The 90th anniversary of the day the last residents of St Kilda asked to be evacuated from their island home will be marked today.
The last 36 people living in the archipelago, 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, were evacuated on August 29, 1930.
They had asked for help three months earlier on May 10, when they wrote a letter to the secretary of state for Scotland saying that life on the island was not sustainable.
The letter was passed to the skipper of the first passing trawler to post and soon afterwards George Henderson, inspector of public health, went to St Kilda and reported back that “swift action” was required to remove the residents.
Julie Hunt, chairwoman of the St Kilda club, said that the decision to leave the archipelago, which had been inhabited for at least 4,000 years, was a difficult but necessary one for the residents in 1930.
She said: “They didn’t want to go but they knew it was the best thing to do. They’d just come out of a devastating winter and things were getting harder. They knew they couldn’t survive but they didn’t know what the other options were.
“It got to the point that they were relying on ships coming in and those were becoming less frequent.”
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