This isn't the story I expected to tell here.
And I want to be clear at the very start:
Gruinard Island, on the west coast of Scotland, is not a tourist destination.
There's not much to see, and what there is, you can see it from the mainland.
But if you really do want to get closer, there is a way.
And these days, the government won't even try to stop you.
While I think Scottish right-to-roam law
would allow us to land this boat and have a walk around,
the owners of the island asked that I don't.
And that's fair enough.
One of the reasons I want to respect that request
is because there is quite a history of Englishmen coming up to the Scottish Highlands and, uh,
acting like we own the place.
Gruinard Island here?
In World War 2, this is where Britain tested its biological weapons.
It was contaminated for decades, and landing was dangerous and illegal.
It has another unofficial name: Anthrax Island.
...and traditionally at this point,
television crews go into the history of the place,
and there'd be a lot of pontificating about whether Britain
would ever have actually used lethal anthrax bacteria as a weapon.
The government has always maintained that the experiments on Gruinard Island sheep here
were just for defence,
to have data in case we were attacked,
or as an early form of mutually-assured-destruction.
All the records I found back that up,
but who knows what was said quietly in private.
Britain did draw up theoretical attack plans.
That seems abhorrent now. But in times of war, the laws fall silent.
This video isn't about that.
I'm telling you that story
so I can tell you something else I found while researching.
Because it's often difficult to find truth about history like this:
so before travelling up here, I went to look at original documents
in the National Archives.
It's really amazing to me that researchers can just ask for those.
All the details are there:
how much anthrax the scientists used in each test,
how many sheep were killed and how,
the dimensions of the clouds of anthrax given off,
and the scientists' comments about just how effective it was.
But that's been well told, in books, in articles, in all sorts of ways.
It's been badly told as well,
like in an overdramatic US TV segment from 2001, where the journalist
wears a completely unnecessary respirator and hazmat suit.
And he didn't need those because in the 1980s,
the island was decontaminated.
Partly because of pressure and petitions from the public,
and there was also more startling pressure,
when an anonymous group calling themselves Dark Harvest Commando
dumped anthrax-contaminated soil outside one of the English government research labs.
The people responsible were never tracked down.
And while all that was going on, modern tourism had become a thing:
in 1982, the government had to deal with a couple of Europeans on holiday
who just landed on the island in an inflatable dinghy
and had a walk around, unaware of the danger that was still there.
There's a letter in the archives from the British Embassy,
and it's this wonderful bit of diplomatic writing.
And it's among those more modern documents that I stumbled on a story about Gruinard Island
that I don't think has ever been told, because in context it's a fairly minor detail.
But out of all the stories about the island, this is the one that stood out to me.
So it's 1986.
The decontamination was successful,
the government used tonnes and tonnes of formaldehyde disinfectant,
which killed a few other things apart from the anthrax,
but the ecosystem was steadily starting to recover from that.
For the government, it all seemed to be going well.
The press coverage was mostly positive,
they got a lot of attention for doing a good thing,
for finally cleaning up an old mess.
And of course the public's interested in the whole thing,
"newly cleaned-up secret wartime anthrax-contaminated island"
is the sort of thing that attracts people's attention.
And it was being sold for only £500!
Slight catch there.
It was being sold for £500 back to the original owners.
Because the government, correctly,
was honouring the original contract from the 1940s, which specified that
once the island was safe again,
the folks who'd sold it to the government, or those people's descendants,
they'd have the option of buying it back.
For the same price they sold it for, £500.
It was worth much much more than that, but £500 was the price, and £500 they'd pay.
What this did not mean
was that there was a bargain-basement private Scottish Island on sale.
But the trouble is that the press can sometimes gloss over some of those details.
And as the decontamination story went out in newspapers and magazines and TV broadcasts,
several government departments found themselves dealing with
a rush of letters and telephone calls from the public,
all asking if they could buy the island for £500.
"It has come to my attention that the island of Gruinard is for sale.
"I am interested in making an offer to purchase."
I realise that getting voice actors to read the letters out
does make them a bit funny,
but I don't want to mock the people sending the letters.
They weren't ignorant,
they'd just been told by an apparently-reliable source
that there was a private Scottish island available for £500.
I'd ask about that. I might even try and beat the offer.
"The price offered is £500. I am prepared to offer £501 immediately."
One woman from Glasgow wrote:
"The fear of anthrax pales into insignificance to me,
"as I have lived adjacent to a council rubbish dump for nearly three years."
And it wasn't just British people.
The enquiries came from all over the world.
Germany, Ethiopia, Bahrain, the UAE, New Zealand,
a couple from homesick Scottish immigrants to Australia.
"I often long for the old country."
People wrote to any department that they thought might be relevant:
the Scottish Office, the Ministry of Defence.
A man from Australia wrote directly to the Prime Minister
offering a thousand dollars.
"Please forgive me for writing directly to you, Mrs Thatcher,
"but I am hoping you will forward this tender to the correct department."
That one arrived three months after the first ones.
This took a long time to clear up.
Not all the incoming letters are in the archives,
probably not all the replies either.
There are also a couple of grumpy memos from civil servants
passing the buck to one another
about dealing with the letters and the phone calls.
I do wonder if any of these writers thought their letter would someday
end up preserved in a national archive.
This isn't ancient history,
that's why I've blocked out their personal details.
And I love this story.
Because it shows that misinformation is not a new thing.
Misunderstandings are not a new thing.
Even now, if you Google "who owns Gruinard Island"
you'll find an article about how Russian oligarchs want to buy it...
dated April 1st, 2018.
April Fools' Day is a curse and we should abandon it.
And anyone who's ever been in the public eye, even briefly,
knows that one wrong word can come back to haunt you for years.
It might not even be your word:
the press might misquote you, or take you out of context,
and somehow the world gets the impression that, for example,
for example, you're the person to call about a surprisingly cheap Scottish island
that doesn't have anthrax any more.