Some Memories of Life on Rathlin Sixty Years Ago
The Rev. Leslie Creery Stevenson (1878–1961) was appointed as Curate-in-Charge of Rathlin in 1902. He and his family lived on the island from May in that year until July 1921 when they moved to Ballycastle, Mr Stevenson having been appointed to the Town Church. They spent another month on Rathlin in 1922. Later, Mr. Stevenson served in Belfast before becoming Rector of Larne, and, in 1937, Dean of Waterford. These notes have been taken verbatim by Anne Mageean from letters written by his wife Letitia (1869–1957) to former parishioners in Sussex. They have been made visible to the Society by the authors son, Patric Stevenson, P.P.R.U.A.
We had intended to cross to Rathlin on Friday May 7th (1920) but the seas got up the previous night and in the morning there was a strong wind from the north-west, the sound was full of white horses and all around the coast the surf was dancing high. Johnny Coyles the skipper, in answer to enquiries said “there’ll be no crossing to the island this day and mebbe not for several days”. Johnny owns his boat, a sturdy two and a half ton open motorboat built at Coleraine and called ‘The Northern Lights’. He crosses on Tuesdays and Fridays (weather permitting) with the mails and any passengers or parcels. His government contract binds him to 104 crossings in the year, often through bad weather he goes on different days. In good summer weather he sometimes crosses many days running, making up the journeys he missed in the winter. But on Saturday May 8th the wind had dropped considerably and the message came that the boat would leave ‘about twelve’. We had a most invigorating crossing, a sail in fact for a brown lug was hoisted to assist the Kelvin motor.
We saw our little stone church St. Thomas’s, right down near the water’s edge and farther along the one Big House of the island and so into Church Bay to land. We were soon ashore and met by our hostess and her sister from the Big House who came running to greet and welcome us warmly as guests for a week or two. Shortly after lunch we set out to have a look at our Rectory. About ten minutes hurrying along brought us to a cottage or two on the left-hand side of the rough island road. The first was a little shop; the second with two gables and two windows looking out onto the road was ours. The cottage was slated and rough-plastered and all around it were small fields enclosed by stonewalls, loose stones piled up without any mortar. The little rectory is larger than we expected, in fact it is not at all a bad little house. It has only got four rooms though we were told it had six and I thought that was bad enough after some twenty-six years in our Sussex vicarage. Off the small kitchen there is a tiny larder, which I would call a cupboard and above the kitchen is a loft floor covering half of it and requiring a gymnastic feat to get onto it. Rumour has it that a little maidservant once slept there (poor girl) in darkness and stifling heat. If she took a step out of bed she would have gone a header on to the kitchen flags ten feet below. In the yard which is cobblestoned and has high walls, I have now a good kitchen table and a couple of kitchen chairs, tubs and pails, a drying line and two butts that catch the rainwater. Our drinking water has to be fetched from the Ballynoe Well, ten minutes walk down a very rough track. We require at least six gallons a day the rector goes off for his early, a yoke on his shoulders. I had invested in a Valor ‘New Perfection American Stove’ (oil, three burners) before we left England and I do all the cooking on this. Quite a number of the islanders, men and women have come to see our stove and glass cooking dishes. Baker’s bread comes from Ballycastle once a week and sometimes not even so it is really necessary to be good at bread making. One week since we came no bread arrived. Johnnie casually said he was full up and had to leave it in Ballycastle – he brought it over one week later and it was quite mouldy.
The islanders are giving us a wonderful welcome and we feel encouraged by the genuine joy they show in having a clergyman of their own again. When they found I could play the instrument in the little church they nearly wept with excitement and delight.
We cycle a lot and now have visited the three lighthouses. The one especially admired from Ballycastle, rolling its great light over Rathlin, is known as the ‘east light’ and is nearest to Scotland. It stands high on a bold cliff, has good married quarters and the head keeper lives there. It is all enclosed by a strong and neat white wall. There is another lighthouse on the Rue, the most southerly point, put up during the war. A new permanent one is just now going to be erected. The work foreman of the Irish Lights has just arrived here to start the job and he will employ some of the island boys. The third – the west light, is about six miles from Church Bay in the wildest and loneliest part of Rathlin. The cliffs go sheer down into the Atlantic three to four hundred feet.
The lighthouse is a triumph of engineering for they had to slap concrete on to the rocks by the ton and build platforms and stairways. The splendid light is two hundred feet above the water; it is paraffin gas and is equal to the light of half a million candles. The mechanism is wonderful; a huge construction which revolves silently and majestically, showing countless prisms of glass set at angle to magnify and re-magnify, concentrate and re-concentrate the light which is red to prevent its being confused with the lights on the Scottish coast. We descended the steep and alarming stairway, thankful to have a stout cable to hold on to. Two men lived here at the time, and they had an accident lately. One of them had gone out somewhere, the other was busy painting outside the lantern, standing on an office stool and whatever happened he fell on his back fourteen feet down on to the concrete and lay there unconscious for some hours. His mate returned about 7 pm and found him, his face badly cut. By midnight a jaunting car had been procured and he was taken over to the east light to be looked after by the women there. The following day a doctor was brought from Ballycastle and the man is making a good recovery. Lighthouse folk have very comfortable quarters and everything is kept in good repair for them. Each house has ordinary furnishings supplied, even crockery, and they get seven tons of coal each year, more than we can burn they tell us. The head lighthouse man has three sons at the east light, they come from Kerry.
There are three shops on our island not counting the pub and oil depot. More precisely there are three cottages in which a little front room has a counter and a modest supply of homely groceries and draperies. Two are on the road close to the rectory; one run by Annie McCuaig and the other by Mary Jane Hunter. The third shop at the upper end of the island is owned by Miss Black. The first is quite close to us and stays open every day except Sunday until 1 or 2 am. In fact it is really in the evenings that she is busy and her little shop becomes a meeting place for all and sundry.
Outside Church Bay can be seen a long curved black object like a great whale, over which the waves break unceasingly. It is the corpse of the H.M.S. Drake, torpedoed in June 1917. Only her bilge keel can now be seen. The islanders say there are nineteen stokers’ bodies still in her. A salvage party is at work on her whenever the weather allows. We often hear explosions. On a quay opposite the mail boat quay there are quantities of stuff that have been brought in; huge pieces of steel plate, engines etc., all twisted and rusted. A steamer comes from time to time to take it away and we hear more than two thousand pounds has been realised already. Some time ago a lot of cordite and gelignite was brought up and lay about unprotected near our little church. We often see the diver in his wonderful rig going off to do his job. The salvage men have a boat, The Mary, to come and go in.
One afternoon down on the shore near the Rue, we saw a thick heavy smoke pouring up and when we got to it we found Johnny Weir and his herd Wullie kelp burning. Kelp is made from the larger varieties of seaweed cast up by the sea or cut from the rocks. The seaweed, usually long tangle or bladderwrack, is gathered and dried in heaps. Then when it is thoroughly dried and the weather is fine, it is put into a rough and ready kiln, built of big loose stones lying about, and is burned for hours and hours until it becomes like molten metal and smells like an operating theatre, for iodine is obtained from this process. The day we found our old parishioner engaged in his work it was extremely bright and hot and he and his boy were streaming with perspiration. ‘Wullie’ called the old man, ‘do you think its ready for stirrin’ and he peered anxiously and poked it with a long metal-shod pole. ‘Och ay, it’s beginnin’ to run’. Whereupon the two of them cast off every garment except their breeks, got up on the rude wall of the grave-shaped kiln and with fierce energy poked and pounded, working the heavy boiling mess with their long poles. Such grunting, groaning and sweating as went on among the thick choking smoke, flames and fumes, I don’t know how they stood it under a broiling sun; the perspiration was pouring off their cheeks, chins and noses in a continuous stream. Old Johnny looked like a Vulcan on Etna, forging bolts for Jove. It really was a great sight. It is wonderful too how they kept on and on at a job like this. They had left their cottage at 4 a.m. and they went on unceasingly burning all day and the whole of the following night. How fearsome the old fellow and attendant must have looked at nightfall on the lonely shore the scene lit up with the lucid glare. Johnnie Weir is a widower, Wullie the herd is ‘a good quiet boy, ye might be workin’ with him the whole day and more and he’d never spake a work’.
Patrick and I went down to the Rue point one day and saw the start of the work on the new lighthouse. A group of men were sitting there breaking stones and one of them was our friend Jimmy Spence who had whitewashed the rectory. He told us they had been three weeks at it and the eye protectors ordered had not yet arrived. ‘It’ll be a long time before we see a new lighthouse here’ he said ‘sure Donall Goram will rise up and have a slap at it’. That was his name for the sea and indeed in the following November we had a severe gale from the west and Donall Goram got up and had a slap alright. Between November 13th and 16th the lighthouse men had a terrible time. Mountainous seas came along and struck them, all their working stuff was swept away and although the new tower stood it, the generator house was washed away and the hut the men live in had ten feet over it. The senior man (E. J. Smith) had a marvellous escape as he had been in the generator house half a minute before it was destroyed. The younger man (who had been through the war and was a prisoner for two years) lost his head completely and dashed out of the hut into the raging water with practically no clothes on and his eyes positively out of his head with terror. We visited the Rue a few days after and although the sea had gone down considerably, it gave one a thrill of horror to see where it had broken in and what distance on the grass round and beyond the hut it had swept.
One day we decided that if the next morning were fine we would make the trip to Ballycastle. On the pier we learned it was a fair day in Ballycastle. In our simplicity we thought ‘how interesting, how lucky we are’. There was a great stir on the pier with all the animals, which were held by long ropes and kept making dashes in different directions. One’s only hope of getting past them was to stand on their ropes for a moment and quickly pass by. Presently the four legs of each beast were roped and they were thrown on the pier, dragged along and tumbled into the boat. Poor creatures, there they lay, panting and terrified. Our boat was an old sailing boat belong to Neilly McCuaig, the publican, and she had not been in the water for several years, also there was a good deal of bailing to do. However we sailed across in fine style and disembarked at Ballycastle shortly after 10am. We were to return at 7pm but when we came to the quay no one was there but the skipper and he was ‘half seas over’, as were many of the passengers when they turned up. There was no wind and this meant we would have to row the whole way and it would take four hours or more to cross. We landed at Church Bay shortly after midnight wishing we had remembered what the Ballycastle folk had said to us in the spring. “On fair day Rathlin boat finds its own way home.”
I suggested to Father McKinley, the priest on the island, that it would be nice to have a social evening in the hall and he warmly welcomed this idea. So we started off with an evening of games and competitions and there was a large attendance – about 200. Since then we have put on magic lantern shows and some little plays I wrote. We get such a grand crowd of men at these entertainments – elderly men who have never been in the hall before and a lot of elderly women too. ‘Och it’s just passing the winter beautiful for us’ they say. After every evening of entertainment Father McKinley makes a long and flattering speech and calls for three cheers for us. We think he has said enough now to do for all the entertainments we might ever give but we don’t like to suggest this to him as he does not sing, play or recite, the speech is his special bit of the show.
We have now got a trained general nurse just come to reside on the island. The guardians (across the water) are providing a salary of £100 per annum and it is supposed to be some return to Rathlin for all the rates the island has paid for years. Her name is Nurse O’Neill and she is just finished her training. Another nice bit of news is that this year (1921) we have started with three motor boats belonging to groups of islanders and we hear that a fourth one is on order. This is a great matter and barring gales will mean far more contact and easier communication with the mainland.
(In July 1921, the Stevenson family left Rathlin and went to live in Ballycastle where Mr. Stevenson was given curacy of the Town Church. Less than a year later, they moved to Belfast but not before they spent a month on the island in the spring of 1922 and found four wrecks around the coast. One of them, (Mrs Stevenson writes), was the Tarv grounded in Church Bay Below our window, it was a Scottish coaster which constantly came across to fetch limestone at the quarry at Killeany. A salvage firm was bound to refloat her and she was eventually towed away to Belfast . . .)
From The Glynns, Vol. 10, 1982.