Softback book ‘No Shame in Fear’ by Alex C. MacLean, 2016. Alex C. Maclean was born on the Isle of Tiree in 1923, and lived there until the age of fourteen, when he went to sea. This is a first-hand account of the WW2 Atlantic convoys and the devastation of war. Stalked by German U-boats, cast adrift in a lifeboat, it also tells of the difficulties of the post-war period, in building a decent family life and coming to terms with his own history back on Tiree. Foreword by Donald S. Murray.
Photocopy of a typed transcript of an interview with Hector MacPhail, Cornaigbeg, on 19 May 1992, about himself, boats, sea transport and sailors, with particular reference to Allan MacFadyen, Scarinish, and ships the Mary Stewart and the Mary & Effie. Topics also include alchohol taxation, violence, Clearances, landowners, hotels, Crofters’ War, coal puffers. The interviewer is given only as ‘Smith’.
Original and transcript of a message in a bottle found on a beach on the southeast of Tiree in July 1964. It was thrown out to sea from the vessel ‘Monte Vlia’, sailing from London to Las Palmas (Canary Islands) on the 11th December 1963.
Emailed extract from the Inverness Journal and Northern Advertiser, Friday 16th July, 1819: “Drowned between Coll and Ardnamurachan on the 15th ult. Mr Donald Macdonald Distiller on the Island of Tyree”.
Book ‘The Viking World’ by James Graham-Campbell, 2013. Authoritative update on a previous edition of the same title, based on recent archaeological research, with a new chapter on ships, shipwrights and seamen.
Softback book ‘Flowers in the Snow’ by Gwyneth Hoyle, 2001. A biography of the plant collector Isobel Wylie Hutchinson who travelled the northern latitudes of the world in the first half of the 1900s in search of plants. Her travels through Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska were by various and interesting means. Includes Tiree.
Photograph of the yacht `Charm` whose wreckage washed up at Hynish Bay in 1945
Black & white photograph of the yacht `Charm` at its berth in Co. Sligo, Ireland in the 1940s. Its wreckage washed up in Hynish Bay in September 1945, with the loss of four lives. The new owner RAF Group Captain G.N. Warrington, his Australian wife and their two friends, FO McGregor and FO Ellis, were sailing from Sligo to Belfast when they ran into a gale and probably a free-floating mine left over from WWII. A full-scale search & rescue was carried out by the RAF and others, but to no avail. Mr & Mrs Warrington had fortunately left their three-year-old son, Alastair, with friends.
