‘And-God-re-mem-bered-No-ah.’
During those long hours spent listening to Biblical exegesis in Meeting, I could take myself to the imaginary salty, spice-scented hold of my boat or into the whale’s belly as if they were parallel worlds. I can still smell the inside of that ark nearly fifty years later, the feel of the hessian sacks against my knees.
It came as no surprise to me then to discover that those Brethren ancestors of mine were fishing folk, that they’d lived on the edge of the sea and the land since 1800. Boats and fish were in my bloodline, too, not just in my Tribulation-survival dreams.
I was the fourth generation of the Brethren Stotts. Unlike the rest of us who had been born into the Brethren, my great-grandfather, David Fairbairn Stott, a Scottish sailmaker, had chosen to join. He was the first. He’d made a choice that would shape the lives of all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because, due to the severity of Brethren rules, if you were born into the cult you’d have to be steely-willed to be able – or allowed – to leave it.
Could that austere Protestantism linger as a kind of tribal consciousness, I’d begun to wonder – like my boat imaginings – long after I’d left the Brethren? If I avoided friends who’d said something that had offended me, if I neglected to return their emails, was that a Brethren thing, or just a human thing?
I found David Fairbairn Stott on the 1890 census return, where he was listed as an apprentice sailmaker in Eyemouth, a fishing village on the coast fifty miles south-east of Edinburgh, located at the point just north of the border between England and Scotland where the River Eye joins the sea – hence the Eye and the Mouth.
As far as I could trace from the records, in the nineteenth century these Eyemouth Stotts had either fished or made barrels or sails. When they were not following the herring, they scanned the sea and sky for signs of changes in the weather; they tapped barometers, they mended nets; they baited lines, hauled barrels, and dragged nets.
For weeks I sat behind a pile of books at a desk in the British Library – sailmaking manuals, books about witchcraft and smuggling and Scottish dissenting groups – reading about the Lowland clearances and how sails were made and how the herring were gutted and preserved in barrels of salt. When I looked at my hands scribbling notes, I thought about the women I was descended from who’d gutted fish for ten hours a day in the fish yard, their hands cut and bleeding from their sharp knives. They must have been in pain every minute of the day from plunging those raw hands in and out of the salt.
Why would someone – anyone – from an already hard life like this have wanted to join the Brethren? The nineteenth-century Eyemouth I was reading about didn’t seem to be a particularly religious place. It was a frontier town, a hard-drinking, law-defying town. There were Primitive Methodists here in the 1830s; Baptists and Presbyterians too. But most of the fishermen and fisherwomen in Eyemouth were in constant battle with the Kirk – the Church of Scotland – because it collected large tithes or taxes from their profits. The minister patrolled the harbour when the boats came in to make sure no one tried to cheat him of his dues.
Eyemouth people seemed to be more superstitious than devout. The local history books include lists of things that sailors avoided before the boats sailed. Women were bad luck. So were pigs, hares, white cats, and apples. It was unlucky to give away salt. It was unlucky to give your mother change from your pocket. If a sailor said the wrong thing, an unlucky thing, he had to touch cold iron.
The devil could snatch you. The sea could swallow you. In Eyemouth, staying alive seemed to be a matter of luck, and making sure you didn’t test it.
4
It’s easy to be romantic about lives lived out on the edge of the sea. The history books told me something darker. In the seventeenth century, several Eyemouth residents, almost all of them women, were tortured, tried, condemned and burned as witches, or torn limb from limb because someone had testified to seeing them consorting with the devil.6 Local ministers ran the witch-hunts, it seemed, not just to drive out the devil, but also to sustain their own power, just as Brethren leaders would do with their own witch-hunts and expulsions generations later.
These were closed communities; people covered for each other. In the seventeenth century, villagers smuggled contraband lace or brandy and hid it in passageways dug through the rock, or stowed it inside hidden chambers they’d made in their chimneys or under floorboards. They’d be hanged if they were caught. The town had its own Masonic lodge, established in the mid-eighteenth century; its members included both smugglers and excisemen, all committed, just as the Closed Brethren were later, not just to religious worship but to sustaining close, secret and lucrative business networks.
But the nineteenth-century documents told me nothing about my family’s religious affiliations. The census officers who’d visited the Eyemouth fishermen and women had asked them about parents, children, birthplace, birth date, even about blindness or madness, but they hadn’t asked about God. So though I found David Fairbairn Stott on the census returns, I was still no wiser about what he thought about the Tribulation or the Rapture, or where he went on Sunday mornings, or whether he called Sunday Sunday or the Lord’s Day.
I would have to drive north, I realised, to find out what took David Fairbairn Stott across the threshold of a Brethren Meeting Room for the first time. The books and historical records weren’t going to tell me.
I’d found his grandmother listed as the widowed innkeeper of the Whale on Eyemouth harbourfront, a ten-bedroomed inn with a bar. How – and why – had the grandson of an innkeeper in a rough town like Eyemouth become a leading member of the Brethren? I’d found scores of Brethren Meeting Rooms further north along the coast, but none in Eyemouth. Perhaps if I went to the town it would give me something to go on.
I followed the road east to Eyemouth from Edinburgh through the border towns and villages where I’d found Stotts in the library records: Haddington, East Linton, Dunbar, Dunglass, Cockburnspath and Coldingham. The road wound through high moorland and wooded dells, past the high walls and gatehouses of great estates, down to sandy coves and inlets where fishing villages huddled against the sides of black cliffs studded with nesting seabirds, and back up again to high moor and big sky. The sea came in and out of view as I drove, the low sun gilding mudflats, white sand dunes or black rocks down below.
On the outskirts of Eyemouth the road passed through grey pebbledash suburbs and caravan parks. Along the harbour road the fishing sheds and warehouses gave way to a row of old pubs and inns facing the sea. Among them was the Whale, its windows and doors boarded up, one of three semi-derelict public houses still standing on the harbourfront.
I parked the car, and stepped out into a cold sea wind laced with the harbour smells of engine oil, petrol and fish from the fish yards. I walked around the perimeter of the inn, looking for gaps in the boarding, wading through the rubbish piled up around its walls, under the gaze of a group of fishermen smoking outside the adjacent pub. How had a forty-year-old widow, my ancestor, raised five children, managed the drunken sailors and the brawls and run a ten-bedroom inn here singlehandedly?
I ordered a glass of beer from the landlord in the pub next door. Inside, half a dozen local fishermen and construction workers sat hunched over crosswords or watched football on a television screen. The Whale had been closed for twenty years or more, the landlord told me. A developer from Hull owned the building now. It was a listed building, he said, protected by law, so the owner was probably waiting for it to become derelict enough for the council to allow him to knock it down. Then he’d build something that would make him some real money. He laughed.
When I asked for the name of this Hull developer, four or five men lifted their heads from their newspapers and looked in my direction. Was I a journalist, the landlord asked, looking away. I had planned to tell him how Margaret Stott, my great-great-grandmother, had run the Whale in the 1850s, but now I thought better of it. I was just doing some family-history rese
arch, I said, and changed the subject.
Eyemouth would have been packed with people at the height of the herring season, I reminded myself as I took pictures of the now almost empty harbour outside; there would have been carts coming and going, clusters of young women working against the clock to gut the fish and get them barrelled up and onto the backs of the waiting carts. During the 1850s, David Fairbairn’s future father, the teenaged Robert Stott, an apprentice barrelmaker, would have presided over those herring packing girls, the ones with the cut and salted hands.
It was difficult to imagine this sleepy town as a once dangerous and violent place, the site of political protests and demonstrations. In the 1850s and sixties, after years of struggle, the Eyemouth fishermen and fisherwomen had finally refused to pay the tithe the Kirk demanded from them. Robert Stott, the apprentice cooper, and his fishing cousins had marched with the two thousand protesters along this harbourfront behind an enormous green banner embroidered with the words ‘Pay No Tithe’. Robert would have been just fifteen when the local men stoned the police who came to arrest the charismatic leader of the protest, William ‘The Kingfisher’ Stearnes.
At the age of nineteen, when the police standoffs, protests and demonstrations were still playing out in Eyemouth, Robert had been courting one of the girls of the gutting yards, Lizzie Fairbairn, the eldest daughter of one of the largest fishing families in town. She was eighteen, and seven months pregnant, when they married. Her own mother was also pregnant with her twelfth child, so, with no room left at home, Lizzie moved into the Whale with her husband’s mother and his three siblings. She gave birth to Agnes there in 1862, behind one of those boarded-up windows I stood beneath. I could see her now, walking out from the inn with her baby strapped to her back, swaddled against the wind, her much younger siblings running from all directions to cluster around her skirts.
I reached for the phone to call my father and tell him about Agnes and David, before I remembered: I couldn’t call my father any more. He was dead. I couldn’t tell him about the Whale Inn or his great-grandfather’s run-ins with the Kirk, or how – when I’d seen that old inn all boarded up like that – I’d wanted to find a way to buy it and rescue it from the Hull developer, get the windows mended and the roof fixed. I couldn’t tell him that for a moment I’d thought I’d seen Lizzie as if she were still alive, striding along the harbour wall.
My father had always been very proud of this Scottish ship-chandler inheritance of ours. When he and I had bought the little cabin boat together, and moored it on the river a few yards from the Mill door, he’d driven me across the fens to the ships’ chandlers in Ely. We needed stocking up, he told my stepmother. He was in one of his extreme spending moods; she and I both knew there was no reasoning with him when he was like that. I followed him through the narrow aisles of the Ely ship chandlers as he selected objects that interested him, regardless of price or usefulness: a stove, a ladder, spare buoys, a captain’s hat, an extra-large waterproof coat.
‘Stott and Sons,’ he said when the shop owner took his credit card. ‘Scottish ships’ chandlers,’ he added, as if he expected the shopkeeper to doff his cap or give him a discount. I winced, but the shopkeeper was charmed. They had already begun to exchange stories.
What would my father have thought of this messy and scattered older family history I’d now found in Eyemouth? What would he have made of the riots and his intemperate great-grandfather Robert? Would he have seen himself in Robert’s reflection, as I was beginning to do?
At twenty-one years old, Robert, most likely in trouble with the police for his part in the anti-Kirk protests and stonings, or in debt to the local moneylender, decided it was time to leave town. According to the census returns he moved Lizzie and baby Agnes into one of the upper floors of a tenement in Edinburgh, where he’d taken a job as a cooper in a large brewery. By the time Lizzie was twenty-nine she was managing six children under the age of eight, carrying water and small infants up and down the steep stairs of the tenement and sharing an outside toilet with several neighbouring families.
After nine years in Edinburgh, Robert moved his family three hundred miles south to Grimsby, one of the biggest new dockyards in the world. The Stotts moved into one of the hundreds of small terraces newly built to house the 2,000 workers needed by the dockyards. Lizzie gave birth to two more boys here, Robert and David Fairbairn Stott. Then in January 1876, at the age of thirty-four, she died in the Grimsby terrace while giving birth to her ninth child. The baby did not survive.
For a year, Agnes, now thirteen, and her sisters, eleven-year-old Margaret and nine-year-old Isabella, must have cleaned and fed and cared for their younger brothers and sisters in that overcrowded terrace in Grimsby, doing laundry, keeping house, making ends meet as best they could while their father made barrels down in the dockyard. Their grandmother Margaret died that summer back in Eyemouth. Unmarried Aunt Isabella had taken over the management of the Whale from her mother, but running the inn on her own, she would not have been in a position to take in any of her older brother’s city-born children.
Back in the Grimsby terrace, baby Robert died that winter, only three years old. Eight-year-old Elizabeth slips off the records around this time, probably a victim of one of the epidemics that swept the town. Remarkably, David Fairbairn Stott, the youngest, survived. Having buried two of their siblings that winter, and their mother only a year before that, Agnes and her sisters must have been tending their baby brother with special care. What would they have made of the heavily pregnant stepmother their father brought home to live with them, another Elizabeth, a twenty-nine-year-old Lincolnshire woman who’d been working as a scullery maid since she was fourteen? Her first baby, born in December 1877 and christened Mary, did not survive the winter.
Now Aunt Isabella sent for her brother’s four oldest children – Agnes, James, Margaret and Isabella. The next census, taken in April 1881, looks better for all of them. Margaret and Isabella are listed as living at the Whale Inn, working as domestic servants. James, the eldest boy, had joined an Eyemouth fishing crew. Agnes, eighteen, had married a sailmaker called John Wilson, and had a baby son. The couple were living in their own house down near Eyemouth marketplace. Annie and David Fairbairn, the two youngest surviving members of the first brood of Stotts, had stayed on down in Grimsby with their father and stepmother and two new siblings. They were both attending school.
Might those older Stott children, I wondered, have finally found refuge after all those years of poverty, migration and loss? But I’d forgotten about the storm.
When the hurricane, one of the most violent in British history, hit the east coast six months later, Agnes, nineteen and pregnant with her second child, would have been among the crowd of Eyemouth women standing on the harbour wall outside the Whale as the fleet of battered fishing boats tried to make it back into the harbour through the towering waves. One hundred and twenty-nine brothers, uncles, cousins, sons and fathers were killed in a few hours that afternoon in 1881, thrown from boats, drowned, or smashed against the rocks or the harbour wall. Among them were Agnes’s three young Stott cousins and three of her Fairbairn uncles. For weeks afterwards the bodies of those Eyemouth men washed up in coves and on beaches, limbs missing, faces unrecognisable.
Eyemouth harbour. The Whale Inn can be seen between the boat and the car
I do the maths. That’s ten, perhaps eleven, family members Agnes had lost: mother Lizzie, grandmother Margaret, baby brother Robert, sister Eliza, baby half-sister Mary, three Stott cousins, three Fairbairn uncles. And she was still only nineteen.
5
Agnes must have considered herself lucky to have married a sailmaker and not a sailor, lucky that her sisters hadn’t married sailors, that they’d been spared the fate of the eighty-two widows of Eyemouth. According to the records I’d found in the Eyemouth fishing museum, many of those women were, like Agnes, pregnant when they buried their husbands. They named their newborn babies after their dead fathers. Now I understo
od why Robert had named his new daughter, born two years after the disaster, Adelina Purves Spouse Stott. It had always struck me as such an odd name. James Purves and Thomas Spouse had been Robert’s childhood friends, and they’d died in the storm. Adelina Purves Spouse Stott was Robert’s twelfth child.
Few Eyemouth families escaped the long aftermath of the storm. With the fishing fleet largely destroyed, John Wilson’s sailmaking business, like all the businesses in the town, was soon on a knife edge. Within four years he’d been listed in the Glasgow Herald as a ‘Scotch Bankrupt’.7 He was one of many from the town. If they’d built a new harbour instead of having to fight the Kirk all those years, historians say, those fishermen would probably still be alive. They’d only gone out in that storm because they had to, because they had children to feed and the Kirk tithe to pay.
John and Agnes moved forty miles east along the coast to start up a new sailmaking business in Port Seton, a small fishing village outside Edinburgh. Since its new harbour had opened in 1880, thirty-five boats had been registered there. The population had tripled in twenty years. It was an industrious town, the history books claim, and, compared to Eyemouth, a Godfearing town. New churches were going up everywhere.
But things just kept getting worse for Agnes and John. They and their two small children had only been in Port Seton for four years when news came from Agnes’s younger sister Annie down in Grimsby that their father had died, at only forty-six years old. Robert Stott died, his son David always told people, a drinker’s death. Five months later, his widow Elizabeth died in childbirth, leaving seven orphaned children in the Grimsby terrace.
Within weeks all seven had been taken in – adopted by their older brothers or sisters, or put to work. Agnes took her fourteen-year-old brother David and her four-year-old half-brother Joseph to live with her in Port Seton. Her husband would take David on as apprentice in the Wilson sail sheds.
In the Days of Rain Page 5