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
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