treated all the town of Haggersta and they all drunk hartily to our long life and happiness and the remainder of what took place I will tell you again I have no paper so you must excuse this scrap I am Your Loving Johnie X
In the 1880s the ‘town of Haggersta’ consisted of four households – the Davidsons, the Mansons and the Smiths as well as the Andersons – so John Isbester’s hospitality was not on quite the scale that his words would seem to suggest.6
Captain Thomson,7 a local man who knew Whiteness well, points out that the schoolhouse used for the wedding was the place where bride and groom both received their early education, and suggests that after the wedding the guests all walked in couples along the banks of Brugarth (where the absent John Isbister, gold miner, had lived as a child) to Olligarth House (Fig.6.1) for the wedding breakfast and reception for the happy couple.
Figure 6.1 Olligarth House in 1916 (Courtesy of the Shetland Museum and Archives)
John’s bride, Susan Elizabeth Irvine (Fig.6.2), was born and brought up in Whiteness, and in her early years had attended the Whiteness school, but as the daughter of the laird she had had opportunities not given to most of the Whiteness community. My father says that his mother ‘Was spoiled, but not spoilt’, as her parents only surviving child. He continues:
Figure 6.2 Susie Irvine, about the time of her wedding to John Isbester
My mother who was known to be delicate, – she had valvular disease of the heart – had been taken gt. care of during her girlhood & had several years wintered with relations or friends in the Scottish Lowlands where the climate was less severe than in Shetland.8
Miss Urquart, a live-in governess from Scotland, was found for her, and seems to have coached her well because she became a talented singer and pianist and a fluent and entertaining letter writer. Her Sinclair ancestors on her mother’s side included doctors, clergymen and army officers in their number, and it was from that side of the family that her parents had inherited ownership of a number of crofts in Whiteness. Her father, Magnus Irvine, was a farmer and, by virtue of his wife’s inheritance, a landowner. That he was actively involved in farming can be seen in a photo (Fig.6.3) which shows him ploughing with two oxen. He is the man guiding the plough. The large black-bearded man with the oxen is probably Robbie Tullock, the general farm servant who remained with the family for many years.
An elderly acquaintance of the Irvine family visited Olligarth a few months before the wedding and, writing to his own granddaughter, explained that Mrs Irvine had not been at home but reported that they had been given dinner and that ‘Miss Irvine of Strom Bridge is a sprightly young lady and did the honours of the table well’.9 In the weeks after the wedding, clearly charmed, he wrote:
Figure 6.3 Magnus Irvine, on the left, ploughing with oxen
The husband of the young lady of Olligarth is a grandson of Peter o’Brugarth and his mother was Sarah Anderson. The young man had been seven years south and he and the young lady fell in love at first sight. She was just the age for that, full of life.10
If we take that literally, as I think we should, this was John Isbester’s first return to Shetland in seven years.
John Isbester (Fig.6.4) and Susie Irvine had made a very happy and rewarding choice. Allan Isbester writes:
From my Father’s first letters – written when he was Master of the Ann Mactavish, – it is apparent that my Mother and he when they married did not know each other at all – what they had in common was temperament. They were both lively and spirited, they were both entertaining talkers and good listeners, they were both responsive to, interested in and fond of other people. Each was proud of the other, each took responsibility for the other’s relations, and when they were together on the Centaur or the Dalgonar, their ship immediately became the host ship of the other ships of whatever port they were in. And they each had a serious side to their natures.11
Figure 6.4 John Isbester in his early years in command
John Isbester clearly believed that one reason to get married was to have babies. When his own daughter married and after a year of marriage was still not admitting to being pregnant, he expressed his anxiety: ‘Kathleen writes bright enough but surely she is not well if there is no sign yet’.12 His own marriage gave scope to no such concerns: Susie gave birth to their first child on 4 January 1885 and must have known that she was pregnant within weeks of the wedding. John Isbester needed to earn some money but did not want to risk a deep sea voyage which might put him on the other side of the world when their first child was born. Instead he was fortunate to obtain a short-term appointment as master of a schooner sailing from Lerwick to the Baltic.
The law required that when a British ship travelled outside Home Trade Limits a master with a full foreign going master’s certificate must be carried. Captain Mactavish, owner and master of the schooner Ann Mactavish had no foreign going certificate, so when his ship was offered a cargo from Lerwick to Danzig he needed a master for the voyage.; John Isbester took the job, sailing from Lerwick on 22 August 1884. Being in love’s grip and on his best behaviour and having little experience of writing love letters his communication usefully reads very much like a voyage report.
About 9 o’clock we took our departure by bearings of Bressay and Sumbrugh Head lights, course SE with a light breeze NE and we ran 140 miles. When the wind changed to about South we tacked ship and made another 70 miles SSE [sic]13 when we sighted an Island, Utsira, on the coast of Norway on the Friday after I left you. But we had moderate weather tacking along the coast up to Sunday afternoon when the wind commenced to freshen and we had a strong breeze the remaining part of Sunday and Monday and we have had two or three breezes since but nothing to hurt us but head winds all the time.14
Arriving at Hornbæk at the northern entrance to The Sound, the waterway between Denmark and Sweden, he wrote:
we have arrived all safe as far as Hornbek that is about 30 miles from Copenhagen and I expect to be a week or two yet before we get to Danzic as the weather here is very fine light airs of headwinds and calms and the glass up to the top branches. It is so calm today that we have had to drop anchor to stop us from going back with the current what we have already come and the village ashore here looks most beautiful.15
John Isbester was visiting the Baltic for his first and only time, and it is no surprise that he was enraptured by the Danish village, with its clean and brightly painted houses set
