Ernest Marwick was born 1915 in Evie, Orkney. He started off working on the family farm, but went on to become a distinguished scholar specialising in folklore, local history, and poetry. Additionally, he went into broadcasting and writing and editing. In 1960 he founded the first local radio programme Town and Country with the BBC. The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland was published in 1975 and he then went on to collect and assemble The History of the Orkney People in the Nineteenth Century. He died in 1977.