The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda

"This is an extraordinary book, too. It’s about the island of St Kilda, highly remote, to the west of the Hebrides and famously evacuated in the 1930s. There’s an extraordinary movie about this made by Michael Powell, called The Edge of the World , which was released in 1937. He made it on another one of the islands, but it tells the story of those last people to live there. It’s an interesting story, because it was quite secretive. At the time of the evacuation of the people from the island, the Scottish Office, who were responsible for it, tried not to allow filming. But there was somebody who filmed on the island just before the evacuation in 1930, so we do have images of what it was like then. There was an extraordinarily ‘simple’ culture. Andrew Fleming calls it the most mythologized community in Britain, because there’s something there about how we make a story about people who are not like us. So do you regard the people of St Kilda as a model of what we should all be like, with a very ‘simple’ lifestyle? Or do you see them as somehow quite ‘backward’, not like us at all, and they should be more like us, they should get into the modern world? It’s a bit of Britain that somehow stood apart from what was happening in the rest of the country, and became a semi-mythical place. This book shows the reality of life on St Kilda, and does it through people’s stories, through early photography, through some of the things we know about how their way of life worked. It was a very, very complex place in many ways, because, yes, it’s a ‘simple’ life, but how do you understand that and how do you account for what went wrong? And would it be possible to have a group living like this in the modern age? It was a very small community. This is a very deep history book about a very small group of people. It asks us questions about how we regard other people, and not just other people who live in other parts of the world, but how we regard a group of people living in Britain in the 20th century, who are in some ways not part of Britain in the 20th century at all. There were lots of issues about disease, but in the end, the population just wasn’t sustainable. It got so small, it had to go. That is still disputed. It’s an interesting topic."