The standard of hygiene improved little. Even as late as 1875, the minister was the only person on the island who used a fork for eating. The ash and refuse heaps were kept almost at the front door. ‘It would not take long’, wrote Ross, ‘to scrub up everything they possess, but they never think of such a thing.’ Plates, if used at all at meal times, were cleaned by the women wiping them over with a corner of their blue skirts. Knives and forks when used were cleaned by putting them in the mouth. Most visitors during the nineteenth century remarked upon the dirty appearance both of the St Kildans and their homes.
Emily MacLeod, a sister of the proprietor, did much at the turn of the century to improve the standards of cleanliness. The attempts to stamp out disease also did much to instil into the women the need to keep a tidier home. The last nurse to serve on St Kilda, Nurse Barclay, recalls that their homes were spotless, and that the people washed themselves and their clothes regularly once a week. ‘The floors of their houses were well scrubbed,’ she says. ‘You could go in and sit on their chairs, in some of the houses on the mainland I couldn’t. I had to put my Glasgow Herald down first. I always carried a Herald in the front of my bag when I was on the mainland and I had to put it down on the chair before I could sit on it.’
Clothing on Hirta was warm and practical. The St Kildans by design as much as by tradition never wore kilts. Instead they preferred to follow the example of fisherfolk on the west coast of Scotland. The trousers, shirts and woollen garments were worn loose to enable greater freedom of action and were hard-wearing. ‘It is remarkable’, wrote Sands, ‘that in all their work there is no attempt at ornament in which they differ strikingly from the Highlander, who when he was at liberty to please his own fancy, decorated his person from top to toe and who…abhors everything that is plain and unadorned.’
The St Kildans made most of the clothes they needed. The men not only made their own trousers and shirts, but tailored the dresses of their wives and daughters. Accessories, such as bonnets, caps, scarves, and cravats, were imported from the mainland. There is a story told that on one occasion a certain type of shoelace found its way to the lonely isle of St Kilda barely a year after it had made its first appearance in London.
The men all wore homespun woollen shirts, sewn together with worsted yarn, and blue tartan checked trousers which were dyed with imported indigo. In winter, they were muffled to the ears with big coarse cravats, twisted round their necks roll upon roll.
The women made a much more picturesque group. They wore short petticoats and long dresses, which they hitched up to knee level when work had to be done. For head-dresses they were fond of bright, turkey-red napkins. The wives kept their gowns together with two strings around their bodies, one under the arms and the other nine inches below. Every woman owned a plaid shawl, which was fastened with a brooch or a pin of native manufacture. The brooch was beaten out of an old copper coin and the pin was made from copper nails taken from wrecks that chanced to come ashore. ‘The women’, wrote Macaulay in 1756, ‘are most handsome; their complexions fresh and lively as their features are regular and fine. Some of them, if properly dressed and genteely educated, would be reckoned extraordinary beauties in the gay world.’ The strain of hard work, however, was soon etched in their faces.
Wedding rings were never worn on Hirta. Married women, therefore, distinguished themselves from unmarried ones by a white frill which was worn in front of the headshawl or kerchief.
During most of the year, the islanders wore neither stockings nor shoes. When Martin Martin visited St Kilda in 1697, the ‘turned shoe’ was still being worn, made out of the neck of a gannet and employing the natural bend in the neck for the heel. Such footwear had to be kept in water when not worn, and even then lasted only a few days. By the nineteenth century, however, every woman had a pair of brogues, rudely fashioned from raw sheepskin thongs by the men.
During the summer men, women, and children worked in the minimum of clothing. The weather could become unbearably warm and the island offered little shelter from the sun. ‘The women are often to be seen’, wrote Sands, ‘on the cliffs and in the glen without any clothing but a woollen shirt, whilst the men also strip to their underclothing when engaged on the cliffs.’
In later years, the standard of dress on the island improved immensely. ‘When I first went out in 1903,’ wrote Thomas Nicol, ‘the men were dressed on weekdays in rough homespun trousers, very baggy and just a shade neater than those adopted by a famous English University, a sleeved waistcoat, and a thick red muffler twisted as a rule twice round the throat.’ In a little less than twenty years, with the help of a mail order catalogue, the St Kildans looked little different from the people who came to visit them. ‘In many respects the people have become wonderfully modern,’ continued Nicol, ‘and this is particularly noticeable in their Sunday dress. The young men now appear in well-cut dark tweed suits with collar and tie. Some of the women even wear hats.’ But the St Kildans were never to concern themselves overmuch with appearances, and little distinction as to dress existed on the island.
Heating and lighting were obvious necessities of life. In the old black houses, lighting was traditionally supplied by a cruse, an oil-bearing container, first made of stone and later of metal, in which a wick floated. A turf impaled on a stick was used as a torch by the islanders when they were outside at night. The St Kildans used paraffin, in later years, given to them by the factor in exchange for tweed and feathers, or else charitably donated by passing trawlermen. Hurricane lamps were regularly in use by the twentieth century both inside and outside the home.
The St Kildans burnt turf to heat their homes and cook their food. The fuel was generally cut from Mullach Mor to Mullach Sgar and from the slopes of Conachair and Oiseval. The turf was stripped often wastefully from good pasture land and occasionally good arable land, but the islanders had little choice in the matter. There was peat available on the island and many visitors argued that it should be cut instead. ‘It is not good moss and would never make fire’, was the islanders’ usual answer when questioned. Besides, it was more difficult to dig, harder to dry out than turf, and above all heavier to carry. The deposits were primarily confined to the top of hills, over three-quarters of a mile from the village.
As with the storing of sea birds, so with the turf: the cleits were of inestimable importance to the St Kildans. Those built beyond the village wall were used to dry and store turf. Normally they were constructed as near to the cutting grounds as possible; hence over the centuries hundreds of cleits appeared on the slopes. Although the men would help, the cutting and fetching of turf was a task for the women.
Hirta could boast a society that from time immemorial treated women as equal, certainly in terms of the work that had to be done. The peats were carried by the women and children on their backs in old plaids or pieces of canvas. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote Ross, ‘to see the burden even the children from six to nine years of age can take.’ There was little room in the house to store the dry peat, so trips to the hills had to be made regularly. ‘We helped too, young as we were,’ remembers Flora Gillies, only ten years old at the time of the evacuation. ‘I always carried for my grandfather. I don’t know why, but I always seemed to carry it. My Aunt Mary, it was nothing for her to carry a bag on her back. She was very strong.’
The women also looked after the cattle, and cut all the grass required for their feeding during the winter months. Twice a day in the summer months they would make the long walk over to Glean Mor to milk the cows and ewes. The first visit was made at daybreak and they would return to the Glean again at five o’clock in the evening. If necessary they would take a bundle of grass with them on their backs to keep the beasts happy while they were being milked.
All the fetching and carrying on the island was delegated by the men to the women. ‘Goods from Glasgow’, wrote Ross, ‘are carried by the women from the shore to their houses and woe be unto them unless they are ready waiting when the men get the cargo to the shore.’ In the landing of stores, the men were responsible for manning the island boats out to the ship and the transferring of goods from the factor’s smack or the steamer to the rowing boat. On reaching shore, the men would tumble the supplies out of the boat. ‘There being but little room,’ wrote Ross, ‘everything must be removed quickly or the place is blocked up. Such a block happened that day bringing forth a hurricane