Seahouses (Mrs Laidlaw): Week 6 – 18 September

The wind has a sharp edge that wasn’t there a fortnight ago; the leaves are falling from the trees, the lawn glistens with morning dew, and the skies are filled with migrating birds. Autumn has come to Caithness. This time of year always makes me wonder what it must have been like in Victorian Wick, when mid-September marked the end of the fishing season, so much activity packed into just a few short weeks.

It would all start in late spring, when the great schooners came with their cargoes of wood from the Baltic from which barrels were made and salt to cure the herring. The salt was stored away in cellars, whose gratings can still be seen in the wall below the brae above the inner harbour. Then, around the end of June, when the first reports of shoals of herrings began to come in from the Western isles, the curing yards would be auctioned off to the merchants, or “fish curers”. These merchants owned the boats, many of which were drawn up on the harbour quays over the winter, and which were now lowered into the water.

Gutters at work. (c) Johnston Collection

Now people would flock to Wick from all over the Highlands, some of them walking a hundred miles to reach here. The population doubled for these few short weeks to 12,000 souls. The merchants would contract with certain skippers, promising to pay so much per “cran” (the measure for herring) to each crew, usually with whisky and tobacco thrown in, and lodging. The skippers would then hire their crews, up to eight men per boat, mainly family and friends, or people they’d worked with in previous years. Men looking for a berth would gather down by the harbour wall, and the skippers would look them over and hire those they needed to make up the crew. The merchants also recruited teams of gutters, mostly young women or girls, three or four to a team, and signed up coopers to make the barrels.

Wick Harbour c1863. (c)Johnston Collection

And then the shoals of herring would reach Caithness. By mid-July, including boats from the Hebrides and Orkney which had followed the herring round the north coast, there might be 1100 fishing boats in Wick harbour. The boats would put out to sea late afternoon, find a likely spot and shoot their nets, and pass the time till the following morning when they’d haul their nets in and return to port. They’d moor at the curing yard of their merchant, and young boys would be paid pennies to go fetch the merchant’s gutters if they weren’t already there. The herrings were tipped out into the great gutting troughs, or farls, and the girls would begin the back-breaking work of gutting and packing the hundreds of fish, sometimes working until it was too dark to see. Meanwhile the merchants would give the skippers a “cran token” for every cran of herring landed.

Studio portrait of two gutters. (c) Johnston Collection

And so it went on, from mid-July to mid-September, every day except Sundays. By early September the quality of the herring was declining, and the shoals were moving south. Within a few weeks the crews would be paid off, the boats hauled back onto the quays, and the “strangers”, as the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were called, would start the long trek home. The skippers would sit down with their merchants and redeem their cran tokens, receiving the agreed amount of cash in exchange. They in turn paid their crews, and everyone would go round the shops and inns paying off their debts; for the whole town ran on credit from the start to the end of the season. And the great schooners came back, bookending it all, filling their holds with barrels of salted herring for the German and Russian markets.

St Fergus’ from the riverside

By the 1880s the system had been transformed as crews had saved up enough money to buy their own boats, new or second-hand, and followed the herring all around the coast, from the Western isles to East Anglia. Fish curers would now bid for each catch as it was landed at the auction mart, as traders still do today (in other ports). But if I had a time machine—and a set of nose plugs—top of my list of places to visit would be Wick in about 1860, just to see the bustle, and the noise, and the fleet of small boats putting out to sea under sail, and to see a whole sub-economy working like a well-oiled machine.

Please note that Margaret and I will be taking a short break, returning on Monday 16^th October. We look forward to seeing you all again on the other side.