Post by Elly on Nov 19, 2005 22:45:25 GMT 10
St Olaf's cottage on the left where Violet Gray lived. To the right is Horroquoy Farm where her mother Tomima stayed.
ST OLAF'S cottage near Harray in Orkney stands alone in an island of fields. Today it is easily reached by road, connected to the outside world by telephone and would make a comfortable family home. During the beginning of the last century it was a place that would have chilled your blood.
In the early to mid 1900s the cottage was occupied by Violet Gray while her stern mother Tomima Gray occupied the neighbouring Horroquoy Farm. No one will ever know for sure what went on behind the closed doors of St Olaf’s, but locals whispered of terrible deeds.
Islanders at the time noted that Violet was often seen wearing baggy clothes and coats - even in summer - in an attempt to conceal unwanted pregnancies. Yet she was never seen with an infant.
Rumours spread and children were told to avoid the house where babies were born but never lived long.
More than 100 years on, these stories had faded from most people’s memories. Perhaps they would have been forgotten altogether had the house not come up for sale and, in 2001, the new owner undertaken its refurbishment. Workmen, on a routine job of redesigning the kitchen, made a gruesome discovery under the floor - tiny human bones. The police were called in and those old rumours bubbled to the surface once again.
Forensic scientists confirmed the bones were skeletal remains of three babies that had lain there for about 80 years. It was impossible to say exactly when or how they died, but there was one family on the island who knew more.
Violet Gray had one surviving son, Gordon, who committed suicide in 1995. After the death of his mother in the 1950s he had lived alone in the cottage. He married his wife Margaret late in life and they had one son Michael. It was Margaret and Michael who chose to break the family silence and speak out when the bones were discovered. They told a shocking story.
During the First World War, Orkney was an important naval base and the island was overrun with sailors. Temptation and the lack of contraception meant that unwanted pregnancies were not uncommon. The shame these pregnancies would have brought on the family was immense. Violet Gray enjoyed a reputation for having a number of gentlemen visitors, the consequences of which were obvious.
It was always rumoured that Violet had killed her babies to hide the pregnancies. But Michael and Margaret told a different story: It was not Violet who disposed of the babies, but her mother Tomima.
Yet Margaret was anxious the picture that emerged was not of a wicked woman wilfully killing babies, but of a woman who acted as she did for the sake of her family.
"Having an illegitimate child was a terrible thing at the time," Margaret Gray war reported as saying in The Scotsman at the time. "She thought she was doing the right thing – that it was better to kill a baby than have an illegitimate child."
Margaret said the solution for Tomima was swift and brutal.
"I've heard it said that the way they got rid of babies at that time was to drown them in a bucket of water. They were literally born into a bucket of water."
Other islanders with long memories added their voices to those urging people not to judge Violet and Tomima's actions in today's terms. They speculate that the Gray family were not the only ones to rid themselves of shame in this way.
Michael says his father Gordon learned of his tragic history when his mother confessed on her deathbed. Violet is alleged to have told him that it was Tomima who killed the newborn infants and that Gordon escaped because a difficult breech birth necessitated a visit from the doctor. Gordon could not be killed, but, still fearful of what her mother would do, Violet hid him in the attic for years until she felt he was safe from his grandmother. The family say the grandmother loathed Gordon and would have killed him if she could.
Michael thinks that his father may have had first-hand proof of the fate of his siblings too, when he was renovating the property. When he lifted the flagstone floor in the kitchen Michael believes his father saw something shocking that caused him to stop work on the building immediately and never return. Did he see the bones of the babies?
No-one will ever know, as Gordon Gray never talked about his memories of being locked in the attic or about the tragedies at St Olaf’s.
The three babies have now been buried in a local churchyard beside Violet, the mother some thought had killed them, or at the very least failed to protect.
Yet the mystery may not be over. The family say that Violet's deathbed confession spoke of four murdered babies. Back in the early 1900s villagers talked of a child buried under a willow-tree with bottles arranged round like a grave. It could be that there is another tiny body near the old cottage waiting to be found and given a proper burial.
The three tiny babies were buried in St Michael's Church in the village of Harray, next to their mother and brother Gordon.
