This year is the 75th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Politician, the wreck that inspired the film Whisky Galore and brought worldwide fame to a tiny Hebridean island.

The Politician set sail for Jamaica on February 3, 1941, with a hold full of shoes, pianos, bicycles and 264,000 bottles of malt whisky.

It should have been an easy crossing, but two days into its journey the ship ran into stormy weather and foundered on a sandbank near the isle of Eriskay.

The ship's crew were rescued unharmed - and over the next few weeks, so were thousands of bottles of malt.

Under cover of darkness, islanders deprived of alcohol by wartime rationing filled rowing boats full of whisky and paddled it back to the islands. Only a few of the missing bottles were ever recovered.

'Guilty but not proven'

Ronald MacDonald was one of the first men aboard the SS Politician. His son, John Neill MacDonald, remembers sitting around their kitchen table talking about the wreck - a table he later learned had been taken from the dining room of the doomed ship.

His son said: "I was a teenager before I became aware of just how deeply involved my father was. Unbeknown to me, the evidence was in front of me for most of my childhood.

"The table my family ate from was square and supported by an ornate pillar rather than four legs.

"Years after it was thrown out I discovered that it was one half of the captain's table on the Politician that my father had sawn in half and taken home on one of his many trips out to the ship."

Mr MacDonald learned of the wreck from a crewman a few days after it ran aground and sailed out to the ship with two friends.

"They were the first islanders to 'salvage' the goods on board - not least a fair chunk of the quarter of a million bottles of whisky which the ship was taking to Jamaica," his son recalled.

"Most of the hundreds of bottles my father brought ashore were distributed among the local community on South Uist. One of the priests said: 'South Uist is an agricultural island but in 1941 nothing much agricultural was done'.

"The cargo was not confined to whisky. New bicycles could be seen around the island in the weeks after the sinking. Machetes intended for cutting vegetation in Jamaica were taken to cut tangle and peats.

"Jamaican currency was used to wipe oil off the hands of the salvagers as they removed the whisky."

Mr MacDonald was eventually taken to court over the theft of whisky from the Politician.

His son said: "The downside of the adventure was that some of the men caught by the excisemen were imprisoned for several weeks, a bit harsh considering the ship was sinking to the ocean floor and that the country had bigger priorities in the dark days of 1941.

"My father was taken to court but was found, as he described it, 'guilty but not proven'."

Buried treasure

Willie MacLeod was one of many islanders to benefit from the wreck of the Politician - despite being a member of an official salvage team sent out to recover goods from the ship.

The 93-year-old remembered: "I got a telegram from home telling me that I had to report in London to work on bomb damage repairs. I already had two or three bottles of whisky under the bed and and I put some in my case."

On his way home, Mr MacLeod's suitcase split open and he was forced to barter away two bottles to a passing taxi driver in exchange for a lift into Stornoway.

The wreck of the Politician still lies off the coast of Eriskay and two bottles recovered from the ship in the late eighties sold for more than £12,000 at auction in 2013. Another bottle ruined by seawater fetched £1400 in 1997.

Only eight full bottles are known to exist, but rumours of forgotten stashes persist.

Mr MacLeod added: "Some of the islanders who had taken whisky off the Politician and buried it couldn't remember where they hid it – I'm sure some of it is still buried there."

Whisky Galore

In 1949 the story of the SS Politician was turned into a hit film starring Basil Radford and Bruce Seton.

In Whisky Galore, the wily islanders of the of Great Todday and Little Todday salvage a huge haul of whisky from the SS Cabinet Minister, a massive cargo ship which is wrecked near their islands in a storm.

The Ealing comedy is now getting a modern remake with comedian Eddie Izzard as Captain Waggett, a home guard commander who tries to outsmart the islanders in a bid to reclaim the stolen whisky.

The remake, which began shooting in Portsoy in Aberdeenshire last summer, is set to be released later this year.