Wick (George Bremner): Week 6 – 22 August

“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).