julian_craster

A report from the location of one of my favourite films......The edge of the world (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)



Living at the edge of the world

Welcome to Foula, Britain's most remote
inhabited island, where the wind blows at gale force most of the time and
there are no shops or pubs
Jon Henley

The Guardian, Thursday February 21 2008


Twenty miles or so off the west coast of Shetland is an island. It
measures three and a half miles long by two and a half miles wide and
consists, to the west and north, of five mighty hills that rise at their
peak to more than 1,300ft and end, abruptly, in the highest cliffs in the
country: lob a pebble off the top and it will hit the waves below 11 seconds
later. To the south and east there is a bleak lowland strip of rock, bog,
peat banks and coarse, wind-flattened brown grass. When the Atlantic storms
blow, which at this time of year is almost all the time, it is almost
unbelievably windy here; the kind of wind that makes your eyes water as you
lean into it and lifts you half off your feet when you turn your back. The
sky, consequently, is filled with startled-looking seabirds, many of them
flying backwards.

There are reasonable, although not conclusive grounds for supposing that
this could be the place the ancients called Ultima Thule, the edge of the
known world. It lies on the same latitude as St Petersburg in Russia, and
Anchorage in Alaska, and is roughly as far from Aberdeen as it is from
Bergen in Norway. London, mercifully, is closer than Reykjavik. But not by
much.

This place is called Foula, and it is Britain's most remote inhabited
island.

To get here, you can either catch a small twice-weekly ferry, which in
winter is more often than not stuck in what might generously - if not very
truthfully - be termed Foula's harbour, or take a tiny eight-seat twin-prop
Islander aeroplane that flies whenever the prevailing force eight is kind
enough to blast straight up or down, as opposed to across, the homemade
landing strip. This does not happen every day.

Astonishingly, people live here. It's hard to say exactly how many because
they come and go a bit, but at the moment it is 21, 22 or 24, depending on
whether you count Magnie Holbourn and his girlfriend, who have been away but
appear to have come back, and the baby born four months ago to Amy Ratter
and her partner, Wullie. What is more, they profess surprise at the notion
that their existence might in any way be considered unusual.

"As far as we're concerned, you're the weird ones," says Marion Taylor, by
way of a kindly welcome. "Everyone has to have a roof over their heads and
ours is here, that's all. We're just getting on with our lives. We don't
really see what there is to get worked up about."

What there is to get worked up about, I reckon, is that if you took 100
people at random and deposited them somewhere like Foula, 98 would probably
go mad (I'm not making that up; a Shetland GP thinks so too). Foula is life
on the edge. The island has neither pub nor shop, apart from a post office
the size of a front porch, which is what it probably once was. Its
inhabitants have, however, been able to communicate with the outside world
by telephone since the late 1960s, and enjoyed the amenities of running
water and a communal electricity supply since the mid-1980s (although at the
moment, what with the ferry being stormbound for the past three weeks, the
generator is running low on diesel and the power goes off every night at
12.)

On Foula, Christmas falls on January 6 and New Year on January 13, the
island having refused to abandon the Julian calendar, which the rest of the
kingdom did more than 250 years ago. Nearby Fair Isle, which boasts a
population nearly three times Foula's, may dispute the title of most remote
inhabited island (it is further from the Shetland mainland, apparently, but
closer to Orkney), but I can assure you that in early February, in a
southerly gale-to-severe-gale veering west and, so help me, strengthening
later, Foula feels just about as far from anywhere as it possible to get in
this country without hitting, say, the Greenland ice cap.

For a start, your groceries come in by plane. Greeting the fragile little
Islander as it bounces improbably down from the heavens - "So here's the
safety spiel," the Botswana-born pilot had said as we took off from Dingwall
airstrip, near Lerwick, into a steadily stiffening breeze. "This'll take 15
minutes, your life vest is under your seat, and if it all goes pear-shaped
you get out the way you came in" - is a huddled knot of people wrapped in
thermals and waterproofs, all waiting for their provisions. Apart from me,
Quentin the pilot and a bearded Romanian - who is married to the island
nurse and spent most of the crossing chortling to himself at the idea that I
seriously expected to be able to get off the island again in three days'
time - the plane was mostly full of potatoes and tinned tomatoes.

Not everyone buys in, though. In Foula's southernmost settlement of
Hametoun, 32-year-old Amy Ratter, who is related to the Holbourn family who
have owned Foula for the past century or so, grows half a dozen different
types of vegetable and rears 28 Shetland ewes, two rams, three lambs, 11
pigs, a dog and a Shetland pony called Piper. Like every child raised on the
island, she left to go to boarding school in Lerwick when she was 11; like
almost all, she didn't return.

"I got a job, bought a house down south, forgot all about it," she says,
heaving bags of hay into Piper's cart, which is made from two motorbike
wheels, an old bed frame and the upturned fibreglass roof of a Landrover.
"But then one autumn I came back to see my mother for the first time in
about six years, and I just thought, what on earth am I doing over there,
working for someone else? What am I doing living anywhere else but here?"

So Amy came back, moved into her grandfather's old cottage, and started by
rebuilding a few fallen stone walls and dykes and fencing in her
apportionment of hill grazing. Now she puts in 21 hours a week for the water
board, pumping the island's supply early each morning, she is a part-time
member of the fire brigade and spends the bulk of her long days working four
crofts. It is harder work than most of us will ever know, but Amy is quite
clear why she does it.

"Nothing else in this life is going to make you happy but hard work," she
says firmly. "Not sitting in an office, not going down the pub, not buying
mountains of rubbish from shops; all that'll ever do is break and make you
unhappy. Sitting down at the end of the day knowing you've done what needs
to be done for your animals, done the best you possibly can by all that's
yours; worked hard on your land for you and your family: that's what makes
you happy."

That said, Amy did, in fact, meet her partner in the pub, on the mainland.
Wullie was a slaughterman from Glasgow up in Shetland on a contract, and
once they had got acquainted he came across with her to Foula to show her
how to kill and slice up a pig. That was 17 months ago and he hasn't left
yet; their son Alex was born last autumn on Mainland, the big island.
"Anyone who worries about bringing up a baby here is overestimating the
risks," says Amy breezily, feeding the lad in the living room. "This is a
fantastic place for a child. In an emergency, the helicopter can almost
always come in. And if that's not fast enough, there was most probably
nothing anyone could have done anyway." Above her head swing numerous pieces
of mutton, drying over the range.

Wullie, keen to be off to feed one neighbour's dog (she is off the island
for a couple of weeks) and fix another's roof (part of it blew off in last
week's storm), doesn't have much time to chat. "You miss your friends and
your family at first, of course you do," he says. "But the compensations are
. . . " He waves a hand, inadequately. "Enormous. I just love it here. Can't
imagine myself anywhere else."

Later, halfway up the side of Hamnafeld, one of the two adjoining hills that
sweep majestically up behind Amy's home, the wind unexpectedly, magically,
drops. The sun is out. The sky is wide, and very blue. Foula looks - there
is no other word - beautiful. A long way below, a plume of peat smoke climbs
into the still air from Edith's croft, where Wullie and his neighbour,
65-year-old Eric Isbister, of whom it used to be said that he had left Foula
just two times in his life, "one of them to be born", are up mending that
roof.

Everyone I see this afternoon (which is three people) warns me, "You don't
get many days like this." And, "Calm before the storm."

Everyone does not, sadly, include Edith, who at 90 years of age has plenty
of stories but is not allowed to talk to anyone who has not been on the
island for at least four days, for fear they might be incubating something
and she catches it. Nor, I am warned, will Edith's nearest neighbour, an
emeritus professor of classics in a handsome bungalow across the road, be up
for a chat. "People have reasons for being on a rock in the middle of the
Atlantic," says Amy, "and they don't necessarily want to talk about them to
journalists."

Others, though, prove willing enough to address the question that brought me
to Foula, which is, basically: why does one choose to make one's life on the
edge of the known world? Once, of course, there were lots more people who
did: double the present total when Amy was a child, four or five times as
many when Edith was little. The fact that anyone is still here at all is
remarkable: since the turn of the last century, officialdom has been asking
pointed questions about the viability of a place whose population peaked in
1881 at 267, when there were 33 children enrolled at the school (there are
currently two).

Twenty years later, the community was being described as destitute, and in
1927 an authoritative Shetland columnist observed that the island ran the
risk of evacuation - a fate that famously befell St Kilda a few years
later - in the face of "a rapidly dwindling population decimated by
influenza and smallpox" whose "young men and women are all emigrating".

In the 50s, a report advised that essential services such as the school,
post office and nurse would be difficult to justify if Foula's population
fell below 30. While in an age of instant communications and reliable
transport there is perhaps no longer a need for a critical mass of
able-bodied inhabitants to fulfil the basic functions, keeping Foula's
community going - and in work - undoubtedly requires an effort of political
will; for the time being, despite frequent complaints at the expense, that
will appears to be there.

According to the extraordinarily tall Jim Gear, the last man to be be born
on Foula and who is now nearing retirement after a varied career that has
seen him hold down - often simultaneously - the jobs of lobster fisherman,
crofter, mailboat skipper, fireman, building contractor, road surfacer, pony
breeder and county councillor, the island's low current head count is
nothing new; Foula's population has always ebbed and flowed like the
Atlantic tides that swirl around it. "It depends on the health of our
economy, and on people's confidence in it," he says. "It's a simple
equation."

When, as recently as 1990, Foula's new concrete jetty was opened with much
pomp and Shetland county council promised a big, fast ferry that would carry
more cargo and halve the crossing time to the mainland to little over an
hour, the island's population surged to nearly 50. The bubble burst, sadly,
when the longed-for new mailboat comprehensively flunked its sea trials.

For long centuries, despite the obvious lack of anything any sane person
would dare call a harbour or even a sheltered anchorage (even today, the
present ferry, the New Advance, has to be winched out of the threatening
water when not in use), Foula made a living from fishing - first for white
fish, then lobster. There was a time when Shetland fleeces were in great
demand, and lamb. Farm subsidies played their part. Now the fish have mostly
gone, netted up by modern industrial-scale trawlers, and nobody makes a
penny out of sheep.

So people on Foula mostly do two or three jobs - on the ferry, cleaning or
cooking at the school, providing fire cover at the airstrip when the plane
comes in, for the water or electricity boards or the met office, repairing
the roads, running the post office, doing wildlife surveys, guiding the
island's few hundred summer visitors (mainly birdwatchers). A clutch of such
vacancies are open at the moment, including the posts of headmaster,
assistant and lunch supervisor at the fine new primary school - enough, with
a little extra paid activity, perhaps via the internet (yes! Foula has
broadband), to give a tough, hardworking young couple or two a fair living.

For this island, all agree, could do with a few more inhabitants. Not too
many; a couple of young families would be perfect. What kind of people would
they need to be? "Self-reliant, adaptable, fond of their own company,
tolerant of other people's views," says Sheila Gear. Another member of the
Holbourn clan, she moved to the island in 1964 to marry Jim, whose
grandfather landed some time in the 19th century and is still fondly
remembered for petitioning Queen Victoria and Disraeli to obtain Foula's
first regular postal service. Self-reliant because when things break on
Foula, you have to fix them yourself. Adaptable because nothing ever goes
quite according to plan. And fond of your own company because the social
scene on Foula is not, on the whole, what you might call wild. "This is a
community in the sense that when it really comes to it, like when the
council threatens to base the ferry off the island, everyone pulls
together," says Sheila, mild-mannered and bespectacled behind the post
office counter (she is the postmistress. As well as the registrar, and an
island guide).

"Otherwise people here keep pretty much to ourselves; we don't live in each
other's pockets. It's always struck me about Foula folk that when they're on
the island, it's a quick wave and they're away. But if they see each other
anywhere else, at some event on the mainland, they'll natter for hours.
There is a bond, even though it may not look like it to an outsider."

(Amy is less diplomatic. "Some people don't get on," she says. "It's normal:
imagine if someone said to you, right, see those five houses either side of
yours? From now on, they're your universe. There would be a few people you
liked, a few you rubbed along with and a few you detested. That's what it's
like here. Everyone has friends, but no one is friends with everyone.")

Tempted? The material rewards are minimal, but there is, it is clear, a
deeper satisfaction to be had from building a life in a place like this. For
some people, anyway. There is just one small further hitch, though: any
would-be newcomers to Foula would almost certainly have to build their own
home. Most of the existing ones are either not for sale, or in a serious
state of disrepair. "Whatever they did, they would have to do it by
themselves," says Jim. "Unfortunately, the community cannot help anyone out
with a house or land; we don't own it."

Twenty-five years ago, Marion and Bryan Taylor did just that, pitching up
from Edinburgh, moving into a small cottage and building themselves first
two holiday chalets and then their present home, which also serves as the
island's B&B. They remain more or less the only Foula inhabitants, apart
from the professor, without an ancestral connection with the place. It
shows, too: they take the whole business a bit less seriously.

"I just get on with it, frankly," says Bryan, a motorcycle engine-tuner by
trade, who now mans the ferry and mends the roads. "A load of nonsense gets
talked about living here. I love the place - when I first set eyes on it, in
1972, I thought: this is it, the final frontier. The freedom to live the
life you want to live. But I don't get drawn into the politics. They'd
quarrel over a fencepost here."

The epitome of indomitable good cheer, the Taylors might disprove Jim Gear's
sentiment that to survive somewhere like Foula you may well need Foula, or
somewhere quite like it, in your blood. But they haven't always had things
easy for all that: a few years ago, Bryan shocked the island rigid by
advertising his chalets for long-term rent, and then letting one to an
unemployed family from Moss Side in Manchester. They stayed for 18 months,
but the episode left its mark. "The shit," says Marion, winking, "didn't
half hit the fan."

It is blowing again outside, an absolute hooley. Up at the wild north end of
the island, Penny Gear, 38, crofter, pony breeder, relief cleaner, school
lunch supervisor, airstrip fire warden, bird monitor and daughter of Jim and
Sheila, explains why she came back 17 years ago: "I never saw anything on
the mainland that I wanted more than Foula." Why does she stay? There have
been times, she concedes, when she has wished it could be easier, "but I've
never wished I was anywhere else. I love the freedom, the beauty, the
nature, the life. Sometimes I walk over to the headland just to see the
rollers coming in. It's breathtaking, always."

Two of Penny's three boys, Paul, six, and Robert, 10, are Foula school's
only pupils. She dreads the day Robert leaves to board in Lerwick, although
Jack, two, should be taking his brother's place before too long. "But how
many parents wouldn't like to drop their children's home and school into the
middle of a park, where they can bike to school, the front door's never
locked and there's no question of crime or pollution or drugs?" asks Penny.
"If that's being remote, it's fine by me."

These days, she says, people expect things to be laid on for them. "Very few
people are going to think: I'll go to Foula, build myself a house, do five
jobs, get by somehow," she says. "In my parents' day, even when I was young,
there was a willingness to do that. I'm not sure there is now."

Fortunately, there is Lynn Robertson bundled up in woolly hat and oilskins,
training her dog, Tallulah, to work sheep. Lynn is 18 and a bit shy, but she
now lives here, on her own, in the island's only council house, caring for
three flocks of sheep totalling more than 100 animals. She was, she says,
determined to make Foula her home since the first day she saw it as a child,
visiting an aunt who no longer lives here. "It does get a bit lonely,
sometimes," she concedes, heaving the barn door shut against the gale. "But
it's the way of life. I ... well, I just adore it." Foula could do with a
few more people like Lynn.

The plane people have called. Today's flight has been cancelled, and Friday
isn't looking like any weather for flying. So it's tomorrow or some time
next week, basically. At 10am the next day the wind is screaming stronger
than ever, and the skies are sodden and grey. But it's a southerly: straight
down the landing strip. Jim and Penny head off to the airstrip on fire duty.
The Islander appears out of the clouds, dimly. It looks awfully small.
Quentin lands, bumps, jolts, taxies to a halt; out get a mate of Marion's, a
man from the water board and a whole lot more groceries.

We take off, pushing bravely eastwards, up to 500ft. Soon, all you can
really see of Foula is spray. The edge of the known world is about right.
But the edge of the known world is pretty damn magnificent.

Steve Crook

It is a great article, but "Julian", check again who made The Edge of the World
(and when)

Steve

julian_craster

Just testing you, Steve........

Steve Crook

Did I pass?

Steve

stevie boy

Have you been to this location steve ???

Steve Crook

Not this one, or not yet. It's a bit of a long walk from London
It's over 800 miles away.

I have done a 400 mile round trip to see one film. That was to see Gone to Earth in the village where a lot of it was shot and in the company of a lot of local people that had acted as extras in it (thanks to an ad in the local paper).

Screening GTE in Much Wenlock
May 2002

Steve

stevie boy

cheers steve, I must take a look at this film

Steve Crook

Gone to Earth is a romantic melodrama. Based on a novel. It's another of their "location films" like The Edge of the World, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I'm Going! where the landscape is almost like another character. Probably not one of their best ever films, it wasn't an original Pressburger story, but one from the second or third rank by P&P is still better than the best film from most people

It was made for Korda and Selznick but despite Selznick being in Britain for most of the period when they were making it, and his showering P&P with memos, when it was finished he decided he didn't like it.

Selznick sued P&P - and lost.
But it did turn out that he had the right to make changes for a US version. Consequently he had the film re-edited and some extra scenes shot in Hollywood to make the version known as The Wild Heart (1952). Selznick's changes are mainly adding: a prologue; scenes explaining things, often literally, by putting labels or inscriptions on them; more close-ups of Jennifer Jones. The most infamous of these are the scenes at the end when she is supposedly carrying a tame fox - in the additional scenes, Jennifer Jones is carrying what is obviously a stuffed toy fox. He also deleted a few scenes that he felt weren't dramatic enough. Sadly some of these were major plot points so the story doesn't make as much sense as in the original film. In his autobiographies, Powell claimed that Selznick only left about 35 minutes of the original film. In fact, about two-thirds remains intact.

Confusingly, the original British version of Gone to Earth was shown on British TV some years ago - with the title The Wild Heart

Gone to Earth was restored by a nice man who was working for Disney. But when he'd finished, the suits at Disney couldn't see how it fitted in with their corporate plans, so they put it back on the shelf! Luckily it was rescued and there's a very good DVD of the restored film available in the UK. The DVD comes complete with lots of "home movies" shot on what looks like 8mm, behind the scenes on location. But there's no soundtrack so it helps to know who everyone is.

Some people have accused Jennifer Jones of putting on a dodgy accent. When we showed it in Much Wenlock in May 2002 I made a point in asking the locals what they thought of her accent. They all agreed that although it wasn't perfect, it was a lot better than most English people manage when they try a Shropshire accent.

Apparently Jennifer spent a lot of time talking to locals, especially those that were acting as extras in the various scenes. A lot of them thought that was a sign of how nice and friendly she was, not at all aloof and not doing the big "Hollywood star" thing. Although I suspect that she might also have been speaking to them a lot to tune her ear to the accent

Steve

stevie boy

thanks again Steve, that is one fine answer. Has the defenitive book been written on P&P?? If you had the time(I know you have the inclination) that would be some project(Or have you started on it already). Are you a writer??

Steve Crook

It'll have to wait until I retire
No, I'm not a writer. But I do write a lot

Steve

foulafan

Hi Julian, Steve C, One & All,

Read this tread with great interest as Michael Powell`s `THE EDGE OF THE WORLD` happens to be my favorite film, which since my visit to Foula only 2 years ago I had never seen nor heard of before. In fact all those wonderful British films such as `A MATTER OF LIFE & DEATH`, `GONE TO EARTH`, `ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING` Etc which I enjoyed so much, I never really knew who directed them, but through research on Michael Powell and finding Steve Crook`s P&P site, I opened up a whole new world of such great `flicks` as `I KNOW WHERE I`M GOING` `A CANTERBURY TALE` `PEEPING TOM` and of course my fore mentioned favorite `EOTW`.

Having watched the film over & over,read Mr Powell`s `200,000 Feet on Foula` the making of the film and visited the wonderful island of Foula, on my return I set about trying to name all the locals who had acted as extras in the film and got some remarkable results.

The film was such a difficult venture and I wonder in those days just how MP managed to get it finished, what with inhospitable weather, equipment failures, accidents to actors etc, All I can say is "What a remarkable man MP was, and he had one heck of a film crew with him, and as for the islanders themselves, I don`t think he could have done it without them"

My website in case is anyone wants to take a look is at:
http://www.webspawner.com/users/foulafan/index.html

Regards.
Dave.

jackie S

I did it the other way round from you. I discovered the Isle of Harris before I discovered St Kilda, which I learned about from the book Island at the Edge of The World whilst visiting Harris. Harris is stunning by the way. If its stark, powerful ancient landscapes, wildlife and isolation that appeals to you, give it a go. I found out about Michael Powell through I Know Where I'm Going, which is perhaps my favourite film, and am now collecting all of his work bit by bit. I have the Powell and Pressburger collection of 9 titles, plus IATEOTW and Gone To Earth. The man was a genius.

I also love everything that I have ever seen by Humphrey Jennings and the British social observation documentary makers and photographers of the 30s and 40s. It's not just nostalgia, but a glimpse of the past that I come from as a post-war baby. The past is the true mystery.

foulafan

Steve,

Did you know that Stanstead flies direct to Shetland during Summer in just a couple of hours, and thence only a 10 min taxi to airport at Tingwall and 15 min flight to Foula. Well worth it I assure you............... Well, if you get good weather anyhow.

Dave.

TimR

A beautiful and haunting film: it has the quality of a tragic myth captured on film.

Hereafter, in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Steve Crook

And now that you've seen it Tim, you'll have to put Michael Powell's book about it on your shopping list. The hardback was published in London & New York but they often sell for hundreds of pounds, especially when they have their dust jackets and are in good condition. But there is also a paperback reprint which can be found at reasonable prices.

200,000 Feet on Foula (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)
200,000 Feet - The Edge of the World (New York: E.P. Dutton & co., 1938)
"Edge of the World": The Making of a... (London: Faber & Faber, 1990 [pbk])

Steve