​A memorial at last to the Perrins of Garynahine

This is about to be remedied with the erection of a memorial stone which will mark the burial site and also serve as a reminder of a colourful cameo in 20th century Lewis history when Garynahine became synonymous with the famous name of its owners.

When Captain Neil Perrins was, in line with his own instructions, buried there in 1965, special permission had to be obtained from the Secretary of State for Scotland because it was not a recognised cemetery. Fourteen years later, he was joined by his widow, Elizabeth Perrins.

Like everything associated with the Perrins’ presence on Lewis, it was an unorthodox point of departure. A diminishing number of people are left to recall this era from first hand experience, but the Perrins stewardship of Gaynahine still evokes an abundance of memories and handed-down anecdotes.

John Smith of Garynahine recalls that there was originally a white fence with chain links, the same as at the lodge, round the graves and that as a youngster, one of his first jobs was to re-paint it. Over the years, it has gone “into the ground”.

He also tells the story of “an old bodach from Callanish who had a premonition … He saw a funeral leaving the lodge and heading down the Uig road before turning onto the moor. Everyone thought he was talking nonsense and it got him the nickname Dòmhnall Amaideach – but he turned out to be right”!

The long-delayed decision to mark the graves was taken three years ago when Andrew Perrins visited the site where his father and step-mother are buried. Andrew met Donnie Whiteford, the estate manager at Garynahine, and they agreed something should be done.

When I spoke to Andrew this week, he was doing what his family has done for several hundred years – farming in Worcestershire. “I suppose you could ask why it has taken 60 years”, he suggested. “But my father didn’t like stones and he didn’t like graveyards”.

As readers of the Gazette’s Archives page will be aware, there was hardly a time in the 1960s when the name Perrins was far from the headlines. Its pre-existing fame, from the labels of the nation’s sauce bottles, helped ensure that it always attracted media interest.

Another who remembers the Perrins era very well is Bill Lucas, who had come to Lewis as a Stornoway Gazette reporter and also freelanced for the national newspapers. From the latter perspective, the Perrins presence was manna from heaven.

In his book ‘Dateline Stornoway’, Bill provides a fine account of the Perrins years at Garynahine and particularly how its chatelaine maintained her media profile: “With a name like Perrins, it was usually pretty easy to place stories about her – especially diary pieces for the Hickey column in the Daily Express and the Charles Greville column in the Daily Mail. She enjoyed publicity”.

Bill recalls Captain Perrins as the perfect foil for his wife’s high profile, with a shared love of Garynahine if not of publicity. “He was very hospitable and approachable. Any time I used to go and visit, he would pour a dram and then come back and say – ‘you’d better have another one. A bird can’t fly on one wing’.

“He was a very nice gentleman and always the same. They used to have a yacht called the ‘Gail and Mary’ and they took part in the regatta here. I was into water-skiing at that time. I used to draw up beside him and of course there would always be the offer of a dram, which didn’t help the water-ski-ing”.

Andrew Perrins believes his father never fully recovered from his war-time experiences. “He was 20 when the war started and was captured at Boulogne in 1940. He spent five years in a prisoner of war camp. There were quite a lot of privations and he had missed vital years in his life”. After the war, he worked for a while in the family business but never fully settled – until Garynahine.

When Andrew and his sister were young, their parents divorced and Neil re-married after a couple of years to Elizabeth who had been brought up in France and became a model working mainly for Schiaparelli. She married an American orthopaedic surgeon and they had four children – all this and a lot more before meeting Neil Perrins in 1954 and marrying him two years later, both divorces having been accomplished.

The Perrins fortune was very substantial. Originally a French Huguenot family, they came to England in the 15th century and settled in Worcestershire. Neil’s grandfather was a chemist who, along with a partner called Lea, came up with the recipe for Lea and Perrins Sauce in the 1830s. By the dawning of the 20th century, they were also major shareholders in Royal Worcester Porcelain.

For Neil and his second wife, the move to Lewis came in the late 1950s. In his book, Bill Lucas told the story: “They had a lot in common. Her interests were horse riding and sailing and the Captain was keen on shooting and fishing… Unknown to each other, both of them had noticed an advertisement in The Field for the 12,000 acre Garynahine Estate, well-known for its salmon fishing.

“He thought ‘Puss’ – his favourite nickname for her – would never go to Lewis to live. She also saw the advertisement, marked it and left it on his desk. He told her: ‘You’re a bloody wily woman, Puss. That is the best hint I have ever had’.

“For Captain Perrins, it was like a homecoming because on both sides his ancestors came from the Western Isles. His paternal grandmother was a Macdonald from Lochboisdale and his maternal great grandfather was a Macneil from Barra”.

Whatever the provenance of his attraction to the Hebrides, the move to Garynahine was, for Captain Perrins, a great success during the relatively few years it was destined to last. His son Andrew – who, by now in his teens, would visit for two weeks every summer – says: “He loved fishing, he loved farming. He was very happy there for six or seven years”.

It did not take long for Mrs Perrins to make a public impression around Garynahine, though not in the manner intended. Some of the RAF men returning on a bus from Stornoway to the Aird Uig base were among those convinced they had seen a ghost near Garynahine, the Gazette reported in August 1960.

“The lady stood motionless as the bus sped past. Some of the airmen reported that she was surrounded by an eerie glow”, the Gazette reported breathlessly.

The mystery of the “Silver Lady” was soon solved when Mrs Perrins declared: “It wasn’t a ghost – it was me. I often go for a walk down by the bridge.

"If it’s fine night I wear an evening dress and if it rains, I wear a white drip-dry raincoat with a closed hood. I also carry a stick”.

Ghost stories were soon replaced with much more positive contributions to island life as the new owners of Garynahine started to make their mark. Most famously, Mrs Perrins brought to bear her experience of the Paris fashion world to become involved in the tweed industry, making a dramatic impact for as long as it lasted.

In 1961, they bought the firm of Maclennan and Maclennan with Captain Perrins as chairman and his wife as managing director and designer. Marketed under the name Ceemo Fabrics, the lightweight tweed incorporated man-made fibres which set it apart from Harris Tweed and, for a time, was seen as a threat to the traditional industry.

A fair chunk of the Perrins fortune went into marketing Ceemo Tweed with a lavish reception at the Savoy Hotel to launch it and agents around the world. It won gold medals at international textile fairs and was worn by Jackie Kennedy.

But, as Mrs Perrins put it in 1965, “success has overtaken us far more quickly than we anticipated and we have a shortage of working capital”.

When a winding-up decree was granted at Stornoway Sheriff Court, Captain Perrins – ever the gentleman – personally shook hands with each of the creditors present.

Later, following her husband’s death, Mrs Perrins re-entered the textile trade when she invested in a company known as Garry Weavers, producing a power woven tweed at Geocrab mill in Harris. Again, it was a bold venture with potential for success but eventually ran out of time and money.

Garynahine saw a constant flow of the rich and famous but there was also free access for locals and the Perrins were far from being conventional sporting landowners. Indeed Mrs Perrins became their sworn foe by accusing absentee landlords of using Lewis “as Louis XVI did the bed of Marie Antoinette: a playground”.

She had a particularly rancorous relationship with neighbouring Grimersta, owned by an absentee syndicate which had sold them Garynahine. Bill Lucas wrote: “At one time she threatened a sit-in at Sir Hereward Wake’s Amhuinnsuidhe Castle in Harris and on occasions paid the defence expenses for poachers caught on neighbouring estates”.

The Perrins bought Scaliscro Estate and in 1964, Captain Perrins obtained the first drinks licence outside Stornoway. Among their other economic experiments, they worked with the Forestry Commission to develop a large plantation which survives at Garynahine to this day.

Among many episodes which unfold through the archives, Mrs Perrins was elected to Ross and Cromarty County Council, led a campaign to have money spent on the Pentland Road and spoke up for the youth of Lewis whose parents were, in her view, “too pious and not understanding the needs of their teenagers”.

In 1965, Captain Perrins died at the age of just 47 on board their yacht in Tarbert, as they prepared to sail to Dublin. Andrew recalls attending his burial at the lonely moorside location when he was aged 17. “He had a piper and the boys had dug a lovely grave”.

When the eclectic group of mourners, locals mingling with high society, had made their way back to the Lodge, he helped to fill it in.

Mrs Perrins stayed in Lewis for another eight years, opening Garynahine to paying guests and continuing to campaign on local causes that attracted her attention, Bill Lucas wrote: “She had arrived in style 14 years earlier and she left in style in August 1973 in a chartered plane, accompanied by her personal physician, a veterinary surgeon and her four dogs – two pugs and two whippets”. She went to live in France and died six years later.

For Andrew Perrins, the connection with Lewis did not come to an end. The family remains friendly with the Greens, who own Uig Lodge, and he has continued to visit there over the intervening years. Next summer, he hopes to return and will find it easier to locate the spot at which his father is buried.

Andrew says: “I always used to visit Donald Mackenzie at 5 Callanish who had worked for my father. About ten years ago, I remember pulling up outside his house. Without thinking, I took the keys out the car and he said ‘what are you doing that for - you’re back in civilisation now.’. That is how I think of Lewis”.