Ness 2

I spent my first ten years living down in Lionel; and was heartbroken to leave it in 1958.

The winds came in fiercely on many evenings.

But none so fierce as the evening of 31 January 1953 -which I remember well, cowering as I was in my bed, with the Lionel schoolhouse wracked by savage gusts. In the morning, we discovered the Clan MacQuarrie had gone aground in Borve: all the crew were saved by breeches bouy rescues from the shore.

But that news was a bit dwarfed on the BBC Home Service the following morning by the news that, out on the Irish Sea, the Princess Victoria had foundered in the atrocious weather conditions with the loss of 133 lives