businessman and crofter

born: March 4th, 1937

died: August 3rd 2018

Donald Joseph Peteranna, who has died aged 81, developed a range of businesses on Uist, while continuing to run the family croft.

Known to all as DJ, he was born in Garryhallie, South Uist, the second oldest with five brothers and his sister Kathy, to Mary Kate Steele, a housekeeper and John, crofter and builder.

During the war years everything was a little scarce, but on Uist people were a bit better off than many others. Most people had their own milk, butter, eggs, potatoes, vegetables and lamb. Of course, there was rationing for luxuries like sugar and tea.

His father would manage to buy half a bullock at the sales and split the carcass, always sharing it out among the neighbours. There was no running water and no electricity to run a freezer so the meat would be salted in barrels to preserve it.

School was not important to him and he preferred to be working with his father with the sheep, cattle and horses. But on his first day in Daliburgh School in 1942, he was given a desk to share with Ronnie Morrison, they got on well and went through all their school years together.

On one occasion, watching bricklayers at work, they decided that that was what they wanted to do. This changed a couple of months after that, the weather turned cold and – seeing plumbers working at the school with blowlamps which gave out quite a heat – they decided that that was the career for them.

DJ's headmaster encouraged this, feeling that, as most of the island didn’t have mains water, there was a good future for a plumber there.

DJ left school at the age of 15 and took up an apprenticeship in welding, fitting, shipwrighting and plumbing. He started working with a company called John Crawford in the new Glasgow housing schemes of Ruchazie, Barlanark and Easterhouse. Wages were under £3 a week, out of which they paid digs of £2 a week and had to buy and launder their own boiler suits which did not leave much for anything else.

In 1954, at a dance in the old Balivanich gym, he met Patricia Brogan who was on holiday with her friends. They were engaged for about a year and a half before getting married at St Margaret’s, Kinning Park, Glasgow on the 26th of November 1957.

He had been called up on national service before this and spend three and a half years in the Scots Guards. After passing out he was stationed at Wellington Barracks in London and carried out duties at Buckingham Palace, St James Palace and Windsor Castle. Later he was stationed near Dusseldorf in Germany before he was demobbed at the end of 1959.

He started with the gas board in Glasgow, as an area fitter, before moving back to Uist and settling in Daliburgh. In the later sixties his father split the croft and he built the house that has been the family home for over 50 years since.

He worked with Mitchells building the Hebridean rocket range before going out on his own. One of his first jobs was working on the North Ford causeway – a challenging job given the logistics of moving equipment and materials.

Later he was joined by his brothers James, Donald Roderick, John Ewan and Angus. This was the beginning of Uist Builders (Construction) Ltd (UBC), which he founed, and which went on to grow steadily through the islands and expand onto the mainland. At UBC’s peak they employed around 400 men including 50 apprentices.

Daliburgh crossroads was a popular meeting place in his younger days and when the doctor’s house and surgery came up for sale his offer was accepted and building work commenced on the Borrodale Hotel which opened 40 years ago and was run for many years by his late brother Charlie. The Dark Island Hotel in Benbecula followed a few years later and the Creagorry Hotel joined the Isles Hotel Group after that.

DJ never said no when someone approached him looking for work or needing a break and that respect worked both ways with the many, many island workers, that helped take the businesses forward, often taking on ventures that had never been done in the islands before.

He was awarded the Honorary Testimonial of the Royal Humane Society after an incident in 1968. After mass on a Sunday afternoon in February, he was with a group of friends, shooting ducks from a small boat off Lochboisdale pie when young Norman Campbell fell in the water. His uncle, Neil Campbell immediately dived in after him buut seeing the two of them were in trouble DJ tied a rope to his waist and went in. He managed to get Norman back into the boat safely, but Neil tragically lost his life.

DJ was forty years old before he had his first real holiday touring America with Pat. On this trip his visited the Rotunda at Capital Hill, Washington D.C. On display there, is a replica of the Magna Carta, which sits on a slab of pegmatite that was presented to the United States by Britain to celebrate their bicentennial in 1976.

DJ himself, with others, had removed this rock from Ardivachair, Uist, which was the nearest accessible point to the States and at 300,000 million years old, represents the time that the two continents were joined together.

DJ was lucky enough to have a long busy active working life and enjoyed good health for nearly all of it. He continued the traditions of sheep, cattle, potatoes and peats and liked to see families work together and eat together.

He is blessed with six children: Iain, Stephen, Patricia, Donald, Sheila and Colin, 26 grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren for granted for whoom he did everything he could to give them a good start in life.

He was very, very proud of the tradesmen that he trained and the work they produced across Scotland.