An Iodhlann Tiree's historical centre

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• Alasdair Sinclair

"To say that Alasdair Sinclair worked in An Iodhlann, Tiree’s historical centre in Scarinish, would be a huge understatement. Alasdair did not just work in the archive – he lived and breathed the place from our very first meeting about the centre in October 1996 until he ‘retired’ two years ago. He made it what it is today.

Alasdair loved old things, old people, old traditions all his life. We often forgot, when he told us another story, that Alasdair had not really grown up on Tiree. He spent only holidays here, but his eyes were sharp, his interest unquenchable and his memory prodigious. His regular visits to his family in Brock and Vaul were enough to give him a wealth of stories about the old days. His eye for every technical detail was astounding. He could describe how the old men of Vaul made a boat so accurately you could have made one yourself.

His special love was boats. Alasdair made a recording for us once about going out fishing with Neil MacKinnon, his mother’s uncle. His job, as a ten year old boy, was to row the boat while the older man placed the creels:
“Occasionally I had the job of rowing out with Neil if for some reason Willie or Donald wasn’t going out. The ‘Duck’, their boat, was something like eight feet wide and the oars were great long narrow bladed things… The creels only had one entrance in these days, and you wanted to get this positioned exactly towards the rock. To manoeuvre a boat like that with a pernickety old man who was going ‘That’s not right at all. Do it again!’ in Gaelic at you. You certainly learnt some swear words in Gaelic once you’d been with Neil for a while!”

But he was also surprisingly modern in his views on women in the old days. “They did all the work”, he used to say!

If there was something practical needing to be done about the museum we naturally turned to Alasdair. Alasdair was not just a trained engineer (although from his rare conversations about himself and his career it was obvious that he had been an extremely able one in Glasgow and South Africa). He was a genius – it’s not too strong a word – at making things work, an art much greater than engineering. I should say, making old things work, because Alasdair was only really happy repairing an old compass or making a tool from scratch out of mahogany and brass, making not just a key but the lock as well. He was a regular at the hardware stalls at the Barras street market in Glasgow and every week he would return to his flat in Drygate with some valuable trophy.

Alasdair was also passionate about Gaelic. While he never became a really fluent speaker, he never stopped trying. From his days in Glasgow when he would be a regular at Gaelic and Highland events in the city, to his evenings on Tiree with each winter’s crop of Gaelic student hopefuls, his would be an encouraging presence.

But Alasdair was not just a practical, passionate enthusiast. He will principally be remembered for being ‘Mr Exhibition’ since we opened ten years ago. And he wasn’t just a volunteer at our exhibitions – he was there every day. If a visitor from New Zealand could only come at 9 o’clock at night, Alasdair would be there. If Sunday was the only day that was suitable, Alasdair would open up then. He was devoted to the cause. But it was as a communicator that he excelled himself. He always said his job was to find out what interested visitors as soon as they walked in the door. He would then spend as long as it took, and sometimes a bit longer, answering their questions. He was also surprisingly good with children, treating them as seriously as he would anyone else.

He was an intelligent and a widely read man and he became quite a scholar about Tiree’s history. He kept up long and detailed correspondences with many people around the world who wanted to know more about the island.
But above all Alasdair was an intensely modest and decent man. We at An Iodhlann will miss him terribly."