Ullapool is a village that sits on the shores of Loch Broom on the north west coast of Scotland. In the nineteen-seventies it was home to a large fleet of Eastern-European factory ships that became known as the Klondykers and they stayed for about twenty years
They processed the herring caught in the waters of the minch and I remeber sailing past them when I was young fascinated by the Soviet flags and the men staring out across the loch. The Klondykers were famous then and stories abounded, mostly about drinking and cars being winched onto boats to be taken back to the Eastern Bloc....
but in a small village nearer to the Artic Circle than London it wasn’t like that at all
In 1984 at the height of the cold war a football match took place between the Klondykers and the village. The media called it Scotland v’s The USSR and it was condemed as a threat ot western democracy
Yet the one thing that everyone agrees on is that there was no threat to western demcracy and now the Klondykers have gone they will tell you how much they miss the lights of the boats at night across the loch like so many stars and the sounds of their horns at Hogmanay