Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
Mackay Country Community Trust Ltd.
The Hostels: Happy or Hellish? Part 1
In 1959 The Sutherland County Council Education Committee initiated a new approach to Junior Secondary education in north west Sutherland by opening hostels in Dornoch, east Sutherland. Their aim was to enable pupils to attend one of two secondary schools in Dornoch or Golspie. This was a system of state run Boarding Schools in effect. Pupils from most of the County lived too far away to travel. They boarded during term time and got home in the school holidays. All of the public schools in the five parishes in question at this point were changed into primary schools. Until that point at least one school in each parish was designated to have a ‘secondary’ department. Pupils from the ‘side schools’ in that district came to that school if they sought to sit the exam for the Leaving Certificate or aimed to take ‘higher’ classes with a view to advancing into a university education. Before the Hostel system was created some children were sent into lodgings in east Sutherland in order to attend secondary school if their parents were able to arrange that.
Work over the previous year has explored the Hostel based school system from 1950s until the 1990s through archive research and oral history interviewing. In the 1990s local secondary schools were created and equipped in west coast locations and the Hostel based system was discontinued. This represented a huge change in the way of life for villages and townships which had seen all the children leave at 12 years old for generation after generation. Most of those children never returned to live at home.
Many people found the Hostel system to be a damaging experience. To this day there are those who will not travel back to Dornoch or Golspie on account of that. Some parents chose to move away or never return in order to avoid sending their children away to Hostel. As each pupil got older they tended to find their way more easily. The first two years at Hostel were particularly tough. For others, particularly those from very isolated locations, being with other people of the same age, being able to play football, loiter in Boots The Chemist hankering after eyeliner - or simply making friends for life - ended up being a really positive experience. The Hostellers look out for each other to the end of their days. The improved access to out of school activities was greatly appreciated. In some cases, where household means were meagre and the family large, some interviewees said that Hostel gave them decent meals and the chance to grow up to have choices. No matter what their experience – hellish or happy – the Hostellers felt that once they left school they were better equipped than others of their age to manage money, share living space and live anywhere in pursuit of work, apprenticeships or further study. Here we can only give a tiny taster of The Hostellers memories – buy the book for the full and rather less edited story!
Hostel Memories
Before The Hostels – The Lodgings
Melness memories Nellie and Nana remember..
“We were twelve. It’s 72 years ago that we left - 72 years ago this summer, we were sitting, full of excitement, preparing to go away to school, and the first school we went to was Lairg – aye, Lairg High School. We stayed with Willie MacDonald in Gruidl’s. You see, there was no hostels and we went into this lovely family … they were so good to us. And then in Golspie there were boarding-houses which were more formal. There weren’t many pupils went to Lairg School, so they just welcomed us in. The daughter was four years older than us, and we were going into first year, she looked after us. I remember how she had a timetable written out for us before we went into the school and, of course, we’d never seen a timetable before that! And we weren’t hungry at all – it was wartime, but still, we weren’t hungry, and we were warm, and Willie was always teasing us and having fun with us; he was very jolly.
Well, Lairg was very different in those days because all the mail buses came in from Durness, the North, Lochinver, Scourie, Tongue, and full of passengers. And the Sutherland Transport garage was alive then; apprentices there, and everything was just – Lairg was very busy. And there was soldiers in Lairg, stationed in Lairg, and airmen in Crask …
Lairg School must have been fairly modern besides other schools at that time; it had a big gymnasium, but we weren’t allowed to use that because the soldiers were in the gymnasium. And the school, Lairg School, was primary and secondary all in one building, and the primary classes down to the right, and the centre of the secondary had only three main teachers: the headmaster, Mr Henderson, who taught Latin; the science teacher …That Dr Mackay started me off on my French, and I’ve loved it ever since. And Mr Henderson, who was so strict - if you didn’t have 100% in your exams, you weren’t on. So, both those teachers, although Lairg was just a little, small school, they were the two that started me off on my career in teaching. I never even thought about it until I had to come and see you, but that was how I started with my French and Latin and went to study at university.
And what about the disaster when we used to get home just at Christmas, Easter and summer – there was no cars to take us, no buses or anything. One Easter, we were all excited …Our first Easter, we were all excited about the holidays. We looked out the window one morning, and the snow was level with the dykes. Every day, soon as we wakened up, we were out, looking out the window, and it was still there … and in those days, they only cleared the main roads, for the buses and but the side roads, like ours to Gruid’s weren’t cleared. Because the men were just doing it with shovels - there was no snowploughs in those days.
The roads were impassable. And we never got home at all, never got home at all. Just in summertime. The snow came the very day we were to drive home, and the day before the snow came we were telling Jimmy Henderson … we’ll be with you tomorrow. It wasn’t snowing. Next day - right up the dykes, it was … and we were heartbroken. I was terrible homesick. It’s an illness, homesickness, if you don’t know about it. We didn’t have half-term holidays like they have now, so when we went away in September we didn’t get back until Christmas, and the school holidays were longer, the summertime. So, we would go back – we’d take off back to school about the 1st of September, and you didn’t get back home until the just before Christmas – about the 22nd. So that was a long time.”