Wick (George Bremner): Week 5 – 15 August

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!