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Archibald Cook April 16, 1898 - June 4, 1971 by Calvin Wight Cook
D ad was born in Greenock, Scotland. A couple of miles down the Clyde estuary was Gourock, with its piers. As in these days separate airlines have separate terminals, so each of the steamship lines plying the Clyde to the villages beyond, had its own pier. The ships with black-topped buff funnels belonged to the Caledonian Steamship Packet Company. They ran to islands in the Clyde estuary like Arran or round the coast of Ayrshire. For the Inner and Outer Hebrides, one line was supreme: MacBrayne's. These ships, like the Cunarders, had blacktopped scarlet funnels. In 1932 I visited Islay with Mum and Dad, Luther and Athene. We travelled on the "Columba," a large paddle wheeler that chunked its way through the water. The ship left two separate wakes, a ship's beam apart, instead of the turbulence of a single screw. We returned over a very stormy sea; the engines strained to synchronize one paddle deep in water, with the other nearly out of the water. Islay is one of the larger islands of the Outer Hebrides and to reach it from Gourock means taking a ship to East Tarbert. Then to avoid the long trip around the Mull of Kintyre, crossing the narrow isthmus to West Tarbert to another ferry for the trip westwards to Port Ellen on Islay. As a boy, Dad used to spend his summer holidays with relatives on Islay and clearly loved the change from Greenock, from urban patois to Gaelic. Indeed so excited was he when leading our family expedition to Islay in 1962, that he shepherded us on to one of the Caledonian ferries instead of the MacBrayne's. The steamer's first stop was Dunoon where he was to die. Then past Innellan where George Matheson wrote the hymn "O love that wilt not let me go." Then came the tricky passage through the Kyles of Bute to Tighnabruich, then a long stretch westwards before swinging north into Loch Fyne to East Tarbert. Not long after leaving West Tarbert we were in open
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