The Climate Emergency. How did we come to this in 2020? Historical context and patterns of consumption. How do we change repeating attitudes and behaviours? By Sally Campbell Historically we know the industrial revolution, started in the UK with coal to generate steam power coupled with brilliant innovative engineering and the hard labour of millions …
By Alice Maxwell In September I hosted a house concert, Music in the Time of Anne Frank, which was covered by the Voice for Arran and the Arran Banner. Shortly afterwards I received a phone call from Jack Paterson of Whiting Bay who had read the article, and said he had a fascinating story to …
Last month Lyn Beard from Australia contacted the Voice to help her investigate a family connection with Arran, and the Allison family of Brodick. Here is what she writes: I am researching a family connection to the Allison’s of Brodick. My father-in-law, Des Beard, died in Perth, Western Australia in 2012 and recently I was …
By Simon Ross-Gill Although I never actually did set foot in the workshop or Gallery at St Columba’s and have no memories of it, it is with great pleasure that I am putting together an exhibition, as a part of A Celebration of Whiting Bay Past And Present on May 11th and 12th 2019. As …
Each year, Earth Day—April 22—marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Setting the stage for the first earth day The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” War raged in …
By Kenneth Gibson MSP Many readers will know of the horror that befell HMS Dasher in 1943 between Ardrossan and Brodick, yet this might be the first time they have heard of the Iolaire tragedy, the worst peacetime British sea disaster since the Titanic; one that hit the Isle of Lewis and its close-knit communities …
By Mike Small The Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has created a mobile exhibition featuring sixty years of the anti-nuclear movement in Scotland. Launched last month at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, Scottish CND has made a visual timeline with accompanying video testimonies from key figures in the nuclear disarmament movement. Scottish CND, which turned …
By Jim Henderson The Darien disaster 1698 – 1700. King of Scotland & England William 11/111 1689-1702. A Protestant with Dutch connections. Leading up to the year 1700 a total of 7,000 Scots emigrated to the America’s, Between 10 and 20,000 moved to Europe and between 60 and 100,000 went to Ireland. This was 60 …
With news that the distillery at Lagg will be opening next spring, local historian Jim Henderson sent the Voice an historical account of the illicit distilling industry in Arran in the early 19th Century. The website for the new distillery says that the Parish of Kilmory and the surrounding area of the island was a …
by Stuart Gough “Robert Burns is said to have been blind to natural grandeur because he could see Arran almost daily from the Ayrshire farms on which he spent his youth, yet never once mentioned it in verse or prose. His blindness has been explained either on the ground that he lived before the fashion …