Michael Batson

The Shetland Islands are 170kms from Scotland, 220kms from Norway, and 360kms from the Faroe Islands. They lie on the border between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea on the same latitude as Helsinki and Anchorage; far enough north that with clear skies the aurora borealis are visible. Just 16 out of the more than 100 islands of the Shetland archipelago are inhabited with most people living on the largest island aptly named “Mainland”, the fifth-largest island in the British Isles. Shetlanders don’t regard themselves as British or even Scottish. The islands were ruled for 600 years by the Vikings until they were mortgaged to Scotland in 1468 as part of a dowry. After the Second World War, many islanders moved to New Zealand so there are connections to down under as well as to Scandinavia. Being the child of immigrants, I can relate to such a move, though my parents weren’t from Shetland. It’s said that the closest railway station to Shetland is Bergen, that’s not quite true but it sounds good.

I once spent part of a summer in Shetland (sometimes Shetlands used interchangeably) where the days are long with almost perpetual daylight and nighttime lasting barely three hours; it got dark at 11pm and was getting light again by 2am. The beaches are beautiful; there are no trees and of the eponymous pony I saw not a one; in fact finding one takes special effort. In winter the fog descends and due to bad weather, the main maritime link can be severed, air travel stops; shops can run out of stock, and the pubs runs dry.  The cost of living in the far north was on a par with that of London. The main economy is based on oil and gas, fishing, and some tourism. Cruise ships stop by on their way to Iceland and the Faroe Islands and when I was there, large factory ships from the former Eastern Bloc called “Klondikers”, moored offshore for weeks at a time, and bought all the fish that the local fleet could catch. Many islanders work in fishing and many of the others have shares in fishing boats so get a share of the money earned. Shetland has achieved television fame through history and wildlife programmes. There was a detective series set on the islands with the main character called Perez. To make the series interesting, they had to turn the islands into the UK’s murder capital.

To get to Shetland I started in London and took the bus to Aberdeen, Scotland’s third most populous city and the northernmost major city in the United Kingdom. It is about 13 hours by road on the National Express from London or 860kms. Aberdeen (or the mouth of the River Don) is noted for its buildings made from locally quarried grey granite, which can sparkle like silver because of its high mica content and giving Aberdeen its other name, the Granite City. Since the discovery of North Sea oil in 1969, Aberdeen has been known as the offshore oil capital of Europe and one of the UK’s leading business hub cities. Established in 1136, the harbour has been referred to as the oldest business in Britain.

The Aberdeen area has seen human settlement for at least 8,000 years. Originally it was two settlements known as Old Aberdeen and New Aberdeen. Robert the Bruce once laid siege to its castle and destroyed it. Centuries later it was ransacked by both sides in the Battle of Aberdeen. In the 19th century expensive infrastructure works left the city bankrupt. During World War Two the Luftwaffe bombed the city numerous times from bases in Norway. Some of the damage can still be seen today and they were still digging up UXBs as recently as the 1980s.

The University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495, one of two in the city, and the fifth oldest in the English-speaking world. It is consistently rated in the world’s top 200 and is home to one of the world’s top medical schools. Alex Ferguson made a name for himself as manager of Aberdeen Football Club (the Dons) before moving on to Manchester United. During his time there from 1978-86 the club won two European trophies, the Scottish Premier League three times, and the Scottish FA Cup four times, effectively breaking the stranglehold of Glasgow’s Old Firm duopoly albeit temporarily. Aberdeen’s captain then was Willie Miller called by Ferguson "the best penalty box defender in the world" and in 2003 was voted the club’s best player ever.

Aberdeen got rich on offshore oil. The harbour is full of OSVs, offshore support (or supply) vessels, their distinctive profiles of high superstructure and inverted bulldog snout at the bow followed by a long flat deck. You can fly to Shetland or sail. I got a P and O ferry. When I arrived in the city, I was still in my backpacking ways, so it being spring, I slept under what soldiers call the “thousand-star hotel”, outdoors in what I discovered the next morning to be a lunatic asylum.  It was chilly even with summer approaching, but the locals went about in shirt sleeves, the women in summer dresses. Waiting for the boat, I popped into Willie Millar’s Bar near the harbour. It was the kind of place if you shouted “fight” they’d be queuing up. Oil money gave the local football team the backing to take on the Old Firm duopoly of Scottish football in the 1980s, winning the Scottish Premier League with a host of players including their captain Millar, with a manager who later went on to manage some other team in red not very well known, south of the border.

The ferry takes all night travelling at half-speed. The route takes you through the North Sea oilfields where the oil rigs are counted by their flare stacks. Britian’s oil and gas is drilled for in the area south of the Norwegian Sea in the UK’s exclusive economic zone and lies all around the Shetland Islands. The water by great ocean standards isn’t’ that deep its’ mean depth being around 90m. The North Sea is one of the most volatile bodies of water anywhere on earth. Warm waters of the Gulf Stream collide with the near Arctic conditions of the North Atlantic which can produce some fierce weather conditions which can lead to some very turbulent seas.

Oil rigs float though are tethered to the seabed. Most of the rig is underwater kept upright and level through huge ballast tanks constantly adjusted in the lower structure. The North Sea contains almost 200 oil rigs making it the area with the highest number of offshore rigs anywhere in the world’s most active offshore drilling. Commercial oil extraction began on the shores of the North Sea in the 1850s. gas was found in 1910 by the Germans and British Petroleum in the later 1930s closely followed by Royal Dutch Shell. Major seismic exploration followed the UK Continental Shelf Act came into force in May 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s major oil and gas fields were discovered one after another by major il companies including the giant Brent Field east of Shetland. Volatile weather conditions in Europe's North Sea have made drilling particularly hazardous, claiming many lives. There have been rig fires, explosions, and giant waves.

The water of the North Sea by great ocean standards isn’t that deep its mean depth being around 90m. Atlantic water moves southwards while freshwater moves in the opposite direction. The main pattern to the flow of water in the North Sea is an anti-clockwise rotation along the edges. The water behaves differently in the North Sea from the Atlantic with different systems where wave speeds are diminished, and the wave amplitudes are increased. Tides are up to eight metres in some places and zero in others.

It was in the North Sea that the first instrument recorded rogue wave was made on 1 January 1995, the so-called Draupner Wave (or New Year Wave) after the gas platform off Norway which recorded it. The wave struck the underside of the platform which was built to withstand a 1 in 10,000-year wave with a predicted height of 20m, but at 3pm on that day it recorded a rogue wave of 25,5m. Ancient geology revels that Shetland itself weas hit by a tsunami about 25m high about 8,000 years ago caused by the Storegga Slide, when part of the Norwegian Shelf fell away in a massive submarine landslide.

People have lived in the Shetlands since the middle stone age. For 500 years the islands were part of the Kingdom of Norway until they were annexed into Scotland as part of a dowry and become part of the United Kingdom in 1707 when Scotland merged with England. Thereafter set in economic decline as trade with northern Europe declined. Until the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the 1970s. oil significantly boosted Shetland’s economy, employment, and public sector revenues in addition to fishing, which has always been an important part of the islands’ economy. The islands have long cool winters and short warm summers, is more temperate than nearby Scandinavia or even seasons in the UK. It rains, a lot and is generally windy and cloudy as you would probably expect from low-lying land masses between wide open stretches of stormy ocean

The Gilbert Bain Hospital is described as both rural and remote, it is certainly both. Named after the businessman that funded the original hospital in a house in 1901 it joined the National Health Service in 1948 and the present building dates from 1959. More latterly it’s been deemed no longer fit for purpose so they local council has announced plans to build a new one. My mate’s brother was an accountant for the health board so suggested to me on my arrival I go and talk to the recruiting department to see if there was any work on offer. By the end of the day, I’d found a job and accommodation at the hospital’s attached nurses’ home or where the nurses stay as opposed to a nursing home where old folks stay. There certainly weren’t many old folks there the average age of the residents was in their mid-twenties.

That’s one of the great things about hospitals. They employ all kinds of people to work there from the highly specialised and hard to find, to the semi-skilled and everyone in between. As people always get sick there are hospitals everywhere so if you’re ever looking for work, they are always a great place to start, if you’re not too fussy what you do. My first job in a hospital I went looking for work was as an orderly (not a porter, they work in hotels) but wound up in the kitchens. The next hospital I worked at I’d looked for a job in the kitchen but got a job as an orderly.

Because of this it was good preparation for many of the tasks I was given at the Gilbert Bain. On the first day I was asked to put a body on view for the family something I knew how to do from my previous job. Other work included driving, security, maintenance, supply, and anything else going. One day I went to the operating theatre to find a severed hand of a fisherman packed in ice in the sink. One morning I was placing calls to West Africa for the intern desperate to call home and probably in culture shock having come from Lagos to Lerwick. Another day I was in the kitchen stirring porridge with a giant ladle in a vat so large I could have had a bath in. One morning I was sitting at the main desk looking out at the beach and as the mist rose with the sun only to see a Norwegian coastal vessel had beached itself. The skipper had come in the night before having missed the turn to the main port so had run aground. They had to wait for the high tide to refloat the vessel and repair the damage.

Staff at the hospital came from all over the UK. Like the rest of the population salaries are paid monthly, which always seems a long time between drinks. Nurses have a reputation for working hard and playing hard. For the first two weeks after payday, it was party time every day. Nurses could be seen drinking at breakfast time having finished their night shift. They were out at the pub, shopping and clubbing. For the second two weeks before the next payday, they were largely broke often borrowing money from each other. They were very generous with their time and company. Lerwick’s solitary night club was the North Star, which was in fact the local cinema. Twice a week it doubled as the local night spot. The dance floor was the downstairs with the seating removed. One night I was invited to a beach party over on another island. I saw the bonfire over the inlet and refusing the invitation to swim over they sent a boat. I went back to Lerwick the same way.

Cruise ships doing a northern Scandinavia circuit would stop by for a day on their way to or from the Faroe Islands, Iceland, the Orkneys and Norway. I looked at work in Iceland in the fish factories as I’d heard there was good money to be had. I didn’t find any evidence of this. The wages on offer seemed average for long hours and boring repetitive work in a country with a high cost of living. The Klondikers were large freighters weighing several thousands of tons. The bought up all the local catch they could until full, processing the fish on board and freezing it and would sail home. Home was in the former Eastern Bloc. Ports such as Gdansk in Poland, Rostock in East Germany or Varna in Bulgaria. Some sailors on these vessels would defect. One morning it was announced a crew member had jumped ship out the port hole and had swum to Bressay, the island opposite Lerwick. He knocked on the door of a startled farming couple who made him a cup of tea and called the police.

Shetland has key infrastructure without which the UK economy would grind to a halt. Sullom Voe Terminal is an oil and gas terminal (the terminal) which handles all oil production from the North Sea and stores it before it is transported by tanker. Rather than have every oil company build their own facility, the Shetland Islands Council had power granted to it by the UK government and was able to contain all pipeline facilities at the one site. Taking six years to construct over 6000 workers were housed in temporary accommodation including a former roll-on roll-off ferry, the Rangatira, which I had once sailed on, all the way from New Zealand. In the late 1990s at the height of North Sea Oil boom, the terminal handled over a quarter of UK petroleum production and around 500 people worked there. By 2008, the terminal had handled almost 8 billion barrels (about 1.1 billion metric tons) of oil. During the Cold War it was considered a strategic asset as were the OSVs which came with mounts for anti-aircraft guns in case of Soviet attack. There’s also the gas turbine power station at Sullum Voe which provides about half the islands’ electricity the other half comes from an oil burning power station. And speaking of burning, the refuse plant near town burns all Shetland’s waste.

The Orkneys lie off the northern most tip of Scotland between the mainland and the Shetlands. The name is derived from Old Norse meaning “Seal Islands”. Smaller in total land area and with fewer islands than the Shetlands but with about the same population they have a similar history to their northern neighbours. The Orkneys were famous in the 20^th century being the main base of the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow during World War One. After the war the base fell into disrepair and was eventually closed years later in 1957. The Vikings used to anchor their vessels there and later it was home to battleship row. After the war much of the German navy – 74 vessels in total – were scuttled there and become a source of pre-nuclear age uncontaminated metal used for instruments in space travel as well as a hot spot for diving enthusiasts.

There have been shipwrecks around the Shetlands ever since people first took to the water; for as long as there have been ships there have been things for ships to run into. Most vessels from northern Europe travelled round the north of the UK. Out Skerries, the low-lying and easternmost island, was a particular hazard as they rounded Shetland. One notable casualty was the Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessel De Liefde (The Love), which hit Mio Ness in 1711 on its way to the East Indies. The wreck lay undisturbed for over 200 years, until rediscovered in 1964 by naval divers. Another famous wreck is the Drottningen af Swerige, or the Queen of Sweden, which hit a rock off the headland of the Knab, on the south side of Lerwick, on 12 January 1745. The ship’s master, Captain Carl Johan Treutiger, was seeking shelter from a storm in Bressay Sound, which forms Lerwick’s harbour. There are also German U-boats and the transatlantic White Star liner Oceanic (once the world’s largest ocean liner) which ran aground in August 1914 on the notorious Shaalds of Foula (an underwater reef where the tides move at 22kph) the first Allied passenger ship lost in the Great War; though she had been pressed into service as an armed cruiser with the Royal Navy. One of the propellors from the Oceanic was recovered and placed outside the town library but when the new library was built after my visit it was moved to the Hay’s Dock area at Shetland Museum. In 1993, the 250m 90,000-ton oil tanker Braer lost power and ran aground off Shetland causing a massive oil spill.

Shetland has several smaller airports throughout the archipelago, but the main airport is at Sumburgh on the southern tip of Mainland and is connected to Lerwick 25 miles away by road. Sumburgh was originally an RAF base and is unusual in that it has a helicopter runway as opposed to a landing pad. During World War Two Bristol Beaufighters, a type of heavy fighter often used as torpedo bombers, would take-off to attack Axis shipping operating out of Norway. These days you can fly to and from Shetland on Logan Airways, Scotland’s airline, once a franchisee of British Airways and nowadays with Flybe, once the largest independent regional airline in Europe, but that’s now been taken over by Connect Airways founded by Virgin Atlantic.

Top of the list for things to do in Shetland, and depending on your taste: surfing (yep) near Sumburgh Airport; diving at lots of places along the 2700kms long coastline; kayaking; wildlife, including bird watching; the Northern Lights; archaeological sites; museums and galleries; lots of Viking stuff; and of course,

eating and drinking. The Shetland Islands, not quite Scotland or Scandinavia, but sort of all on their own.