Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
Mackay Country Community Trust Ltd.
The Hostels: Happy or Hellish? Part 2
The Early Hostellers
1959 – a wee lassie leaves Skerray Primary School to go to Dornoch Academy…
“Let me just think, I was born in 1948 so I was eleven so let’s do our sums – ’59 say, I was looking to go to secondary school. I suppose because I suppose when you are in a small school and in the top of the class with only two of you, you would feel that confidence and feel capable and then to suddenly go from that….I don’t suppose I ever really considered my own intelligence, if you like. But when I found myself in that situation when I went to Dornoch, I know I felt a complete failure. It’s possible that if the children in the class with me had been different – I think there possibly was a pattern. I would say that the majority of them were all from in and around the school area itself, Dornoch, Bonar Bridge. I don’t actually remember any of them being from – the term they liked to use for us in those days ‘backcoasters’! I don’t remember anybody from the west coast or up round here.
It was a shock to the system. But the hostel, once you got used to it, was fine because there were so many of us. And not everybody could accept being there and there were girls who must have been heart-broken with home sickness. But myself, I made friends very quickly and I had very good friends and because we shared accommodation there would be a minimum of four to a bedroom, for example. So you had pals and we had laughs and everything but initially going into that and finding your way around and learning the rules, what you could and couldn’t do – and there was a lot of what you couldn’t do! It was hard, there’s no question.”.
Hostel Days - 1950s
Scourie no more ...
“Well, when I started school in … I don’t know when – early ’50s? – there was – you could still leave at fifteen and do all that time in Scourie. If you wanted to progress beyond that, you had to go to the east coast. The Education Committee hired a bus. And it took you away in the summer, back at Christmas, and then back after Christmas, and then Easter, and then home for the summer. I can’t remember the October break at all. I think it might only have been a few days. You weren’t allowed to … staying in a hostel, some people could get home if they could get transport, and some in their wisdom decided that this was upsetting the people that couldn’t get home. So nobody got home. Apart … twice a term, you were allowed to go home. You were a prisoner there.
“We were going to a much bigger school – a school of 700 at the time, and that was a great experience, because it meant that I was meeting people from all over the county; so, west, north and east coast. And hostel life was tough to start with. Leaving home at eleven to go to the scary east coast was tough but school itself was great. I particularly enjoyed the social aspect of school. I wasn’t so keen on the academic side, and … but I certainly gave it a go at Standard Grades; I got enough credit grades to get a few Higher options. I think that’s important about high school; that it’s not just about the academic side of it; it is about interaction. We were all together in Golspie. Sometimes I’m vaunted as this great success story, but I was actually suspended from the hostel for drinking, so, you know, so there is good and bad. But I managed to get a few ‘A’s, as I said, and I can remember a teacher saying to me, ‘Well, yes, you got two ‘A’s and a ‘C’ and three ‘B’s’, (???) and he said, ‘Well, Andrew, what would you like to do?’ And I thought, well, I’d quite like to be a lawyer.”
I didn’t particularly like it, partly through being at school and partly if anything went wrong, you know, like windows being broken or something – ‘Oh, it’s the hostel boys.’ So you got blamed for everything that… it was more talk, you know, than anything else, you know. ‘Och, it’ll be a hostel boy.’ I always got the feeling that they didn’t really want us there, but they needed us to keep the school going ...”
The Last of The Hostellers
Andrew Mackenzie, Clashmore, Stoer – 1990s
