John Peterson

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John (Jack) Peterson, writer and photographer.

Born on the 23rd of October 1894, at the Schoolhouse, Gruting, Jack was the oldest son of John Scott Peterson, the schoolmaster there. His mother was also a teacher, Christina Ann McInnes, from Logie in Perthshire. After being wounded in World War 1, he returned to Shetland and worked as a photographer and writer, producing a number of books. He was radicalised during the war, and was a Communist sympathiser for the rest of his life. He died in 1972, and left an archive of over 8,000 images. His poetry has never been collected. He also left an unpublished novel about a Shetlander in Soviet Russia, now in the Shetland Museum and Archives. His sister Emily also published, under the name E. O'H. Milne.

"A young friend of Haldane Burgess and sharing his interest in poetry and politics was Jack Peterson … He first came into prominence as a First World War poet writing under the pen-name of Private Pat. His first book (in English) Roads and Ditches reflected his experiences in the war where he was wounded in action. They are, for the most part, bitter, angry poems showing intense disillusionment at the horrors and waste of war. Streets and Starlight published in 1923 is a mellower book which contains some poems in the dialect. But ‘Seine-netters’ written in the 1960s shows best his skill in the old tongue …” Laurence I. Graham, ‘Shetland Literature and the idea of community’ in Shetland’s Northern Links: Language and History, (Edinburgh 1996)

“ … The interwar years were a depressing period in Shetland letters, as in so much else. The only bright spots were the work of two socialists: John Nicolson, and Jack Peterson, whose Roads and Ditches and Streets and Starlight came out in the 1920s. Then even Peterson fell silent (he only re-emerged as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, incidentally producing his best Shetland dialect work then). The twenties and thirties were an era when Shetland dialect writing, if it appeared at all, was slapstick (cf. Joseph Gray’s 'Lowrie'), or grossly sentimental … " Brian Smith, ‘Shetland poetry since the war’, The New Shetlander 171

“ … It has been said that Shetland poetry too often evades reality for the cosiness of sentiment and nostalgia. The accusation could never be applied to the poetry of John Peterson. Whether writing about the corpse-littered land of the Western Front or of the Shetland Crofters riddling from dross a residue of soil he faced the reality and wrote of what he saw … “ John J. Graham, 'Seine Netters by John Peterson: an appreciation', The New Shetlander 212

WORKS:

Roads and Ditches, as Private Pat, Lerwick, 1920.

Streets and Starlight, Erskine MacDonald, 1923.

Shetland: a photographer’s notebook, London (Lindsay Drummond) 1948.

Shetland: a picture, in verse and photography, 1966

Shetland Notebook Number Two, Shetland Library, 1985