The Scarp Rocket Post Disaster

Isle of Scarp, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

In 1934 a German inventor tried to deliver post from Harris to the Isle of Scarp by rocket. The rocket exploded on launch, scattering 1,200 letters across the Sound of Taransay. Both islands remember it.

The Isle of Scarp is a small island off the western coast of Harris, separated from the larger island by a narrow strait — the Sound of Scarp — about a quarter-mile wide. It supported a small Gaelic-speaking community of perhaps a hundred people from the medieval period until the last family left in 1971. The strait, though narrow, was famously difficult to cross safely in winter, and the Scarp community was frequently cut off from medical care, the post, and the school on Harris. In 1934 a German engineer named Gerhard Zucker — at the time touring Britain promoting his rocket-mail system — proposed to demonstrate the technology by delivering the Scarp post across the strait by gunpowder-rocket. The Royal Mail, encouraged by the Postmaster General, sanctioned a trial. Special commemorative envelopes were printed and 1,200 letters were addressed for the rocket. The launch took place on 28 July 1934. The rocket detonated on the launch frame, scattering letters in every direction across both islands and the sea. A second attempt the following day cleared the launch frame but exploded in mid-air about halfway across the strait, depositing a further blackened scatter of mail in the sea. Both lots of letters were eventually recovered by Scarp and Harris families with boats and patience over the following days. About 800 of the surviving letters were eventually delivered, scorched but legible. The remaining envelopes — which had not been damaged enough to fail and which had reached their addressees by official mail — became highly collectible. A Scarp rocket-mail cover today fetches several hundred pounds at auction. The folkloric overlay is mild and good-natured. Scarp tradition says that the rocket explosions woke "something" beneath the strait that had been sleeping for a thousand years, and that Scarp's eventual depopulation thirty-seven years later was the price. The Harris tradition is more sceptical and tends to focus instead on Zucker himself, who was deported as an undesirable alien shortly afterwards on suspicion of working for German military intelligence (he was; the post was a cover for ballistic research). The remnant of his launch frame, partly buried in sand, is still on the Scarp shore.