A Tribute to Wendy Gear
Wendy Gear passed on recently in February, age 92. She’d been a regular researcher, lightsome, informative, and productive, in the Archives in ‘90s and early 2000s, often with her friend Mairie Anderson. In the beginning, along with Susan Cooper and Jane Manson, she explored the work of John Walker, the Aberdonian factor of the Garth Estate, in the 1860s and 1870s. No-one could fault John Walker for energy and application, but how he deployed those qualities was the problem. Communities in Bressay, Delting, North Yell and Unst found they had to seek their futures elsewhere as Mr Walker, making use of the rights of property as they stood then, laid out sheep farms.
Wendy had learned a special story as a young girl. Jane Mary Spence, age six weeks, daughter of Wendy’s great-grandparents Margaret and William Spence, died following a December boat journey from Basta Voe to Reafirth, Mid Yell, in 1868, despite being protectively enclosed in a leather bucket. The Spences had been moved on in favour of Cheviots and Leicesters.
The story of Jane Mary was a motivator and Wendy kept on exploring the story of the factor, who was happily a great producer of records, and a vigorous correspondent. Many of those have survived in Gardie House, Bressay. Apart from his work for the Gardie estate, he became involved in School Boards, mining, and fishing. Leaving Shetland in 1872, he was to live well for a while, until bankruptcy intervened.
Businesses and business failure followed, including a spell in South Africa. He’d had a pre-Shetland career in Australia (his diary of the voyage survives) and Wendy went there to seek information. John Walker died, after his various adventures, in College Bounds, Aberdeen’s university quarter, with very little wealth. A lot of Shetlanders have passed the site unknowingly, in their higher education years, including Wendy and myself, and many of the descendants whose lives he disrupted in the islands.
In 2005 Wendy’s book came out – John Walker’s Shetland – one of the best books about Shetland in recent decades, a joy to see. It had many a quotation from John Walker. Hay Williamson, a tenant in Quoys of Garth, Delting, dug in his heels, but died suddenly. In a letter to his employer, John Walker says – Your troublesome tenant Hay Williamson is dead. – He must have been seized with a fit whilst at the ebb and drowned in the tide. The book is still available if you want to know more.
John Walker was a difficult act to follow. Wendy did pursue other interests after that, one was known as Mad Neven, an 18th century Yell magnate with issues. Pre-Covid she had thoughts of exploring the history of Hascosay, where some of her ancestors came from. It was easy to find something to interest Wendy. A rule book for the Bruce Hostel for Girls sparked off a reminiscence about a sleep-walking (and disturbing) matron, and a short article in Shetland Life magazine No. 314. The regime was strict for the girls in the late 1940s. She told about the sheer joy of being allowed out for Up Helly Aa, and remarked that they had to study as so little else was allowed.
That habit of study, inculcated in the peerie lass who arrived in an unfamiliar Lerwick in 1946 to be educated in the Anderson Institute and stay in the town for weeks at a time, paid off in her retirement, with her biography of John Walker that grew from the kernel of the story of Jane Mary Spence’s short life.
