LONDON – After working for years at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, in the far north of the British Isles, Paul Moar is used to helping the public get rid of unwanted items.
But when an older man entered the recycling center in Lerwick, the archipelago’s capital in the North Atlantic, carrying two large bags full of slides of old photos, he quickly realized that it might be worth saving this intended garbage.
In the bags, he found a wealth of old photos of the Shetland Islands taken in the 1960s and 1970s – farmers shearing sheep by hand, views of winding dirt roads between small stone houses and fishermen rowing small boats down to the coast.
“My jaw dropped to the floor,” said Moar, a fan of local history. “Some of them were incredible snapshots of island life, and others were just scenic photos,” he said. “But I knew I had found a little treasure.”
Since then, Moar has worked on digitizing the 300 images, tracked the photographer and shared dozens of photos online. There, they were a sensation for island residents, who have a population of just 22,000 or more, who helped put the pieces 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 the restrictions that left people feeling isolated.
“I was certainly in the right place at the right time,” said Moar. He added that the photos offered a rare and intimate glimpse into everyday life decades ago in an island community.
“I think it’s giving people a little ray of light, you know, in a dark moment,” said Moar. “It’s been lovely, not just to save the photos, but to see people enjoying it as much as they do.”
Through a neighbor, Moar contacted Nick Dymond, the local resident who left the bags and took the photos and, with his permission, uploaded a series of images to a group of Shetland memories on Facebook.
During the night, dozens of people were leaving messages and helping to identify prominent people, commenting on family homes and sharing memories of places they spent time as children.
“That must have happened 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, with my name on it,” wrote Mairi Thomson next to a photo of the port.
“If only those days were back,” Frank David Simmons wrote of an image, in which he shared memories of agriculture with limited machines.
A member of the Facebook group where Moar first shared the images said it was “giving everyone a boost in these dark times”.
Moar said his own passion for island history – where his family can trace ancestors back to 1400 – was what first attracted him to save the photos.
The rugged Shetland Islands are about 180 kilometers north of mainland Scotland and about 190 kilometers west of Norway. More than half of the island’s residents live less than 10 miles from Lerwick, and the rest are spread across communities on 16 other inhabited islands – although there are about 100 small islands in total in the archipelago.
Dymond, 77, was surprised by the confusion surrounding his old photos, but said in a telephone interview that he was happy that other people could enjoy them.
“I was just cleaning,” he said of his decision to take them to the dump. “I had these three big boxes of slides in my very small house for, well, 30 years or so.”
Mr. Dymond was a prolific photographer who loved to document his travels, including to places like India, Kenya and Russia, but he said he never switched to digital and no longer had the slide projector to view his old photos.
“I can’t do anything with them and I’ve seen all the things I took pictures of,” he said with a laugh. “But I realized that other people are liking them.”
Mr. Dymond is originally from Bedford, England, but in the 1960s, he made his home in the Shetland Islands. He first moved to Fair Isle, the group’s southernmost island, and in the 1970s, he began conducting bird and wildlife tours in the summer. He served as director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity, and later wrote a book on bird watching on the islands.
Dymond said that seeing the photos was a trip back to the small moments of his life, which he had not thought of for some time.
“There are some who bring me memories in a personal way,” said Dymond of the images. “And it’s a bygone era. Some people won’t know who the people in the photos are and are trying to find out, and there are some that I don’t know either. “
One of his favorites is the photograph of a farmer kneeling to feed a lamb, taken on the tiny island of Fetlar, which had a population of just 100 during the seven years that Dymond lived there. He recognized the man, Lollie Brown, a neighbor, who died years ago.
“He was a wonderful man,” he said. “That was a great reminder for me.”
Mr. Dymond has given permission for the slides to be donated to the Shetland Museum and Archives, and Moar plans to take them there as soon as the site is reopened after the coronavirus restrictions.
Moar said he hopes they can serve as a reminder of the simplicity of island life.
“Life is slower here,” he said. “But these old photos are certainly a window into an era where life was, people would say, more real and more tangible.”