nuclear-news

The island priest who fought a nuclear rockets range

Shona MacDonald & Steven McKenzie, BBC Naidheachdan & BBC Scotland, 25 Feb 25

Seventy years ago, in the early years of the Cold War, East and West were locked in a nuclear arms race.

The UK government needed somewhere to test its first rockets capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

It picked South Uist, a Hebridean island of a few thousand inhabitants on Scotland’s rugged Atlantic coast.

What the government did not expect was resistance from within the community led by a Catholic priest, Fr John Morrison.

Kate MacDonald, was a girl growing up in West Gerinish, South Uist, in the 1950s and remembers keenly the furore around the rocket range.

“When they started firing the rockets they used to go wrong and fall in the sand behind our house with a big bang,” she says.

“People were upset in the beginning.

“Then they just accepted it because it was bringing jobs.”

Fr Morrison, a parish priest, had initially supported the rocket project for that very same reason.

In 1955, when the UK government first announced it planned to open the guided missile testing site, the economy was still recovering after the end of World War Two 10 years earlier.

Jobs were hard to find and in South Uist people earned a living from small farms called crofts.

They supplemented their income by weaving tweed or harvesting seaweed.

The Conservative UK government of the time was under pressure from the US and other allies in the West to help create a nuclear deterrent against Russia and the wider Eastern Bloc.

It needed a location for training troops in the live firing of rockets – minus their deadly payload.

A number of sites were considered, including Shetland and north east Scotland’s Moray Firth.

The government went for South Uist.

It was home to 2,000 people and was described as an island with more water than land due large number of lochs, according to a debate in the House of Lords.

On one side of the island was the vast expanse of the North Atlantic where, the government hoped, misfiring rockets could safely crash land.

Landowner Herman Andreae claimed he was given little choice but to sell his land on his South Uist Estate to the Ministry of Defence.

The huge scale of the military scheme soon revealed itself.

Crofters were to be evicted to make way for thousands of military personnel and their families.

Fr Morrison was horrified. He feared a way of life was at risk of being lost.

Many islanders were deeply religious with Catholic the dominant faith, and for most of them Gaelic was their first language rather than English.

“You were talking about the removal of basically all the crofters from Sollas in the north to Bornais in the south,” says Fr Michael MacDonald, a priest who looks after Fr Morrison’s parish today.

The distance between the two locations is more than 30 miles.

“This was draconian stuff,” Fr MacDonald adds.

“A huge village was to be planted in there.

The huge scale of the military scheme soon revealed itself.

Crofters were to be evicted to make way for thousands of military personnel and their families.

Fr Morrison was horrified. He feared a way of life was at risk of being lost.

Many islanders were deeply religious with Catholic the dominant faith, and for most of them Gaelic was their first language rather than English.

“You were talking about the removal of basically all the crofters from Sollas in the north to Bornais in the south,” says Fr Michael MacDonald, a priest who looks after Fr Morrison’s parish today.

The distance between the two locations is more than 30 miles.

“This was draconian stuff,” Fr MacDonald adds…………………………………….

Fr Morrison spoke out publicly against the rocket base.

Not everyone in South Uist supported his view, but Fr Morrison attracted local and national press attention…………….

The rocket range did go ahead, although on a smaller scale than planned due to cost savings.

But Mr Bruce says Fr Morrison’s campaign should be credited for achieving important concessions…………………………………….more https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rndz513xzo

February 26, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | PERSONAL STORIES