IT WAS not my fault, right? No one told me that I had plonked myself on the path the Princess Royal was due to take, so when she suddenly made a beeline for me I panicked and thought she was going to land one on me.
I was at Tong School to talk to the kids about the visit of the Princess Royal, who was chatting to them about their great efforts for Save the Children. There were all these shifty, thick-set baldy guys standing about, talking into their lapels. I was just about to ask Dorothy Kennedy, the head teacher, to shoo them outside the gate when someone said they were the royal protection squad.
Sorry, guys. It’s just that with skinhead haircuts and scowls like that, I thought you were all from Vatisker Park.
A knot of Bacachs and Ying Tongs had formed outside the gate to await the arrival of the 10th in line to the throne. I could smell trouble. Beckoning over one of the still-smarting spooks, I tipped him off that there were some real dodgy types on that pavement and to expect serious trouble.
I warned him to keep a beady eye on one Etta Macleod from Upper Coll because, as I explained to him, she had form, having been banned by an airline for carrying offensive weapons.
A master of disguise, eight years ago, while posing as a champion charity knitter, Etta was banned from flying between Stornoway and Dusseldorf because she was brandishing not one but two fearsome weapons. Although they were cleverly made to look like knitting needles, she could not fool the eagle-eyed airline staff. They realised the threat was plain and purloined the needles – and the even more dodgy Aran jumper Etta was knitting for husband Mal.
Happily, there was no security incident when the Princess Royal glided past the Coll girls with Sandy Matheson, who was resplendent, although not in his usual snugly fitting lord lieutenant’s uniform but, far more suitably for the sunny and clammy conditions, a kilt which allowed him to hang loose and be cool.
The Princess Royal also looked cool in her sunglasses and appropriate Harris Tweed jacket. All the dignitaries from Tong to Tolsta dutifully lined up outside the school like naughty kids waiting outside the headmaster’s office.
Iain Murdo shows how it's done
The princess quickly set about pressing the flesh of the great and the good – and Iain Murdo Macleod.
That was when it all began to go wrong. I was so busy taking photos of HRH I didn’t see that a frantic Dorothy Kennedy was gesticulating to me and to Alasdair Macaulay from BBC Alba to skedaddle from where we had set up base camp with our cameras because the princess was coming through.
It was only when the Princess Royal suddenly loomed large in my viewfinder that it dawned on me that the Queen’s daughter was hurtling straight for me. In the photos, you can see that, by this point, she had begun to stab her finger excitedly towards me and was shouting to someone to her left – probably to the shifty security guys to put a bullet in me so she could get past.
"Just go bang bang. Like this."
Launching myself skywards, I leapt sideways out of the galloping princess’s way. Unfortunately, although it went well when I practised that manoeuvre back in 1980, this time I landed heavily for some reason and in the process just about scythed the feet from under Alasdair Gaelic Macleod and almost pitched fellow snapper Bill Lucas headlong into a flowerbed.
It was pandemonium. The baldy spooks sprinted over to investigate, but when they realised it was the guy who called them skinheads, they just yomped past as if they hadn’t seen me.
In a stroke of genius, the schoolkids of Tong presented the princess with a fantastic painting of Tiumpan Head lighthouse. Even though their school is on the other side of Broad Bay, you can see more of the lighthouse from Tong than you can from anywhere in Point.
After her look round Tong, the princess then went to the Nicolson Institute, where she was presented with a Harris Tweed bag made by my mate Paulette Brough up in Skigersta.
The weird thing was that, yet again, the tweed jacket she was already wearing perfectly matched Paulette’s bag. Fashion disaster averted; big smiles all round. How did she know? That sort of thing keeps happening with her. Weird.
Although she was only five when she was there, the princess has good reason to remember Tiumpan Head lighthouse. On her first visit to Lewis in 1956, she was with Her Maj and big brother Charlie when he officially opened it by blasting away on the foghorn. It was so loud that it was recorded that some of the youngsters suffered laundry incidents. As I said, wee Anne was only five.
The fright the tiny princess got that day must have stayed with her. Fifty-three years later, she is obsessed with pharology, the study of lighthouses, and is a mine of useless information about who built which one, how many steps up to the top and, of course, how loud each foghorn is.
I hear that the entire population of Point is still fizzing about Tong and Back giving her that particular painting. Tiumpan Head is theirs, they reckon. It’s theft, they say. Still, maybe it’s their just deserts.
After all, who snatched away the most charismatic Free Church preacher to have ventured beyond Tong Bridge when they made that unwelcome call to Reverend Iain D. Campbell? Those Point people, that’s who.
Oh dear. Yet another schism that will take a long time to heal.
