Here's to your heart, family and land
Alasdair got on pretty good terms with the unit, as I have said, but with the Vedra and its skipper, never! For one thing he was unable to forgive Vernon for not wrecking his ship, preferably on the Hoevdi Grund. The wreck of the Oceanic is wearing a bit thin these days. It is twenty years ago and has been told many times. The piling up of the Vedra was just what Foula needed to justify its reputation. Alasdair never wearied (he mentioned it to me only the other day) of telling how Vernon sailed clean over the reef on his first arrival at the island, cheerfully discounting all Alasdair's friendly warnings. Every time that Vernon put out from the Voe or hove in sight from Scalloway, Alasdair would down tools wherever he happened to be and run down to the Voe. If anyone was near he would start a monologue in a tone of gloomy fatalism: 'That man bears a charmed life, him and his ship! I wouldn't sail with him for a fortune. It's a mystery to me why he has never wrecked his ship—look at that! He's heading straight over the Hoevdi! The tide will carry him down. Look! He's being carried south! Aha! Mphm! Ay! This time he's gone too far! He'll hit! He'll hit! There's not a chance in a million that he'll clear it. He'll be right over the Oceanic now. Well, he can't say I didn't warn him!' and he would stand there with his clenched hands in his old overalls and his mouth set, waiting for the crash and the bodies to come ashore. It never happened.
—Michael Powell, Edge of the World (200,000 Feet on Foula, 1938)
Alasdair Holbourn is the character![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks said would be my favorite when they gave me my copy of Edge of the World and they were right, which has only occasionally been weird considering he was a historical person and his brother's descendants still live on the island (and sell Foula wool, which I would be tempted to purchase if I weren't allergic to it). He has a chapter to himself; it is titled "The Negus is not such a Fool as he Looks." He is described as looking like a Shetland pony and seems to have worked as an occupational therapist when he wasn't acting as factor of Foula on behalf of his family and if the Chronicles of Narnia had existed in the summer of 1936 Michael Powell would undoubtedly have compared him to Puddleglum. As it is, his extravagant catastrophizing is sufficient to earn him his other nickname of "the Smallie," after the troll that is supposed to live at the bottom of the Sneck o' da Smallie "weaving spells and chuckling to think of all the evil in the world." He does not make an immediate hit. He turns out to have a sense of humor, though, including about himself, and a real eye for the weather; he's good with animals, especially ponies ("perhaps because in his working clothes, unshaved, crouching, with his thatch of hair flopping over his forehead, he looked like a relative"), and eventually he wins the undying admiration and affection of the film crew by almost getting himself drowned in a geo in service of the film's dramatic storm sequence. I had never gone looking for him on the internet before. Powell gives his age as twenty-six at the time of filming, but it seems he was born in 1908 and his full name was Laurence Alasdair Menander Stoughton Holbourn. I had wondered from Powell's book how he had gotten away without a classical Greek name like his brothers Hylas and Philistos. He hadn't.
I just discovered that there is a memorial on Foula to Alasdair and his wife. I am obviously inappropriately amused to read that the copper for the plaque came from the wreck of the Oceanic.
—Michael Powell, Edge of the World (200,000 Feet on Foula, 1938)
Alasdair Holbourn is the character
rushthatspeaks said would be my favorite when they gave me my copy of Edge of the World and they were right, which has only occasionally been weird considering he was a historical person and his brother's descendants still live on the island (and sell Foula wool, which I would be tempted to purchase if I weren't allergic to it). He has a chapter to himself; it is titled "The Negus is not such a Fool as he Looks." He is described as looking like a Shetland pony and seems to have worked as an occupational therapist when he wasn't acting as factor of Foula on behalf of his family and if the Chronicles of Narnia had existed in the summer of 1936 Michael Powell would undoubtedly have compared him to Puddleglum. As it is, his extravagant catastrophizing is sufficient to earn him his other nickname of "the Smallie," after the troll that is supposed to live at the bottom of the Sneck o' da Smallie "weaving spells and chuckling to think of all the evil in the world." He does not make an immediate hit. He turns out to have a sense of humor, though, including about himself, and a real eye for the weather; he's good with animals, especially ponies ("perhaps because in his working clothes, unshaved, crouching, with his thatch of hair flopping over his forehead, he looked like a relative"), and eventually he wins the undying admiration and affection of the film crew by almost getting himself drowned in a geo in service of the film's dramatic storm sequence. I had never gone looking for him on the internet before. Powell gives his age as twenty-six at the time of filming, but it seems he was born in 1908 and his full name was Laurence Alasdair Menander Stoughton Holbourn. I had wondered from Powell's book how he had gotten away without a classical Greek name like his brothers Hylas and Philistos. He hadn't.I just discovered that there is a memorial on Foula to Alasdair and his wife. I am obviously inappropriately amused to read that the copper for the plaque came from the wreck of the Oceanic.
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John Laurie is at least in The Edge of the World (1937)!
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(I mean, I'm sure he wasn't, but the only films I've watched with a Scottish character in who wasn't actually fake-Scottish, or Welsh, it was still John Laurie, looking much the same as in the 60s. Immortal, eternal only-Scottish person in film, possibly.)
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Don't forget Finlay Currie (also in The Edge of the World!) and Gordon Jackson. The latter turned up in The Captive Heart (1946), almost younger than I had ever seen him; he was of course standing in for Scotland while Mervyn Johns was representing Wales.
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(My 1930s film watching is still quite limited! Can you tell? But, heh, even in the 1940s, in The Silver Darlings the Scottish hero was played by Clifford Evans, who was most certainly... Welsh. John Laurie must have been busy that day.)