AMONG the six “trailblazing women” included in the latest recipients of Historic Environment Scotland’s Commemorative Plaque scheme are Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982) and Dr Margaret Tait (1918-1999), both pictured here.
Hutchison was, in the words of HES, an Arctic traveller and botanist “who risked life and limb collecting plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens and Kew. She pioneered new routes across inhospitable terrain, boarded ghost ships and captured some of the earliest documentary footage ever recorded”. The plaque is to be installed at Carlowrie Castle in West Lothian, her birthplace and lifelong home.
Dr Tait was an avant-garde film maker and the first Scottish woman to direct a feature-length film – 1992’s Blue Black Permanent. The plaque will be installed at her birthplace in Kirkwall, Orkney.
Hutchison is third from left in the main image, which was taken in February 1939. The occasion was a dinner to mark the 21st anniversary of the passing of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification.
At the dinner she took the opportunity to mention another 21st anniversary, that of the founding of the Republic of Estonia, which she had visited the previous autumn, and where she discovered many connections with Scotland.
The Carlowrie Castle website details her life and career. Her idyllic childhood was shattered by the deaths in quick succession of both her brothers and her father. “Restless and grieving, Isobel found comfort outdoors and while walking, which laid the groundwork for her inspiring independent and unconventional life.” As an explorer and botanist she pioneered new routes across challenging landscapes. She was fluent in more than eight languages, and was an accomplished artist, poet and travel writer.
“As poet, artist and above all film-maker Margaret Tait realised her vision of the world across many of the artificial boundaries in the arts”, began Murray Grigor’s obituary of Tait in the Independent in 1999.
After qualifying as a doctor in Edinburgh during the Second World War, she trained as a film-maker at the Centro Sperimentale di Photografia in Rome. Over her career she made some 30 films, many of which were screened internationally: film cognoscenti believed she had the reputation of being a true original.
Blue Black Permanent, her only feature film, is, in the words of the British Film Institute, a “haunting and magical film” that moves between Edinburgh and Orkney as it tells of a woman’s attempts to come to terms with her mother’s death through her childhood memories.When Hollywood action director Sam Fuller, adds Grigor, saw Blue Black Permanent at Edinburgh he called it a poem. And that pleased Tait immensely.
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