Category: Wider Achievement

The Bookends prize will be awarded for the first time at the 2024 Games.

This commemorative medal was designed by the P7 pupils of the school and will be awarded to past pupils of Taynuilt Primary for significant contributions to the village or The Games.

The ‘Bookends’ are two teachers – one in the here and now, and one who came to Taynuilt more than 100 years ago.  

Berni McMillan, Head Teacher of Taynuilt School is ‘now’, and Angus Murray, also Head Teacher of Taynuilt School, is ‘then’ – from 1921 to 1939. 

They are joining together (through Angus’s granddaughter who is jointly sponsoring the prize with Berni) to support the music and sporting traditions shared by the school and the village.

Mr Murray was born on the Island of Lewis and was one of the very first from the remoter parts of the island to go to University and to become a teacher.  He was a native Gaelic speaker, committed to the language and to the countryside, its names and traditions, as well a teacher who relished and sustained as wide a curriculum as possible in his school.  He fished the Awe (recording the names, in English and Gaelic, of all its fishing pools), chaired the Hall Committee, walked the hills and was Gaelic tutor to the Taynuilt Gaelic Choir as well as an indefatigable organiser of the annual school sports.

To find out much more about him, and about the school a hundred years ago, go to:

Angus Murray MA