The South Uist priest who fought a nuclear rockets range

BBC News

24-02-2025

Seventy years ago, in the early years of the Cold War, East and West were locked in a nuclear arms race.The UK government needed somewhere to test its first rockets capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.It picked South Uist, a Hebridean island of a few thousand inhabitants on Scotland's rugged Atlantic coast.What the government did not expect was resistance from within the community led by a Catholic priest, Fr John Morrison.
What was the Cold War?
Kate MacDonald, was a girl growing up in West Gerinish, South Uist, in the 1950s and remembers keenly the furore around the rocket range."When they started firing the rockets they used to go wrong and fall in the sand behind our house with a big bang," she says."People were upset in the beginning."Then they just accepted it because it was bringing jobs."
Fr Morrison, a parish priest, had initially supported the rocket project for that very same reason.In 1955, when the UK government first announced it planned to open the guided missile testing site, the economy was still recovering after the end of World War Two 10 years earlier.Jobs were hard to find and in South Uist people earned a living from small farms called crofts.They supplemented their income by weaving tweed or harvesting seaweed.
The Conservative UK government of the time was under pressure from the US and other allies in the West to help create a nuclear deterrent against Russia and the wider Eastern Bloc.It needed a location for training troops in the live firing of rockets - minus their deadly payload.A number of sites were considered, including Shetland and north east Scotland's Moray Firth.The government went for South Uist.It was home to 2,000 people and was described as an island with more water than land due large number of lochs, according to a debate in the House of Lords.On one side of the island was the vast expanse of the North Atlantic where, the government hoped, misfiring rockets could safely crash land.Landowner Herman Andreae claimed he was given little choice but to sell his land on his South Uist Estate to the Ministry of Defence.
The huge scale of the military scheme soon revealed itself. Crofters were to be evicted to make way for thousands of military personnel and their families.Fr Morrison was horrified. He feared a way of life was at risk of being lost.Many islanders were deeply religious with Catholic the dominant faith, and for most of them Gaelic was their first language rather than English."You were talking about the removal of basically all the crofters from Sollas in the north to Bornais in the south," says Fr Michael MacDonald, a priest who looks after Fr Morrison's parish today.The distance between the two locations is more than 30 miles."This was draconian stuff," Fr MacDonald adds."A huge village was to be planted in there."I think he felt the faith would be swamped. That the Gaelic culture would be swamped."
Fr Morrison spoke out publicly against the rocket base.Not everyone in South Uist supported his view, but Fr Morrison attracted local and national press attention.Journalists dubbed him Father Rocket.His headline-grabbing comments included his suggestion he and his parishioners would leave South Uist in protest and move to Canada.Historian Neil Bruce said: "Newspapers in the US were carrying stories about the rocket range and these doughty locals who were standing up to what the government wanted to do."People from outside the islands threw their support behind him. They included anti-nuclear campaigners, conservationists and academics.There was a spin-off benefit for Fr Morrison.Since 1952 he had been working on plans for a statue called Our Lady of the Isles, dedicated to the Virgin Mary.Mr Bruce says publicity around the rockets row made it easier to raise the funds needed for the work of art.It was unveiled in 1958 and some saw it as a symbol of opposition to the weapons facility.
The rocket range did go ahead, although on a smaller scale than planned due to cost savings.But Mr Bruce says Fr Morrison's campaign should be credited for achieving important concessions.They included an assurance that common grazings - land shared by crofters to raise livestock - would not be used and access remained available to some other areas rent-free.The historian believes local road improvements were in part thanks to the priest.And a promise was secured that only essential maintenance would take place on the range on the Sabbath.Mr Bruce says: "On balance, there was a very strong local view that he won at the time."Whether that holds today is for others to say not me."Fr Morrison died in 1992.
The range remains operational and is a significant local employer today.Islanders fought against a proposed closure of the site, before the MoD announced it was "safe" about 14 years ago.It has been used for training in anti-aircraft weapons and military drones.In 2015, the facility played a part in the launch of the UK's first rocket into space.Part of Fr Morrison's legacy is the Our Lady of the Isles statue.It shares a hilltop with a radar station for the range.Fr MacDonald says: "When you pass there, particularly at night-time when the statue is floodlit and you see the radar domes and the aviation warning lights, it's striking the juxtaposition of these two symbols of the nuclear age."