A sad little story

This story has been told by Lindsey D Neil and also published on the Jurapedia Jottings.

Story
In 1991, I was fishing one day on the river Tweed in the company of a man called Norman Mackenzie. Norman was a hotel-owner, a successful builder and had businesses in Stornoway on Lewis. We were talking and I mentioned that my forebears came from Jura and that we had a house there.

He then started telling me about a man he had known in Stornoway called Sandy Buie who had lived and died on Lewis but had been brought up on Jura. Sandy Buie had apparently arrived one day on Lewis, knew no-one and had no friends there. Norman met him by chance and had given him a few jobs and became a friend of Sandy’s, who was by then over 70. Sandy had no income apart from a small pension (which Norman added to) and nowhere to stay so Norman ended up giving him a cottage to stay in rent-free and, in return, Sandy did odd jobs for him.

Norman, a warm and generous man, knew nothing about Sandy’s origins other than the bald fact of his being born on Jura and that before coming to Lewis, he had worked for many years before retirement as a gravedigger for the council in Argyll. Sandy had just recently died, sadly, aged about 85, and Norman had seen to his burial and was the only one who had attended it. So I undertook to try to find out what I could about him and immediately thought of the other Sandy Buie who was then aged about 85 and still active on his croft in Knockrome on Jura. Some weeks later, when I was on Jura, I saw Sandy Buie (Knockrome) and asked him if he knew of his namesake. “Aye, aye, I knew him well, he was a great knitter. We used to go to ceilidhs together.” Sandy (Lewis) was no relation of Sandy (Knockrome). He was one of the ‘Feolin Buies’. Sandy (K) remembered that Sandy (L) used to cut peats for two ‘cailleachs’ (old women) who lived “this side of Feolin” and were related to him. He was born illegitimate and in those times, 100 years ago, this was severely disapproved of. He was told he could never marry a Jura girl and would have to leave the island. His mother was Kate Buie, who lived for a time in Keills but moved to Caigenhouse when she got older, where she died. She obviously foretold that life would be hard for her son and Sandy (K) remembered that she deliberately set out to make sure that he could manage everything around the house when he eventually had to leave the island to fend for himself. Knitting was one of the things she must have taught him. Unusually for the time, Kate Buie brought him up openly on Jura when it was commonplace to hide illegitimate children or have them adopted. She was a brave woman for her time. Sandy (K) remembers sitting next to Sandy (L) at one of the ‘Leap Year’s day’ ceilidhs when both were young men. The tradition was that a celebration was held on every 29th of February in the cottage (where sandy (K)’s wife was born) which is now part of the Whitehouse, in Knockrome.

There is a photograph in the Jura Church gallery of Kate Buie, standing at the corner of a house at Ballard. His natural father was “a McDougall from Knockrome” whom he said lived in the house, often featured on Jura postcards, that now belongs to Hugh Carswell. Alternatively, from other sources, it may be that the MacDougall father was a MacDougall from what subsequently became the Mack’s crofthouse. Sandy (K), being a different generation to this McDougall, could not remember anything about him. He did remember that Sandy (L) had left Jura, gone to work on Islay for a while before getting the permanent job as a gravedigger for Argyll Council. Sandy Buie from Feolin never married. He lived a lonely, unmarked life shunned by the ‘respectable’ society of the day. Without Norman, his life would have been entirely forgotten. Only Norman grieved for him and attended his funeral. He said simply “he was a lovely, lovely man”.