Scottish island offers Black Friday antidote with celebration of community and resistance

A group on Stromness on mainland Orkney will reject Black Friday and instead mark Fair Saturday. Commercialisation will be sidelined as the people that stood up to business and power are remembered.

Present-day resistance to events in Gaza will also be recognised at the event, with artists delivering a creative response to the island’s place in peaceful protest over time.

A key focus will be the successful anti-uranium protests of the late 1970s, which halted the prospecting for the radioactive element on land between Stromness and the cliffs at Yesnaby in the late 1970s.

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Charlie Peevers, professor of International Law at Glasgow University, is supporting Fair Saturday. She has recently produced an exhibition on the No Uranium protests to reflect how grassroots activism on the island resisted corporate and political intent to mine for uranium on the island for energy supply.

Resistance to the proposals was led by Orkney Heritage Society and two of its key figures, Marjorie Linklater and the rector of Stromness Academy, Ian MacInnes, who generated a “near unanimous coming together of islanders”, Prof Peevers said.

She said the protests in the 1970s harnessed an “explosion of creativity” to support its message, with composer Peter Maxwell Davies writing his famed Farewell to Stromness in response to the proposals.

Poet George Mackay Brown was also involved in the campaign, with Mr MacInnes delivering a series of satirical cartoons and artworks, which linked the extraction of Orkney’s minerals to a wider web of international exploitation, industrialisation and militarism.

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Prof Peevers said levels of resistance shown on Orkney “challenged metropolitan assumptions about rural life and communities in remote areas”.

She said: “Marjorie Linklater was a really formidable woman and was incredibly active in drumming up massive co-ordinated opposition. What is interesting is that she is putting forward these environmental arguments about uranium that bring in all these other groups, including farmers and fishermen.

“So she has this incredible way, as many of them did in the heritage society, of bringing people together to show that this would be detrimental to all of them.”

Orkney Islands Council rejected the planning application for the test bores, with the issue then dealt with an “examination in public” ordered by the Scottish Secretary. When the examiner arrived at Kirkwall, he was greeted with the sign "Uranium Never. Orkney Forever”.

It was later ruled there would be significant local impact if the mining, proposed by the South of Scotland Electricity Board, went ahead.

Fair Saturday will celebrate the activists of the island, with the 'Portraits for Peace' event to be held at Northlight Gallery in Stromness and hosted by Orkney News. It includes work by the artists Carolyn Dixon, Fiona MacInnes, Susy Shearer and Bryce Wilson.

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Martin Laird will also be using Northlight Gallery as an open studio and inviting members of the public to watch as he paints the portraits of several local peace activists who have volunteered to sit.

Other strands of activism on the island will also be remembered, including the Orkney Woman's Suffrage Society and the Free-Winged Eagle newspaper, set up by anarchist Stuart Christie.

Mr Christie settled on Sanday after his acquittal of involvement in the Angry Brigade, an anti-establishment group who set off a number of explosions in London in the 1970s. The previous decade, he spent time in prison in Madrid for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Franco.

- Prof Peever’s exhibition Disarmament from the Margins will show at the Sir Alex Ferguson Library at Glasgow Caledonian University until December 19.