On 10 May 1930 the people of St Kilda sent a collective letter to William Adamson, the Secretary of State for Scotland, requesting that they should be evacuated from their home. By the end of August that year the evacuation was completed and the process of resettlement on the Scottish mainland had begun. The abandonment of St Kilda is sometimes described as one of the few occasions when the ending of a community has taken place in a voluntary fashion. We will see, however, that while the adult members of the St Kilda community came to a unanimous decision that it would be right to leave many of them were in fact reluctant to sign the letter. Behind the decision, moreover, lay a complex pattern of social changes over a long period of time that had transformed a stable and contented community into one that saw no future for itself.