Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester
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.12 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