This article formed the second part of Mrs Catherine Kinnaird’s memoirs which were previously published in the SHS Journal. This one appeared in issue 20 from July 2003.
I remember the busy fishing seasons when the town was full of fishworkers and the harbour full of fishing boats.
In those days the summer and winter season had fixed dates – 10th May was the start of the summer season which usually lasted until about the beginning of August. The winter season started on 10th December and went on until about the middle of February.
It was mostly island girls who were engaged in the gutting. When I worked in the Labour Exchange (during the twenties),[1] we had three thousand fishing girls on the Register. It was mostly East Coast girls (‘Betsacs’, we called them)) who did the kippering; but there were quite a number of Stornoway girls who were kipperers too, a lot of them from Battery Park but quite a few town girls also. (The Battery must have been viewed as apart from the town proper, presumably). Most of the men were employed in the kipper sheds – the “smokers”, as they were known- and for the most part they came from the East Coast, although there were a few locals employed as well.
The girls lived in large shed-like buildings adjoining the yards or kipper houses which ran down almost the full length of both Inaclete Road and Bell’s Road. There would be several hundred of these girls in a busy season.
The kippering houses were owned by well-known fish trade families from all the main fishing ports in Scotland and England, Buckie, Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Lerwick, Hull, Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Some of the names which came to mind: the Nutmans of Great Yarmouth (one of the sons of whom married a Stornoway girl and bought the house at 28 Kenneth Street); Woodgers from Hull, and of course the Scottish East Coast firms like Downies (who owned the yard at South Beach Street) and Slaters.
I remember the long summer evenings when the fishing was in full swing and there would be a blue blaze over the town from the oak chips from the fires which smoked the kippers- no dyed kippers in those days!
In the winter time when there would be a glut of herring, the gutting went on until all hours, the girls working by the light of naphtha flares. The “stations”, as the stances were which the different curers leased from the Council were called, stretched along the harbour from ‘Billingsgate’[2] round and along South Beach Street.
You could hear the girls singing away as they worked – I doubt if nowadays anybody would be prepared to work all hours in the conditions in which these girls worked.
They gutted the herring at lightening speed, two gutters and a packer to each crew. As they gutted the herrings, the gutters sorted them out into different grades. There would be a row of small tubs behind each crew and, as they gutted each herring, they flung it over their shoulders to the appropriate tub. Among the grades were “Extra – large Fulls” (usually more plentiful in the summer season). “Large Fulls”, “Matifulls, “Matjes”, “T.Bs” (‘torn bellies’) and one or two other grades I cannot now recall.
When I worked in Murdo Maclean’s office and they had the fish-curing yard in operation[3], we used to get Market Returns each week from Danzig (Gdansk, nowadays), Hamburg and other Baltic ports. The Returns listed the prices fetched at auction for the cured herring and invariably, the Minch herring fetched the best prices. When I first started to work in the office, there was a shelfful of old ledgers which I thought would be the better of tidying up. On going through them, I saw that one of these was a record of their fish-curing dealings with the Continental market. MacLean’s was one of the smaller firms in the business, in a modest way compared to the big names in the fish trade; but for the year of the Russian Revolution 1917, they were owed £14,000 by the various firms affected by this event – mainly in the Baltic ports like Riga and other cities in the area where cured herrings were sold. The curers were never compensated for these losses and, if you convert £14,000 at that time into its comparable present-day equivalent, it represents a sizeable sum of money.
When the winter herring fishing ended, the white fish season started. I can remember, as a youngster, when our family used to have a supply of cured white fish in store – dried cod, ling and sometimes eels. My father (he died in 1918) bought those on the pier when the boats came in. They were gutted, cleaned and split, then laid side by side to dry on the wall adjoining the church (i.e. the boundary wall between the Free Church and 37 Kenneth Street, my mother’s and my own family home).
Another source of fish at that time were the haddocks and whiting which the women from the Back area sold in town from their creels. They went from house to house calling “Ceannich sibh iasg?” (“Do you want to buy fish?”). Usually, there would be three large or six small haddocks to a string (or ‘gad’, as we called them), the prices, in my earliest recollection, ranging from 6d. to a shilling a string (2.5p to 5p in current coinage). It was good value for fish fresh from Broadbay, then a rich source of the choicest flat fish – plaice, sole, turbot and halibut as well as the common haddock – now, unfortunately, so over-fished by the trawlers from all the airts that the breeding grounds have been depleted to such an extent that they are on the verge of extinction.
[1] The old Labour Exchange was located on the site of the former RNR Naval Base at Battery Point.
[2] Billingsgate was a local nickname for sheds on the old No 1 pier. It was a reference to the famous fish market in London.
3. Murdo Maclean, best known for his furniture and department stores, on Cromwell Street also had a fish curing yard behind the former Coffee Pot café at the corner of South Beach St and Kenneth St.