A white-painted bench shines at you, and on the backrest it is painted in red: “The Millionaire Bench”. Some smile, others go straight over and sit on it – perhaps living out the dream of being a millionaire – if only for a short while.
Common to most of them is that very few of them actually know how the bench ended up there sometime in the early eighties.
On the quay at the Ship Expedition in Skrova there have been a couple of benches for many years. Ship’s clerk Rishatt bought these when the fisherman’s home, Havly, switched to chairs in the prayer hall. One of them is placed against the wall facing the harbor with a view of Kuholmen on the other side.
Painted blue and weathered, it stood there on a fine summer’s day in 1982, when a journalist from Billedbladet NU came ashore with the express boat. From “reliable sources” he had received information that there were between ten and twenty millionaires among the 250 inhabitants of this small island in the Vestfjord.
The visit ended in a three-page article in the now defunct weekly magazine.
In this one, the journalist could not resist jokingly insinuating that some of the millions might be kept in Switzerland.
On one of the benches on the quay, he gathered some of the inhabitants for photographs.
He wasn’t quite sure if they were all millionaires, but a nice photo was taken on the bench in front of the office window of the Ship Expedition. NU came out a couple of weeks later and the headline read “Millionaires on every knoll”, and at the local store the weekly magazine was quickly torn away. Thus, there was no turning back – the Millionaire Bench was a fact!
In late summer, members of the Vestfjord Youth Association began planning for the annual autumn revue.
A group of residents, young and old, had a brainstorming session ahead of this year’s performance, and it was indisputable that a feature about the millionaire’s bench had to be included.
Otto Nilsen’s melody from “På en grønnmalt benk i haven”, became the obvious choice of melody.
So during an evening’s pleasant get-together with a lot of laughter at a kitchen table at the home of one of the revue makers, the text “On a blue-painted bench on the quay” was created.
To get a nice stage picture, the revue gang borrowed the bench from the quay, red paint was bought for the letters, “MILLIONAIRE BENCH”.
The group of happy amateurs performed all the verses to the accompaniment of the Svolvær band “Cirianis” that had been brought in for the occasion.
And the audience laughed and clapped.
During the clean-up hour after the revue, some of the amateur actors were ready with blue paint. The letters were to be painted over, and the bench returned to the condition it was when it was loaned. But at one point or another, things got busy, and the bench was put back with the inscription still on.
Today, the blue bench is painted white, and stands there in its twenty-seventh year, often to the wondering gaze of visitors. With today’s denomination of money, there are many more people who can safely sit down and feel entitled to a rest on the Millionaire Bench in Skrova.
Text: Gøril Thrane, Photo: Remi MJ Eilertsen, Gøril Thrane
