Rachel (Gillies) Johnson (1922 - abt. 2016)

Born 8 Jul 1922 in Hirta, Scotland

Died about 4 Apr 2016 at about age 93 in Clydebank, Scotland

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Biography

Rachel, born in July 1922, was just a child, 8 years old, at the time of the evacuation of her village of St Kilda aboard HMS Harebell on August 29, 1930.

St Kilda is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland which, together with Scottish Natural Heritage and the MoD, run conservation projects on the island.

Today, very few people populate the island, with numbers differing from week to week. According to the National Trust for Scotland, the largest number of people who may be found on St Kilda is around 20.

These are likely to be staff members working on behalf of the trust and people working for the Ministry of Defence.

At present, only three people from the National Trust are on the island.

As a youngster growing up in the close-knit community, Rachel's duties included being lowered by rope off cliffs to scoop up puffin, gannet and fulmar eggs.

Children on the island received basic schooling and once the day's lessons were over, they would go and play down by the water's edge.

Rachel and her family settled in Larachbeg, Scotland.

Rachel married Ronnie Johnson, and had a son named Ronnie Gilles Johnson who was from Clydebank Dunbartonshire and worked or works as a draftsman.

Tributes have been paid to the last native of the remote island St Kilda whose death has marked the 'end of an era'.

Rachel Johnson, 93, was just eight years old when the remaining 36 residents were evacuated from the remote Atlantic archipelago in 1930.

The island sits on the outermost reach of the Outer Hebrides, 110 miles off the west coast of Scotland, and was routinely cut off by stormy seas and plagued by illness.

Rachel's son, Ronnie Gillies Johnson, 61, from Clydebank, Dunbartonshire, said: 'If you asked her about St Kilda now, she would look at you and smile.

'St Kilda was an important part of her life, but she did not speak much about it.'

The St Kildans lived in a semi-circle of 16 cottages and Rachel stayed at number 13 with her parents Christina, Donald and her older sister Cathie.

Their remote life was based on a strong sense of community where each member had to do their bit - including the children.Ronnie, a draftsman, said: 'The people would meet in the morning and decide what the day's work was.

'It could be fishing, looking after the sheep or basic building work. My mother would often go down to the cliffs and collect bird's eggs.

'The men would lower her down with a rope and she would pick the eggs from a nest on the ledge and put them in a wee coracle.

'She would help to prepare meals or pick up seaweed from the beach. The people would dry it in a hut and then use it as fuel.

'It was a very hard life on St Kilda, but there was a great sense of community.

'But if they had stayed there any longer more people would have probably died.' Unlike those born on the mainland, the islanders had little resistance to diseases, and when Rachel's aunt Mary died of appendicitis after giving birth, they decided to leave.

The St Kildans' petitioned the government to be resettled to the mainland and boarded the Harebell for Lochaline, Highlands, on 29 August, 1930.

Rachel was only eight years old when the once close-knit community was broken up and scattered.

But the Gillies family did not venture far - they settled in a cottage at Larachbeg, near Lochaline in the Highlands.

Rachel spoke Gaelic and only very little English at the time, but she managed to catch up at nearby Claggan School, Highlands.

At weekends she worked at the Ardtornish Highland estate, where she helped out with general household duties.

She was also a dedicated and talented highland dancer and she competed at events across Scotland, where she caught the attention of a young house builder.

Ronnie Johnson from Luss, Argyll and Bute, spotted Rachel at the Lochaline village hall and after winning her heart he proposed and married her in the town of Oban.

The couple moved to a small property in Scotstoun, Glasgow, in 1949 and then settled in Clydebank with their two sons, Ronnie and Malcolm.

Rachel worked as a dinner lady at Kilbowie Primary School in Clydebank but never pursued a career as she dedicated herself to family life.

And although she had found a new home on the mainland, she would keep some traditions of the devout St Kilda community alive. Ronnie said: 'Her family would walk to church in any weather, no matter if it was rain or hail.

'This was one of the main things. Sunday was always just a day of rest. That is the way it used to be.

'My mother would go to church every Sunday - without a fail. If she was feeling ill or had difficulty walking, she would arrange a lift.

'It was always a quiet day in our house, apart from going to church, because meals were always prepared on a Saturday.

'She was always very family-orientated wanted to do the best she could.

'My mother never wanted to be in the limelight. She was just a family person who looked after me, my brother and my dad - that was good enough for her.'

Rachel lived out the last years of her life in a care home in Clydebank, Dunbartonshire and the grandmother-of-five only went back to St Kilda on two occasions - once for a documentary and once on invitation of the army to see the transformation the island had gone through.

She became an honorary member of the National Trust and their annual meeting would be one of the only times she would speak of her heritage.

Ronnie added: 'She would answer questions at this gathering, but she would never give interviews.

'Her family were not interested in all of the publicity or making a fortune - they just attended to what they had and they were happy with the simple life.' St Kilda is one of only 24 global locations to be awarded 'mixed' World Heritage Status for its natural and cultural significance.

It is also Europe's most important seabird colony, one of the major seabird breeding stations in the North Atlantic, and boasts the world's largest colony of gannets nests on Boreray and the sea stacs.

St Kilda has the largest colony of fulmars in the British Isles – nearly 65,000 in 1999.

Stac an Armin (191 metres) and Stac Lee (165 metres) are the highest sea stacs in Britain

The island is one of the best places in Britain for diving because of its clear water and its submerged caves, tunnels and arches.

St Kilda has one of the most extensive groups of vernacular building remains in Britain. The layout of the 19th-century village remains to this day, and over 1,400 stone-built cleitean for storing food and fuel are scattered all over the islands, and even on the sea stacs.

Seabirds formed a major part of the St Kildan diet, especially gannets, fulmars and puffins. At one time it was estimated that each person on St Kilda ate 115 fulmars every year. In 1876 it was said that the islanders took 89,600 puffins for food and feathers.

The St Kildans used to eat puffins for a snack – just like a packet of crisps.

Soay sheep, from the island of Soay, are a unique survival of primitive breeds dating back to the Bronze Age.

In 1726 a St Kildan visited Harris, caught smallpox there, and died from it. His clothes were returned to St Kilda in 1727, and brought the disease with them. Most of the islanders died – only one adult and 18 children survived the outbreak on Hirta.

Rachel died 4 Apr 2016. She was buried in ^[1]

Her obituary was published in The Daily Mail April 7, 2016.

Last St Kilda islander

Born: July 8, 1922;

Died: April 4, 2016

RACHEL Johnson, who has died aged 93, was the last surviving former resident of St Kilda, the remote island group in the North Atlantic, far west even of the Western Isles.

Born on the main island of Hirta, she was brought up as a hunter-gatherer, often, because of her light weight, lowered by rope down steep cliffs to gather seabirds such as northern gannets and fulmar, and their eggs. These were delicacies to complement the islanders' locally-raised mutton, sheep's milk cheese and beef. Fish were generally too dangerous to hunt on the wild and wasteful ocean around the islands.

Another delicacy was seaweed, used for soups, stews or fuel, which young Rachel raked up from secluded beaches. She also became a child expert in catching adult puffins with a fowling rod, something which would not be considered environmentally-correct today but was borne of the islanders' survival instinct. However, they ensured survival beyond their own by never killing young puffins or other young seabirds.

Rachel had just turned eight years old when all 36 St Kildans were evacuated by a Royal Navy sloop to mainland Scotland at their own request in 1930. Their ancestors had lived on St Kilda since before Jesus Christ was born, possibly even for a millennium before that. But with failures to their barley and potato crops, emigrations to Australia, increasingly-lethal illnesses such as influenza and no doctors, by 1930 life had simply become too hard.

After a spell in the mainland Highlands around Loch Aline, where she saw her first trees and motor cars, Rachel and her family settled on Clydeside, first in Scotstoun and ultimately in Clydebank. While bringing up her two boys, Ronnie and Malcolm, she became a popular dinner lady at Kilbowie Primary School and was said by pupils at the time to have been the most popular lady at the school. As she helped feed those primary school children, she never forgot the hardships of her own childhood, when food had to be caught, plucked, cooked and shared among all families on her native islands.

Rachel was a much-loved member of the Clydebank Co-Operative Women's Guild, where she helped promote Clydeside women in working for the local community. She was also an active member of Radnor Park Parish Church on Spencer Street, Clydebank, where her funeral took place.

Rachel Gillies was born on July 8, 1922, on Hirta, the largest island of the St Kilda archipelago, to Ronald Gillies and his wife Christina (McKinnon). Her address was No. 13, Main Street, in fact the only street, which went from numbers 1 through 16 and included the islands' only school.

With no doctors, the minister and postmaster were entrusted with dealing with sickness until the nurse from the Hebrides came by on a fishing boat every few weeks. The islanders took great pride in believing (though it is possibly an apocryphal story) that Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed for a time on Hirta while fleeing his demented English pursuers in the wake of Culloden.

Rachel was still seven when her dad's sister Mary Gillies fell ill with appendicitis, and eventually pneumonia, in January 1930. Mary was rowed to a passing fishing boat, taken to the Hebrides and ultimately to Glasgow, where she passed away, also losing her baby daughter. Her death became a catalyst for the final evacuation of the islands.

The islands' "parliament" - the dozen and a half adult males meeting on Main Street - decided life had become unsustainable. Via mail taken by fishing boat, they requested final evacuation for all 36 islanders. The St Kildans' unique democracy and connection with the land was said to have been a major influence on Catalonian architect Enric Miralles in designing the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh.

Evacuation day was August 29, 1930, which turned out to be the calmest day, weather and ocean-wise the islanders had ever seen, something they took as a sign they had made the right decision. They filed down to the jetty, the adults carrying pieces of furniture on their backs, Rachel and other children laughing with excitement at seeing HMS Harebell, a single-funnelled, armed Royal Navy sloop built by Barclay Curle on the Clyde.

Before leaving Main Street, the islanders left an open Bible and a bowl of oats in each of the 16 houses - a symbolic gesture in case lost fishermen ever came ashore. Young Rachel recalled looking back from the stern deck of the Harebell and watching her homeland grow tinier under a cloudless blue sky, too young to realize that no-one would ever live there again.

To pass the time, while the adults wept, she and the other children played hide-and-seek on the Harebell, an anti-submarine vessel designed to look like an innocent fishing boat. (St Kilda had been fired upon by a German submarine towards the end of the Great War but the only casualty was a lamb).

The islanders disembarked on the Scottish mainland near Oban and Rachel and her family settled first in a cottage at Larachbeg, by Loch Aline. It was there that Rachel met her future husband Ronald, a builder. They married in Oban before moving to find work on Clydeside and to raise their two boys.

Before the evacuation, the islands had been owned by Sir Reginald MacLeod, chief of the MacLeod clan in the Highlands and Islands. They were later bought by Lord Dumfries, Marquess of Bute who, in his 1956 will, handed them over to the National Trust for Scotland. The National Trust currently allows the Ministry of Defence a small presence on the islands, which are also temporarily occupied by conservation workers, scientists and other volunteers who have helped restore the old cottages on Main Street. Tourists and gannet-loving ornithologists also visit by ferry in the summer months.

Rachel Johnson's husband Ronald and son Malcolm predeceased her. She is survived by their other son Ronnie, a draughtsman in Dalmuir, and five grandchildren from the two sons. Source: Herald Scotland. Rachel last lived in Mount Pleasant House a care home in Clydebank. Rachel was buried at the North Dalnottar Cemetery in Clydebank.

Sources

1. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/218895754/rachel-johnson: accessed 29 April 2023), memorial page for Rachel Gillies Johnson (8 Jul 1922–4 Apr 2016), Find A Grave: Memorial #218895754, citing North Dalnottar Cemetery, Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland; Maintained by Glenlivet (contributor 49123124).

See Also:

• St Kilda World Heritage Site (Note - seach for Rachel Gillies or Johnson did not find any results.)