“The herring fishing has increased the wealth, but also the wickedness,” wrote the Reverend Charles Thomson about Wick in 1840. “There is great consumption of spirits, there being 22 public houses in Wick and 23 in Pulteneytown, seminaries of Satan and Belial.” (Interestingly, when I left school I applied to attend a seminary of Belial, but my grades weren’t good enough: I only got a D in Moral Turpitude.) The consumption of alcohol was the main reason Wick was known as The Sodom of the North—at least, I assume that was the main reason—and with 45 pubs for a town of 6,000 inhabitants most of the year, you can rather see why. When a fish curer contracted with a skipper for the season he also usually undertook to furnish the crew with tobacco and whisky, which actually makes you wonder how anyone except the publicans made a profit.
Redshank in the river
I mentioned the other week how the boats would go out in the afternoons and evenings, locate a shoal of herring, shot (i.e., cast) their nets, stay out overnight, and haul them in and return to harbour next morning. When they shot their their nets, fishermen would follow Jesus’s instructions in the Bible, St. John 21:6: And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. They fished at night because it was believed it made the nets harder to see. A shoal of herring could be sighted by the presence of gannets or gulls, or even whales, and a slick of oil of the surface of the water. Most boats carried up to six nets, which were made of hemp, 30 yards long by 14 yards wide, and buoyed up by corks, with the ends attached to empty barrels or inflated pigs’ bladders. Sometimes if the fishing was poor the fishermen might even toss coins overboard, saying, “If we canna catch ye, we’ll buy ye.”
The fountain, back in operation
The Statistical Account of Scotland of 1845 bemoans the fact that so many turned to the fishing between July and September to make a quick buck: “Weavers, taylors, shoemakers, house and boat carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, &c…. repair to the fishing boats, go to sea in the night, the only time for catching herrings, and spend all the day in sleep, by which their customers are sure to be ill served”. So let me get this straight: you sleep all day, put to sea, sleep overnight in the boat, haul in the nets, return to port for another day’s hard sleeping—and you got paid? Where do I sign up?
Wayside flowers
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TECHNICAL STUFF
After knitting the gussets to a half-diamond 17 stitches across (plus a couple of rows), or three inches in length, I’ve put them on holders and divided front and back. As I usually find commercial stitch holders get in the way for a while when I’m knitting the rest of the body, I tend to thread some leftover differently-coloured guernsey yarn through the gusset stitches and tie each one off with a bow. The downside is that you have to be careful when you start the sleeves, as it’s very easy to spilt stitches when you go to put them back on a needle (this one advantage a commercial stitch holder—which is basically an oversized safety pin—has over my method, as you’re effectively transferring the stitches from needle to needle).
I use a second circular needle after dividing for front and back. That way I can leave the rest of the stitches on my original circular needle and use another one for whichever half I start with (usually the back, though of course if the gansey doesn’t have a shaped neckline, like this one doesn’t, both sides are interchangeable). So now I’m well embarked on Side A, and it only remains to be seen how accurate my maths is in terms of the pattern bands when I reach the top for the shoulder (the jury is currently out).
This week, in the third of my trilogy of posts about the fishing, I’d like to focus on the work of the fisher lassies, the gutters and packers, without whom the industry couldn’t have operated; and neither could this blog, since it’s really their skills and creativity we’re here to celebrate. I’d have to take up another hobby, such as watching football and shouting at the television.
As ever, it all started with the fish curers, the merchants. They would often contract with a head gutter for the season, the same way they contracted with a skipper to crew the boat. Usually the head gutter would find the other members of her team, one or two gutters and a packer, and these would often be family or friends. The curers would have to provide their accommodation (the fishermen slept on the boats, except for Sunday nights) and, once the teams started following the herring round the country, pay for their luggage to be transported (each girl had her own wooden chest, or kist).
Bumblebee on mint
The girls would start each day waiting for the boats to come back, and this is when most of the knitting got done. A boat would land its catch at the station of the curer that employed the crew, where supplies of salt and brine, and stacks of barrels and hoops, would all be waiting. If the gutters weren’t already there, small boys would be sent into town to fetch them for pennies. The herring would be winched out of the boat in baskets and tipped into great troughs, or farlins, and the gutters would get to work, stripping out the guts with their short knives and dropping the fish into baskets or tubs positioned behind them, grading them by size and quality. The guts were tossed into baskets called cougs which lay to hand in the troughs, and which were emptied into barrels when full. The packers took the baskets of gutted herring and tipped the fish into tubs of salt brine before packing them in barrels.
Lengths of line
It all required great speed and coordination. The day’s catch had to be gutted and packed by nightfall, though one day in Wick in 1861 so many herring were landed they couldn’t all be processed in daylight and heaps had to be left to rot on the quays. It’s been estimated that an experienced gutter could gut and grade 60-70 herring a minute, or 20,000 a day. Backbreaking work it must have been, too, leaning over a trough for hours, and dangerous, for all they bound their fingers with bandages. I often think that if I met Doctor Who I might ask him for a trip to Wick in the 1860s, just to see it all in action. Though I know if I did so I’d need to wear nose plugs for the smell, plus of course if the Doctor took me we’d probably have to fend off an alien invasion while we were there, so there’s that to consider.
[N.B., some of the information in this post is taken from the booklet “Dear Gremista”: the Story of the Nairn Fisher Girls at the Gutting, by Margaret Bochel, produced by the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, Edinburgh, for Nairn Fishertown Museum, 1979, which I hereby gratefully acknowledge. And if you want to see Wick Harbour in action, here’s a short film from 1937.]
I said at the start that this was a trilogy of posts about the fishing—in album terms, this the Sgt. Pepper to the previous weeks’ Rubber Soul and Revolver. Unfortunately that makes next week Magical Mystery Tour. Don’t say you weren’t warned…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
First of all, an apology. In my artlessly girlish approach to patterns (and life), viz. not worrying about stuff until I need to, I made a mistake in charting the chevron pattern last week. Each chevron should be three knit stitches apart (P-K-K-K-P etc.), not two as previously indicated. This has been corrected in this week’s pattern chart, and last week’s has now been updated. Sorry about that.
I am well advanced on the gussets, and at some point in the next few days will divide for front and back. If it helps, for a gansey which will measure in the region of 42-45 inches across the chest when laid flat, I tend to always allow 12 inches from the start of the gusset to the top shoulder join. This consists of one inch for the shoulder strap (which, when joined to the reverse side, makes for a shoulder strap of more or less 2 inches in total), 8 inches for the armhole (from the point when you divide front and back at the top of the half-gusset to the start of the shoulder strap), and 3 inches for the half-gusset. So, whatever the actual pattern, I always know I have to start the gusset about 12 inches from the very top.
Floral galaxy
A quick word on gussets. My standard increase is two stitches either side of the gusset every 4th row, for 3 inches. I don’t usually do the increases on the very edge stitches, I usually do them on the stitches immediately inside them, i.e., on the second stitch from the edge. It really doesn’t matter: I’ve just come to like the way this gives you a clean line of knit stitches all round the edge of your gusset when it’s finished (as though the gusset is nearly enclosed in brackets).
I’ve also fallen into the habit of increasing the fake seam stitches by one purl stitch (to make each fake seam 2 purl stitches) a couple of rows before the first gusset increase. Again, it doesn’t matter, and it’s not traditional, but this way your first knit stitch of the gusset is already nested between 2 purl stitches, you’re not trying to turn one purl stitch (P) into 3 (P-K-P). Instead you’re turning (P) into (P-P), and then into (P-K-P). And yes, of course it’s possible I’m over-thinking this!
I started to talk last time about how the fishing industry in Wick operated, and now I’d like to share with you a little more on that. I just find it all so fascinating.
When we think about the fishing, we tend to picture it as it was in its later days, when fishermen and -lassies followed the herring round the coast, from the Western Isles, past Orkney, round Caithness, down the Moray Firth and the Scottish coast, down past Northumberland and Yorkshire and on to East Anglia. But this didn’t properly start until, what, the 1870s?
Sign at the Forum Arts Centre, Groningen, The Netherlands
Before then in Wick the merchants, the fish curers, owned the boats and hired the crews and gutters.The population of the town doubled for those few short weeks to 12,000, many of them Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. In Wick the boats remained idle on the quays from September to July. At the start of the season, a curer would contract with a skipper to crew the boat and land fish for him at a fixed price of so much per “cran” (a cran was a standard measure, holding about twelve hundred herring, give or take). For every cran of herring the boat landed, the curer would give the skipper a “cran token”. At the end of the season the boats would be hauled back onto the quays and the skippers would redeem the tokens for cash. They would then use the money to pay their crews, and settle their debts in the town.
For this is the truly remarkable thing: for three months the whole town ran on credit, with a great reckoning in September. Any money left over would be taken home, usually to help survive a bleak winter on the family croft. And sometimes if the fishing was poor there was nothing left over, and all those poor people had to go away empty-handed, with nothing to show for all that effort.
Riverside view, Wick
As the years passed, and families and friends began to club together to buy their own boats, the economy shifted. The fishermen became professionals, following the herring as they migrated, and auctioning their catches to the highest bidders at the nearest port. In the 1880s the trawlers came and they, like the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, delved too greedily and too deep, and now the vast shoals of herring are no more. But for a while, for maybe 50-60 years up to the 1860s and 70s, the ecosystem was just about in balance, and an economy flourished that’s quite unique in my experience.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I promised I’d explain all my behind-the-scenes workings out on this gansey, and so today we’re going to look at the question of when you start the yoke pattern. (The answer is, of course, it depends on the number of rows you need.) As this is a replica based on an old photograph, I’m going to try to get as close to the original pattern as I can. And yes, some maths is involved (sorry).
So, George Bremner’s gansey has alternating bands of diamond lattices and chevrons, divided by the usual 5-row bands of 3 purl rows alternating with 2 plain knit rows. The diamonds are 25 rows deep, and the chevrons are 17 rows. I plan to have three bands of each, making six in total, more or less following the original.
Restaurant kitchen window, with reflections, Groningen
This gives me (25 x 3 = 75) + (17 x 3 = 51) + (5 x 6 = 30), or a total of 156 rows for the yoke. Although it varies depending on the yarn I’m using, I tend to average 12 or so rows per inch: so, 156 rows \ 12 = 13 inches for the pattern.
As the gansey is going to be 24 inches from the top of the welt to the top of the shoulder, and as I usually make the shoulder 1 inch (or 12 rows), that means that the yoke pattern plus the shoulder strap = 13 + 1 = 14 inches.
Therefore, 24 – 14 = 10 inches: so I start my yoke pattern after knitting the plain body for 10 inches. (Which I have indeed just done.)
I dare say there are easier ways of calculating this, but this works for me. It seems very precise, but different yarns throw out my row gauge. It’s more of a guideline. So we’ll see how well this works. I can always run the pattern into the shoulder strap if I need to, or do a few extra pattern rows at the top of the yoke (as the original has), so for now we’ll hope for the best and finagle it when we get there…
So, here’s a question for you: what’s the connection between the introduction of decks into fishing boats, and the invention of that natty item of apparel, the blazer? Granted, they both happened during Victorian times, but that’s not the answer; I mean to say, so did rickets.
The story begins in tragedy, with the great storm that devastated the Moray Firth on the night of 18/19 August 1848. In Wick this became known as “Black Saturday”. The weather on the afternoon of 18 August was fine, so all down the coast some 800 boats put out to sea. It was the custom in the herring fishing to go out in the afternoon, find a promising spot usually about ten miles offshore, cast (or “shot”) your nets, sleep overnight on the boat and haul the nets in next morning hopefully bulging with herring. In the 1840s most of the boats would have been owned by the local merchants (or “fish curers”, which still makes me think of piscine faith healers) and the crews would be hired by one or other of these merchants. There were no auctions of herring at this time, and the boats would deliver the catch to the curing station rented by their merchant to be gutted and packed by the fisher lassies and coopers also in the merchant’s employ.
Forss Water at Crosskirk
Well, the boats were out on the night of Friday the 18th, when a storm arose out of nowhere around 3.00am. The crews frantically raced for the many little harbours all along the coast, but plenty didn’t make it. 124 boats were lost, and over a hundred fishermen lost their lives. Heartbreakingly, at Wick the sea had fallen enough to prevent laden boats from passing over the bar into the harbour, and there are accounts of families helplessly watching their loved ones perish in the storm (the passage was deepened after). The scale of the disaster was such that the government commissioned Captain John Washington of the Royal Navy to write a report and make recommendations. One innovation was to display barometers in harbours to warn fishermen of any sudden drops in pressure; and another was to fit decks to fishing boats to make them more stable. (Interestingly the fishermen resisted the decks, on the grounds that it could increase the chances of their being swept overboard and reduced the space available for the catch.)
Speaking of fishermen, it’s always good to be reminded of the dangerous conditions these men were exposed to as they smile blandly out at us from the old photographs and we admire the patterns on their jumpers. My replica gansey worn by George Bremner is coming on apace (I know I promised to include technical details, but at this stage it’s just a question of rinse and repeat, same as last week, making the most of all the plain knitting before the pattern comes along and complicates things). If Fate is kind I might even start the pattern next week.
Helmsdale River looking out to sea
Now, what about the blazer, I hear you ask? The origin is disputed, as so many historical facts tend to be, but this explanation seems plausible. The story goes that back in 1837 our Captain Washington hosted a visit to his ship by the newly-incoronatified Queen Victoria, and decided to fit out his crew in a spanking new uniform for the occasion. This was a double-breasted, navy blue jacket with shining brass buttons. The name of his ship? I kid you not, it was HMS Blazer…
The funfair’s back in town, on the meadows down by the river near where they used to dry the fishing nets back before car parks were invented. If it wasn’t for a merciful row of trees lining our street we could see it from our bedroom, but if we can’t see it, we can certainly hear it. Imagine the type of music you like the least—let’s say jazz, since nobody really likes jazz—played over loudspeakers at very high volume, and you’ll get the idea, not so much a funfair as a sort of psychological warfare with moving parts. There’s usually an amplified voice shouting over the beat, too; it’s probably inviting us to roll up, roll up, but I can’t make out the words and it sounds disconcertingly like a drunken Dalek singing along to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.
Fog rolls into Sarclet harbour
But then, I’ve never liked funfairs, amusement arcades, or any form of entertainment involving candy floss and motion sickness. Not that I have anything against candy floss qua candy floss; it’s just that once you grow a beard any chance eating it with dignity disappears (see also: cream cakes). This puts me at odds with my fellow men, as I know the return of the funfair is eagerly awaited each year, so I just have to lump it for a few weeks every summer. Many years ago I shared a flat with a vegan friend who had studied philosophy at university, majoring in logic. Although he was healthily emotional in many respects, when it came to reason he was as cold and logical as Mr Spock. One night the flat across the hall was having a party, and by 3.00 a.m. it was still impossible to sleep over the noise. My friend offered to go and tell them to turn it down. Ten minutes later he returned, with the music, I noticed, continuing as loud as ever. “What happened?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a question of the greatest good to the greatest number: since there are more of them than there are of us, they convinced me they should leave the music playing…”
Lochans in the peat bog at Forsinard
[Editor’s note: Margaret’s off on her travels just now, so all photographs are courtesy of me and my iPhone. Can you tell? Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks.]
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Alert readers will have noticed that the designated pattern has changed from last week. This is because, having previously agreed I’d knit another pattern from the Johnston Collection held by Wick Museum for my charity project, I promptly forgot all about it and defaulted to a Filey pattern, only for Deb G to remind me. D’oh! Not that it will make any difference to the project, as I hadn’t started the pattern yet; and in fact I do this quite often, starting projects and changing my mind before I get to the pattern, or indeed starting a project and leaving the choice of pattern open until I get to the yoke, to see what mood I’m in when I get there. It’s only having to show my hand in the blog that forces me to declare the pattern upfront. (Now I think of it, this is a perfect illustration of quantum indeterminacy, where anything is possible until I make a choice and the waveform collapses into a single project. There you go: I’ve invented a new discipline, quantum knitting. Now, where’s my research grant?)
Anyway, we’ll have to wait a couple more weeks to see it, but this is a very nice pattern of alternating horizontal bands of chevrons and open diamonds in a lattice. Meanwhile, I can relax with lots of nice, gentle, plain knitting, none of which, thank heaven, requires me to remember anything…
“The herring fishing has increased the wealth, but also the wickedness,” wrote the Reverend Charles Thomson about Wick in 1840. “There is great consumption of spirits, there being 22 public houses in Wick and 23 in Pulteneytown, seminaries of Satan and Belial.” (Interestingly, when I left school I applied to attend a seminary of Belial, but my grades weren’t good enough: I only got a D in Moral Turpitude.) The consumption of alcohol was the main reason Wick was known as The Sodom of the North—at least, I assume that was the main reason—and with 45 pubs for a town of 6,000 inhabitants most of the year, you can rather see why. When a fish curer contracted with a skipper for the season he also usually undertook to furnish the crew with tobacco and whisky, which actually makes you wonder how anyone except the publicans made a profit.
