8th December 1987: The Scottish Land Court ordered the English owner of the Hebridean Island of Soay to sell more than half the island to a crofter who had lived there for more than 41 years.
Born in 1919, Joseph "Tex" Geddes - typically, he claimed he was given his nickname by a Red Indian fellow commando.
By his own account, he was born in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, and taken to Canada by his father when he was two, following a trivial altercation with the police. Others maintain he was raised by an aunt, the youngest of three fighting brothers, in Easter Ross, and never went to Canada in his life. His neighbours in nearby Skye believed that he hailed from Australia.
In the book Hebridean Sharker Tex Geddes describes his exploits during the 1950s as a hunter of basking sharks in the waters of the Minch, between the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Using an adapted whaling harpoon, he and his crew stalked these huge fish often in perilous conditions, the liver of which is a valuable source of oil.
Always a maverick, before World War Two Geddes had been a boxer and a rumrunner to Newfoundland. During the war he established a reputation as an expert knife-thrower and bayonet fencer and served in the Special Forces with fellow hebridean Gavin Maxwell (author of Ring of Bright Water), and was a central character in Maxwell's Harpoon at a Venture
He combined the hazardous pursuit of sharks with crewing the local lifeboat, ring-net fishing, lobstering, deer-stalking and salmon poaching.
Thesubject of previous posts, historian of Gaelic culture Margaret Fay Shaw said of him: "Tex was a great storyteller and important as such. He was also immensely kind, and had that hunger for life and fun that is essential if you are to make a go of living in these islands. The Hebrides needs more people like Tex Geddes. So does the world
He went on to purchase the tiny island of Soay, where he lived with his wife Jeanne, Geddes continued fishing basking sharks, selling unprocessed livers rather than processed oil to Glasgow.While much of the remaining population of the island evacuated to Mull in 1953, Geddes and his family remained. Geddes protested at the lack of emergency telephone services and with the threat of loss of postal service to the remaining inhabitants of the island, he asked people to send him registered letters and packages. As a result the service was kept with post arriving once a month.
Today the island has a population of three, and the post arrives once a month. The population peaked at 158 in 1851, following eviction of crofters from Skye in the Clearances.
Tex Geddes, died on 11th April 1998 while returning from a bagpiping competition in the Outer Hebrides