ĂŰŃż´ŤĂ˝

My father, John Harvie, then aged sixteen, certainly knew where he was going in 1944. It was to Tobermory on the isle of Mull, to work at the Western Isles Hotel. The hotel, an imposing, Scots baronial style edifice, still overlooks Tobermory bay and the resplendent coloured houses that line the quayside. It’s a landmark and, in 1944, established for itself a small footnote in the history of British cinema.

Dad was employed at the hotel at the same time the film ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ was being shot on the island. It was made by the legendary partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Archers), one of the most famous creative duos in cinema history. The film tells the tale of a young woman on her way to meet her fiancé in the western isles of Scotland. Bad weather forces her to remain on the isle of Mull and there, against her will, she gradually falls for the local laird. The film’s backdrop is Mull and Tobermory, though being a work of fiction plenty of liberties are taken with local geography (the whirlpool of Corryvreckan, for example, where a key sequence is played out, is not off Mull but off Jura). Both the exterior and interiors of the hotel make fleeting appearances in the film. If you visit the hotel now, you’ll realise that not much of substance has changed since those black-and-white images were shot sixty years ago.

The films stars were Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller. It always bemused me a little that Dad often recalled seeing, and even speaking to, Wendy Hiller but never to Roger Livesey. At the time Roger Livesey was a very distinguished, and indeed very distinctive looking and sounding, actor who I thought Dad would certainly have recognised and seen about the place. When I asked him directly, did you meet Roger Livesey, the answer was always along the lines of, “I suppose I must have done”, before then going on to talk about Wendy Hiller. It was only years later that I found out the reason for his evasiveness. Despite what you see on the screen, Roger Livesey never set foot on the island throughout the entire course of the filming. As Michael Powell states in his autobiography, “Roger Livesey, playing Torquil MacNeil … never came within five hundred miles of the Western Isles”. Apparently, doubles were used instead, and a fair amount of trick photography and editing, because Roger Livesey was starring in a West End play at the time and couldn’t be released for the on-location sequences. “I know that those of you who have seen the film won’t believe it”, Powell writes, “but it’s true”. Dad’s recollections — or rather lack of them — confirms this was indeed the case.

Livesey’s co-star, Wendy Hiller, certainly was there though, and stayed in the hotel itself. Dad liked her. She was gracious, polite and unassuming. He didn’t say what her tips were like though.

Dad was employed at the hotel as both bellboy and barman. During the daytime he carried guests’ cases up the steep stone steps that lead up from the jetty to the hotel’s terrace that overlooks the bay and the Sound of Mull. Years later, he still cursed those steps as well as the guests for their ingratitude and miserly tips. He also helped out with cleaning and polishing, a big task in a hotel that has several floors and an awful lot of wood panelling. In the evenings he served behind the bar, a job he was fiercely protective of and which other hotel staff apparently envied. As barman Dad soon realised he got more tips than the other staff. Hence when they suggested that tips be pooled, he flatly refused to do so.

Among the other guests who stayed at the hotel, or used its facilities, were the crews of the ships anchored out in the bay. Dad developed a particular regard for the submarine crews, and especially a Lieutenant-Commander Hunt, RN, a submarine “ace” in Dad’s description. Hunt was more down to earth and considerate than the general run of Royal Navy officers, a caste whose arrogance he later got to know only too well when serving in the navy himself as a member of the lower deck. Hunt used to preside over large drinking parties, and used to slip Dad large tips to make sure they didn’t have to wait around for drinks. “There you are, son, look after us, and I’ll look after you”. On one occasion — though I’m not sure it was necessarily Hunt’s group — a party of submariners tore up the bar and lounge when a drinking spree got out of hand.

Dad never liked hotel work much. He wasn’t one to kow-tow to guests and, being sixteen at the time, he missed his family and friends, especially his sisters Maureen and Ellen. So after three months he threw the job in and went back home. ĂŰŃż´ŤĂ˝ was Kinlochleven, a village between Fort William and Glencoe right at the end of Loch Leven. It’s dominated — or at least was — by an aluminium factory which employed the greater part of the village’s male population. During the war it was a likely target for German bombers and Dad used to recall how, early in the conflict, RAF aircraft used to fly down the loch and over the village trying to establish whether low level raids on the factory were possible. The mountains that form the back-drop to the village, and which hold the waters of the Blackwater reservoir that used to feed the aluminium furnaces, were considered too steep to allow for low level precision attacks. Dad talked about the aircraft making steep and precipitate climbs to avoid flying into the mountains. I can’t see the film ‘633 Squadron’ without thinking of these mock attacks.

Dad used to talk about Commandos appearing in the village from time to time. There was a commando training school at nearby Spean Bridge, and a large granite memorial now commemorates that fact. But that was about the extent of the war’s immediate impact on Kinlochleven. The German bombers stayed away. So too, come to think of it, did the film crews. Given the aluminium plant belching forth smoke, steam and pollutant gases, it wouldn’t have fitted Powell and Pressburger’s twee depiction of the Highlands and Islands as a place of ceilidhs, Gaelic folk-song and love struck lairds.

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