Joan Grigsby
JOAN GRIGSBY was born in Hampshire in 1909. A love of the sea was evident early in her life – many journeys and many reports of them led to a blossoming journalistic career. Her first book, Longshore and Down Channel, was published in 1932, the year after her working trip to Shetland. That trip was commemorated in her second and most famous book, An Island Rooing, published in 1933. A dashing air pilot and squadron-leader, Peter Bryer, wrote her a letter of appreciation soon after their publication; she married him in 1934, and they went on to have two sons. She combined married life with further sea adventures and travel, publishing several more books, including works on yachting, cookery at sea and local history. She died six weeks after her husband, in 1994, at the age of 84.
Walmer titles by this author
Introduced by Mary Blance
In April 1931, a young English sailor was sitting in a café in London, attempting to persuade a documentary film-maker that she was the perfect assistant for a stint of filming on a remote Shetland islet. Joan Grigsby was the applicant, with boat-handling skills and sterling practical capacities. Jenny Brown (later Gilbertson) was the film-maker, beginning her first shoot in a beloved location. Grigsby got the job…
An Island Rooing documents not only this brief early summer stay on the Isle of Stenness, but also Grigsby’s further solo adventures right through the season: staying with a crofting family in Heylor, and sampling the period of calling the sheep in from the hills, lambing, removal of their fleeces by hand (the rooing of the title); setting the tatties for the new crop, and hearing many stories around the fire at night about Shetland history and major events, including several tragic accounts of shipwreck; heading to Lerwick to explore the knitwear and fishing industries, including first-hand experience of being part of the crew of a drifter seeking their next big catch; befriending the gutting women onshore and learning that deceptively difficult skill.
Grigsby’s style is fluent, adventuresome and direct, both in terms of how she treats the world, and how she writes. This freedom and honesty shapes, in this her second book, a narrative full to brimming with vigour and character. An Island Rooing was first published in 1933.
NORTHUS SHETLAND CLASSICS Myndins / memoir stream, volume 2
PUBLICATION: March 25, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7638700-4-8 paperback