Half a century ago the retired Kirkhill engineer was learning his trade on the hydro schemes which brought power to the glens in the 1950s, alongside displaced Europeans and workers from all parts of the British Isles.

Now, along with the many wind farm projects planned for the North, dam building is also back with the £140 million Glendoe scheme at Loch Ness, which is again seeing a multinational encampment spring up in a Highland glen.

Not that Archie had to stay in a camp at first. Belonging to Strathglass, he could travel to work by bus rather than stay at the encampment which was created at Cannich.

“They certainly made a good job of the camp,” he said. “It was built on army lines, all Nissen huts, but to quite a good standard. It had central heating, a dance hall and cinema, a shop, a barber’s — everything you needed.”

Later, however, Archie was to discover not all camps were so well appointed.

“I stayed in Clunie camp and it wasn’t so brilliant,” he said.

“They built the huts on top of tunnel spoil and some of the huts sank down a bit. When it was raining you would have to pull your bed away from the wall to stop it getting damp.”

All of that was ahead of him when in 1948 he began his engineering apprenticeship.

“The hydro schemes probably came along at the right time for me and it gave me a very broad experience in all sorts of things,” Archie said.

“They were using some pretty primitive plant. There were hardly any hydraulic machines at that time, so it was quite a job to keep them going.”

There is a downside to his career. Archie blames years of working with loud machinery for leaving him a little hard of hearing — rather than listening to his fiddler son Duncan perform with Celtic rock band Wolfstone.

As a native Highlander, Archie was also in a position to appreciate the difference the hydro schemes would make to life in the glens.

“I worked at Cannich for three years before we had electricity at home,” Archie explained.

“It was ironic. You would be working with electricity all day and be going back at night to Tilley lamps.”

The scheme had a more immediate impact on local life, however. “It increased the population of the glen considerably. At its peak there were about 4000 people working on the scheme,” Archie said.

“There were Poles, Lithuanians, Irish, some Canadians and Maltese — a real cross-section — and of course plenty from Glasgow and England.”

Despite the mix of nationalities, Archie does not remember any language difficulties. In any case, conversation was impossible in the noise of the tunnel where workers had to make do with sign language.

Nor were there any great tensions between the various national groups, though there were always fights on a Friday night when the workers let off steam.

“There was a mass evacuation to Inverness on a Saturday and all the villages around when there was a dance on. It was quite a trial for the locals,” Archie added.

“If you went to the Gellions Bar on a Saturday night you could hardly get in for all the Irish there and all the talk would be about drilling and blasting.”

The workers had every reason to unwind. Not only was the work long and arduous, with double shifts or “ghosters” common as the tunnels were drilled round the clock, it was also dangerous, with many accidents, several of them fatal.

“There were fatalities on every scheme I worked on,” Archie confirmed.

Workers would turn up on their first day and become digger drivers without any prior experience or training. There was even a certain laxity in the use of explosives. Some blasters were known to use gelignite to start their fires, though Archie adds he never saw that himself.

Retired engineer Archie Chisholm learned his trade working on the Highland hydro schemes in the 1950s. Pic: Phil Downie 01463 831249

However, it was not at the hydro scheme, but on his way to it, that Archie had has closest brush with disaster.

“It was winter time and we were being bussed up between Cannich and Struy when we met this other vehicle on the road and the bus driver pulled out to pass,” Archie recalled.

“The bus rolled over the bank, did three somersaults and landed on the river bank. The roof came off, but nobody was hurt apart from one chap who cracked his collarbone. So we gathered ourselves together, picked up our pieceboxes and walked to work.”

When he did arrive at the scheme, Archie was gruffly asked where he had been, so explained what had happened.

Archie continued: “My boss, Malcolm MacNeill, said: ‘You’ll probably be suffering from shock.’ And I probably was, come to think of it. He reached up to a shelf in his office and took down the first aid tin and took out a little green bottle and told me to take a sniff of it.

“This was smelling salts and when I took a sniff it almost knocked me on my back. It was worse than the shock! That was it, then back to work. Nowadays you’d probably have stress counselling.”

It was not all hard work and danger, though. Archie had many good times and it was his work on the schemes which allowed him to travel outside Scotland for the first time.

As second man on the low loader which took the diggers back to England for repair, he would be frequently called on to use his mechanical skills during the six-day round trip. The radiator would fill with water, there would be regular punctures and doubts about the effectiveness of the brakes made for an interesting time on steep roads with a 30-ton load at his back.

“That was my first trip south of the Border, down to the land of television,” Archie said. “The first television I saw was on one of these trips — Eamonn Andrews in ‘What’s My Line?’.”

His southbound trips also introduced him to jukeboxes in the transport cafes he used on his journey, though the accommodation these establishments offered left a lot to be desired.

“You would be lying in bed and they would be frying bacon and eggs below you and the smell would be wafting up,” he said.

It was not just transport cafes which provided interesting accommodation experiences.

He recalls staying at a guest house in Dunkeld which was so full he and driver Ali Fraser had to stay in the front room — which they shared with the landlady’s parrot.

“In the early hours the parrot must have been seeing chinks of daylight and started squawking. I remember Ali getting up and putting something over its cage to keep it dark. After we left, I think that parrot must have had a few more choice words in its vocabulary,” Archie added.

He worked on a number of other schemes, though his Highland engineer career was also interrupted by National Service with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, which saw him spend seven months in Libya with a tank regiment.

On his return he worked for a Muir of Ord based company on the Lower Invermoriston dam and other schemes, as well as other projects such as road building, many of them made possible only by the way electric power opened up the Highlands.

Archie later started his own business as a field engineer repairing machines from Orkney to Mull.

He has since retired to spend more time on the golf course or at his easel, having joined Inverness Art Society and taken up landscape painting, but his latter working life also had its interesting incidents and characters.

He recalls one time when he was asked to repair a bulldozer and, in those pre-mobile days, asked which side the damaged part was on so he could order it before he headed west.

“There was a lot of discussion in the phone box,” said Archie. “Then the answer came back: ‘It’s the side nearest Kyle’.”

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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