A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Once the crews had arrived at the fishing port they would be allotted lodging with a family or in a boarding house at best, though in the more outlying fishing stations such as in Orkney and Shetland, or on the west coast of Scotland, they were often housed in wooden huts built for the purpose. These were usually very basic accommodation and the girls would have a small stove to cook on. In the bigger ports the landlady would often cook the food provided by the girls as part of the service. Up to the First World War, lodging cost somewhere in the region of 3s 6d a week. Such was the constant stink of fish about the girls that most landladies removed the carpets before the start of the season, replacing these with straw mats which could be thrown out at the season’s end. It was not uncommon for three girls to share one bed. Tradition has it that they were often woken up at five o’clock in the morning with a bang on their door and the cry ‘Get up and tie your fingers’, a reference to the ‘cloots’ or bandages with which they wrapped their fingers, tied on with bits of old rag, to protect them from cuts and the salt. They dressed in warm clothes to counter the often cold windy spaces they worked in and their outerwear consisted of rubber boots and oilskin aprons.

  Work started early in the morning when the first boats came in, though Trevor Lummis notes that sometimes they worked through the night, ‘from 10 am to 4 o’clock the next morning’.7 The herring was carried from the boat by the labourers and placed into the long trough called a ‘farlane’ where it was roused in salt by the coopers who would otherwise be busy making barrels. The girls stood at the farlane and gutted – or ‘gypped’ – the herring at great speed, using their small, sharp knife. In one easy movement they inserted the knife into the belly, and with a quick twist, the guts and gills came out and dropped into a basket. The herring was then thrown into one of five tubs which, when full, were neatly packed into more barrels in a very neat way, the herring dark side up on the bottom layer, and alternatively afterwards, each layer being roused in salt, until the top layer with the silver belly up. The barrel was sealed and left for several days before being opened and the brine poured off. By this time the herring would have shrunk as its moisture was removed, and the barrel was topped up from another cured barrel, before being resealed and the brine added through a bung hole. It was eventually branded under the eye of the Fisheries Officer using a brass stencil and the various Scottish Crown brands were recognised throughout Europe as guarantees of quality.

  Many of the best girls gutted at the rate of one a second, i.e. sixty a minute or 3,600 an hour. Thus a crew of two gutters working up to twelve hours a day could rack up a total of over 85,000 a day, though in reality the figure was probably nearer 60,000, taking into account the time to move the baskets to the barrels and breaks. With a barrel holding between 700 and 1,000 fish, this meant that some seventy-five barrels could, in theory, be filled a day, though it would be difficult to maintain this over a long period. However, one report does state that one crew produced 288 barrels in four working days of twelve hours each when the fishing was ‘big’ and the crew ‘good’.8

  Wages were generally paid hourly rate with extra barrel money and a living allowance paid on top. Gracie Stewart was 19 when she was photographed topping up a barrel at Lowestoft in 1904. She was from Buckie on the Moray Firth and she later married and settled in Lowestoft and had two sons and a daughter. However, at the time of the photograph her granddaughter estimated she was earning a halfpenny an hour and received another ten shillings at the end of the season. Contemporary evidence suggests a weekly wage of between 8s and 17s 6d and an extra hourly rate for topping up the barrels of between 3 and 6d. Before 1914 the average take-home pay was in the region of ten shillings which had risen to one pound ten years later. The arles was in addition to these figures and it is said that the girl responsible for packing the barrels negotiated with the curer over the rates of pay and other engagement terms.9

  Herring lassies at work at the farlane. The number of barrels in the background shows the massiveness of the industry. Barrel-making – or cooperage – was itself a huge business.

  Gracie Stewart filling herring barrels with brine. This is one of the most enduring photos of the curing process and contrasts the young woman’s beauty and radiance with the smell, the grime and the gloupy liquid of the job at hand.

  Sunday was never worked and the previous Saturday night was for dancing or going to the pictures and work finished early so that they could get back to their lodgings to get ready. A night at the pictures cost fourpence, according to Annie Watt.10 Any spare time in between was spent knitting. Sunday were reserved for religious observance and Sunday schools, and a visit to the Fishermen’s Mission at four o’clock to listen to the weekly fishermen’s singing. Their best dresses, carefully kept in their kists for the occasion, were brought out while their working clothes were hung out to dry after a morning’s washing.

  The annual report of the Chief Inspector of factories and workshops of 1901 was severely critical of the working conditions of the herring lassies. Miss Adelaid Anderson reported that 3,000 women in Fraserburgh the previous year were housed in unfurnished sheds where barrels were stored during the winter. They would, according to her, ‘bring everything – bedding, cooking utensils, and any furniture they need. In this room they eat, sleep, entertain friends, and perform their domestic duties, with what I can only consider marvellous harmony.’ In Yarmouth they worked on unpaved, undrained, uncovered plots of land where the soil was awash with decaying fish.

  Not surprisingly, then, strikes were common. When the rates of pay shrank after the First World War when markets disappeared and some curers went bankrupt, the women downed their knives until the curers re-established reasonable rates. Rest rooms, canteens and first aid stations, as well as maximum working hours, were negotiated between the curers and the factory inspectorate after that war. Rest rooms were for use when work was slack and canteens ensured meals could be taken within the time allowed. Previously ‘diet time’ was not allowed and they had to eat on the hoof, grabbing a watery cup of tea and a few biscuits if they were lucky during the day. First aid points about the curing yard also provided cures for splinters from barrels and salt sores. In 1931 they went on strike again to insist on a minimum weekly wage and, in Yarmouth, agreed to fifteen shillings. Five years later, 4,000 lassies, led by Maria Gott of Rosehearty, went on strike again to regain a shilling for each barrel packed after the rate had been reduced to 10d two years previously.11 They timed the strike to coincide with the busiest time of the season, stopping work for three days before their demands were met. Even though they were not members of any union, and lacked organisational skills, the way the ringleaders moved from yard to yard, spreading the word, was testament to their determination. The curers stopped buying fish so that the fishermen couldn’t sell their catch and within hours the industry ground to a halt and was totally paralysed. The amazing thing is that it took three days for the curers to capitulate.12

  The herring lassie phenomenon has perhaps attracted more nostalgia than any other aspect of the herring fishing trade, more so than the boats and fishermen themselves. The idea of roving hordes of what were on more than one occasion described as ‘buxom’ women (quite unfairly in this author’s opinion as some were extremely beautiful women as in the case of Gracie Stewart), coming from the coastal and highland regions of Scotland, was unheard of at the time, and the air of pride with which they undertook their arduous task has not failed to impress historians and writers alike. Often it is said how they would sing while at work, and when they were not working, they clustered in groups and the only sound heard was the rattle of knitting needles accompanied by the occasional laughter. That they were an unusual band of folk is accounted for by the fact that they invariably came from fishing communities which, as we’ve seen, were already set apart from the rest of society. Yet they were generally a lively bunch, dancing often while singing when not working.13 Annie Watt also tells us how they would sing and dance while travelling down from S
cotland on the train.14

  In conclusion, the term ‘fisher lassies’ is worth noting because it wasn’t just the herring that these young women worked at, even if this was where the majority were. Take canning, for instance: Morton’s canning factory in Lowestoft employed dozens of girls in the 1920s. Although much of what they pickled was Dutch vegetables out of the herring season, the company had come down from Aberdeen in 1901 to cure and can herrings. A year later the plant was the probably largest canning factory in Britain. Herring lassies worked on a separate pickling plot barrelling fish while on the main site some 20 million herrings were canned. Girls worked in teams in a range of buildings on the site which were devoted to canning. These contained presses, formers, seamers and a lacquering shed where cans of all shapes and sizes were manufactured.15 Arthur Collins worked there after the Second World War:

  Yes, we had rows o’ girls packin’ cauliflower, gherkins and silverskin onions in the jars. We had our own pickle boats come over from Holland with cauliflowers and cucumbers and onions, and they used to land on our own quay … as soon as the Home Fishing started, everything went over to herrins. The drifters used to come up-through-bridge and land on our quay and we also had lorries bring stuff up from the fish market …When the herrins arrived at the factory, they would go to the knobbing machines which cut off the heads and squeezed the guts out. Then they were put into vats, washed around in brine, left in for so long, and eventually taken out and sent to the packing lines …We did rows [sic] as well. They were packed into seven ounce tins, either as hard or soft, and we had quite a good trade in them. See, we used to tin kippers for export, Australia and New Zealand and places, and we had splitting machines to get the herrins ready for curin’. There was a number o’ smokehouses there at the factory and then, in the end, the management got a smokin’ machine to speed up the job. That was like a great big oven and it cut down the time needed for the smokin’ side. Back before the war Morton’s used to do a lot o’ red herrins and they had their own underground pits where they used to store the fish before they were cured … Oh yes, we had six or seven lines battin’ out the tins. Sometimes we used to get in extra supplies down from Scotland, but the Home Fishing was the main season. When that died away, o’ course, canning herrins died away with it, so the firm had to go into other things. We used to do a fish paste, which was mostly made out of whiting, and then there were all the other various products. O’ course the factory was originally built for herrins, just like Maconochie’s. There was a lot o’ herrins done at that place as well when it became the Co-op.16

  Morton’s eventually stopped dealing in herrings in 1956 because of the collapse of the fishery although the company carried on until 1988 canning all number of other products, the last can being one of Redcurrant & Raspberry Fruit Filling.

  It was the same in the net-making industry where Minnie Pitcher started working for Stuart & Jacks of Lowestoft in 1919 for 7s 6d a week. Alongside her, girls were employed as beatsters and braiders, keeping the fleets served with fishing nets. As far as she was concerned, the sons in a family were given a trade whereas the daughters ‘went to work to help keep the boys’. In her case her brother got 2s 6d a week in his apprenticeship while her father, as a coalman, earned eighteen shillings a week. Thus her contribution was regarded as vital to the family’s finances and goes some way to explaining why the daughters of fishing families chose to be a fisher lassie, if not a herring lassie!17

  Notes

  1 Mike Smylie, Herring – A History of the Silver Darlings, Stroud, 2004.

  2 David Butcher, Following the Fishing, Newton Abbot, 1987.

  3 Arthur E. Neiland, The Fish House – Passage East, self-published, 2012.

  4 Christopher Unsworth, The British Herring Industry, Stroud, 2013.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Smylie, op. cit., 2004.

  7 Trevor Lummis, Occupation & Society – the East Anglian Fishermen 1880–1914, Cambridge, 1985.

  8 Butcher, op. cit., 1987.

  9 Smylie, op. cit., 2004.

  10 Butcher, op. cit., 1987.

  11 Smylie, op. cit., 2004.

  12 Unsworth, op. cit., 2013.

  13 Smylie, op. cit., 2004.

  14 Butcher, op. cit., 1987.

  15 A.R Charlesworth, The Morton’s Story, self-published, 1995.

  16 Ibid.

  17 Ibid.

  16

  MODERN FISHING, THE EU

  AND LEGISLATION

  Ships always seem to have an air of dignity, or so I believed when I was young. This idea, I assume, was nurtured from visits to Liverpool Docks, armed with paper and pencil where I used to go to draw the images of smoky funnels, ocean tramping and the days before the jet engine completely transformed global travel. Later my ship interest waned while I developed a healthy appetite for traditional working boats and the folk that sailed them. Fishing boats became an obvious extension, and later an emphasis. With this came almost a hatred of the larger fishing craft as a result of both their sheer ugliness and their ravishing of the sea. These ‘vacuum-cleaners’ swept up all within their sights, without any attention to conservation and protectionism. They were simply mechanical monster ships built to rape, or so I thought.

  It was with this in mind that, back in about the late 1990s, I caught a train to Aberdeen. I’d decided it was time to experience at first hand this pillaging. Perhaps I was lucky to find anyone to have me aboard for a few days, so vehement had I been in my opposition to their use, especially in inshore waters. From Aberdeen a bus took me to Fraserburgh, so that by ten o’clock that evening I was searching the quayside after my quarry among the numerous boats of all descriptions, big and small.

  Daystar, BF250, belonged then to Alec West, and was skippered by his son Alexander, who, judging by the way he reversed and turned her in a dock that was hardly longer than the boat as we departed that evening, knew his boat. At a mere 49.28m in overall length, Daystar was by no means the largest of the pelagic purser/trawlers. The 1994-launched Norway-built Altaire, LK429, was 243ft (74.06m) long, had a 4331kW (5805hp) engine and could carry, at the maximum, something like an awe-inspiring two and a half thousand tons of fish. Not surprisingly, then, she was at that time the largest tank ship in the UK fleet.

  Daystar, though, was perfect for me to learn about the way these fellows caught their herring. She had a 1990kW (2668hp) Caterpillar main engine, and could carry only 300 tons of herring in her tanks, which is pumped from the net through an 18-inch diameter pipe into refrigerated sea water (RSW) tanks.

  I quickly did some mental calculations, in awe of these quantities of fish. Imagine an open herring boat of around the end of the last century, say a scaffie from Wick for example. Twenty crans of herring would be deemed an average catch, not brilliant, but neither disastrous. This weighs about three tons, so it follows that one thousand boats would catch 3,000 tons, a thousand boats being something like the number working out of Wick in about 1870, before steam drifters joined in with the fishing. So ten Daystars or, would you believe it, one and a bit Altaire can catch the same amount as the whole fleet in Wick might catch in one night, give or take a few fish. One thousand boats employed, say, 4,000 fishermen, and probably the same amount again on shore. Daystar has up to twelve crew, and perhaps the same are employed ashore. Four thousand jobs for, say, a 150, or much less in the case of the biggest boats. No wonder the conception of modern-day fishing has gone all haywire.

  I mulled all this around in my mind as we sped north towards Orkney. After all, the same fate has befallen agriculture, as has most of Europe’s industry. Or what is left of it. But, like everything else, it’s a question of balance: the advantages of technology versus the old ways of full employment and conservation. And it’s pretty obvious that there are at least some advantages in these bigger boats.

  Like the increased safety and comfort aboard. No cramped coffin-like bunks here, but double cabins. Mine, which I had to myself, even had a television and video upon the table. There are two flu
sh toilets, a shower and a washing machine. Up above there’s a huge mess-room with seating for sixteen people, a galley with fridges, large cooker and washing-up machine and a communal TV. All the comforts of home, in fact. Well nearly! And atop the superstructure there’s the bridge, all 20ft by 20ft of it, bristling with sonar screens, fish finders, radars and radio equipment, as well as the normal navigation gear and engine and winch controls. Technological wizardry with state of the art computers that, given a few more years, will completely oversee the fishing procedure. These are what many people believe to be the final death knells to the industry, and there’s no stopping it. Progress marches on in its inevitability, and we all have to join the bandwagon to keep in competition, or so we’re told. The only debatable point is the stage at which you choose to jump aboard or over the side, as your way of thinking leads. For this still remains a personal choice – just. Although, I must add, these scientific advances do produce positive improvements. Such as the split-beam sonars that can measure the size of fish about to be hoovered into the net. Shoals with a high density of immature fish can technically be avoided. Not that many signs show an improvement in selectability from the fishes’ point of view!