The Tristan da Cunha islanders evacuated to the UK in 1961
When a volcano erupted without warning on Tristan da Cunha in October 1961, it forced the evacuation of the world’s most remote inhabited community — and threw 264 islanders who had never seen a car, a television or a shop window straight into modern British life.
Tristan lies in the middle of the South Atlantic, about equidistant from Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro, over 1,500 miles from the next nearest inhabited land and reachable only via a week-long sea voyage. “Just over a year ago, they’d never seen traffic or a road or a house higher than a cottage,” BBC broadcaster Tim Brinton said of the islanders in a 1963 programme.
The island’s volcano, dormant since Tristan was first settled some 150 years earlier, erupted on 10 October 1961. “We heard the rumbles first, then the ground just automatically cracked… Then the smoke and the fire started coming out the ground,” one islander recalled in a 1998 BBC film. Mary Swain remembered shouting to her husband: “Jump up quick, Fred, the Earth is opening!” As cracks spread near the main settlement, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, and lava threatened homes, residents fled by fishing boat to nearby Nightingale Island, carrying little more than, in Swain’s words, “a rifle, an overcoat and a lamp.” A Dutch liner that happened to be passing picked up the entire community the next day.
The islanders ended up living at a disused military base outside the port city of Southampton, where almost everything was unfamiliar. “They’d never seen shops because on the island, money wasn’t used… For them, there’s been no industrial revolution,” Brinton explained. Teenager Joey Repetto struggled with England’s polluted air — “I steady coughed without stopping,” he said of his journey — while his father Gerald found the rigid routine of a nine-to-five job disorienting after a lifetime dictated by the seasons and the sea. Swain, meanwhile, found the entire cash economy baffling: “If we haven’t got no money, well, we just go without it… I still can go and get my own fish,” she said, adding bluntly of her new surroundings, “we don’t like the weather… we don’t like the place at all.”
Tristan had been annexed by Britain in 1816 to stop it being used to help free Napoleon from nearby St Helena, with a Scottish corporal, William Glass, founding the permanent settlement a year later. By 1961 its population of 264 — descended largely from shipwreck survivors and sharing just seven family names — had already resisted previous British attempts to evacuate them during food shortages, and most were determined to go home again.
A 1962 survey found the volcano had gone dormant once more, and that the village had suffered surprisingly little damage: lava had turned away at the last moment, though some roofs had burned and looters had taken livestock in the islanders’ absence. In a secret ballot, Tristanians voted 148 to five to return, and most were back on the island by November 1963. Swain said she most looked forward to “a free life. We can get our own fish and everything of our own back there without money.” Decades later, islander Elaine Repetto reflected on what the ordeal had shaped: “Today, the volcano is still a smoking reminder of the events which shaped our view of ourselves and our contact with the outside world.”
Source: BBC News