‘MY FAMILY HAS BEEN INVOLVED IN SEVERAL SEA DISASTERS’

My granny, who would have been eight at the time, remembered her father putting on his Sunday best and going out with other people from the village to collect the bodies that were washing up on the shore.” This was the aftermath of the Iolaire sea disaster in 1919. And when William Cumming, a maths teacher living in Gateshead, began tracing his ancestors from near Stornoway, he discovered that many more of them had been touched by maritime disasters. Some of these feature in three booklets he has published about the history of the area.

“Every summer, when I was a child, my parents would take me and my brothers up to the Outer Hebrides, which was very different to the south of Scotland where we grew up,” says William. “We were immersed in Gaelic culture, and I became very aware that I was descended from the people there. It was an idyllic time – there