LONDON – After working for years at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, on the northernmost part of the British Isles, Paul Moar has become accustomed to getting rid of unwanted articles.
But when an elderly man walked into the recycling center in Lerwick, the archipelago’s capital in the North Atlantic, carrying two large bags of old photo chips, he quickly realized that they were worth the intended rubbish.
In the bags he found a myriad of old photos of the Shetland Islands taken in the 1960s and ’70s – old farmers shearing sheep by hand, views of dirt roads winding between small stone houses, and fishermen small rubber boats row ashore.
“My jaw fell to the ground,” he said. Moar, a local historian, said. “Some of them were these amazing screenshots in island life, and others were just beautiful photos,” he said. “But I knew I had run into some treasure.”
In the days that followed, Mr. Moar worked on digitizing the 300 images, locating the photographer and sharing dozens of photos online. There, they proved a sensation to residents of the islands, with a population of just 22,000 residents, who helped work together when they were taken, identified the people in the photos and shared their own memories of the islands .
In the process, they became an unexpected bright spot amid the coronavirus pandemic and restrictions that made people feel isolated.
“I was definitely in the right place at the right time,” he said. Moar said. He added that decades ago the photos gave a rare, intimate look at everyday life in an island community.
“I think it gives people a little ray of light at a dark time,” he said. Moar said. “It was wonderful, not just to save the photos, but to see how people enjoyed it as much as they did.”
Moar reached out through a neighbor to Nick Dymond, the local who downloaded the bags and took the photos, and with his permission uploaded some of the images to a Facebook group of Shetland memories.
Dozens of people left messages overnight and helped identify the people, taking notes on family homes and sharing memories of places they spent as children.
“It must have been 40 years ago when we were so young!” wrote Gillian Okill, after someone tagged her in one of the photos.
“My father’s boat on the right, named after me,” Mairi Thomson wrote next to a photo of the harbor.
“If only the days were back,” Frank David Simmons wrote about one image, where he shared memories of farming with limited machinery.
One member of the Facebook group where Moar first shared the images said it “gives everyone a boost in these dark times.”
Moar said his passion for the history of the islands – where his family can trace ancestors back to the 1400s – initially attracted him to save the photos.
The rugged Shetland Islands lie about 110 kilometers north of mainland Scotland, about 190 kilometers west of Norway. More than half of the islands’ inhabitants live within ten miles of Lerwick, and the rest are scattered in communities across 16 other inhabited islands – although there are about 100 small islands in the archipelago.
Mr. Dymond, 77, was surprised by the uproar over his old photos, but said in a telephone interview that he was glad others could enjoy it.
“I just made a clear impact,” he said of his decision to take them to the landfill. “I had these three big boxes of slides in my little house, well, 30 years or so.”
Dymond was a prolific photographer who wanted to document his travels, including to places like India, Kenya and Russia, but he said he never made the switch to digital and that he no longer had the slide projector around his old to see photos.
“I can do nothing with them, and I saw all the things I took pictures of,” he said laughing. “But I realized other people enjoyed it.”
Mr. Dymond is originally from Bedford, England, but in the 1960s he settled on the Shetland Islands. He first moved to Fair Isle, the southernmost island in the group, and in the 1970s he began leading summer bird and game tours. He served as warden for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity, and later wrote a book on bird watching on the islands.
Mr. Dymond said looking at the photos was a journey into small moments of his life that he had not thought of for some time.
“There are people who bring back memories for me in a personal way,” he said. Dymond said about the images. “And it’s a bygone era. Some people will not know who the people in the photos are and try to figure it out, and there are some I do not know either. ”
One of his favorites is a photo of a farmer kneeling to feed a lamb, taken on the small island of Fetlar, with a population of just 100 inhabitants during the seven years that Mr. Dymond lived there. He recognizes the man, Lollie Brown, a neighbor, who passed away years ago.
“He was just a wonderful man,” he said. “It was a good memory for me.”
Mr. Dymond gave permission for the chips to be donated to the Shetland Museum and archives, and Mr. Moar plans to take it there as soon as the site reopens after coronavirus restrictions have been eased.
Moar said he hopes they can serve as a reminder of the simplicity of life on the islands.
“Life is going slower here,” he said. “But these old photos are definitely a window into a previous era in which life, people would say, was more real and tangible.”