Anthony: I’ve had a love affair with gannets every since we went on family sailing holidays as a child. We saw all these exciting birds, but the most dramatic of all was the gannet, even in the Clyde, but much more when we got up to the western isles, the number of gannets was stupendous and I’ve just never seen wildlife like it. One saw the whole bird, and all of its motions diving, flapping and the sheer beauty of its form, to the extent that when the aeroplane Concord was designed it just so reminded me of the gannet because of its streamlining. But anyway these family holidays – my father was very keen on sailing and pretty well immediately after the war, I must only have been about ten – the late 40s – most years he chartered a yacht. He never intended to own a yacht, but when he had the opportunity he would charter a yacht as a family holiday for a fortnight. He was a competent sailor – he had done a lot of sailing as a young bachelor, a young man in Glasgow. Many of his friends were actually yacht owners and he went as crew for them. Jane was the one who got the bug. Susan was like me, she went for the holiday and the places one got to. Jane was the keen sailor.
Anyway, the love affair with gannets was such that just after my apprenticeship I decided to go to Ailsa Craig to photograph gannets because it is the easiest place to photograph them but of course there is no transport to Ailsa Craig. I suppose there was Bass Rock but that’s East and we also looked West… would pass it when going down to Drumslandsford?? for summer holidays so I was always aware of Ailsa Craig and discovered that there is a quarry on Ailsa Craig making curling stones and a boat delivering the men on a Monday morning early and picking them up on a Friday evening so I arranged to join that boat and went out with my tent and everything to photograph gannets and had a wonderful week entirely on my own. The quarrymen didn’t want to know me and I didn’t want to know them – the only other people on the island were the lighthouse keepers and they kept to their place and so it was just me camping and the gannets. [Anthony says later he was taking cine film of the gannets, rather than stills].
In due course, I think it was our first holiday on Orkney – I don’t know how many we’ve had – two or three times we’ve been to Orkney – and we ……. drove round and we came to Chocolate Cottage on Birsay, and mum totally fell for the artist Lesley Murdoch and her paintings of Orkney birds, and of course she used all the Orkney names. She referred to the gannet as the Solan Goose which I’d always known of ……she referred to the green lapwing, or the peewit, as the teeick. She had a painting, a modernist impressionistic but very beautiful painting that used to sit in the lavatory of number 9 above the swan [nb we don’t have this picture]
And John Thompson the sculptor did a lot of wooden models of birds…. Amongst the prints he had, he had this one of the gannet, and it represented everything I had in my mind of it appearing out of the sky, and its streamlined flight, so I bought it [in 2003].
[back to sailing – Mil asking if Anthony’s father was the skipper or if they had crew]. We only had crew one time because father was ambitious to sail a 12 metre yacht and one man can’t sail it on his own, so we had a crew man called Will, and he came two years. It has belonged to the Dutch Royal Family, probably 50 years previously, and it was now just an old yacht, but a distinguished one. Usually we left from the Clyde – we typically took the ferry to Rothesay and picked them up at Port Ballantyne. Then we would sail down past Tighnabruaich and up Loch Fyne and the first year we just pottered round in Loch Fyne and various bays. That’s where the family learned my extraordinary fussiness when we went to a farm to get milk in a galvanised milk can and I wouldn’t drink it because it was warm – fresh milk from a cow wasn’t acceptable. The worst example of this was at school where we were forced to drink sour milk and it serves them right because I was sick all over the dining table and must have ruined ten people’s meals.
The Royal Collection 