1
The campaign for a Town Hall in Lerwick,
1880-1887
by Brian Smith
I
The campaign for a Town Hall in Lerwick, decorated with beautiful stained glass and
heraldic shields, took place between 1880 and 1887.1 Its promoters were local officials, an
antiquarian and a community mobilised for action.
The campaign’s main begetter was Charles Rampini (1840-1907), a native of Edinburgh
who had been a judge in Jamaica.2 He arrived in Shetland in 1878 and became sheriff
substitute. Rampini threw himself into local activities. In April 1879, acting as croupier at an
event for the local Curling Club, he mused about Lerwick and its amenities.3 He had visited
the islands when he was a student, he said, in the early 1860s: ‘The New Town was not then
built, there was no hotel, and not a carriage of any kind to be had.’
Charles Rampini.
Photo: Brian Smith
But things were changing. There were the first signs of what would be a major boom in
local fisheries, and a vigorous building programme related to it. But ‘[s]omething more’, he
said, ‘could be done in sanitary matters; we wanted a Town Hall, where meetings and
concerts could we held; we wanted some new roads, and a pier of some sort or other must be
got.’
People like Rampini felt the need of premises where they could listen to a concert or watch
a play. The only place available for such relaxation in the town was the former Methodist
chapel in Mounthooly Street. ‘[W]hen we wished to have a public meeting,’ Rampini said, a
few years later,4 ‘or to have a concert, or even to witness a theatrical performance, we had to
betake ourselves to an old and disused church! The pews were very narrow, and the seats
were very hard – and there we took our pleasures sadly.’
And in the same way there was an absence of august premises for public business. The
Town Council had to meet in another old church. ‘[A]s for the Burgh Court Room!’ Rampini
reminisced. ‘Well, I think I must draw a veil over the sufferings of my friend the Chief
Magistrate and his brother Baillies in that penitential cell!’
‘It is high time’, he said, addressing a temperance bazaar in December 1881,5 ‘that we
should have a Public Hall which may serve as the centre and pivot of the fast-increasing busy
life of our town.’
Prosperity looked set to solve the problem. As the 1880s dawned, there were more and
more promising signs of it: a fall in poor-rates, and a plan to build new Harbour works. But it
would be wrong to regard the campaign for Lerwick Town Hall as the celebration of an upand-coming-class and its new opulence. Just before building work was due to begin, in July
1881, there was a great fishing disaster in Shetland. 58 men were drowned; their families
2
became destitute. The promoters of the Town Hall immediately diverted their attention to a
new campaign, to raise money for the fishermen’s widows.
Rampini threw himself into the new cause with vigour. He and his colleagues raised
£17,000 in a few months, enough to build four Town Halls. ‘We have no doubt’, the Shetland
Times said in due course,6 ‘the work would have been commenced before now but for the sad
disaster to our fishermen, and the fact that the energies of those who were most active in the
Hall scheme had to be diverted to the purpose of relieving the distress caused by the storm.’
The campaign for a Town Hall in Lerwick was far more than a celebration of prosperity.
Prosperity assisted it; but (as we shall see) it answered the ‘felt want’7 of the whole
community, rich and poor.
II
On 19 November 1880 a meeting of a ‘thoroughly representative character’ met in Rampini’s
chambers in the County Buildings. It set up a ‘large and influential provisional Committee’ to
draw up a scheme for a Town Hall.8
Shetlanders loved and love committees and the Provisional Committee was the first of
many in the Town Hall project. Six weeks later, however, it ceased to exist. During its short
life it had commissioned a plan, by the architect Alexander Ross, of a ‘[p]lain and massive
and handsome’ building, ‘with full scope for future decoration’.9 The committee reckoned it
would cost £3000. The committee had ‘wisely resolved’, said the Shetland Times, ‘to put it
within the power of all classes to further the good work. … [I]n an undertaking of this kind
the poor man’s shillings are of as much importance as the rich man’s hundreds.’ The
committee proposed a capital sum of £4000 in 800 shares of £5 each, but some members
thought that such a share-price might discourage many from getting involved. They finally
decided to sell 2000 shares at £2.10
The Provisional Committee then stood aside in favour of a body of promoters pledged to
form a Joint Stock Company. That company, with nine directors, mainly merchants, met
instantly. It appointed a provisional committee of shareholders, mainly landowners.
A prospectus appeared.11 ‘The want of accommodation for meetings of all descriptions of a
public or social nature,’ it announced, ‘as well as for those of the Municipality, has long been
felt in Lerwick, and has occasioned much publicly-expressed dissatisfaction. At present there
is no building in the Town suitable for the purpose, the only Hall which has hitherto been
available for public purposes having been recently let.
‘It is a generally-expressed opinion that the growth and prosperity, together with the future
prospects of the Town, will justify a proper effort being made to remedy this deficiency, and
to supply the capital of the Islands with a Town Hall suitable for its requirements, and at the
same time of such architectural merit as will reflect credit on the culture and intelligence of
the community.’ ‘Community’ is a word that frequently appears in the discussions about
Lerwick Town Hall.
3
During the next few months the Company sold shares rapidly. One of the first purchasers
was Captain John Nicolson of South Shields, one of many patriotic exiles who dabbled.12 He
bought ten. In April Samuel Laing, the member of parliament, took 50; in May Lord Zetland
said that he would buy 100.13 By June so many had been taken that there was certainty that
the scheme would go ahead.14
Meanwhile, attention was being given to another key financial strand of the project. The
Company asked the Town Council and Commissioners of Police if they were willing to rent
accommodation in the proposed building, including cells, for £40. The councillors expressed
some doubt about the price, but agreed that their present lock-up was ‘really not a fit place to
put anyone into over a winter night’.15 They succumbed.
In April the directors chose a site at the North Hillhead, overlooking the old and new
towns;16 in July they approved the architect’s working plans. They then appointed a
decoration committee,17 whose operations we shall discuss later. In September they invited
tenders, and appointed local tradesmen. They accepted an offer by John M. Aitken to
construct the whole building for £3,240, with an arrangement that he should begin work
immediately in cleaning and levelling the ground.18 They planned to use white local freestone
from the South Ness quarry in Lerwick.19
They were moving quickly, with a view to having the foundation stone laid by Rampini in
December (a reward for his efforts in the Town Hall and disaster campaigns), and the
building complete by Christmas 1882.
They didn’t manage to adhere to that programme, but they didn’t depart from it markedly.
As we shall see, the stone was laid in January, and by that time the foundation walls had all
been built. Five months later large iron girders for strengthening the floor of the main hall
were being put in position, and vestiges of the second storey were beginning to appear.20
Meanwhile, the scheme became bigger. The original plan had envisaged a large hall 60 by
30 feet in size, with a smaller hall and burgh court room underneath. Now the directors added
a wing of three stories, comprising a room for the magistrates, retiring rooms attached to the
hall, and a lean-to lock-up at the rear. Then another wing was added. The main impetus for
these alterations was the need to attract revenue from tenants: the left rear wing, for instance,
was leased to the Customs and Inland Revenue departments, and the Good Templars offered
£350 for a room for 19 years.21
The opportunity was taken to improve the appearance of the building as well. In June 1882
the Directors rejected the ornamental fleche designed by Ross for the centre of the large hall
roof. They replaced it with a square tower with a battlemented top, and began to think about a
public clock and peal of bells for it. The whole building work was complete by June 1883.
A year later the Town Hall Company considered the results of the campaign. The capital of
the Company consisted of 2000 shares of £2 each, of which 1000 had by then been taken up.
They held on loan £2,000 from the Shetland Fishermen’s Widows’ Fund – that connection
again between the Town Hall and the disaster. The buildings, ground, architects’ fees,
4
furniture and fittings had cost £4,541 5s.6d. The company was taking in annual revenue of
£180.22 It was a success story.
III
What we have seen so far might imply a campaign controlled and completed by rich
businessmen. That would overlook the part played in it from beginning to end by ordinary
Shetlanders, at home and abroad.
The temperance movement, which was highly popular in Shetland, supported the campaign
from the outset. It was important to raise funds. With that in mind, in December 1880 the
Good Templars promoted a grand bazaar in Lerwick, opened by Rampini in the drill hall of
the Seaman’s Institute on Christmas day.23
There were so many intending patrons that dozens failed to get in. (‘Never … could the
need of better Hall accommodation appeal more strongly to an assemblage’, remarked the
Shetland Times. ‘Owing to the lowness of the roof and the great crowd of people … the heat
soon became most oppressive’.)24 So much material had been donated that the bazaar opened
again on two subsequent days; it realised £160.
A year later there was an even bigger effort, a ‘grand bazaar and fancy fair’, this time
expressly for the Town Hall Decoration Fund, and mainly the work of women. Commander
LeCoq of the Royal Navy gave permission for it to be held in Fort Charlotte.25 In October
1881 a group of 13 ladies formed the inevitable Shetland ‘executive committee’, to organise
the event; ‘whilst a goodly band both in the Islands and in the south’, the Shetland Times
reported, ‘… consented to co-operate and receive contributions of fancy work, &c.’26 The
paper published a long list of those official recipients, forty or so of them, at addresses in
Shetland, Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Galicia.27
Meanwhile, sewing meetings were taking place in the County Buildings every Tuesday and
Friday,28 and young women were devising and promoting a subscription card that brought in
much funds.29 A ‘splendid box of goods’ for sale arrived, contributed by a Shetlander in
India.30
The bazaar lasted three days, like its predecessor, and produced £243 17s. for the fund. It
was ‘the largest amount ever raised in a similar manner in Lerwick before’.31 ‘The “Grabbag”’, a species of lucky dip, “went off like a flash”’, the Shetland Times reported; an
elaborate dolls’ house, built and donated by Major Cameron, chief magistrate, who opened
the proceedings, attracted much attention. Mrs Rampini and Mrs LeCoq displayed an array of
goods from foreign lands, including ‘beautiful specimens of palmleaf fans’ from the West
Indies. In the evening the hall was packed ‘to suffocation’.
There were other attractions nearby: a musical entertainment ‘by a choir of fifty juvenile
voices’ in the Volunteer Drill Hall, and a production of ‘the musical Robinson Crusoe’.32
5
IV
We have already noted the appointment of the Decoration Committee, and the public effort to
collect funds for it. The move to decorate the Town Hall was the brainchild of Arthur
Laurenson (1832-90), a native of Lerwick. He was a prosperous hosier, and a diligent public
servant; but he was also a student of Scandinavian eddas and sagas, and a writer about
abstruse historical and linguistic problems.33
Arthur Laurenson.
Photo: Brian Smith
Laurenson took control of the committee. Later, after most of the decoration was done,
some participants complained about his methods. ‘[T]he whole of the work connected with
these decorations’, the chairman of the Town Hall Company harrumphed in 1884, ‘[has] been
carried on in a very secret manner’.34 There is no doubt, however, that Laurenson’s
knowledge, his clear ideas about what he wanted to achieve, and his skills at cajoling
benefactors, were crucial in bringing the Town Hall campaign to completion.
At an early date the directors of the Company had set down their vision for the project. ‘[I]t
was part of the scheme’, they said,35 ‘that, to keep the capital of the company as low as
possible, the building should be as plain as the circumstances of the case would admit. It was
thought, however [they added], that a little ornamentation could be added both externally and
internally for the credit of the town, and for providing which patriotic citizens and townsmen
in other lands would contribute.’ Rampini announced, at the laying of the foundation stone,
that the Company was ‘anxious to make the internal adornment of our Town Hall at once a
record and an illustration of the history of our islands’.36
Laurenson’s first plan was to paint the ceiling of the proposed main hall with scenes from
Shetland’s history. ‘The roof …’, the Shetland Times reported,37 ‘is of pitch pine, and is
supported on six richly-carved arch ribs rising from stone corbels’. It was divided into panels,
and was thus ‘suited for painted and coloured decoration, a scheme of which has been
propounded by Mr Laurenson, and which, if carried out, will be unique in its way, and
embody a complete representation of the leading events of the history of these northern isles.’
It would have been an interesting project.
However, the committee changed its mind. In January 1882 Sheriff Thoms had offered a
stained glass window portraying the wreck of a Spanish Armada ship in Shetland.38 The
Armada window didn’t appear – Thoms donated a portrayal of Archbishop Eystein of
Trondheim and Bishop William of Orkney and Shetland instead - but the committee’s
attention did turn overwhelmingly to stained glass.
Laurenson carefully planned a series of windows portraying personalities and events from
the islands’ history, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. The majority of them were about
Shetland’s Scandinavian period, and the series culminated in the royal marriage between
Denmark and Scotland which ended that era.
[Stained glass: no caption required]
Photo: Brian Smith
6
During the work Laurenson contributed detailed accounts of these windows to the Shetland
Times, and about the earls and notable occasions dealt with in them – ‘[a]s we are aware that
a general interest exists in our community’, he said.39 He eventually wrote and published a
pamphlet about them.40 Laurenson’s idea that the islands’ history was confined to the Norse
period, and petered out after it (unthinkable today), was popular among Orkney and Shetland
historians until the mid-20th century.41
Laurenson also commissioned heraldic shields from Shetland’s past. Just as he had
confined the stained glass in the main hall to subjects from the earlier period and the highest
echelons of the islands’ history – earls, kings and queens – he was determined to exclude
merely local families from the heraldry there. ‘I was thinking’,42 he wrote to an antiquary in
Edinburgh in March 1882, ‘we might get local family coats for the cornice decoration of the
inside corridor, not for the Main Hall. … I mean that any heraldic decoration of the Main
Hall should be restricted to commemorating ancient royal, noble, or ecclesiastical personages,
and not families of merely modern local rank.’ Once again, he regarded the modern period of
Shetland’s history, and its contemporary families, as insignificant.
He made one exception, but only after much soul-searching. At the last moment he inserted
the arms of the Stewart family, cruel overlords of Shetland in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, into the scheme. ‘[W]e had consulted about the Stewart arms …’, he
wrote to his friend.43 ‘The odium attached to their name alone made us hesitate, but I have
seen the Sheriff again, and we have decided to take them for the twelfth shield on the ground
of fact and historical sequence.’
Laurenson’s energy and ingenuity was unbounded. He began to correspond with
communities abroad about potential donations. In March 1882 the chief magistrate of
Amsterdam responded to say that he and his colleagues would offer a window. It arrived in
January the following year.44 Later the senate of Hamburg presented another.45 Both windows
commemorated the friendly relations between Shetland and Dutch and German sailors and
fishermen over the centuries. Someone remarked about these foreign donations: ‘Much is
being said of the public spirit and brotherliness which are being displayed in the supplying of
the Lerwick Town Hall with beautiful windows …’46
A big disappointment for Laurenson was that the Scandinavian countries were less
forthcoming. As late as July 1883, just as the building opened, he wrote to a relative in St
Petersburg about the situation. ‘We never heard from Stockholm or Copenhagen,’ he said,47
‘and as yet have got nothing from the Motherland. I wish they would do something for us for
the sake of the old connexion.’
He persevered. His last great achievement was the great Rose Window, on the north side of
the main hall. Completed in July 1884, its central decoration was the arms of the Burgh of
Lerwick, presented not by that body but by individual councillors. Around it were fourteen
heraldic shields, also in stained glass. Five of them were presented by the City of Bergen –
Laurenson had been successful at last – comprising the arms of the main Norwegian urban
centres. The rest were presented by Shetlanders in the United Kingdom and Australia.
7
Laurenson himself donated the Danish window.48 As a member of the Town Hall Company
remarked, soon afterwards, ‘but for [Laurenson’s] great exertions the Rose Window would
not have been filled up.’49
The Shetland Times monitored the efforts of the Decoration Committee throughout, and
was delighted, as no doubt many others were. ‘We believe’, it remarked in July 1882, ‘that
already the expectations of the Decoration Committee have been greatly surpassed by the
support they have received in their efforts to make our Hall a building worthy of the
increasing prosperity of the town, and we have no doubt that their efforts will continue to be
supported and encouraged by all our community and by everyone who has the interests of
Lerwick at heart.’50
V
As we have seen, the campaign for a Town Hall in Lerwick – its planning, finance and
decoration – were truly a community effort. The most striking manifestations of that
corporate effort were public and sometimes spectacular expressions of delight, at different
stages in the process.
The first public event was the laying of the foundation stone in January 1881. This time the
organising committee was vast:51 three Freemasons, the directors of the Town Hall Company,
five Commissioners of Supply of the County, three magistrates and town councillors,
Commander LeCoq (representing the Coastguard and Royal Naval Reserve), two rifle
volunteers, three representatives each from three temperance organisations, the contractor,
the Convener of the County and the town clerk.
At first it was intended that it should be a Masonic occasion, with Rampini laying the
stone.52 The event was originally scheduled for Christmas 1880, but was postponed until
January, because the masons hadn’t managed to borrow costumes from their Grand Lodge in
Edinburgh. ‘Without the masonic element’, said the Shetland Times, ‘the ceremony would be
shorn of much of its dignity’.53
News then came that the Duke of Edinburgh was due to be in Lerwick in January. Rampini
and the Masons were summarily dropped from the programme. (‘The Free Masons we always
have with us;’ a local journalist wrote, years later, ‘but a Duke, a real live Duke, and one,
moreover, who was a son of the good “Wheen Victorie”, was a veritable rara avis …’)54 The
duke presided. There was a royal platform, ‘gaily decorated with flags and evergreens’.55 The
magistrates and the Town Council marched in procession to Fort Charlotte, picked up the
duke (who ‘looked every inch a sailor, and won all hearts with his fine bearing and
unassuming manners’) and escorted him to the site.
‘The scene at the Town Hall Buildings was very gay and animated. The Volunteers were
drawn up in line as a guard of honour in front of the platform. Behind them were the brethren
of the Lord Clyde Lodge of Oddfellows with their banners and regalia. At the other side of
the building, and right opposite the royal stand, was the stand erected by Mr Aitken …
8
tastefully decorated with ever-greens and filled with people, while the rest of the space inside
the barricades was filled with a crowd of Reserve men, and others.’
At first sight these events look like the self-celebration of a prosperous class. But there are
aspects of them that bear a different interpretation. When Rampini met the duke he didn’t
present him with a meaningless gift, but with a copy of the printed report of the Shetland
Relief Fund Committee, bound in vellum and gold. Amidst the celebrations, those drowned
fishermen hadn’t been forgotten.
That evening the town was illuminated. At 7 p.m. the streets were thronged with people, ‘a
great many of whom had come in from the country’. And in the town itself and its environs
people vied with each other to mark the occasion. ‘From the meanest and most out-of-theway to the most prominent, every house had its array of lights. … Even the Bressay folks …
made a no mean display.’
Some of the displays prepared were striking and ingenious. ‘In several shop windows were
designs wrought out with jets of gas. … In some windows were perfect pyramids of candles.
… In one window gaily decorated with evergreens could be seen a miniature fountain
playing; in another was a wheel formed of various-coloured paper which revolved in a circle
in which was the word “Welcome”, thus showing the letters in constantly changing hues;
while in still another was a miniature lighthouse …’
Another aspect of the celebrations was significant and long-lasting. For decades young
Lerwegians, plebeian males, had misbehaved at Yuletide and New Year. They had paraded
the streets in disguise with burning tar-barrels and torches. Recently they had given their
celebrations the name Up Helly Aa. They now offered to join in the proceedings, to the alarm
of some.56
The Shetland Times was more tolerant. ‘Among other expressions of welcome [for the
duke] which is to be offered, we must not omit to mention the “Guizers”. They are to
celebrate the event by substituting it for the usual “Uphelly a” festival, and are to have a
torchlight procession. Between 90 and 100 torches will be lighted at the North Hillhead about
9 o’clock and start in procession round the town. Each torchbearer will be dressed in fantastic
garb and if the Duke should condescend to look on the scene, we fancy he will think it most
unique.’57
In the event 130 guizers took part, and ‘thereafter broke up into groups, each with one or
more fiddlers, and proceeded to visit the houses of friends and enjoy a dance.’58 It is not too
much to say that this performance at the Town Hall celebrations inaugurated Lerwick’s
modern Up Helly Aa festival in more or less its present form.
All in all, the laying of the foundation stone of Lerwick Town Hall was a memorable
occasion during the modernisation of Lerwick. Writing a long poem entitled ‘“Wir toon’s”
foundation stone’, an anonymous bard memorialised ‘That day, in our sheltered vale of
life,/That our jog became a trot, sir.’59
9
There was a more formal and genteel celebration in July 1883, when the Town Hall opened.
The central event was a public subscription ball, ‘at which everybody in the islands who
could be called anybody would be present’.60 There was, however, a series of complementary
events, referred to as a Gala Week: a flower show by Lerwick Horticultural Society, the
regatta of the Boating Club, and a concert of glees, part songs and solos by Lerwick Choral
Society. At the same time, ever more prosperous Lerwick laid the foundation stone of a new
pier and harbour works.
On the following Monday Sheriff Thoms declared the Town Hall open. ‘[H]ere in
Lerwick’, he said, ‘… Union is Strength, for it is through the unity of those who have taken
part in this business that we have now to chronicle this splendid success.’61
And there remained one final celebration. To complete the project, in 1887, the directors
placed a clock and chime of bells in Lerwick Town Hall. The bells were cast by M. Severin
van Aerschodt of Louvain, and the clock by Messrs W. Potts & Sons, clock manufacturers of
Leeds. ‘As a community’, said the Shetland Times, ‘we feel proud of having one of the very
best clocks in the United Kingdom’.62
The directors chose Queen Victoria’s jubilee to inaugurate these final adornments to their
Town Hall. At 7 a.m. on the morning of 21 June 1887 the town band marched to the Market
Cross and played there. ‘Perhaps never before has Lerwick presented such a gay and festive
appearance’, said the Shetland Times, in the latest and last of its reports about the
community’s campaign to build a Town Hall in Lerwick.63
Lerwick Town Hall
Photo: Brian Smith
10
Notes
1
The best accounts of the Town Hall campaign are in the Shetland Times (S.T.), Shetland’s
only newspaper until 1885. It contains hundreds of articles about the subject, and is the main
source of information for this essay.
2
There is a good obituary of Rampini in the Aberdeen Journal, 27 July 1907.
3
S.T., 12 April 1879.
4
S.T., 28 January 1882.
5
S.T., 1 January 1881.
6
S.T., 15 October 1881.
7
The phrase occurs in S.T., 20 November 1880.
8
S.T., 20 November 1880.
9
S.T., 15 January 1881.
10
For share certificates in the names of Arthur Laurenson and Mary Sutherland, knitter, see
Shetland Archives, D3/31; and for a printed list of shareholders see Shetland Archives,
SA4/3000/16/43/8.
11
Shetland Archives, TO/10/115.
12
S.T., 5 February 1881.
13
S.T., 7 May 1881.
14
S.T., 25 June 1881.
15
S.T., 19 March 1881.
16
S.T., 30 April 1881.
17
S.T., 23 July 1881.
18
S.T., 15 October 1881.
19
S.T., 4 February 1882.
20
S.T., 3 June 1882.
21
S.T., 18 November 1882.
22
S.T., 27 September 1884.
23
S.T., 18 December 1880. In due course the company fell into debt, and Lerwick Town
Council bought the Town Hall for £2,750: see printed circular letter by J. Kirkland Galloway,
secretary, Lerwick Town Hall Company, 1 July 1903, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/16/43/7.
24
S.T., 1 January 1881.
25
S.T., 3 December 1881.
26
S.T., 8 October 1881.
27
S.T., 15 October 1881.
28
S.T., 19 November 1881.
29
S.T., 8 October 1881.
30
S.T., 15 October 1881.
31
S.T., 7 January 1882.
32
S.T., 10 December 1881.
33
Catherine Stafford Spence, ed., Arthur Laurenson, his letters and literary remains, London
1901.
34
S.T., 27 September 1884.
35
S.T., 23 July 1881.
36
S.T., 28 January 1882.
37
S.T., 4 February 1882.
38
S.T., 28 January 1881.
39
S.T., 8 July 1882. See also his article ‘The three Earls Rognvald’ in S.T., 30 June 1883, and
‘The stained glass windows of the Town Hall’, in S.T., 14 July 1883.
11
40
Arthur Laurenson, Memorandum on the Decoration of the Town Hall of Lerwick by a
series of historical portraits, Privately published 1885. He was presumably responsible for at
least part of the official Handbook to the Lerwick Town Hall, with historical and descriptive
notices of its decorations, published by Thomas Manson in Lerwick in 1885.
41
Brian Smith, ‘Holy Moses! Orkney historians on medieval Orkney’, New Orkney
Antiquarian Journal, 3, 2003.
42
Catherine Stafford Spence, ed., Arthur Laurenson, his Letters and Literary Remains,
London 1901, p.71.
43
Ibid., p.68.
44
S.T., 4 March 1882, 20 January 1883.
45
S.T., 30 September 1882.
46
Letter to Orkney and Shetland Telegraph, reprinted in S.T., 23 December 1882.
47
Catherine Stafford Spence, ed., Arthur Laurenson, his Letters and Literary Remains,
London 1901, p.73.
48
S.T., 5 July 1884.
49
S.T., 27 September 1884.
50
S.T., 8 July 1882.
51
S.T., 10 December 1881.
52
S.T., 26 November 1881.
53
S.T., 10 December 1881.
54
Thomas Manson, Lerwick during the Last Half Century [1923], Lerwick 1991, p.238.
55
S.T., 28 January 1882.
56
For a hilarious account of the occasion see Charles Mitchell, Up Helly Aa: tar-barrels &
guizing, looking back [1948], Lerwick 2015, pp.97-102.
57
S.T., 21 January 1882.
58
S.T., 28 January 1882.
59
S.T., 4 March 1882. The poem was reprinted in the Town Hall’s official handbook: see
note 40.
60
Thomas Manson, Lerwick during the Last Half Century [1923], Lerwick 1991, p.240.
61
S.T., 4 August 1883.
62
S.T., 5 February 1887.
63
S.T., 25 June 1887.