260,000 bottles of first class whisky.
RE: The name of the boat in the movie ?
RE: The name of the boat in the movie ?
Apparently was the fictitious S.S. CABINET MINISTER:
Mackenzie, Compton Whiskey Galore!
Mackenzie’s uproarious World War 2 “home front” tale (well, the Outer Hebrides were part of Britain’s home front!) opens in Feb. 1943 and focuses upon the intensely suffering residents of two small Outer Hebrides islands (the fictitious Great Todday and Little Todday, modeled, it seems, upon the very real islands of North and South Uist) – suffering because, in the wake of strict wartime rationing, there’s nary a drop of whisky to be found on either island. Fate lends a kindly hand, though, when a heavy fog falls upon the sea approaches to the islands and a freighter (the fictitious S.S. CABINET MINISTER) bound for America strikes an outcropping of rocks and has to be abandoned by her officers and crew. The seafaring islanders have harvested flotsam from the Atlantic for generations, but this time they’ve struck the equivalent of Scottish gold: 50,000 cases of expensive, bonded whisky being shipped to the States as part of Britain’s Lend-Lease payments. The islanders – mainly older men and boys since most of the area’s young men are serving their country in the Merchant Marine – lose no time in “harvesting” the CABINET MINISTER’s bounty and then lead officious government administrators on a merry chase as they sequester the liquid booty all over the islands.
Mackenzie’s fictious S.S. CABINET MINISTER incident was inspired by the very real wartime stranding of the freighter S.S. POLITICIAN off Eriskay Island in the Hebrides. Like Mackenzie’s CABINET MINISTER, the POLITICIAN’s cargo included over 264,000 bottles of Scotch whisky – many of which found their way into homes on the islands of Barra, South Uist and North Uist. Whisky Galore was turned into a hilarious Ealing Studio’s motion picture in 1949 starring Joan Greenwood, Basil Radford (as a Col. Blimp-ish Sassenach) and a young Gordon Jackson. Compton Mackenzie himself had a small part in the film as the captain of the grounded S.S. CABINET MINISTER.
The novel was later published in the United States under the alternate title Tight Little Island:
Tight Little Island. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. 339 p
K.