very fortunate that my father was a hoarder of family documents and that throughout his life he was happy to correspond with anyone interested in my grandparents, the ships and Shetland. I have been fortunate, too, that my unusual name enabled one former shipmate to trace me and provide me with intriguing letters and photos 60 years after we had last spoken.
In this story I have quoted extensively from my grandfather’s writings. They vary considerably. His handwriting is always admirably clear, and when writing in the official log book, or composing a letter which he would have considered important, for example a birthday letter to a 13-year-old son or condolences to a friend of his wife’s, the punctuation and spelling are good, with few mistakes. When he was writing to my grandmother, however, his punctuation was sometimes missing and the spelling more arbitrary. It may be that when writing his personal letters he was writing colloquially, but it could be that he had a glass of Scotch beside him. With the exception of a couple of lines to be taken away by the pilot or the tug, and once when a trusted sea pilot had the con, he appears never to have written letters while at sea. To remove the distraction which might be caused by the minor errors in his letters I have, throughout the book, usually inserted punctuation and corrected spelling where necessary in the documents I have quoted.
I have usually referred to my grandmother as ‘Susie’ because that is who she was to her husband and friends, and so that, throughout the book, is how we usually meet her. I do, however, have the clear impression that as the well-bred daughter of a Victorian Shetland landowner and as wife of the captain of large sailing ships she was conscious of her place in society. She died a year before I was born, but I suspect that had we overlapped and had I when a child addressed her as ‘Susie’ rather than ‘Grandmama’, it would not have been well received! So I do have a slight feeling of lèse-majesté when I use her given name.
Jack Isbester
On the face of it my grandfather John Isbester could hardly have had a poorer start in life. He was born at Mailand, in South Whiteness, Shetland, on 9 February 1852 to Sarah Anderson, who was illiterate, and John Isbister, a seaman who left for the Antipodes without marrying Sarah and never returned. That my grandfather survived the further blow of his mother’s death when he was 15 to become a master in sail at the age of 32, to sail in command for 29 years, and to command for 13 years one of the largest three-masted square-rigged sailing ships flying the red ensign, is a testament to his character, ability and determination, as well as to his good fortune.
John Isbester’s first surviving words were not written until he was 32, but there is plenty of information about his family, and about his life and times, to help us to understand his background and early years.
Mailand was the home of the Anderson family, and at the time of the 1851 census the household consisted of Mary Anderson, aged 66, her sister-in-law Elizabeth, 73, and her son’s wife Catherine, 22, in addition to a farm servant, Christina Robieson, aged 20, and of course her daughter, Sarah, aged 20, who was to become my great-grandmother. Catherine’s husband, Laurence Anderson, was probably away at the fishing at the time of the census. The Andersons were a big family – my great-grandmother Sarah was the last of ten children – most of whom were born in Hogan, South Whiteness, and were by 1851 dispersed through Shetland and overseas. My grandfather’s Anderson uncles are variously described in census records as fishermen, seamen and whalers, and family tradition has it that he spent much of his childhood in the household of his uncle Laurence Anderson, a crofter and fisherman of Haggersta, Whiteness. There he was much closer than might be expected to his absent father’s side of the family, because his father’s younger sister, Catherine Gifford Isbister, had married Laurence Anderson in 1850. The Haggersta home of Laurence and Catherine Anderson seems to have been a real home to John Isbester. In later life he quoted it as his place of birth – perhaps he knew no better – and it was there in 1884 that he shared a bottle of whisky ‘with all the town of Haggersta’ at seven in the morning of his wedding day!1
Laurence and Catherine Anderson had moved from Mailand in the 1850s, most of their children being born in Haggersta, and my grandfather would have grown up in a household mainly of women. For Shetland this was very normal: the menfolk worked and often died at sea or overseas. Consequently there was at this time a marked population imbalance, with about nine women for every six men, a circumstance that made Shetland women capable and independent minded.2 Apart from his mother, Sarah, and his aunt, Catherine, there were her children, his cousins, Ann (a year his senior), Mary (three years his junior), Catherine (four years younger) and Robina (six years behind him). It wasn’t until he was ten that male cousins, in the form of Peter, Robert and Laurence, began to arrive. The man of the house, Laurence Anderson, was often away from home, the census only finding him in Whiteness twice in sixty years. The evidence of his children’s birth certificates is consistent with his being away from home for most of the summers, suggesting seasonal employment in the Shetland fishing industry, a very familiar pattern at that time.3
I rely on my father for the information that my grandfather spent most of his childhood at Haggersta and went to school in Whiteness, but there is confirmation of this from an interesting source. Writing in 1913 my grandfather describes meeting Bella Leask in Melbourne and reports ‘Bella minds a whole lot about me when we were at school that I had forgotten’.4 I think that this must be the Isabella Leask born in 1859, daughter of Arthur Leask, a merchant seaman who in 1871 was living in Hellister, Whiteness.5 The entire school, comprising the teacher with 59 children aged from 5 to 15 or 16, was housed in a single room6 but, as is so often the case, the results depended more upon the skill and enthusiasm of the teacher and the interest of the pupils than upon the pleasantness and comfort of the surroundings. John Isbester’s future career suggests that his schooling was more than adequate.
In 1857 or thereabouts, when he started school, my grandfather would have been taught by Robert Jamieson, whose letters were published in Shetland – a love story.7 Ten years later, when he left to go to the fishing, his teacher would have been David Hobart (Fig.1.1) who we will meet again as a teller of vivid stories and a friend of my grandmother’s family. Between Jamieson and Hobart came James Irvine and possibly other teachers. My father wrote ‘Mr Hobart was an excellent teacher of navigation – all the Whiteness boys benefited, my father included – and my mother’s Gifford cousins used to come from Busta to stay at Olligarth to get Mr Hobart’s teaching.’8 Shetland teachers who could teach navigation – a day’s work and perhaps a meridian altitude9 – were in demand by seafarers on leave because their prices were lower than those of the navigation teachers in the seaports.10 Schooling in Whiteness would have been interrupted from time to time for more immediate or, occasionally, more enjoyable matters. Few records from the 1860s remain but they were doubtless similar to later years when attendances were down when the peats were being cut or the crops harvested and when a half day was awarded for the nearby Whiteness and Weisdale regatta.11
The baptismal register for Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale shows that my grandfather was baptised in February 1854 as John Isbuster, son of John Isbuster seaman and of Sarah Anderson.
