Wick schoolmates in chance meeting in America, Telford house demolished and bus boycott for Vulcan staff
LOOKING BACK: News from the John O’Groat Journal of yesteryear
Chance meeting of Wick schoolmates
From the Groat of February 13, 1925
An interesting meeting between two Wick men almost 50 years after they were at school together had been reported in an American newspaper.
The two men, William B Groat and John Milligan, who lived just a mile apart in Astoria, met each other by chance.
The report stated: “The meeting on the street was a surprise to both men. They had last seen each other 47 years ago in the town of Wick, where they were born and attended school.
“They both wandered back in memory to the days when they were boys, and swapped stories of their native heath for more than an hour.
“Many acquaintances of the men are living in every country in the world.”
John Milligan, general manager of Rosenwasser Brothers’ shoe factory, was the brother of Wick librarian Captain D W Milligan. And Captain Milligan featured in another Groat story in which it was reported that he and his assistant, Mr Glass, had “carried out what will be a much-appreciated rearrangement of the Caithness section of Wick Carnegie Library”.
A large special case had been set apart in the main book-room to house “all the books and pamphlets bearing on the county or the work of Caithness writers”.
Telford house demolished
From the Groat of February 14, 1975
A bow-ended gable building at the corner of Saltoun Street and Bank Row in Pulteneytown had been demolished.
A bid to save the house had been made in 1972 by the Wick Society. However, the group was then in its infancy and had been “unable to raise the money needed to retain and restore the building which was built in 1827 and served in turn as a pub, shop and lodging house”.
The bow-ended gable had matched two others along Union Street and Bank Row, “making it possibly a unique set-up in Scotland”.
The others were the offices of the John O’Groat Journal and the already demolished building at the corner of Rose Street and Bank Row. Mackays Hotel, built 50 years later, had been designed to match the three other bow-gabled premises.
Dean of Guild Mr J Miller was not sorry to see the building go and commented: “I hope the Wick Society saw the rubbish that went into the building of this house… when it was knocked down.
“It was made of absolute rubbish. They obviously knew nothing about houses when they asked us to preserve this one.”
Elsewhere, plans for another demolition in the county had prompted two protest meetings. Residents in the Canisbay area were concerned about the plan to knock down the old Canisbay school and schoolhouse.
Vulcan staff vote for bus boycott
From the Groat of February 18, 2000
More than 100 nuclear workers had voted to boycott their work bus service in protest at huge increases in fares.
At a mass meeting outside the gates of the naval reactor test establishment at Vulcan, they agreed to abandon the buses and travel by car instead – a move which was likely to congest the car park and access road to the site.
They were angry at proposals to increase the flat-rate weekly ticket from £7.60 to as much as £25.
Workers claimed the rise in fares made a mockery of operator Roll-Royce and Associates’ “green” policy to encourage workers to use public transport.
The changes could have resulted in buses being withdrawn for shift workers, leading one angry union member to call for a ban on overtime until the dispute was resolved.
Rapsons, which had inherited the service when it bought Keiss-based Dunnet’s Coaches, said that losses on the route were unsustainable, and the company had to increase fares.
In fact, the company stated that the service could cease altogether after the end of May unless it became profitable.
The service did not receive a public subsidy, and workers claimed that Rolls-Royce was the only company at Dounreay that did not subsidise transport for its employees.