SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS
The true story behind "Whisky Gallore"
by Arthur Swinson

Latest Reviews:

Allan Burnett in the “Sunday Herald" on 20th November, 2005.
George Mair in "The Scotsman" on 9th November, 2005.

Published 10th November 2005 Luath Press .
Price £7.99 paperback - ISBN: 1 905222 09 2

"Scotch on the Rocks"— Now available from all good bookshops
or it can be ordered direct from Luath Press Ltd :
543/2 Castlehill, The Royal Mile, EDINBURGH EH1 2ND, Scotland
Telephone: +44 (0) 131 225 4326

See also www.scotchontherocks.net


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Whisky on the Rocks. by Antonia Swinson

Article published in the Scotsman, 10th December, 2005

It is difficult to know what to expect when you plan a trip to the Outer Hebrides. The 150-mile-long island chain is marketed as an oasis of calm in a chaotic world, yet this notion does not begin to get across the stark, dramatic magic of this most outlying part of Scotland. It is certainly a holiday I would recommend to all Scots for a more complete understanding of our own country.

It was a fine autumn day when our Caledonian MacBrayne ferry sailed out of Oban. I had assumed I would spend my time on deck marvelling at Tobermory's passing colourful real estate, but I found myself instead spending most of the six-hour crossing in the comfortable ferry bar, glass of malt in hand, deep in conversation with a mainland farmer engaged to buy hundreds of lambs for a food supplier down south at the forthcoming cattle sale at Lochboisdale on South Uist. Mull swept by unseen in the heat of Hebridean farming economics, but experience has taught me that gaining an understanding of the real-life concerns of your host community maximises the pleasure of any holiday.

It certainly worked this time. The next day we visited the cattle market, and though the auctioneer's patter was incomprehensible, I could see where the good prices were going and recognised some of the local personalities the farmer had described.

The Hebrides have long fascinated me because, as I touched on in a recent gardening column, my late father, Arthur Swinson, spent weeks on the islands in 1962 researching the true facts behind the sinking of the Whisky Galore ship, the SS Politician, which went down in February 1941 with 240,000 bottles of best Scotch on board. Sir Compton Mackenzie's fictionalised account found an international audience with the 1949 Ealing comedy, and the public's fascination with the tale lives on today, with a new film in pre-production on Barra, and last month's re-publication of Scotch on the Rocks, my father's account of what really happened.

I was keen that my children should follow their grandfather's journey. He had stayed at the Lochboisdale Hotel which, though modernised, I instantly recognised from the Box Brownie pictures he had taken all those years ago.

Our own accommodation was a converted barn, in nearby South Boisdale. To my surprise its inner shell was totally encased in polished pine, giving it the feel of a Scandinavian city apartment rather than a traditional but and ben. But when Atlantic storms blew in a few days later I could appreciate our hosts' foresight, because trapped holidaymakers don't want to be further depressed by cold draughts.

However, our first morning as Hebrideans was marked by hot sun and extraordinary cloud formations. A short walk through the fields revealed a deserted, white sandy beach and clear blue water. Though the sea was hardly Mediterranean, Rory and Ella, aged 18 and 13, ran straight in.

This is a fantastic family holiday destination if you have children with a wide age span. There is kayaking, riding, lots of culture and tremendous opportunities to explore. Restless teenagers (and their fathers) will be tempted by tales of the SS Politician's whisky, bottles of which apparently lie buried to this day in the machair, the island's grassy dunes. Younger children, equipped with binoculars, will get into Bill Oddie mode - this is the last wilderness in Europe, home to puffins, basking sharks, whales, dolphins, otters and golden eagles.

History is inescapable in the Hebrides. Having seen the film Whisky Galore so often, it was extraordinary to see just where the SS Politician ran aground and how the ship must have dominated the landscape. I also now appreciated what the local women had coped with. One islander told me they had complained bitterly about their men returning night after night with yet more whisky, when out there on the rocks was an 8,000-ton wartime godsend groaning with bedding, furniture and food.

To add insult to injury, the men wore their womenfolk's dresses on their "fishing trips" to keep their own clothes from being covered in incriminating oil from the ship's holds. I urge every visitor to Eriskay to visit the SS Politician pub, toast the women islanders in malt whisky and check out the original bottle on display on the way out.

There is so much living history in the Hebrides and inevitably this includes the Clearances. On a sunny morning we walked for two hours above a most beautiful loch and found a large roofless, abandoned croft, which commanded extraordinary views of the waters below and the mountains beyond. There would have been fish in the loch and sheep on the hillside - a diet fit for a king.

In the nearby museum at Kildonan, I picked up a facsimile newspaper cutting from the 19th-century Canadian press: "800 Hebrideans all 5ft 9in or more are en route to Canadian shores. Lock up your daughters!"

Alas, unreported, were the real facts as revealed by a knowledgeable local journalist: that the landowner on South Uist, being a major shareholder in the Canadian Pacific Railway, had found a neat solution for getting islanders off her land for ever - exporting them as cheap labour to boost the value of her share portfolio.

One holiday highlight was travelling by ferry to Lewis, seeing the green waters and white sands of Harris and the world-famous Callanish stones which date from 1800 BC. The interaction between stones and clouds should be the subject of a masterclass for any aspiring artist.

Children often have the most unexpected favourite holiday moments. For my kids, their best memory came earlier that day, when, after a long drive to North Uist, they beheld the strange sight of their frustrated father jumping up on the causeway wall and shaking his fist at the departing ferry - also operated by the long-suffering Caledonian MacBrayne - yelling in pithy Ayrshire terms that the ferry should return at once. The sight of the ferry reversing the 200 yards or so back to the jetty will live in our collective family memory for all time.

Scotch on Scotch On the Rocks by Arthur Swinson, with an introduction by Antonia Swinson, is published by Luath, priced £7.99.

FACT FILE

HEBRIDES

How to get there

• Caledonian MacBrayne's Island Hopscotch tickets cost £131 in the winter months plus £30.50 per vehicle occupant. Tickets are valid for one month from the date of your first journey, with 26 options to choose from. Tel: 08705 650000 or visit www.calmac.co.uk

Where to Stay

• Antonia Swinson and family stayed in self-catering accommodation provided by VisitScotland. See www.visitscotland.com

• Lochboisdale Hotel, Lochboisdale, South Uist has double rooms from £70 per night, low season, £90 high season. Tel: 01878 700332 or visit www.lochboisdale.com

• South Boisdale, South Uist: Stay on a working croft for £25pp including full breakfast. Contact Mrs Christina MacPhee, tel: 01878 700586.

AND THERE'S MORE

• Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust supports four hostels: Berneray on North Uist, Garenin on Lewis, Howmore on South Uist and Rhenigidale on North Harris. Open all year, fees are £8 for over-18s, £5.50 for under. See www.gatliff.org.uk or visit www.visitthebrides.com

• The Scotsman offers escorted holidays to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland. Tel: 0131-620 8400 or visit www.holidays.scotsman.com

The Return of Scotch On the Rocks. by Antonia Swinson

Article published in the Scotch Malt Whisky Association Magazine
5th November, 2005

“The future's just the past entered in through another gate." One of Victorian dramatist Arthur Wing Pinero's best lines. The story of how my father's remarkable book came to be republished forty two years after it first appeared, is a very good example.

Early in 2005, with the arrival of the Freedom of Information Act, the SS Politician began to surface with news that apart from the 250,000 bottles of whisky, there was £3m in Jamaican currency on board - £90m in today's value. Given that the ship was initially bound for the Caribbean in that cold February in 1941, new though unsubstantiated rumours appeared that this was spending money intended for the Windsors, in case Hitler had invaded and they decided not to wait to look the East End in the face. That Winston Churchill was up to his neck in the Politician's preparation. These have yet to be proved, but these reports fed an already growing fascination on what really happened, which had been stoked by regular reports in the press that the film Whisky Galore was being remade. It seems it was time to take a new look at this dusty slice of Scottish wartime history, particularly here in a newly devolved and increasingly self confident Scotland. Yet in all excitement , it was widely acknowledged that though long out of print, Arthur Swinson's Scotch On The Rocks, the original true story of what really happened, had never been surpassed.

One Autumn evening in 2004, I received an unexpected invitation to a supper party at the elegant premises of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town. Local expert Keith Hewitt was displaying his extraordinary collection of SS Politician artefacts from the wreck, followed by two film producers and script writer Bill Bryden discussing the forthcoming remake of Whisky Galore which they promised would centre on the true story. In their hands: rare copies of Scotch on the Rocks!

(Explaining its sudden stratospheric price rise on Amazon). Such was the excitement in the room, there was the extraordinary sight of Edinburgh ‘maltocracy' enthusiastically whipping out their chequebooks to back the film.

Islander Duncan McInnes, a remarkable gentleman, then described the weeks he had spent salvaging the whisky as a teenager. How the women islanders would give their menfolk hell, for returning trip after trip, with just more and more whisky, at a time of the severest wartime rationing. When at risk, out there on the rocks, lay the real treasure - food, crockery, furniture and upholstery - just waiting to be salvaged. Men! He described his mother's pleasure when they brought back bales of calico which were used for decade afterwards on the island for curtains, cushions and underwear.

That evening, early childhood memories resurfaced: my father returning to our home in Hertfordshire after weeks of living on, what sounded like, a cold, desert island. He brought back a bottle full of white sand, and a blue and yellow tartan rug which for years afterwards served as a tree house tent or a magic carpet for my brother, sister and me. A second flashback: fresher's week at Edinburgh University and my astonishment on being told by a lecturer, that Scotch On The Rocks had been a best seller, and that everyone I would meet in Scotland aged over forty would have a copy in their bookshelves.

Sir Compton Mackenzie always described Whisky Galore as a modern fairy tale. But the true story, as Arthur Swinson found after weeks researching on the islands, was a grittier, far more textured affair, which curdled into island life with few neat and happy endings. As he writes, “ to anyone who insists on a moral, one can only state I think, that faced with these extraordinary circumstances, the rash became rasher, the drunken more drunken, the avaricious more avaricious, the convivial more convivial, the generous more generous , the treacherous more treacherous, the selfish more selfish, and the commercial more commercial.”

Frankly, it was always a mystery how on earth my father - very much the moustachioed, Sandhurst and public school educated English army officer - could ever have persuaded the islanders to open up. Yet Arthur was no posturing, Captain Waggett, but someone who had grown up through the Depression with few luxuries, winning his way on scholarships. He also loved people and, larger than life, could always create a party with his stories. It must also have helped, he was generous to a fault when buying a dram! But I believe it was principally through his seven years in the ‘Forgotten Army', serving in Burma, India, Assam and Malaya, that he found the means to connect to Hebrideans, so many of whom had shared his experience.

Scotch On The Rocks is therefore as much a journey of self discovery, as that of a celebrated ship. Page after page, you can feel that south east English stress slipping off Arthur's shoulders as he encounters the kindliness, prickliness and integrity of island life, and begins to process the trauma of his own war years. Open minded, with a nose for truth and a fine eye for detail, he cuts the islanders some slack, seeing them as neither cut out cardboard thugs or heroes, just real people making ends meet, in an unfamiliar world he must come to know. Scotch On the Rocks remains an extraordinary piece of travel writing, vividly evoking a Hebridean way of life which had changed little since wartime.

The manuscript has not been changed nor updated, but deserves to be seen in its own terms, in its own time. When Arthur arrived at Eriskay in 1962, wartime rationing had ended only a few years earlier, and with the 1960s yet to swing into action, deference ruled. Like all his generation who had lived so intensely through World War Two, he retained a faith in national institutions, the landed Establishment and centralised Westminster government, which may seem strange from today's more cynical perspective , but he did not hesitate to rattle cages and refused to take no for an answer.

Arthur did not have the advantages of the Internet, nor any Freedom of Information Act. War time ‘D' Notices still bristled. But this story of how he managed to get round officialdom and solve the mystery of just why the Politician ran off course remains a masterly piece of detective work. Perhaps best of all, Arthur Swinson was a magical storyteller, with an energetic, sparse prose style which remains refreshingly contemporary. As the London Evening Standard observed at the time, Scotch On The Rocks is ‘a rattling good read.'

***

Arthur Swinson died an untimely death from a heart attack aged 54, just seven years after Scotch On The Rocks was published. In total, he wrote over 30 books, mainly military history, as well as 300 radio and TV plays and documentaries, and even a musical. His creative connection to Scotland continued, in writing both the TV and Radio series of Dr Finlay's Casebook.

To those who knew him, he was a human whirlwind, always working on a thousand projects at once, paid and unpaid. In his home town, St Albans in Hertfordshire, he co-founded a still thriving theatre company and poetry society, and would regularly discomfort local councillors with popular petitions to save ancient trees, and period buildings from the bulldozers. In his professional life, he was a leading campaigner for Public Lending Right, and, as an executive committee member of International P.E.N., campaigned energetically for writers imprisoned abroad. He also loved helping ambitious, young people get that first break into the BBC - two of whom were radio presenter Susannah Simons and ‘Harry Potter' film producer Mike Newell.

When Arthur Swinson died in 1970, hundreds packed into St Albans Cathedral for his memorial service, unable to believe that this extraordinary, huge, driven, kindly personality had actually left town.

Cold, commercial logic in a world of commoditisation of both books and authors , would suggest that there is nothing quite so dead as a dead author. But thanks to the imaginative vision of Luath Press, Arthur Swinson lives on, in this remarkable book.

His talent also endures for the future: in the lives and potential of his two grandchildren, Rory and Ella Swinson Reid, to whom this new edition is dedicated.

Allotment Tales. by Antonia Swinson

Article published in the Scotsman Magazine "Allotment Tales"
5th November, 2005

In 1962, my late father Arthur Swinson spent weeks in the Western Isles researching the truth behind the story of the ‘ Whisky Galore ' ship the SS Politician, which ran aground in 1941 carrying 20,000 cases of malt whisky. Armed with his tape recorder, he obtained extraordinary interviews and his book, a best seller in its day, revealed a grittier and even more exciting tale than Compton Mackenzie ' s magical fiction. It was also remarkable travel writing, recording vivid first impressions of island life.

One day, after interviewing the widow of the Charles McColl the Customs officer, famed for his dogged pursuit of islanders and whisky, Arthur stopped to congratulate a woman working in her garden. He had been struck that no one on Eriskay or the Uists cultivated their gardens. She was an incomer from the Lake District, who always planted daffodils and tulip bulbs each Autumn because she missed spring gardens. Though as she explained that ‘ the blast ' would come in from the sea so strongly that ‘ after a gale you go out into the garden and it looks as if there has been a fire, all the plants are black. “ Walls built in squares didn ' t help because the wind ‘ would get inside and spin like a top. ” For Arthur this was extraordinary. He couldn 't imagine life without a garden.

A few weeks ago, in his footsteps, my family and I spent a week ' s holiday in Lochboisdale. I visited the widow of the former headmaster on Eriskay, a remarkable lady whose splendid walled garden, sheltered by a hill, was green and thriving. In extraordinary counterpoint, there on her wall was a photograph of her husband leaning against the St Joseph, the islands ' only motor boat which Charles McColl had commandeered for his chase.

My father came from a long line of professional plantsmen. The family had a nursery business from the 1920s, and for generations had worked on the grounds of the Dean of St Albans Cathedral which then stretched down into Roman Verulamium. (Those of you up on church politics, will know it is always the Dean not the Bishop who snaffles the best real estate in any cathedral town.) Raspberries were my father ' s particular talent. There always bigger and tastier than any in our neighbourhood. I suppose that is why about a third of my allotment is raspberries. Childhood memories sharply remerge when I work among the canes, the tang of fresh Autumn Bliss eaten when picked, is a instant comforting connection to a gentler time. And of course they also taste great soaked in malt whisky.