Alfie is a good advert for reaching 100
By Gillian Wylie
(from The Orcadian dated October 18, 2001)

Alfie Merriman of Newgarth, Sandwick who was 100 on Monday. (Picture: K Pirie)

If Alfie Merriman is anything to go by, reaching your 100th birthday has a lot to recommend it.

Sitting in his comfortable livingroom surrounded by his daughters and family pictures he smiled and looked at me quizzically before saying: “I don’t know what you want to speak to me for – there’s plenty of folk reach a hundred these days. What about the man in Deerness – Willie o’ Pickletillum, he’s a hundred too, is he no?” I assured him we were going to try speak to Willie as well. He sat back grinning: “Oh well that’s all right then.”

On Monday, Alfie joined the select band who receive a letter from the Queen congratulating them on reaching their 100th birthday. A party at the Merkister was arranged in his honour for that day, marking Alfie’s birthday in style. Around sixty guests – 22 of them close family members – and some from far flung corners of the world, gathered for the event, including daughter Benna Thomson who has travelled all the way to Orkney from Arrowtown near Queenstown in New Zealand.

“So do you think I look a hundred then?” he quizzed me with a wicked twinkle. “Not at all,” I answer truthfully. And he doesn’t, he has a spark and a sense of humour which reminds me of my late grandfather.

He told me he couldn’t remember much about the past. Nevertheless, prompted by his daughters, he seemed to manage well enough.

Alfie and his twin brother, William John, were born less than a mile (as the crow flies) from his present home, Newgarth in Sandwick, in a small cottage by Harray Loch called Scarratang – now in ruins. His daughter, Minna, I was told, still owns it.

His schooldays were spent at South Sandwick Public school. “There were two schools in Sandwick then.”

“That’s one change,” someone points out. “All the small schools have closed, they all go to Dounby now.”

Like many of his contemporaries in Orkney, Alfie left home to work on the farm – in his case his father’s farm, Doehouse, in Sandwick. “I’ve been a farmer all my life. I started at 14 when I stopped school. It was horses in them days, no tractors.”

The Great War, of course, raged on the Continent, but Alfie was never called up, only coming of age a year after hostilities ceased. “The war just stopped when I was age to start,” he explained.

When he started working at Doehouse, the farm boasted a little over 70 acres, about 20 cattle including seven or eight milking cows, and two or three horses. “We didn’t have a big lot. The mare had a foal every year which was reared and sold.”

He married Elizabeth Angus Fotheringham from Templehall in Sanday whose brother, John, was a schoolmaster at the Sandwick School. A sepia photograph of Alfie’s wife as a young girl with her parents and siblings in Sanday is hung above the mantelpiece – above a portrait of Alfie’s parents from Doehouse.

“I was married and had nine of a family (seven daughters and two sons) – well not me but my wife did!” He laughs amid shrieks of “don’t put that in the paper!”

“I have seven granddaughters,” (Elizabeth, Caroline, Fiona, Helen and Jennifer, his daughters list their names). “Then seven great grandsons before a great granddaughter was born.”

“She’ll be three now,” the company agreed. “It was all girls and then all boys, and twin boys amongst them.”

Farming methods, and even the sorts of crops grown in Orkney, have changed immensely over the last 100 years: “We grew oats and bere and turnips. We used to cut the crop using reapers. Then we got a binder – three horse on the binder. That made a great difference,” he added. “It‘s all combines now, and barley and big tractors – too big these days.”

A far cry from their first tractor – a grey Fergie. Even further from their Clydesdales before that, which ploughed, harrowed, and reaped as well.

“I mind father setting off to cut a five acre field with three horse and a binder,” said one of his daughters. “He managed it in a day no bother at all.”

More people worked on the land of course then: “We had a servant man when we were small.”

The whole family lived in what Alfie described as a “but-and-ben” with a kitchen, “back piece” and three “open plan” bedrooms.

The roof of the old house at Doehouse was thatched. “What was that like?” I wondered. “Leaky things,” I was told “they dripped.”

The “terrible storm” in January 1952 eventually put paid to the old thatched roof: “The storm was huge and the whole roof just blew off!” Alfie lost his cap and never saw it again – “I missed my cap!” he added with a twinkle.

“It was a terrible night,” said one of his daughters, “I was at Binscarth at the time but my mother said it was like the end of the world.”

Dodgy roofs weren’t the only trials: “We had to carry water from the well.” No electricity meant everything had to be done manually. No fridges meant salting and curing foods - herring, pork in the time honoured way.

Alfie said the pigs were good. Salted and cured after slaughter, they hung from the ceiling. “You could just reach up and cut slices off and eat it,” he reminisced with relish.

Puddings could be put outside in the winter to freeze: “You put out custard in the snow – it made a kind of ice cream.”

And there, someone pointed out, was another big change in recent years – the weather. There was much more snow. “We used to take a shovel into the house every night to clear the door in the morning. There were very high snow drifts. This would happen for a while of the winter, every winter.“You just expected it”

“But we were as happy as Larry. There was no TV – just wireless, and Tilly lamps and oil lamps for the bedrooms. Tilly lamps were good because heat came off them as well.”

Work began on a brand new farmhouse at Doehouse before World War Two, but was interrupted by the outbreak of war, and took until the mid–1950s to complete. Alfie quarried all the stones that went into Doehouse and carted them to the site using horse and cart. The house, itself, was built by Garrioch’s the joiners.

The new house had two storeys: “We thought we were in clover, we had hot and cold water and an inside toilet.”

Alfie lights up. “I still suck a pipe!” It doesn’t appear to have done him any harm. He goes to Dounby every week, and still goes to Kirk on Sunday.

And he is probably one of the country’s longest standing freemasons, having joined the Masonic Lodge in Dounby on March 1, 1923. Certainly, he is the oldest Freemason in the Northern Isles, and he showed me a certificate he had been presented with three years ago celebrating his 75th year as a mason. The Lodge at Dounby, he explained, was built the year he was born.

So what is the biggest change Alfie has seen over the last century?

“I don’t know.” Maybe mechanisation? one of his daughters suggests. He agrees.

And what is his secret for such longevity?

“I don’t know. I was very ill with pneumonia when I was one year old. That was very serious then – no antibiotics.”

So serious, in fact, that his mother “gave his twin brother away” to an aunt and uncle for his own safety, and he never came home again.

So Alfie has a strong constitution, then, I hazarded? There seems to be broad agreement. Alongside that, there is the strong sense that family ties are very important to Alfie and his daughters, and I suspect (though he may think I’m being rather cheeky) that Alfie is rarely alone.

Willie o’ Pickletillum gets ready to celebrate 100th