How do Scottish honesty boxes work and who uses them? : NPR

Scott Detrow, host:

The boxes of honesty are a long and rich Scottish tradition. You will find them along the rural roads, at the end of the aisles, next to the farms or outside in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes they can be a swinging wooden cabinet filled with a homemade jam. Other times, an abandoned phone full of cabbage or leaks or kale or perhaps chicken.

What they all have is a price list and an implicit understanding that if you want a shortbread or a dozen eggs or something else, you will leave money in the honesty box. No one is there to look at you. It is a thing of confidence. Today, the sisters of the kitchen, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, take us on tour of the boxes of honesty of Scotland.

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Unidentified person # 1: A box of honesty is like a magical little thing that is next to the road in rural Scotland. They are quite childish. You are not expecting yourself to see animals or something like that or Easter eggs. And in them, they are full of purchasing, and you leave money. There is no one who will check you. Previously, it was eggs, especially – so he simply developed and grew up. You get shortbread, trays, a Scottish tablet – you know, this super sweet, destructive, delicious – a lot of knitted things, a lot of apples. Anything that can be cultivated in the west of Scotland, you will unlock it in the box of honesty.

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Unidentified person # 2: (laughs).

Annie: You have an homemade apple chutney, a shortbread tray for six pounds, a Gigha home tablet (PH) – A traditional Scottish school cake. Yeah. The nod of my son’s head. He is 5 years old and he obtained part of this at school. And a lemon drizzle – Each property has a price. Just get money in the box because it’s a box of honesty. So I put 20 pounds and I take my change of 10 pounds. There is a lot of money in there, so I suppose that others do the same.

My name is Annie and I am here visiting Gigha with my family. We are from Northumberland in northeast England. And there are a lot of honesty boxes there, in fact. When you are in a place as rural as it in Scotland, there is respect for the local community, to use the honesty box as the locals would like. There are a lot of people who want to stay with this kind of morality of trust.

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Nicky Brown: I was about to get the eggs of the hens to put in the box.

Here, girls. Who posed this morning?

Older girls – You can see that they just made fun. This is why they do not have many feathers on some of them. I’m Nicky Brown. My husband, Pete, has just left the island to take a bull on the market. We are at Clachaig Farm on the island of Arran.

We don’t have much to put in the box earlier because we have just planted vegetables, leeks, kale, all the brassicades and beets, peas, beans, pumpkins, zucchini.

My eldest son-in-law came to stay and said you have so many cabbage. Why don’t you sell some? I went, oh, no, nobody will want to buy our vegetables. And that’s where it started. Just a small box at the end there. It is an old top of plastic ice cream. And people put their money in there and take the change if they need it.

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Brown: I’m sure things could disappear. Well, when is happening if it is the strange cabbage? I firmly believe that 99% of people are honest. If you trust people, then they are honest with you, especially.

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Mark Cousins: Very rarely, people are dishonest. I very rarely think, I suppose. We cannot be too romantic or sentimental on this subject. You know, in a city like Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, there is a lot of poverty, a lot of poverty, a lot of social deprivation (pH), you could not leave a box of money seated there because people will take because they need money to feed their children or to feed their drug habits or something else.

My name is Mark Cousins. I am a filmmaker. I live here in Edinburgh. When you go to the western islands where you saw these boxes of honesty, there is a less extreme difference between rich and poor and that means that very few people are so desperate for five pounds that they will take it from your box. So I think this is one of the practical reasons why money is not cut all the time.

Unidentified person # 3: box of honesty – You are counting on the honesty of people. You come to Gigha, you put your 15 pounds in the small wooden box, you connect in the book to say, my name is John, and I paid 15 pounds, then go play your golf course and play as much or as little golf as you wish, from first light to light.

Unidentified person N ° 4: John Bannatyne.

Unidentified person # 3: He is in the wheelhouse. He is at the wheelhouse.

Unidentified person # 4: It is the man who takes care of the golf course – he cuts the grass, dyed the greens, puts everything away. In his free time, during his week’s leave of the boat, that’s what he does.

John Bannatyne: I am John Bannatyne. I am the secretary of the Gigha Golf Club of Gigha. I am also the skipper of the ferry which goes from the Kintyre peninsula. When I do not drive the ferry and I have to take free time, I volunteer on the golf course of nine holes on Gigha. We continue the tradition of volunteering so that the inhabitants of Gigha have the opportunity to play golf.

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James: When you arrive in a place like this in Scotland, there is no clubhouse as such. As you can see, it’s a hangar, literally a garden shed. They do not have the funds to provide a clubhouse. And many of them have boxes of honesty, and it is based on people who put their money. And everyone respects it, and it works.

Here by playing golf, as it should be – I am James. I am here on the island of Gigha.

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Scott Eland: Ah.

I am Scott Eland from Portland, Oregon. My goal is to play all golf courses in Scotland, and I don’t think it will ever happen. We started northern northern northern that you could go. It was a one-way road for about an hour and a half, and no one was up there. No staff, nothing, just – it was almost like a former bus stop. We put five pounds in a mailbox, and it’s a matter of honor, then you will walk nine holes, and you have finished.

In Ireland, we went to the most distant golf course in Ireland, and it was exactly the same thing, The Honor Golf. Each family of the city playing golf is awarded a certain hole to mow and take care. And you could say because some holes were better than others. Some people had a talent.

Charles Colin MacLeod Currie: My name is Charles Colin Macleod Currie. My family has been in this neighborhood in Blackwaterfoot for over 300 years. My grandfather provided eggs. He also passed a milk here. He had an old Land Rover really beaten. The doors were not suitable. And when I was a little boy, we were in charge of milk and go to the golf course first, then come here and deliver milk to each house.

Agriculture was a very difficult life. The honesty box would occur if you get an excess product and you cannot set up a store. People would think of flying as totally against lifestyle. And you are in a local community, so if things were stolen, finally, someone discovered who did it and you would be completely cut.

Catherine Anne Macphee: My younger sister, Holly (PH), has just opened her first box, so it’s bright pink. It was at the end of my parents’ conduct, and he says Holly’s Box. She has a QR code at the door, and there will just be a box there to put the money. She advertises Facebook. She has also created her own Instagram page, as many others do, so you can hold both, as, which is this week. She makes muffins, jams, pantyhose caramel pudding, millionaire shortbread – still popular by the Scottish.

My name is Catherine Anne MACPHEE (PH). I am an archivist and activist of the island of Skye. The boxes of honesty seem to have exploded in the past 10 years in places like Skye and other Hebrides islands. You see them everywhere. Well, it’s really nice to see one at the end of the family home.

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Unidentified person # 5: Some people might think that boxes of honesty come from the past, from different age, a simpler age, a more honest age. But I would say it is a future thing too. From the Internet and Covid, many more people can live in rural communities, and these boxes of honesty are small embroidered edges for their lives.

Unidentified person # 6: People are honest. Most people are honest. The fact that you offer them something and trust their honesty makes them even more honest. I think it’s vital. The company will collapse if you cannot trust the people you are there.

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Detrow: “The boxes of honesty of Scotland” were produced by the sisters of the kitchen with Mark Buell and George Bull. It was mixed by Jim McKee. You can hear more stories of the kitchen on their podcast, “The Kitchen Sisters present”.

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