In Search of Angels by Alistair Moffat

Author:Alistair Moffat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Maclean went on to complain about the poor conditions on board MacBrayne’s ferries – ‘scarcely an advance on the emigrant ships of the nineteenth-century Clearances’. But standards began to rise when a demand for car ferries led to new purpose-built ships in the 1960s and a new company called Western Ferries began to compete on the route from Islay to Kennacraig in Kintyre. In 1973, Caledonian MacBrayne came into being and the Steam Packet Company added its device of the lion rampant to the red funnel.

When I boarded the evening ferry at Lismore and listened to the welcome and safety announcement in Gaelic, it struck me that it was not only a recent reaction to the decline of the language but also an echo of the history of CalMac. Many of the skippers were native speakers from the islands and some became legendary.

When one captain announced to passengers that his ship had completed a very fast crossing, one of them asked, ‘Is it a record?’

‘No, it is not a record,’ replied the captain in the lovely sibilant accent of the Hebrides, ‘it is myself who is telling you.’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.