‘They’d never seen a car or a TV’: The people evacuated to the UK from the world’s most remote inhabited island in 1961

But on 10 October 1961, a sudden volcanic eruption blasted the islanders out of their splendid isolation and into the industrialised modern world. “We heard the rumbles first, then the ground just automatically cracked… Then the smoke and the fire started coming out the ground,” one of them told the BBC in a 1998 film. Another, Mary Swain, said that she’d run to her husband and shouted, “Jump up quick, Fred, the Earth is opening!”