The two-year delay in baptising him may have been partly due to his illegitimacy, although no baptisms were registered between December 1852 and January 1854. It seems unlikely that he suffered any serious prejudice as a child, embedded in a supportive family and with his father well known locally but absent overseas like so many other men from Shetland. Illegitimacy was rare in Shetland at this time, with a frequency of about 4 per cent compared with a frequency of 9 per cent throughout Scotland.13 It carried a stigma except when the couple were simply anticipating the wedding. John Isbister senior – my great-grandfather – eventually died aged 86 in Hokitika, New Zealand where he had lived, unmarried, for much of the final 50 years of his life.14
Figure 1.1 David Hobart, schoolmaster at Whiteness
The 1851 census in Shetland recorded the family name as Isbuster, but the 1861 census adopted the spelling Isbister for the same individuals – and in 1871 the enumerator decided on Isbester! In cases where people were unlettered the enumerators used their own judgement and different enumerators at different times reached different conclusions. My grandfather, at the age of 15, signed his mother’s death certificate boldly and clearly in 1867 as ‘John Isbester’, and that is the spelling of his name which he used for the remainder of his life. A belief within the Isbester family that my grandfather had chosen to change his name from Isbister to Isbester for unknown reasons seems to have been mistaken. While Isbister is by far the most common version of the name in Shetland it is clear that in the 1850s and 1860s the spelling was arbitrary. It seems likely that his schoolmaster decided the spelling to use.
My great-grandmother Sarah Anderson is variously described in official documents as ‘a knitter of shawls’ and ‘an agricultural labourer’,15 which doubtless reflects the life lived by crofters in the 19th century when a skill such as knitting shawls was a means of earning a few pennies to supplement a subsistence diet consisting of what could be grown or caught. She was, at the time of the 1861 census, living in South Hamarsland with her son John Isbister (sic) and his two-year-old half-sister Barbara Anderson, later known as Barbara Hunter. Barbara, like John, was illegitimate and her mother signed her birth certificate with a cross, identified by the registrar as ‘Sarah Anderson her mark’, a reminder that in the days before education became compulsory it was still common for poorer people to be unschooled. South Hamarsland is only 4 miles from Whiteness, but such is the nature of Shetland, with long fingers of sea penetrating the land, that Whiteness is on the West or Atlantic coast of Shetland while South Hamarsland, on the shore of Lax Firth in Tingwall, is on the East or North Sea coast.
Knitting shawls was, for Shetland women in the 19th century a very common activity. Shortly after Sarah Anderson’s death the Truck Report16 provided the results of the investigation into the barter system used in the Shetland shawl and hosiery industries and in the fishing industry during the years when John Isbester was growing up. The report contains some 17,000 questions put to more than 200 men and women about their lives and working conditions, and contains fascinating insights into the lives of Shetland folk in that period. The landlords and merchants who operated the barter system generally claimed that their tenants were treated fairly and reasonably and were not oppressed, while detached observers such as clergymen considered that the crofters were compelled to knit shawls and to go fishing in circumstances where, being usually in debt to the landlords and merchants, they had little alternative.
Women knitting shawls used wool from their own sheep which they spun themselves, or wool obtained from the merchants who bought their finished shawls. These beautiful, intricately patterned creations were about 2.5 yards (2.3 metres) square, and, if the wool had to be spun before the knitting the whole process of making a shawl took about four weeks of hard work. Clementina Greig17 of Scalloway, a woman with 33 years’ experience of knitting shawls, reported ‘When I spin the wool myself [making a shawl] it takes me a month, but with clean worsted I will make it in about three weeks,’ and when she was asked ‘How long will the spinning of half-a-pound [of wool] take?’ she replied, ‘It will take me a week to spin it sitting very close at it and sleeping very little.’
Euphemia Russell18 of Scalloway had knitted shawls for 25 years when she could sell them, and when she could not she worked ‘Sometimes in the fields and sometimes at the fish’ for about three months a year. Working at the fish would have been gutting herring or tending the cod spread to dry on the beaches for subsequent sale overseas.
Shawls usually sold for 17 shillings which would normally be paid entirely in the form of goods from the shop such as tea, sugar, bread, soap and cotton. The knitters preferred payment in cash, but this they say was normally refused except for the odd penny or two. They would accept more tea than they needed and would then exchange it with farmers for produce such as potatoes and meal. The possibility of selling a shawl for £1 cash direct to a summer visitor was a rare but welcome opportunity.
When asked ‘Have you often had to barter your goods for less than they were worth? ‘Mary Coutts19 of Scalloway replied:
Sometimes, if there had been 2½ yards of cotton lying [unused] and a peck of meal came in, we would give it for the meal. The cotton would be worth sixpence a yard, or 15 pence [in total] and the meal would be worth one shilling [12 pence]. I remember doing that about three years ago; but we frequently sold the goods for less than they had cost us in Lerwick.
To explain why spinning the necessary wool would take her more than a week, Mary Coutts said, ‘We have to go to the hill for our peats and turf, and that takes up part of our time,’ a reminder that the knitting of shawls was no alternative to housework, but just one more task.
It is not clear how long Sarah Anderson lived at South Hamarsland, but six years after the census she was again recorded in the same vicinity. On 4 July 1867 she died in the Garths of Easthouse, a stone-built dwelling with a single room, the ruins of which still stand about 200 metres from the ruins of South Hamarsland. Her death was untimely – she was only 37 – and terrible. The death certificate gives the cause of death as ‘Inflammation of the throat and lock-jaw’, otherwise known as tetanus. John Isbester was 15 at this time, and had already spent a summer at the herring fishing. He was home between cod-fishing voyages aboard the Faroe smacks. The death certificate records that he was present at her death and that she had no regular medical attendant.
His mother’s death and the manner of it must have been a traumatic experience for my grandfather, boy that he still was at the time. My father spoke often of my grandfather – he was proud of both of his parents – but I do not recall him ever mentioning his grandmother’s death, and it is possible that he never knew the details of this event, which had occurred more than 30 years before he was born.
So, what was Whiteness like in the 1850s when my grandfather was a boy? The crofters lived their lives at subsistence level:
It has been calculated that from 1780 to 1850 there was on average one famine year in every four and, although destitution did not reach the level of Ireland or the Western Isles in the 1840s, there were families who lived without oatmeal or bread for months on end. Fish proved to be their salvation.20
The census enumerator describes South Whiteness in 1851 as being
partly pastoral and partly agricultural … Soil mostly thin on limestone rock with a considerable portion of wild moor – precipitous towards
