Extract from the obituary in yesterday's Times of Norman John Gillies, "one of the last links with life on St Kilda, the windswept North Atlantic archipelago finally abandoned by its population in 1930". Gillies was born there and left with the others in 1930. He died on 29 September aged 88.
Quote:
The community was a mutually supportive one in such hard times, and the harvests of sea birds were shared — as Gillies recalled, "When the men got a big catch they always distributed it first to the needy, widows, the ill, and then to every other household."