A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Martin also tells us of various other superstitions from around the Clyde. Stones were used in the ballast of the Lochfyne skiffs as they were in many other areas. White stones were considered unlucky in both Kintyre and Ayrshire, these being referred to as ‘chuckies’ in that they were thrown overboard. A white handled knife was another no-no. But over on the east coast of Scotland it was deemed lucky to have a few white and red stones in the ballast as these were supposed to possess magical properties.16 In some communities it was bad luck to take ballast stones from one boat and put them into a new boat.

  Swan Vesta matches were deemed unlucky to have aboard by some simply by association with swans because they were neither sea birds nor land birds. When the swans were rarely encountered, the superstition was transferred just to the matches and there’s a tale of how a boy was sent off for matches to the local Dunure shop and when he came back the skipper saw that they were the taboo matches and threw them over the side.17

  Simply journeying to work and meeting certain people can result in fishermen turning round and going back home, refusing to set out to sea. Confront a priest or man of the cloth, a cat or certain women, especially those with red hair or physical deformities, and many fishermen would first attempt not to cross their path on the way to the boat and if they did, delay – or even postpone – their trip out. Martin mentions one fisherman passing a tramp and if seen or greeted would return home, sprinkle salt over his shoulder before setting out once more. Catherine Czerkawska recalls the Girvan chimney sweep Hughie Clark, who some regarded as blighting their day and notes that chimney sweeps generally tend to be blackened as ministers are dressed in black, which might explain their taboo given that the extremes of black and white have great significance in superstitious contexts.18

  The skipper is often the most superstitious aboard and he alone can delay the day’s fishing. Starting out on Friday is deemed unlucky, especially if the weather has delayed the fishing until then. ‘Crows don’t build on Friday’ they say.19 Neither should new boats be launched on a Friday. Mondays were bad days to some, as was the thirteenth of the month, although the peril of Friday the thirteenth is recognised throughout society. Don’t borrow things on a Monday either, though it has been said that fishing on a ‘bad’ day would often bring you a good catch if you dared venture out.20 A boat should never be turned against the sun when fishing, steaming or manoeuvring. Hatch boards should never be turned upside-down, as shouldn’t baskets, boxes and pond boards, as otherwise the boat itself might capsize. Eggshells should be crushed when throwing overboard or otherwise they will float along, following as ‘witches boats’. Another ‘witch’ superstition or ritual is the ‘burning out of the witch’ when fishing is bad. This involves lighting an oily rag and wafting it around all the nooks and crannies in the boat and shouting at the same time, chasing the witch and her bad luck away.

  Superstitions were also real for those left ashore. Women would not comb their hair at night when the menfolk were at sea for fear that they would be drowned with their feet entangled in it. Neither would they allow their men to wear clothes dyed with crotal, a lichen, because the belief was that crotal would go back to the rock from whence it had come.21

  Superstitions survived the end of the working life of a boat. In Llangwm, in southwest Wales, a fisherman there refused to part with one of the last small compass-net boats when the author asked about it, although it was already in a derelict state. He wanted it to rot away where it was. Martin recalls a story told by Donald MacVicar of Kames, where a fisherman left a perfectly good boat on the shore to rot rather than selling it and one explanation is that the fishermen believed they would live until the boat they have abandoned began to fall apart.22 When researching the history of the Lochfyne skiffs, the author remembers Neil MacDougall of Carradale telling him how one skiff his father built, the Clan Matheson, was scuttled off Plockton as the owner did not want to sell her on. Another MacDougall boat, the Clan MacDougall, CN9, was allowed to rot away on Port Righ beach, Carradale, a similar fate awaiting the Maggie MacDougall, CN65.23 This is one reason that few Lochfyne skiffs survived into the late twentieth century, although their light construction might have exacerbated the situation.

  Few superstitions involve luck and this is thought to be because fishing itself is basically insecure and dangerous and thus bad luck is more likely than the good variety. On the other hand, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, just because it is a dangerous job, they would be in need of more good luck. A coin under a mast was always a good omen and a John Dory left on top of the wheelhouse is considered lucky, though maybe not for the fish!

  Holiday-makers coming ashore after a short trip around the bay. Fishermen often made more money from this work than from fishing in the peak of the holiday season.

  Two things fishermen do learn are about the weather and local knowledge. Haloes around the moon are a sure sign of wind and various colourings in the clouds foretell of bad weather. However, as we’ve seen, they weren’t always right when recognising approaching bad weather. It is said that the fishermen of the haaf fishery in Shetland, and those from the north of Lewis, could interpret the weather by watching waves and how the mother wave came at them. Being out in a small open boat many miles from the sight of land meant they learned quick. Barometers were placed in various harbours in the nineteenth century so that these could contribute to warnings of gales to come.

  But it was their knowledge of the local area, gleaned from years of experience from fishing around the small coves and rocky reefs that was so useful. Many fishermen joined the local lifeboat crew after the introduction of life-saving boats in the early nineteenth century, both for this local knowledge and their seamanship qualities. This remains so even today when many a longshore fisherman is a member of the RNLI’s crew.

  We’ve already seen that fishing was never an occupation with set annual earnings, unlike other labouring jobs. This, too, remains the case today. The share system has been around for a long time even if some fishers did not benefit, as in the case of the truck system in outlying parts of Scotland. Seldom did a crew get a fixed wage even through a particular fishing season. Occasionally a hand might get an advance to join a crew but the share system ensured that the boat and its gear were paid for before the crew, and that the skipper received more than the boy at the bottom of the ladder (literally when redding the header rope!). Nevertheless, skippers and boat owners were able to earn huge amounts when the fishing was good and prices high. Areas of the country abound with grand houses that were built upon the backs of fish, and especially from the herring.

  There’s a belief among many parts of society that fishermen are huge drinkers of alcohol. It has been said that the vice of drunkenness is a stumbling block which fishermen are liable to fall over.24 These probably stem from the days when some were said to have been paid in whisky but are wholly exaggerated. Captain John Washington did find that the fishers of the east coast of Scotland did receive whisky but not in total payment, and he advocated this practice was ended. Others profess that they drink when the fishing is good from the profit and then, when it is bad, drink to drown their sorrows. Surely this is the case in many professions when the pay is erratic – princely at times of plenty and impoverishment at times of emptiness.

  However, having said that, the drink was obtainable in the days of trawling the North Sea under sail. Grog-ships, called ‘copers’ from the Dutch koper, to barter, were old fishing smacks coming from continental ports selling cheap liquor and tobacco. The fishermen were attracted to them with the promise of one drink to relieve the boredom and hard labour of fishing. But the liquor was often raw spirits and fishermen were sometimes poisoned by it, others acting in a violent way or even becoming demented. A ration of rum might be served in the Royal Navy, but the rum served here was called by the fishermen ‘chain lightning’ such was its effect. It was also one reason for the great loss of life.25

  In 1893 the North Sea Fishing Act made it illegal t
o sell alcohol to fishermen at sea, and for them to purchase it. The copers simply went elsewhere, though a few still worked around the North Sea. This fact alone encouraged the young missionary Ebenezer Mather to raise money to buy and fit out an old smack for trawling, and crew her with evangelists to spread the Christian word among the deep-sea fishermen. His ultimate aim was to have such a vessel among all the fishing fleets, which would be a floating church, a dispensary, library and temperance hall, according to James Dyson, and which Mather himself described as ‘a veritable anti-coper’. Thus the Ensign, his first vessel, set sail from Yarmouth on 7 July 1882 to the scorn of fishermen. But, contrary to those sceptical fishermen, Mather’s movement gathered pace when he bought duty-free tobacco at Ostend and sold it to the fishermen at the same price, under-cutting the copers. The fishermen were given a cup of tea aboard, clothing was supplied, first aid given out, songs sung and prayers said. Within two years the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen was born and by 1890 there were eleven vessels, the so-called Bethel Ships – preaching the message of God. Many fishermen, as we’ve seen, were God-fearing folk and it seems they didn’t need too much persuasion in some parts. Thus today’s Royal National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen evolved, an established institution that remains in the forefront of helping fishermen and their families at difficult times. Not only do they provide shelter, but on a daily basis they open their doors so that fishermen can meet, eat and shower at many venues dotted around British fishing ports. As a charity, they are financed wholly by donations, and make a massive contribution to the fortunes of fishermen everywhere.26

  Much of their work involves working with the bereaved families of missing fishermen. When a boat is lost and crew members die, the local branch of the RNMDSF comes to the rescue. A colleague volunteers to help and sometimes tells me about the work he does. A family needs comfort in many different ways – from purely financial to emotional help, from form-filling to dealing with funerals. Injured fishermen receive help in different ways though they are just as needy. A fisherman recently lost fingers in the winch and my colleague spent many an hour helping him to readjust to life ashore. The State doesn’t recognise urgency and sometimes it can take ages for restitution to occur. The Mission steps in as a buffer. Fishing, as we’ve seen, is a dangerous occupation and it is not always death that destroys a man’s earning capability.

  Nevertheless, fishermen do still drink though rarely at sea. Often, when back from several days or weeks at sea, and armed with a bunch of wages, he’ll hit the shore hard, pubs in fishing ports being renowned for their often rowdy behaviour. But who wouldn’t relax after spending hard days afloat without much except the monotonous routine that fishing can be. Look at the figures again for 1909 and we see that seventeen fishermen were killed returning to their vessel while another eight fell into the dock and most were presumably under the influence. This represents some 11 per cent of the total deaths of fishermen. This is almost double the percentage of deaths attributed to drink of the crews of seagoing trading vessels.27

  Fishermen have always been able to earn good wages at certain times (while at others they are awful). So, with good wages, they play hard, though dependency on drugs – especially class As – has become a major problem in some communities, just as they have in towns up and down Britain which are totally unattached to the stresses of fishing. That’s the nature of today’s modern world where fishermen have lost much of their former identity and as likely a fisherman can come from an inland town, attracted by the call of the sea, even though there’s no history there. Traditions linger through sentiment in many cases and these are fading very quickly, to the ultimate detriment of us all.

  Notes

  1 Emma Cardwell, ‘Invisible Fishermen, The Rise and Fall of the British Small Boat Fleet’, in Thomas Højrup and Klaus Schriewer (eds), European Fisheries at Tipping Point, Murcia, Spain, 2012.

  2 Peter Anson, Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast of Scotland, London, 1930.

  3 James G. Bertram, The Harvest of the Sea, London/Paisley, 1885.

  4 Stafford Linsley, Ports and Harbours of Northumberland, Stroud, 2005.

  5 Mike Smylie, Working the Welsh Coast, Stroud, 2005.

  6 Peter Anson, Scots Fisherfolk, Macduff, 1950.

  7 As quoted in Peter Frank, Yorkshire Fisherfolk, Chichester, 2002.

  8 William and Edward Finden, Ports and Harbours, London, 1838.

  9 Frank, op. cit., 2002.

  10 Smylie, op. cit., 2005.

  11 Mike Smylie, The Herring Fishers of Wales, Llanrwst, 1998.

  12 As quoted by Sally Festing, Fishermen, a Community Living from the Sea, Newton Abbot, 1977.

  13 Nelson Cazeils and Fanny Fennec, Il y a un siècle … Les Femmes et la Mer, Rennes, 2003. The book, although in French, has gorgeous illustrations and photographs of these women.

  14 Angus Martin, The Ring-Net Fishermen, Edinburgh, 1981.

  15 Catherine Lucy Czerkawska, Fisher-folk of Carrick, Glasgow, 1975.

  16 Walter Gregor, Notes on the Folk-lore of North-East Scotland, vol. 7 of Folklore Society Publications, 1881.

  17 Czerkawska, op. cit., 1975.

  18 Ibid.

  19 William Innes, ‘Superstitions’, in Fishing Boats, the magazine of the 40+ Fishing Boat Association, no. 11, 1998.

  20 Czerkawska, op. cit., 1975.

  21 Angus Martin, Fishing and Whaling, Edinburgh, 1995.

  22 Martin, op. cit., 1995.

  23 Personal comminucation.

  24 ‘Fisher-Folks’, in The Highland Magazine, Oban, no. 7, September 1885.

  25 John Dyson, Business in Great Waters, London, 1977.

  26 Dyson gives a full account of the Bethel ships and the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen.

  27 HMSO, Return of the Deaths of Seaman and Fishermen reported to the Board of Trade in the Year ended 30th June 1909, London, 1910.

  15

  WOMEN IN FISHING

  In 1861 there were 42,571 fishermen and boys engaged in the herring fishery in Scotland and that part of England over which the Scottish Fishery Board had jurisdiction. Something like 900 million herrings were caught that year and much of this fish was landed into Wick. All these herrings were either salt-cured or smoked, and for this an army of herring lassies was employed to gut the millions of fish.

  Drawn mostly from the coastal villages of Scotland, women and girls alike flocked to the towns and villages where the fishing boats were landing their vast amounts of the fish. In 1862 it is said that there were 3,500 herring lassies – as they became known – gutting 50 million herring over a two-day period and more than 800,000 barrels were cured in total that year in Scotland.1

  These girls, leaving their districts probably for the first time, followed the fleets down the coast, from the spring and early summer fishery off northeast Scotland, perhaps up to Shetland to begin with, and gradually down the east coast to the autumnal fishery off East Anglia. Some went west, travelling to the west coast, the Outer Hebrides and over to Ireland. For example, Annie Watt, born in Peterhead, worked at Ardglass for seven weeks and arrived in Gorleston, near Great Yarmouth in 1908 for the first time. Often she then returned to Ireland for the winter fishery after maybe a few days at home over Christmas. Like many of these Scots girls, she eventually married and settled in Yarmouth.2

  Many young herring lassies came from Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides where work was hard to come by. Mrs Mary Keating was one such woman who travelled south from there in the 1920s and worked various herring fisheries until she arrived in Passage East, in County Waterford, working at the Fish House built by Arthur C. Miller in 1901. Mary eventually settled in Passage East and married, her daughter Peggy O’Neill (née Keating) living in nearby Dunmore East.3

  Others went over to the Isle of Man and parts of Wales. In 1912, the year before the peak of the herring fishery, there were some 10,800 women and girls on the move from Scotland, mostly from the Highlands of Scotland but not exclusively so. 1913 saw 854 million herring bei
ng landed into East Anglia in just fourteen weeks, almost all of which was gutted by the herring lassies, though it is impossible to estimate how many lassies were working in Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The nearest estimate is that 2,400 girls worked the Shetland season that year and that 1,600 of these later travelled to these two towns, although there were most likely to have been other girls coming from other directions.4 However you look at it, this annual migration of this female workforce lasted for almost a century and is unique in British history on such a scale. The 1960s seemed to have brought the phenomenon to an end, when, in 1962, it was reported that only a handful of girls – less than a dozen – were still at work and by 1968 there were none.

  So how did the system work? It was down to the curers to find their own workforce and many of the new girls were recruited by agents of the different curers who travelled around the fishing villages before the season started. These agents tended to recruit whole crews, each crew consisting of two gutters and one packer and on signing up for the season’s work each girl would receive an initial payment – the so-called ‘arles’ from the Gaelic a earlais – which was around ten shillings at the turn of the century. By the 1920s this was three pounds and it guaranteed that the crew would stay with that curer for the whole of that season. Most of the girls were young and some started at the tender age of fourteen, though by the time war had ended in 1945 the average age of the women was much higher.

  Once the arles was paid and the job confirmed, each girl would then pack everything she needed for a period away from home that could last several months. In went workwear, her Sunday best, bedding, the tools of the job (knives and sharpening stone), knitting needles and wool, toiletries, a plate, mug and cutlery and, finally, a bible into a wooden trunk or chest often called a ‘kist’. Travel was arranged by the curer or his agent who would supply train or boat tickets. Some even chartered special trains just for their lassies down to East Anglia, these departing from towns such as Fraserburgh, Oban, Mallaig, Kyle of Lochalsh and Aberdeen.5 Sometimes the luggage went by lorry. George Davidson who worked for A. Bruce & Co., fish curers of Fraserburgh in the 1930s, recalled that the kists went down to Yarmouth on the back of the company’s Austin lorry at 40mph while the gutting crews went by train.6