Fàilte air ais
Recent editions of Am Pàipear have highlighted preparations under way to mark the centenary of the 1920s emigrations on well-known emigrant ships including the SS Marloch and SS Metagama.
Someone who has undertaken her own Hebridean Homecoming ahead of the centenary celebrations is Effie MacEachen of Aird, Benbecula, who has returned to the island of her birth following sixty years of living and working in Canada.
Born in Aird in 1935, Effie entered the nursing profession shortly after leaving school. Following several years of training and working in and around the Glasgow area, Effie chose to spread her wings and emigrate to Canada in the summer of 1962.
That first transatlantic journey was taken on the Cunard liner RMS Carinthia, setting out from Greenock on a journey taking one week to reach Quebec, then on to Montreal. From there, it took another week to reach her destination, the city of North Battleford in west-central Saskatchewan, where she spent two years before moving ninety miles north in the same province, to the small city of Meadow Lake; Indian Reservation country.
Through correspondence from home in Aird, Effie was put in touch with Mary MacCormick, living in the city of Regina and whose family originated from Hacklet. Frequent visits to the Gaelic-speaking Regina household followed, until eventually Effie moved from Meadow Lake to work in the Regina General Hospital.
Following a visit to the “old country” with Mary MacCormick in 1965, Effie decided to remain on this side of the Atlantic, working alongside her older sister Agnes who was in the nursing profession in England.
As time went on, Canada came calling once again and Effie emigrated once more, this time in 1968, to take up nursing duties in a hospital in Pembroke, Ontario, about ninety miles north west of Ottawa.
Effie’s time off would often be spent in the big city of Ottawa and, following some time in Pembroke, an opportunity arose to take up a post in the city’s Grace Maternity Hospital, where she remained for twenty-five years before taking her well-earned retirement.
Now back home from her six decades on the move, Effie is looking forward to the “warm” Hebridean winters in her new abode overlooking the place of her birth.
