Remembering Leven's 'Buckie Hoose'

Out of all the places that have disappeared from Fife’s landscapes, one keeps resurfacing with lasting affection – the Shell House in Leven.

Commonly known as ‘The Buckie Hoose’, for the few who have no knowledge of the attraction this was a house and gardens at the west end of Leven, near the Shorehead. Trinity House, sat at the junction of Henderson Street and the Seagate while the gardens were on the edge of the Prom’, with the tall wooden-gated entrance opposite the junction between Seagate and School Street.

The gardens would go on to open its doors to the public, accommodating a small menagerie and was a local and visitor attraction.

There are still a lot of postcards circulating of the Buckie Hoose, though there are more copyright claims than there are images, which probably underlines its lasting popularity though it closed and was demolished 40 years ago.

Trinity House still stands but the ‘Shell Gardens’, as they were originally called before the Buckie/Shell Hoose tag, have all but disappeared though some remnants of the decoration still remain on walls around the Seagate.

Though posts on community pages that focus on Fife’s heritage fondly recall the mini zoo and shell covered enclosures, there is also indignation that such a landmark was permitted to be cleared for a new-build house. 

A detailed record of what exactly occurred is hard to find. The local paper, the East Fife Mail, did carry reports of its demise and the plans for a new family home but there was not a clamour of buyers willing to take the venture on. Approaches to the local authority to take it over came to nothing and, in hindsight, it would have been quite an asset for Kirkcaldy District Council, but that wasn't to be.

And while I can personally vouch for the Bisset family’s care of the animals in the menagerie, times were changing and the legal and health requirements probably would never have allowed its continued existence in its present form, charming though it was.

My personal interest in the Buckie Hoose is easy to explain. It was at the end of my street and my big sister and I were regular visitors. I was so enchanted by the place that I got to know James Bisset, the son of the original creator,Wull, whom I would have known too though he would have been a good age.

Mr Bisset must have decided I’d spent enough thruppennies on admission and told the lass on the wee admission kiosk at the gate just to let me in whenever I turned up. During the season that would have been at least twice and day, maybe more. I came and went as I pleased and was enlisted during the off season to occasionally help out with the care of the animals that were kept in the Bissets’ workshop in the middle of School Street, just along from my door.

So, the Buckie Hoose was a major part of my childhood and like so many others I remember fondly the monkey, fox, parrot, birds and everything else, and the sheer joy of sitting beneath the tree at the aviary and watching the world go by.

But other than those shared memories that appear in ‘comments’ on Facebook posts, I haven’t been able to pull the entire story of the Buckie Hoose together. I do recollect the East Fife Mail’s cutting files which had at least one brown envelope containing all stories and references to the Shell House. Unfortunately, that was binned a few years back. These articles will be lying in the paper’s archives … somewhere, as will references in the Fife Free Press and Kirkcaldy Guardian, the Fifeshire Advertiser and the Dundee Courier.

Getting access to these, especially during lockdown, is well nigh impossible and then it would be like searching a for a needle in a haystack because you would not be looking for a particular incident or event, just a feature or colour piece, and these are few and far between.

If this article manages to reach an audience I would dearly love to hear first hand memories of visits to the Buckie Hoose and any other details locals could provide on this much loved attraction. I am pretty sure someone, sometime, must have pulled together a booklet with pictures and memories, along with its history. Sadly, if such a publication exists, I have yet to find it, and it would likely settle the competing copyright claims on the pictures that are out there.

So, what do I know? My personal knowledge is based on my own memories and remembering the new house being built though I honestly do not recollect any widespread community anger at the Buckie Hoose’s passing. If I recall correctly, my own sadness was not even shared by my fellow reporters along the road at 7 Mitchell Street.

The internet offers a few in-roads to the story but for a landmark that stood for nearly 60 years, and one that is still so vividly remembered, full honour has not been done.

The Buckie Hoose name does crop up here and there, not always in connection with it being a visitor attraction. Remember it was also a home to the Bisset family, cropping up in newspapers quite far afield when there were rooms to let and the creative and craft skills of the Bissset family obviously also extended to another son, Henry. He made the newspaper columns in 1948 for his handiwork in making a cabinet for Leven Old Men’s Club, which operated out of the band hall.

The Buckie Hoose also crops up as a recognised geographic point in Leven, even surfacing in court reports where an accused bicycle thief, the worse for drink, recalled passing the Buckie Hoose then heading along towards the Jubilee…

And there were times when it made the headlines itself. One such occasion was in September 1940 when it provided the backdrop for a story where a sheriff, sitting on the bench in Cupar, made the news by expressing his preference of sentencing a young offender to the birch, and his frustration at not being able to do so.

The little menagerie at the Shell House had not been the attraction at the heart of the case but a donation box to help offset expenses. At that time Mr Bisset made no admission charge but had a goodwill box and it was that which tempted a 14-year-old Methil boy who, together with a 17-year-old brick worker, stole seven shillings (35p) in the change that had been donated.

“The Procurator-Fiscal explained that the Shell House was a private building, the walls of which were covered with shells. It attracted a large number of visitors. There was also in the grounds a small private zoo,” reported The Scotsman.

The reason this tale of the snatched 7/- made the news was because Sheriff JW More, presiding, had commented: “I would far rather order you to have a birching. In my long experience I have found it has good results, but, apparently, it is not in favour these days.”

While the support for birching made the national newspaper columns, the 14-year-old probably would rather have taken the beating. Sheriff More, with his long experience, decided the raid on the Buckie Hoose box merited a three-year stint in an approved school. The older accomplice was given probation.

So there we have the Buckie Hoose as an address and even a crime scene, but what about its story as one of Leven’s most enduring and loved attractions.

It would seem work on ‘Wull’ Bisset’s house began around 1920, opening to the public some seven years later. Like many Levenmouth folk then he made his living at the local pits, employed as a coal trimmer. He began the shell decorations as a hobby, one that literally grew to take over the house and the gardens. Such was his skill that this wasn’t just a case of using tidal debris as harling but a growing elaborate work of art.

In the summer of 1931 the Dundee Courier carried a wonderful first-person piece by a “special correspondent” who spent some time with Wull Bisset, hailed as “Leven’s artist extraordinary”.

“Others may etch and draw,” reported the Courier, “or paint in oils or water colours, but this genial coal trimmer has a different medium. He decorates in shells. His work is photographed and reproduced on picture postcards as one of Leven's wonders, and a possible enticement for tired city-dwellers to come to Leven, where, within sound of the waves rolling from the wide span of the Forth, mixes King Neptune's colours on canvas of cement and stone. The white of sea-worn seashells predominates, but there is a tinge of blue, of red and yellow in the patterns he has woven. He uses coloured glass to relieve the whiteness of the shells.”

The Courier correspondent tells us how Mr Bisset devoted all his spare time to his hobby, creating such wonders as a shell-covered buffalo skull, with giant mussel shells for ears and eyes of red sea glass.

But the masterpiece was deemed to be the bus. Many people today will remember that and it features prominently on many a postcard with a Dundee destination plate. Some sources, such as Outsider Environments Europe, reckon this was erected by Wull’s son, James, much later and possibly as an intended dining car. He may have replaced it and while it would have made a great cafe there was a bus in situ by 1931 and that carried Arbroath as the destination though it was reckoned to be the first Kirriemuir to Dundee bus.

“Wull Bisset has bricked up the bus body, built the bonnet in bricks and cement, made cement wheels, and overlaid the entire cement work with shells from the nearby shore,” stated the Courier.

“ ‘Built this as a summer-house,’ said Mr Bisset ‘It is an ideal hoose for that very purpose, for you've light all round with the glass on every side.'

“Through the bus windows I could see the sands of the far-famed Largo Bay and the Berwick side of the Forth estuary jutting out from the faur haze on the water; the sound of the sea was clearly audible with a soft wish-wash, and the rattle of the surf on the shingle. It was idyllic spot.”

Mr Bisset said his sole aim had been to brighten the house and gardens up, and he felt the shells had helped him achieve that.

“I looked at the hundred different designs in shells and thought of the hundreds of visitors who came to see the spot, and the hundreds more who could only admire its beauties by picture postcard, I quite agreed,” wrote the correspondent..

“Mr Bisset was a real artist.”

But he also took a great deal of pride in something else in the gardens – the aviaries. In 1931 they were populated with budgerigars, scarlet macaws, cardinal birds, a couple of owls, kestrel hawk, two parrots, scores of canaries, and golden pheasants.

“Here was where Leven's artist extraordinary spent his odd moments,” concluded the Courier.

“I said goodbye him by a wall on which dozen designs had been wrought in shellwork and coloured glass. Before we parted he spoke of his pheasants. ‘Phesians’, he called them.

“It was long time since I had heard such good south country word as that, but as I left him by the shell-covered wall I felt I had met a man worth knowing.”

While the Buckie Hoose menagerie would remain an attraction for decades to come, some of its residents did, on occasion take to the road.

For instance In November 1935 Mr Bisset headed to Anstruther and District Cage Bird Society’s annual show in West Anstruther Town Hall and the Commercial Hotel hall. With him for the trip along to the East Neuk were his Amherst pheasant, pet black and white mice, tawny and barn owls, a kestrel hawk, four guinea pigs, four monkeys, two macaws, an African parrot, an Amazon parrot, along with a number of the smaller varieties of cage birds.

Wull died in 1964 at the age of 95, while son James passed in 1978 and, soon after, the Buckie Hoose also faded into Leven’s history.

But what memories it left. During the 1930s, it was reckoned it attracted over 30,000 visitors each season but it remained popular, especially among locals, right into the 1970s.

I would welcome comments and memories on the Buckie Hoose but just three years after Wull Bisset began this treasured project - his “canvas of cement and stone”, as the Courier called it - was already being admired.

In 1923 the Leven Advertiser carried this poem from a T. Ure that will probably resonate with those who remember their visits to Seagate.

Now, if that was Tommy Ure who owned an ironmongers at the Shorehead, just a few yards from Wull Bisset’s house, we will probably never know. But it would be nice to think that the growing beauty of the Shell House brought daily joy to those on its doorstep. Its memories still do.

The Shell House, Leven

The work of a local miner, exhibiting rare patience, taste and skill; and visited and admired by the hundreds of summer visitors who come to Leven in search of recreation, health and pleasure.

0! Have you been to Leven Toon

And seen the "Bucky" Hoose?

If no, you've missed a brew, braw sicht,

Tho' ye be rich and spruce.

But if you've been to Leven Toon,

And the "Shelly" Hoose you've seen,

You've seen a sicht that's rare to see,

Tho' far you've travelled been.

The architect o' Nature's plan,

Showed handiwork most fair;

And he who planned the "Shelly" Hoose

Revealed an art most rare.

How rich and gay the flowers appear,

To give you invitation;

And much that's seen, yet canna' name,

Add to your delectation.

The Lovebirds flit on happy wing,

Unmindful of the passing gaze;

While varied birds o' varied hue,

Combine to sing their Maker's praise

In Nature's realm and Art's domain,

Are some most charming things to see;

But the "Shell" Hoose and its bonnie birds.

Are dear, aye dear to me.

T. Ure

Leven

The push to get rid of the Poles

Polish troops parade along Leven prom' during the war.

If I was asked what was the greatest lesson I had learned in all my years as a reporter my answer would be, “There is always another side to every story, and each side comes with more layers than you can ever imagine.”

History is like that. The more you read, the more avenues you venture down and what perhaps seemed simple becomes complex. The black and whites all turn grey.

So historical superficiality reigns supreme, even on a personal level. The older I become, it seems the less I know – be that the realities of the Great War, the supposed heroes and villains of the last century, the many disturbing dimensions of World War Two, the community I grew up in. All of these and more, probably everything, is so much more complicated than I ever imagined.

That realisation also brings so much regret. I never took the opportunity to quiz my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents. In some instances I was too young to understand but certainly, as far as the previous two generations went, I was old enough but, unfortunately, not interested enough. Now it is too late.

And that makes it particularly frustrating when another layer of history reveals itself and you realise that you could have had first-hand accounts of what shaped the lives of those who shaped us. And how, in many instances, attitudes have not changed.

I grew up aware that there had been anti-Polish sentiment in my community. Graffiti such as “Be a man, go home” was daubed outside the homes of some of the ex-soldiers who settled in Fife. But I was led to believe this was rare but I had a wake-up call when I was 16 and my girlfriend received a black eye from her father for dating “the son of a dirty Pole”.

Perhaps, I would have been more aware of that undercurrent if my father had immediately settled here after the war. However, through the schemes set up when hostilities ended, he and my mother emigrated to Argentina. They returned in the 1950s and, by then, the ill-feeling towards Poles had, if not disappeared, certainly diminished.

Of course I now understand what was going on. Most of the Poles who served during the war opposed the Soviet system and wanted no part of a socialist federation, controlled by Stalin in Moscow. As a result, returning to the motherland was perilous, possibly fatal. My father received ‘coded’ messages from his family warning him not to return and it would be the dawning of the 1960s before he could be reunited temporarily with his family behind the Iron Curtain, and then his protection was his British naturalisation.

But whatever his tale, he missed the first hand experience of the wider local community’s attitude to the Poles just as the war ended. He was based in Germany then there was a brief stay in the UK before his marriage and departure to South America.

For others in my home area of Fife, the ‘Polish question’ at that time was a controversial and heated issue. It received a full airing on October 16, 1945, in the Jubilee Theatre, Leven. Ironically, just 15 years later the Jubilee would be my playground, and a stone’s throw from where we lived.

Without pulling back too many layers, such as the trade union support for the USSR, which, at the time, is both valid and understandable, the 70,000 Poles in Scotland were seen as a major threat to jobs, and likely to be stealing work from the soon-to-be demobbed Scots.

The Jubiliee, location of
the 1945 public meeting.

Around 600 people from Leven, Buckhaven and Methil, crammed into the theatre for what turned out to be an ill-tempered meeting over the early repatriation of the Polish exiles.

“Platform speakers and speakers from the body of the hall were applauded, jeered and howled down … and the fact there were mixed feelings on the matter was obvious by the frequent interruptions, caused to a considerable extent by womenfolk,” stated one newspaper report. “There were times when the meeting got beyond the control of the chairman and threatened to become a farce.”

The Fife Free Press reported that the feeling was that the Polish soldiers were billeted and “having a good time” in Scotland and if they were not sent back there would be a work crisis.

“Polish soldiers were being trained in building and other skilled trades while many of our own countrymen, already skilled in various kinds of trades, were still serving in the occupied countries of Europe and the Far East,” reported the Press.

One speaker pointed out that Scotland, prior to the war, had been designated a depressed region so the country was in no position “to cater for immigrants”.

A resolution was then put forward for the “immediate repatriation” of all Polish forces.

There was an amendment from the floor, taking into account the stance of the British League for European Freedom, that the Polish troops should not be forced to return to Poland.

That was challenged by one spaker who stated: “If the amendment is adopted you will be seriously jeopardising the happiness of the country in not being able to provide employment and homes for our own people.”

That prompted a stern rebuke from a local minister, the Rev. G.J. Edwards, who said: “I do not stand in support of the Polish troops but I strongly deprecate the inhospitable and antagonistic attitude which has taken the place of a very friendly and harmonious relationship.”

The amendment went to the vote first, drawing 110 hands in support. No count was taken for the resolution given the show of hands indicated an overwhelming majority for the motion: “That the Leven Town Council follow the example of Peebles Town Council and pass a resolution urging the immediate repatriation of the Polish Forces in Scotland.”

Following that historic decision, it was agreed to recruit volunteers and organise a Levenmouth-wide petition to send the Poles home with the signatures being forwarded to the Secretary of State for Scotland.

As it was, forced repatriation did not come to pass, but the occasion did offer a valuable lesson, one that has been lost from local history. The fears and the sentiment expressed then still, unfortunately, have a resonance today.