The local islanders continually visited the wreck of Politician to unload whisky, even though it was in a hold filled with marine engine oil and seawater.

The cargo ship SS Politician was built by the Furness Shipbuilding Company between 19 September 1920—when she was laid down—and 1923 at the Haverton Hill shipyard, County Durham, England.

[16] In early February 1941 SS Politician left the Liverpool docks to travel to the north of Scotland, where she was to assemble with other ships to be convoyed across the Atlantic to the US and Caribbean.

[24][e][f] The whisky had been taken from bonded warehouses in Leith and Glasgow that had been damaged by German bombing, and was being shipped to the US to raise hard currency for the war effort; as an export product, none of the bottles bore an excise stamp.

[36][37] Lloyd's, the lifeboat from Barra, spent several hours searching the area south of the island in heavy mist before a report came in of Politician's siren, which had been heard north of Eriskay.

[46] Local customs officers considered that some whisky had already made its way onto the islands, and asked Kay to put a guard on the ship at night-time.

The islanders took a different view of salvage and considered that they did not "steal" any cargo from local wrecks, but instead talked of "saving" or "rescuing" it from the sea.

[52] Once the salvage crew had left the Politician, islanders from across the Hebrides, as well as boats from Scotland's west coast, engaged in what Hutchinson calls the "wholesale rescuing" of the whisky.

No seizures were made on Barra, but local police heard of large-scale selling of the whisky on the island and arrested four men, whom they charged with theft.

"[63] He also told Gledhill that he intended to step up his search efforts, and ensure that as many of the malefactors from Eriskay and South Uist were sent to prison for as long as possible.

[70][71] McColl and Gledhill wrote reports to their superiors that accused the looters of vandalism on Politician and widescale black-marketeering of the stolen whisky,[72] and claimed the local police were being bribed to ignore the situation.

[73] The journalists Adrian Turpin and Peter Day write that the outrage of the customs men should be taken "with a pinch of salt"; the organisation was in the midst of providing evidence for later prosecutions and was not neutral.

Hutchinson relates that the searches destroyed peat stacks, forced entry into people's homes and disrupted the innocent and guilty alike, "an unnecessary, disproportionately harsh harassment".

[74] Sources differ over the success of the raids: Swinson quotes Gledhill, who states that "wherever we went, we got tons of the stuff ... [At Lochboisdale, South Uist], it filled the cells, the police garage and the policeman's house.

[74] Hutchinson also quotes Gledhill, who says "The ineffective result was due to the fact that on the first day the local inspector of police refused to continue the search after lunchtime".

[77] The police did not work on the Sunday (the 8th), and those on Eriskay spent the day hiding or moving goods to better locations, waiting for a resumption of the raids the following week.

A storm blew up on Monday 9, so the mail boat could not carry McColl and his colleagues across, and by Tuesday the policemen had returned to the mainland to resume their normal duties.

One man was found not guilty, nine others were not proven—the Scottish legal verdict to acquit an individual but not declare them innocent—three were fined and 19 were incarcerated at Inverness Prison for terms ranging between 20 days and two months.

[72]The night the prison sentences were handed down, a hole was made in the roof of the shared garage where McColl's car was parked; paraffin was poured in and set alight.

[81] In September 1941 the whisky that had been salvaged by BISC was shipped to the mainland and put into locked railway carriages which had the excise seal placed on them.

[82] Relations between the police and Customs men became increasingly strained by late 1941, and Gledhill began to criticise the force in his reports back to London.

[m] He also wrote to William Fraser, the chief constable of Inverness-shire, to complain that customs were not being fully informed of all developments, nor of the total amount of whisky seized.

A permanent procurator fiscal, Donald Macmillan, had replaced his temporary predecessor, and Gledhill wrote to him to try and have the remaining cases heard under customs legislation.

They removed extraneous weight, patched the underwater holes, pumped compressed air into the hold, and waited until the weather conditions and tides were right.

The BISC's superintendent engineer on site refused to allow the towing to take place; he said that if there was bad weather on the route, or the sea was rough, then Politician could sink in deep water and never be recovered.

[97] Those islanders who were prosecuted were angered by what Hutchinson describes as "the perversion of natural justice, by the stain put on their characters and not least by the fact that each of them, members of possibly the most peaceable and law-abiding community on Britain, now had a criminal record".

The customs men were replaced with Captain Paul Waggett, an English officer of the Home Guard, who vainly seeks out the purloined whisky.

[106] In January 1991 the broadcaster Derek Cooper presented Distilling Whisky Galore!, an hour-long documentary on the Politician, the Ealing comedy film and attempts to salvage any remaining cargo.

Many of these were filled with sand from the local beach and turned into lamp bases before being sold in Edinburgh; the provenance was particularly interesting to American tourists who had seen the Ealing film.

[110] Several full bottles of whisky were found on the island when locations had been forgotten by those who buried them; sand dunes that changed shape with the wind or a new thatch roof being installed often uncovered a hidden cache.