Edge of the World by Michael Powell – a gripping voyage into the past

It starts, as great voyages perhaps should always do, with a ship crawling through the thick fog. “Where bound, Captain?” comes the deep voice of the Aberdeen harbour-master across the water.

“Lerwick,” replies the captain of the Vedra through his megaphone. The man standing next to him, a then-unknown British film director called Michael Powell, grabs the megaphone and shouts, “AND THE ISLAND OF FOULA!” Below decks, in the ship’s saloon, a film crew lounges around looking, as Powell puts it with a director’s eye “like a scene from one of those American films where the whole cast is catching the Last Express from Shanghai”.

Adventure story ... a still from The Edge of the World (1937). Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

It had all started six years earlier in 1930, when Powell had stumbled across a short article in the Observer about the then-ongoing evacuation of St Kilda and decided it was the perfect subject for the film to make his name. He was, of course, destined to become one of the titans of postwar British film, with classics such as A Matter of Life and Death and Peeping Tom. But this account of the making of his first major film, also called The Edge of the World, is something else entirely – an inadvertently fresh and racy portrait of prewar Britain.

The poignant story of the Scottish island of St Kilda – stranded dozens of miles west of the Scottish mainland – would, alone, fill several books (indeed it has). The islanders lived in virtual isolation for centuries until the military arrived during the first world war, forcing them to accept that that their world was obsolete, and eventually prompting their migration. The dramatic potential of the story itself is obvious – but Powell’s book about the obstacles he faced to get the film made, many of which would have overwhelmed a less resourceful and determined person, has its own gripping hold.

Powell’s plan, in 1936, when he was finally ready to make his film, was to shoot on St Kilda itself, and his script was designed to accommodate the dramatic landscape and buildings. He duly assembled his cast and crew, only to have the island’s owner – terrified of the effect a film crew might have on the place – withdraw permission at the last minute. Faced with finding another location within 24 hours or abandoning the film, Powell was pointed towards another possible candidate: an island to the west of Shetland called Foula. Having adapted his script and reassembled his crew, Powell and his gang set off on what turned out to be as much an adventure as a film shoot.

Powell’s tale really gets going in the second part, when the crew is finally ensconced in Shetland and ready to film. Offering glimpses of what would make him such an innovative film-maker during his later collaborations with Emeric Pressburger, Powell eschews the customary dictatorial role of director and inaugurates a democratic “parliament” in the camp. His tale of living and working together, an embryonic version of the “castaway”-style reality shows, is magical, and there’s even a final-act real-life drama to round things off.

Nobody would accuse Powell, on the strength of this book, of being a literary stylist, but the fog-bound world he conjures up, and the wonderful cast of characters he encounters, from grumpy landowners to enterprising journalists, makes for a gripping portrait of another time and place.