"I suppose that was the case wherever people got to see prisoners as human beings, but life must have been pretty miserable for them.”"

Escape attempts ended in farce. Half a dozen prisoners rowed out to a fishing boat, but were unable to start the engine. Seasick and disgusted, they returned ashore and were captured cooking a rabbit not far from the camp. Others hid out until they were recaptured. “I’m sure they hadn't realised that they were on an island,” says Gillies.

Death was another escape. Georg Kagerer was killed by a roof-fall in the mines in May 1917; Paul Sosinka died of unknown causes the previous Christmas.

Early in 1919, before the prisoners could be returned home, another dozen succumbed to the fatal influenza epidemic that swept through Europe and the world that winter.

“"They couldn’t have been very robust by then,”" says Gillies. “"It’'s quite
tragic, because the war was over.”" While Kagerer and Sosinka were accorded a
headstone, the dozen others were given flat grave slabs.

Not long before the second world war began, recalls Gillies, the German
graves were desecrated. “"It was in 1936 or 1937, some people from one of the
universities came to the island for the day. There was a lot of anti-German feeling at the time, and somehow these people found themselves in the graveyard and they destroyed the German graves, smashed them completely." People on the island only found out weeks later when they had a funeral.

The team that came for the remains of the POWs in 1967 showed similar disdain for the burial ground. The two-ton carved boulder in memory of Sosinka and Kagerer was cast aside carelessly and only put back upright many years later by the islanders.

None of the former prisoners retained contact with the island, although they left behind clues to their identities. There is a postcard of one of the Germans in a tunic which John Ferguson has unearthed. Many more photos may exist.

"There was a Jewish hawker who used to come round the islands, and he would take photos with a camera he had,”" he explains. German prisoner records
were destroyed by Allied bombing in the second world war. In the upheaval of a twice-defeated and then divided nation, there is no trace of the prisoners’ side of the story.

The obelisk war memorial in Inverarish, meanwhile, is witness to the 22 men from the island who died in the first world war. Two out of three who volunteered never returned. It was an enormous loss for a small island.

Given Raasay’'s Free Presbyterian leanings, there is not usually an Armistice ceremony at the memorial. But the islanders will remember their dead, and some will still spare a moment for the Germans whose names are carved on the boulder high on the hill, the enemies who became their wartime friends.
The Raasay Iron Mine by Laurence and Pamela Draper is available from Raasay
Stores, Isle of Raasay.