Back to HOMEPAGE How Barra’s characters meandered
on to the screen
Magnus Linklater
Editor: The TImes, Scottish Edition
Filed 20 Sep 09
©Magnus Linklater
This article was originally published in The Times on 18th September 2009.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and of the newspaper.
Compton Mackenzie never quite reconciled himself to the fact that his wonderfully comic Highland novels — Whisky Galore, Monarch of the Glen, Hunting the Fairies and others, replete with absurd characters like Hector MacDonald of Ben Nevis, or Hugh Cameron of Kilwhillie, or the bumptious Paul Waggett — would be remembered long after the serious work he valued so highly like Sinister Street or the Four Winds of Love, had faded from memory.
As his godson, I used to go and see him occasionally in his house in Drummond Place in Edinburgh, where he would receive visitors in his single four-poster bed, which, I am proud to say, he left me in his will. There he would expatiate on life and philosophy, interspersed with extremely well-informed gossip.
He wrote more than a hundred books, including volume after volume of autobiography, but, fascinating as his life had been, nothing quite sprang from the pages as colourfully as the characters of the imagined Highlands and Islands which he loved so much.
“One of my continuous regrets,” he once admitted, “is my inability to bring real people to life.” But when it came to fictional characters — particularly Highlanders whom he lampooned outrageously, but for whom he felt enormous affection — he was unbeatable. Of course, he had real-life models to draw on.
He lived on the island of Barra for more than a decade, and there he was introduced to people who had nicknames like The Coddie, The Crookle, or the Red Scholar, who moved seamlessly from the fireplace of his Barra house, Suidheachan, where they consumed prodigious quantities of whisky, onto the fictional pages of his novel.
“Everyone on Barra was an outstanding personality,” he wrote, and that included Dr Bartlett, the English incomer with his grey eyes bulging with self-satisfaction, who became the original of Paul Waggett in Whisky Galore, standing for authority and convention, destined to be taken down a peg or two.
The real-life event which inspired the novel took place in February 1941, when Mackenzie was at a low point, in great pain from various ailments and afflicted with a skin irritation. His novel, The North Wind of Love, was not going well, and money was running short. In that month, the big story in the Hebrides was how a ship, the SS Politician, had run aground off Eriskay, between Barra and South Uist, with a prodigious cargo of whisky.
He did not realise the full potential of the story at the time, and turned instead to write The Monarch of the Glen. But he did get his hands on some of the bootleg whisky, and arranged the bottles on top of his bookcase.
The book itself was not written until 1946, when Mackenzie had moved to England, but his command of the Gaelic cadences and his memory of the characters he had known remained as secure as ever.
©Magnus Linklater
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