A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Bertram doesn’t speak too highly of the Footdee fishers but he did also quote a local journalist who countered the claim that they were ‘a dirtily-inclined and degraded people’ by writing that he found their houses ‘clean, sweet and wholesome’ on inspection. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture well-rubbed, the bedding clean and the floors freshly sanded though one might wonder why he was looking into the bedding, and why the floors were freshly sanded. Presumably well-rubbed furniture suggests it was dusted and polished. Nevertheless, the unnamed journalist presented a picture of tidiness and order not normally associated with fishers and suggested that this picture was seldom seen in the classes of the population on a higher social scale. The mention of nineteen widows brings to life the horror of fishing when women are left alone by tragedies among the fisherfolk, something mentioned in earlier chapters and which again hammers home the dangerous reality of this occupation.

  Whereas Footdee was part of a much larger city, the coast of Britain is littered with small fishing communities that have existed just on their own, out on a limb so to speak. A fine example of a planned fishing settlement is Low Newton-by-the-Sea, mentioned in Chapter 4. Nestling on the very edge of the Northumberland coast, some half way between the harbours of Beadnell and Craster which are some six miles apart, there’s a terrace of houses on three sides of a square with the open side facing the sea. Situated at the northern end of Low Newton Bay, the top of the beach is almost at the point where the last house ends, so close to it are the cottages. These were built as fishermen’s cottages in the eighteenth century although it is certain that some form of housing for fishermen existed prior to this as the fishing is said to date back at least to the fourteenth century and probably beyond. Originally called Newton Seahouses, to distinguish it from North Sunderland Seahouses (later to become just Seahouses) the Square, as it is known, has since been added to and the cottages are all rented out as holiday homes, although the Ship Inn, formerly the Smack Inn, occupies the northwest corner and is said to be older than the cottages themselves. Now belonging to the National Trust, the settlement formerly belonged to Newton Hall. The coastguard cottages were added about 1829. The Square exists as only one of two sets of ‘Seahouses’ left in Northumberland. Craster, the home of the famous Craster kipper, was once Craster Seahouses, where new houses were built in about 1780 for fishing families on a vacant plot of land by the sea on the south side of the stream that runs into Craster Haven.4

  However, of course, many fishermen lived in communities that were planned for that purpose. The British Fisheries Society, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, financed the building of several herring stations in Scotland. Apart from Pultneytown, Wick, on the northeast tip of Scotland, which flourished as Europe’s herring capital in the mid-nineteenth century, the only other settlement of success was Ullapool, on Loch Broom. Here today the orderliness of the housing is obvious – long straight roads parallel to the shore and each other, with crossing roads at right angles. Aberaeron, in west Wales, is today a well laid out Georgian town dating from the early nineteenth century with a harbour and warehouses and, it is said, a fleet of sixty herring boats. However, it would seem that the town could not support a year-round herring fishery and that the fishing was supplemented by shipbuilding and the export of grain and lead ore.5

  Fishermen always needed space to store gear, whether sails, nets or pots. On the Moray Firth, a typical fisherman’s house of the mid-nineteenth century had two or three rooms (as at Footdee) with lean-to sheds. New houses had tiled or slate roofs though the older ones still had turf on the roof. Larger houses had part, or all, of the upper floor given over to a spacious loft area where gear could be stored and nets mended. These lofts would have a separate entrance by an outside staircase and, even in the twentieth century, houses where the upper floor was confined to storage were being built in some ports and fishing stations. But, as standardisation became the norm, the postwar fishermen had to do with the same type of house as other workers, be they bakers, butchers, candlestick makers or any other labouring workers.6

  Fishing, as has been shown, was always a family affair though it was the wife that literally knitted the family together, she being the catalyst for the marital bond. Or at least this was the case before the days of the second half of the twentieth century – postwar Britain really – transformed Britain into something unrecognisable a century before. In those older times it was the wife who was in control and, as Bertram saw, it was she that ran the family income, looked after the home and brought up the children. It was she that induced the early sense of tradition in the children to play their part so that their contribution was widely recognised. The wife, herself coming from a fishing family, knew too well the future that lay ahead for her offspring and that there was no escape. Thus the children helped out in various ways – picking mussels or whelks or whatever shellfish was needed for bait, to dig for worms in some cases, to bait the long-lines, to repair nets, bark them, repair the boat and even going out to sea at a tender age.

  The net sheds of Hastings, recently restored using Heritage Lottery funding.

  Brighton fish market under the Arches. Selling the catch at market was usually the domain of the wife, much in the same way as the women hawked around the countryside in rural fishing communities.

  Furthermore, in the great days of the Scottish herring fishery, it was young women (both wives and daughters) that did the curing, working for the fish curers around the country: we shall learn of these girls, and the stout women they turned into, in the next chapter. In Morecambe Bay, the women, both young and old, worked in the local shrimp factory, shelling the shrimps because it was considered that this tedious job after the boiling was only women’s work.

  Women in fishing communities had many roles apart from the immediate ones within the home. Various photographs available today show women of a particular build carrying their menfolk out to their boat, thus ensuring at least that they set out to sea in a state of dryness although they probably wouldn’t remain so for long. Although they seldom sailed out aboard the boat – superstition wouldn’t allow women aboard – their fishing work didn’t stop once their husbands had sailed off. They might pick shellfish for bait or to sell, check the finances, buy and cook food, do the weekly washing, repair clothes, knit ganseys (the traditional jerseys of most fishers) or simply keep the home tidy. On top of that they bore children, and that in itself, when added to the general debilitating effect of the hard work upon their bodies, increased the danger of premature death.

  Peter Frank uses the example of Maud, the eldest daughter of Jane Harland, who unwittingly came into the role as fisherman’s wife when her mother died after giving birth to her tenth child who was twenty-one years Maud’s junior. Maud had vowed not to marry into fishing since childhood, prompted, probably by her parents who shared the same belief that the life was too hard. She saw her father get up at 2 a.m. to check the weather and then he’d come back and rouse the family. Maud used to wish that ‘t’cobles wouldn’t get off today’. Once her father had gone she’d start work on the mussels. Until she married five years later a bricklayer, she started every day thus and the worst was when the mussels were frozen in winter, ‘You got bad fingers with them.’ It was work of the sheer ‘wearying, unremitting repetitiveness’ type indeed.7

  In many parts of Britain we come across colourful fishwives: Newhaven, Edinburgh and Llangwm, Pembrokeshire being two examples many miles apart. In Cullercoats, Northumberland, there’s a good description of their work from 1838:

  The duties performed by the wives and daughters of the Cullercoats fishermen are very laborious. They search for bait – sometimes digging sand-worms in the muddy sand at the mouth of the Coble-dean, at the head of North Shields; gathering muscles [sic] on the Scalp, near Clifford’s Fort; or gathering limpets and dog crabs among the rocks near Tynemouth; – they also assist in baiting the hooks. They carry the fish which are caught to North Shields, in large wicker baskets called cr
eels, and they also sit in the market there to sell them. When fish are scarce, they not infrequently carry a load on their shoulders, weighing between three and four stone, to Newcastle, which is about ten miles distant from Cullercoats, in the hope of meeting with a better market.8

  The Yorkshire photographer Fisher of Filey made various studio portraits of fisherwoman in their so-called ‘traditional dress’, this being the costume of their work. It was intended to be warm for working on the shore, and consisted of woollen jerseys worn under bodices, shawls, cloaks, bonnets, aprons, thick woollen socks and strong shoes.9 The fisherwomen of the Penclawdd cockle fishery commonly walked to the market at Swansea, carrying a basket in each hand and another on their head. They walked the first seven miles to Olchfa barefoot before donning boots after washing their feet in the stream. On the return journey, after hopefully selling the catch, they filled their baskets with provisions for the family.10 Similarly the women of Llangwm, a small community on the western shore of the River Cleddau, were well known for hawking herring, salmon, oysters, shrimps and cockles around the locality. These women controlled all aspects of the fishery and no merchants were ever employed. Their clothing was equally well known and recognisable by their colourful tweed dresses, aprons and black felt hats, and they for speaking their own dialect of Welsh. One woman, Dolly Palmer, was known for her strength and beauty and was even interviewed by the Daily Mail.11

  A typical fish wife from Llangwm in Pembrokeshire. These women walked miles hawking the day’s catch around the locality.

  For the majority of fishwives, when the husband was out sailing, there was always one thing in the back of her mind. The constant worry was that he might never return, and many a woman might keep one eye checking on the clouds from time to time. A Mrs Harrison gave an apt description of how a woman did feel when her husband was out in rough weather. This was in the 1960s:

  I know my boy goes to sea and he’s got a dangerous job working off the Shetlands, but when he goes I expect him to come back. My husband had some very narrow escapes during the war and he’s been overboard about three times but I don’t expect him to go and drown either, I think that’s the only way you can look at it unless you’re going to worry yourself sick all the time. I’ve been very worried once – though that wasn’t until after it occurred. It was ten or twelve years ago when he was out herring catching with his younger brother off Caister. October or November, and the net must have fouled the cork that bungs the bottom of the boat. They had seven cran of herring on board and their boat sank under it. Fortunately the corks on the herring nets just kept her buoyant so she was level with the top of the water. They burned their shirts, burnt everything they could but nobody saw her, not even the coastguards, until at last a fishermen did notice and took them into Caister. I can always remember – he must have gone up to the Caister lifeboat house and rung me at about two o’clock in the morning. He said, ‘Well thank God I can hear your voice, thank God I can still talk to you.’ I thought what on earth has happened, does he want me there? But he said ‘Somebody is going to bring us home, will you be prepared to get up early in the morning to go to Caister and help salvage anything we can?’ It’s strange because we had every faith in this boat, she’s still being used down at Sheringham. After that I was sort of sick for a fortnight. But he had two boats. He couldn’t use that one because the engine had got water in it, so that was a big set-back, but he’d had the other built. He came home, got the mechanic to make sure the engine was all right, pushed it down and went off the next night. Just like that, because he had to go again.12

  Belgian fisherwomen with their shrimp nets which they push through the shallow water over sand. Others work on horseback with trawls, similar to the Morecambe fishers who didn’t ride the horse but worked from a cart.

  In some parts of the world the women were fishers. In Britain this was mostly confined to cockle picking on the sands of Morecambe Bay or around the Bury Inlet and River Towy in South Wales. Good examples of these robust women also once worked in Belgium and France picking shellfish from the beaches as well as picking crabs from rocks and using nets in the shallow water to catch shrimps. As in Britain, the French women who sold the catch wore colourful traditional dress and, in one instance in 1908, the President M. Fallieres met a band of these women to pay homage to their work at Dunkirk.13

  These fishing communities were, to a great extent, self-sufficient. They had no need for outside help as the jobs within the community stayed within. The fishermen themselves were either perfect examples of God-fearing men, taking their religious beliefs seriously or, in some cases, they were the exact opposite, regarding their contemporaries as pious fools. Much has been written about these religious attitudes.

  The only things they imported were their boats and its gear, although some communities had their own boatbuilder, sometimes an itinerant jobbing boatbuilder who would build to order on the local beach or field. Hemp first, then cotton, netting was bought in although the job of setting up a drift-net or whatever was done by the fishermen. Nets were barked periodically to prevent their rot in seawater until manmade materials arrived in the twentieth century. To do this, a tannin-strong solution was made up. Oak bark was used extensively and records of Welsh trade show huge amounts being brought in from Ireland while some was also exported from South Wales. The solution was made by boiling up the bark in water in a huge vat. Often such a container, with a fire below, was set up in a harbour so that all the fishermen could use it, and often they worked cooperatively, helping each other in the work. The net would be dropped in using an A-frame to hoist it, and then left for sometime before being hauled out and hung to dry of the net poles. All harbours had net poles as the old nets were often hung up to dry after each use at sea. Sometimes they were hauled up the mast of a boat to dry in the same way.

  Cutch – or catechu to give it its proper name – was adopted in the late nineteenth century and is a preservative made from the acacia tree of the Indian subcontinent. It arrived in Britain as a brittle rectangular lump in a wooden box, packed around with large leaves, the box measuring about 18in by 12in by 8in. It was made in India by boiling the wood and bark of the acacia – especially the species Acacia catechu – in water and then evaporating the resultant brew. The fishermen then broke up the lump which was not unlike treacle toffee in brittleness, and added it to boiling water before immersing their nets. Cutch was also used in the dying and leather industries, and thus was used by the fishermen to tan their sails. Other additives were included when tanning sails to help preserve them, among which were unsavoury substances such as rancid butter, dog faeces and other compounds that are there to generally fix the dye. Nowadays powders such as quebracho are used with dyes and other modern fixing agents. But, there again, no fisherman these days tans his sails: that’s left to the enthusiast with his restored traditional boat!

  It’s a strange thing but some boats used to tan their sails red while the majority of fishermen coloured theirs brown. Red, you see, is a colour that was regarded unlucky in many quarters, as was green. ‘Red and green should not be seen, except upon a Derby Queen’ goes the saying, though how the fact that some fishing boats were painted green (and red) equates to this is unknown. Superstitions, after all, are negotiable, in that they differ from port to port. Some were sacrosanct throughout the fleets: no red-haired women aboard, don’t whistle up the wind, etc. Many animals could not be mentioned aboard: rabbits, pigs, rats, monkeys, ferrets and salmon were variously referred to as ‘moppies’, ‘curly tails’, ‘long tails’, ‘hairy faces’, ‘futtrets’ and ‘red fish’ though even here there were regional differences. In and around Campbeltown rabbits were ‘bunnies’, salmon ‘billies’ and pigs ‘doorkies’. The custom of speaking these words was so imprinted on the minds of fishermen and their families that Angus Martin relates a story told by George Newlands of Campbeltown of how a young fisherman’s son Willie insisted in saying ‘P-i-g … doorkie’ instead of ‘P-i-g … pig’ in lessons
because ‘My daddy’ll no let me say that’, referring to the actual word ‘pig’!14 Just why are these particular animals taboo? It has been pointed out that pigs, unlike most farmed animals, are bred only to eat while others such as hens, cows and sheep have a dual purpose though whether this makes any difference is unknown. Rabbits are pests and game as well as pets in some cases. There’s an instance of a fisherman hunting and hanging dead rabbits in his fish hold only to find the night’s fishing so abundant that the hold was full of herring. So you can shoot them, eat them, bait your creels with them and hang them in the hold to bring luck: but don’t mention them in word! But that’s the point about superstition; they are completely contradictory and often seem whimsical to outsiders.15