“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II poignantly observed. Of queens, too: for, as you may perhaps have heard, Britain is now officially in mourning for the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
When I was younger I was something of a republican, feeling that a monarchy had no place in a serious, mature, modern democracy. But then I remembered that I lived in a country which had voted to name a scientific research ship “Boaty Mcboatface”; which has an unelected second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords; and which now has noted climate change sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg as its *checks notes* minister for climate change. At which point it dawned on me that adjectives like mature, modern and serious are, perhaps, a touch optimistic. (A propos of nothing, someone once labelled Rees-Mogg “The Haunted Pencil”; I don’t know why, but it cheers me up no end whenever I hear his name.)
My only brush with royalty came just over a decade ago, when one of Charles’s brothers, Edward, earl of Wessex, officially opened a new Scottish archive centre. I’d been invited to host the event, and it was something of a revelation. He was amusing, self-deprecating, made time for everyone, spoke to everyone, listened, and made each person feel a little special. And suddenly I got it: it wouldn’t have been the same with a politician (half the room would have voted for the other side) or a celebrity, when it would have been all about them. He made it about us. I was, a little to my own surprise, genuinely impressed.
Stopping for a cuppa
I was also a little surprised to find how touched I was by the passing of Her Majesty: touched by some of the tributes (especially the ones involving Paddington), touched by the grief of the family, and also by the memories it brought back of some of the losses in my own life, especially of my mother and (just recently) her sister. The Queen, God bless her, is dead: long live the King. And if another’s grief ever seems excessive or misplaced, well, maybe we should remember Benedick’s words in Much Ado About Nothing: everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
Waves on the harbour wall
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TECHNICAL STUFF
So, the sleeve. In the original photo, George’s gansey has repeats of the pattern bands all the way down to the cuff. I’m not doing that for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and obviously, because I’m lazy. And secondly, because I don’t particularly like the look of a fully-patterned sleeve on a half-patterned body. It just looks a bit top-heavy to me, like a gansey designed for orcs (I like to think that Aragorn encouraged the surviving orcs to take up fishing for herring after the fall of the Dark Lord). But it’s just a question of personal taste. I cast on 137 stitches round the armhole, and after the gusset am decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5 rows.The sleeve will be about 15.5 inches shoulder to cuff; the cuff will be 6 inches standard k2/p2 ribbing, folded back on itself.
Loch Watten
Now, I don’t know if this is useful or not. When I’m knitting purl rows on straight, double-pointed needles, try as I might I can’t get the stitches an even size across the join from one needle to the next: either they’re too loose, and they sag; or I overcompensate, and they end up tight and tiny. So I’ve got into the habit of just slipping the last 3 or 4 stitches from those on the needle I’ve just done onto my new needle. This means that I start my new needle with 3 or 4 purl stitches already completed, sitting there—i.e., the join/ transition point between needles is now 3 or 4 stitches back, it’s already happened—and I can carry on with my purl row, and the tension is automatically the same in every stitch. It only takes a couple of seconds per needle, and the effect is, well, seamless.
I was musing the other day on the the Bible story of the Prophet Elisha and the bears, as told in 2 Kings 2:23-24. As you will doubtless recall, the prophet was on his way to minister to Bethel when he was mocked for his baldness by some children of the city: “And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them”. (What, I wonder, is the procedure, if no bears are available, and you have to find a substitute? I mean, the only animals I usually see from my window are sheep, but I’m pretty sure the local children could take them in a fight.)
Gone to seed
This is the sort of smiting that seems, regrettably, to have gone out of fashion, leaving children free to mock the follically challenged without fear of ursine dismemberment. But if you had that sort of power, what other sorts of high crimes and misdemeanours would you punish with it? As an archivist, the worst crime my profession faces is the loss of original documents, something which has happened all too frequently in the past, and even in the present too.
Take Edward I who captured Edinburgh in 1296 and removed the nation’s archives, shipping them south to London, where they somehow (*cough*) disappeared. Then Cromwell came along in 1650 and did it all again. This time they weren’t misplaced: instead, after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they were actually being returned to Scotland, when the ship carrying the records sank in a storm off Northumberland. Or here’s another example: when Napoleon’s army invaded Russia in 1812 it was so badly prepared that, after the battle of Smolensk, French doctors had to use documents raided from the city’s archives as bandages. (I like to think that when the bandages were eventually removed the ink was transferred to the skin like a tattoo, so that Smolensk historians followed the French army around asking the soldiers if they’d remove their trousers so they could read their legs.)
The old gate
And as for anyone improperly withholding US government files from the National Archives, all I can say is, if I were the guilty party I’d be pretty nervous if I learned the FBI had requested the loan of a couple of she-bears from the Smithsonian National Zoo…
[Update to last week’s post: regrettably Margaret and I won’t now be attending Thursday’s craft event at Drumnadrochit owing to logistical challenges. We wish everyone involved a very successful event.]
Thistledown
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TECHNICAL STUFF
As you can see, I’ve now finished front and back, joined the shoulders, knit the collar and started on the first sleeve. I’ll say something about the sleeves next time.
The neckline isn’t shaped or indented at all, but is the traditional straight rectangle, and is the same front and back. I don’t usually worry too much about the exact number of stitches for the collar—so long as they can be divided by four for the k2-p2 ribbing, it doesn’t really matter. So for the first row of the collar I knit the stitches on the holders (i.e., the ones left over from front and back), and pick up stitches along the sides (the inside edges of the shoulder straps), aiming for roughly 8 stitches to the inch. I keep count as I go, so that I can finish with an exact multiple of 4 for the ribbing. Sometimes my counting goes awry, but it doesn’t matter: if I have one or two stitches too many, I can decrease them out of existence on the first pattern row of the collar (usually on a purl stitch, since the purl stitches are pushed to the background by the k2 ribs, and thus become invisible).
Back when I was little, I can’t remember how I imagined I’d be spending my time in my sixties: watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, perhaps, or travelling the American Midwest teaching bullying cowboys the error of their ways by preaching non-violence, and, when that didn’t work, breaking their arms with kung fu. Not making urgent trips to the bathroom at inconvenient moments and trying to remember if I’ve already taken today’s medication. And yet here we are.
I wonder this about vampires, sometimes; does their biology stop when they get bitten? I mean, if Dracula’s hundreds of years old, think of the state of his prostate. (And his opinions: “The children of the night, what music they make. Not like modern so-called ‘popular music’, ha, I mean, call that music, there’s not even a bloody tune.”) I can barely crawl out of bed in the morning, never mind go creeping down castle walls face-down. I don’t suppose they have to worry about blood pressure, but do vampires’ teeth ever fall out? And what happens if someone knocks out a canine? Are there vampire dentists? Or do very elderly vampires go searching for prey armed with a very sharp straw?
Wildflowers by the path
Meanwhile, back in the real world I have a couple of parish notices. First of all, Judit’s been busy again, this time with a gansey in lovely grey-green Finnish yarn (Novita 7 Veljestä, or 7 Brothers), not unlike the Frangipani Cordova shade. The pattern is the classic double-line zigzag, also known as marriage lines, as described in Rae Compton’s book, pp.82-83 (with associations all along the east coast, though here I’m claiming it for Scotland!). Congratulations again to Judit, and many thanks as ever to her for sharing it with us.
In other news, Margaret and I will be making a rare public appearance at the Highland Meet the Makers event on the morning of Thursday 8 September at Blairbeg Hall in Drumnadrochit, south of Inverness near the shores of Loch Ness. The event is organised by Loch Ness Knitting, and is primarily a showcase for Highland yarn suppliers and craftspeople. We’re delighted to be invited, and will be taking along a selection of ganseys for people to look at and hopefully chat about. If it’s quiet we may even slip out for a spot of Nessie-watching.
Abstract hawthorn
And if growing old hasn’t turned out quite the way I’d expected, to be fair few things have. Take joy. I used to imagine the summit of human pleasure came through falling in love, the passion of physical embrace, the symphonies of Bruckner, or religious ecstasy. But no: turns out bliss really lies in finally scratching that itch in the small of your back that’s been driving you mad, or finding a space in a hospital car park, or discovering you can still reach your little toe with the toenail clippers. If only I’d known this earlier, how much simpler life would have been…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’ve finished Side A and am well embarked on Side B. (Because this gansey doesn’t have a shaped neckline there technically isn’t a front and a back, as such.)
Now, either this batch of yarn is knitting up a bit thicker than some others, or (more likely) I just got the maths slightly wrong, because I ran out of room at the top of the yoke (i.e., I still had some rows to go when the armhole reached 8 inches from the gusset). I only had 3 rows still to knit, but 3 rows per side equals 6 rows in total, or half an inch, and that would make the armhole just a wee bit deeper than I wanted.
Flower of Scotland
So what I did was simply divide the row into three, a third each for the two shoulders and another third for the neck. (As my row has 180 stitches, each third has 60 stitches.) I put the neck stitches in the middle on a holder—and yes, the chevron ends 3 rows early here, but I’m hoping no one will really notice once it’s finished. And after all, the original (which is knit on finer needles and so has more rows than mine) has a truncated chevron band at the top, so obviously the knitter was fine with being pragmatic too.
I then knit the 3 extra rows to complete the chevron on each shoulder. Now, my shoulder straps are usually 12 rows, so I knit another plain row after the chevron and then made up the remaining 8 rows with 2 ridge and furrows (of 4 rows of p-p-k-k each). More on this next week.
I should finish Side B this week, then it’s on to the collar and—sigh—picking up stitches for the sleeve.
“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!
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II poignantly observed. Of queens, too: for, as you may perhaps have heard, Britain is now officially in mourning for the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
My only brush with royalty came just over a decade ago, when one of Charles’s brothers, Edward, earl of Wessex, officially opened a new Scottish archive centre. I’d been invited to host the event, and it was something of a revelation. He was amusing, self-deprecating, made time for everyone, spoke to everyone, listened, and made each person feel a little special. And suddenly I got it: it wouldn’t have been the same with a politician (half the room would have voted for the other side) or a celebrity, when it would have been all about them. He made it about us. I was, a little to my own surprise, genuinely impressed.
