|
|
David Craigie was by all accounts a pleasant and well liked young man. His
uncle described him in a letter to a friend as having a lightsome turn and
as the best natured lad he had ever seen. Like
his elder sister Christina and his younger sister Elizabeth, David was
born and brought up on the small croft of Fa'doon with its buildings
tucked in under a brae on the lower slopes of Keirfea Hill in Rousay. He
attended the General Assembly school in Sourin which was situated across
the road from the present school. When
school attendance became compulsory in 1872 that building could not
accommodate the seventy-five pupils attending and so, for the next few
years until the new building was ready, the school was housed in the Free
Kirk. A group photograph taken
outside the kirk shows David, then about eight or nine years of age, as a
well groomed boy with a pensive and wistful expression.
|
|
|
David Craigie is the boy in dark clothes just left of
centre in the third row from the front.
His sister Christina is in the middle of the second back row, in
front of the teacher to the right whose hands rest on her shoulder.
|
|
After leaving school David
decided to follow in his father's footsteps by becoming an apprentice
joiner. Writing to an
Australian cousin at the end of his apprenticeship he complained, "We
are working here in Rousay for ten shillings (50p) a week and if we had
not other help that would not keep us." In
that same letter he bemoaned his inability to save any money, unlike his
cousin Hugh Craigie who had served his apprenticeship at the same time. Hugh
was later to become one of Rousay's expert joiners, examples of whose
meticulous work can still be seen on the island.
|
|
Emigration to
Australia
was very much on David's mind as he reached his twentieth birthday in
December 1883. For several
months he had been in touch with a Tulloch family in Shapinsay, one of
whose sons had been to
Australia
and was then back home. David
had visited this young man in Shapinsay and from him
had heard many tales of life down
under.
|
|
At this time, too, he was in
regular correspondence with his aunt and cousins in
Melbourne
. Writing to one of them in
January 1884 David expresses his hope of accompanying his Shapinsay friend
when the latter "returns to
Australia
shortly."
|
|
In that letter he also describes
how he spent New Year's Day. "We
had a very beautiful New Year's Day here this year and a very happy one. In
the morning I went down to Swandale and Uncle Hugh and me went across to
the island of Egilsay and spent most of the day there and in the evening
we came back and I went to a dancing at Scockness at night." At
that time his sister Christina was a servant girl at Scockness.
|
|
David pushed ahead with his
plans to emigrate. By the
middle of March his passage had been booked on the P & O steamship Orient,
due to sail from
London
on 16th April. He wrote to his
cousin asking to be met at
Melbourne
"because I will be no ways acquaint there."
|
|
Parting came a few weeks later. From
his uncle Hugh, David received £5 with which to buy a watch and Christina
gave him £6-10s which, by dint of hard saving, she had managed to
accumulate from her meagre wages. He
bade a fond and, no doubt, tearful farewell to his parents and sisters and
left Orkney with the Tulloch brothers, arriving in
London
on 11th April. Next day he
called at the shipping office to obtain his ticket on payment of
four-fifths of the £21 fare, and in the evening he
penned a letter to his sister Elizabeth who was then aged thirteen. "My
dear Sister," he wrote, "I now embrace the opportunity to write
these few lines to let you know I am well." He
went on to explain that their stop-over in
Aberdeen
had been longer than expected due to the
London
boat having been delayed by stormy weather. David
had used this time to equip himself with a waterproof coat thus enabling
him to claim that he was then "as well fitted out as my
companions." He also gave
his young sister an account of their visit to an
Aberdeen
music hall, no doubt his first experience of the kind. "It
was just about as fine a sight as ever I saw. It
was a very fine ornamented room and there was two most beautiful Girls
came out and danced and they could do it." David
asked
Elizabeth
to tell their mother that he had eaten the hen she had given him but he
reckoned he had enough cheese to see him as far as
Melbourne
.
|
|
After five days in
London
in the cheapest lodgings they could find at half-a-crown (12½p) a day for bed and board, David and his friends paid the
balance of their fares and boarded the Orient
at
Gravesend
. She was a ship of 5,386 tons
plying between
London
,
Adelaide
,
Melbourne
and
Sydney
.
|
|
£21
for a steerage passage did not buy much in the way of
comfort and even less of high living. David's
ticket, now in the possession of his nephew, is a document the size of
this page. It lists what the
steerage passenger's entitlements were, viz., not less than 15 cubic feet
of luggage space, 3 quarts of water daily (not counting what was needed
for cooking), and the following weekly scale of provisions –
|
|
Flour
|
3 lbs
|
Sugar
|
1 lb
|
Bread
|
4 lbs
|
Butter
6
|
ozs
|
Salt beef or pork
|
1½ lbs
|
Treacle
|
¼ lb
|
Vinegar
|
1 gill
|
Pressed Meat
|
1½ lbs
|
Pickles
|
¼ pint
|
Mustard
|
½ oz
|
Soup & Soulli
|
½ lb
|
Suet
|
6 oz
|
Salt
|
2 ozs
|
Peas
|
½ pint
|
Pepper
|
½ oz
|
Oatmeal
|
¼ lb
|
Cheese
|
¼ lb
|
Rice
|
½ lb
|
Raisins/Currants
|
½ lb
|
Pres Potato
|
½
lb
|
Lime juice
|
6 ozs
|
|
|
or Fresh
|
2 lbs
|
in tropics
|
|
Tea
|
2 oz
|
Coffee
|
¼ lb
|
|
|
|
It
was stipulated that various
substitutions could be made at the master's discretion, e.g. pressed meat
for salted, or rice for oatmeal. Steerage
passengers had to provide their own bedding as well as mess utensils such
as cutlery, plates, and drinking mug.
|
|
The Orient made good time through the Mediterranean heading for the
Suez Canal
which had been opened fifteen years earlier. The
relatively gentle warmth of the Mediterranean spring would no doubt have
been a pleasant experience for the Orkney lads who were used to cooler
climes. Once through the
canal, though, they would have had to face the fierce, unrelenting heat of
the
Red Sea. The temperature in their
cramped, uncomfortable quarters would have forced many of the steerage
passengers to spend most of their time on deck. Perhaps
the sleep that was denied David in the stifling conditions below decks at
night overcame him while he was basking on deck during the day.
|
|
Unaware of
the dangers of sunstroke, especially for someone unacclimatized to
tropical heat, he could have remained under these scorching rays until
irreparable damage had been done. In
a case of
sunstroke the body temperature can rise to dangerous levels and this is
coupled with severe dehydration. Unless
these conditions are quickly and expertly dealt with, death will soon
follow. For David, death came
on 6th May, only twenty days after leaving
London
. The victim's most obvious
symptom, delirium, apparently led to the cause of death being given in the
ship's records as "brain fever".
This description is an indication that there was not a doctor on
board.
|
|
A report of
David's death from sunstroke came first to his uncle, Hugh Sinclair of
Swandale who had the task of breaking the tragic news to the lad's mother
who was working in one of Fa'doon's fields at the time.
Letters that
Elizabeth
wrote to her aunt in
Melbourne
tell us that David's mother collapsed on hearing the news and had to be
carried back to the house. Christina
was so distraught that she had to be brought home from Scockness in a
cart.
|
|
Fa'doon, Rousay
|
Christina's son, Jeemie Grieve, is the present owner of
Fa'doon and spends an extended summer there every year. Now
in his eighty-seventh year, he sees to it that the dwellinghouse as well
as the outhouses at Fa'doon, all of which have flagstone roofs, are kept
in good repair, an act of preservation that is its own reward, and is a joy
to see.
|
|
|