LecturePass 2025

It was called Orkney’s only nightclub, just by the Brig o Waithe, on the corner of the Orphir road, and it was a source of late-night nourishment to a generation of young Orcadians going home from Friday night dances. There were packets of Orkney crisps, bottles of Sunjoy, and hot pies on a biscuit tin lid. The light came from paraffin lamps, and water came from the well. Willie Farquhar in his cobbler’s leather apron welcomed everyone – and passed into Orkney legend. A fellow Stenness resident, local historian Patricia Long, tells the story, with reader Graham Garson.

On 2 October 1925 the Scots inventor John Logie Baird sent the first televised image – the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stookie Bill. It was scanned by a whirling disc with a 30-hole spiral, with the signal sent down a wire to modulate a neon lamp in the receiver; and the moving image appeared on a screen. Prof. Tom Stevenson tells how the technology developed so rapidly that within 11 years the BBC was transmitting a 405-line picture from Alexandra Palace. And by the end of 1958 Orkney had its own service, from the wartime radar masts at Netherbutton.

It began with crochet squares, and developed into jumpers – and eventually they were producing knitwear for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and Harrods in London. The community company, Isle of Sanday Knitters, brought in additional income to island households, and provided new challenges and opportunities to many people, and really changed lives. Ages ranged from late teens to late 80s, and at its peak the company was enlisting knitters from Shetland to Wolverhampton. For most of its three decades, Sandra Towrie was designing and knitting, and she has now written a book telling the story. For much of that time Tom Rendall was company secretary, and he joins her to look back at a remarkable story.

Amongst the ruins of ancient Nineveh were fragments of thousands of tablets of baked clay from a Babylonian king’s library, written in cuneiform writing. They included an original story of the Flood – and also a record of appearances of the planet Venus over 21 years. The exact date of the observations is not clear. But, as Dave Craig shows, modern Stellarium software can match them up with NASA data.

Only a few of Orkney’s Neolithic cairns have produced bones of the people from that time, but the number has now increased with an excavation at Blomuir in Holm. And this time many of the bones are not mixed up together but preserved as articulated skeletons. The survival of these skeletons, says joint excavation leader Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark of the National Museums of Scotland, makes Blomuir “truly exceptional and unique”.

How to transport a 6-tonne stone slab many hundreds of miles, from Scotland to Stonehenge? Dr Mark Cooper of the University of Washington is a biophysicist with a deep interest in archaeology and ancient ships. He describes possible forms of boat construction that would have been strong enough to cope with the Irish Sea and the North Sea, as well as the Pentland Firth – and also methods of navigation, and thus systems for measurement of length and time.