Fishing for Heritage

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 Fishing for Heritage
Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast

Jane Nadel-Klein

Oxford • New York

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 First published in 2003 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York NY 10003-4812, USA

© Jane Nadel-Klein 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nadel-Klein, Jane, 1947–
Fishing for heritage : modernity and loss along the Scottish coast /
Jane Nadel-Klein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-85973-562-2 – ISBN 1-85973-567-3 (pbk.)
1. Tourism–Scotland–History–20th century. 2. National characteristics,
Scottish–History–20th century. 3. Historic sites–Interpretive programs–
Scotland–Public opinion. 4. Cultural property–Protection–Scotland–Public
opinion. 5. Heritage tourism–Scotland–Public opinion. 6. Scotland–
Economic conditions–1973– 7. Fishing villages–Scotland. 8. Public
opinion–Scotland. 9. Coasts–Scotland. I. Title.

DA867.5 .N33 2003

941.1085–dc21
2002013469

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 562 2 (Cloth)

ISBN 1 85973 567 3 (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants.

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Archetypes, Fantasies and Ethnographic Destinations 1

2 Stigma and Separation: Fisherfolk as a “Race Apart” 21

3 Fisher Lassies: Gender, Stereotypes and Marginality 51

4 Ferryden: Place, Power and Identity 93

5 Perpetual Crisis and the Making of the Fisherfolk 133

6 Fisherfolk under Glass? Memory and the Heritage Wars 171

Afterword: Scotland in the General and the Particular 213

Bibliography 221

Index 245

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 Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation period. Many people have helped to
give it birth. My first thanks go to my husband, Bradley S. Klein, who, by
dint of loving, nagging, browbeating and encouraging me (as well as by
brewing endless cups of coffee) gave me the strength and persistence to
complete the task. He is also a ruthless editor. My next thanks go to my
dear friends and colleagues, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington,
whose brilliant, patient and painstaking editing skills rescued me from
many blind alleys. Their courage has also taught me much about the
meaning of loss and resilience.
Others have also given very helpful critiques along the way, in part-
icular: Joan Hedrick, Margo Perkins and Barbara Sicherman, from Trinity
College, with whom I spent many productive afternoons as part of a
writers’ circle. With Dona Davis of the University of South Dakota, I have
had countless stimulating discussions comparing Scottish fishing com-
munities to those in Newfoundland and Norway.
I owe an incalculable debt to the fisherfolk of Scotland. Many people
in Ferryden, Anstruther, Pittenweem, Eyemouth, Buckie and Nairn endured
my questions with great patience and good humor. They have given
generously of their hospitality, time and information. I must particularly
thank members of the Buckie Heritage Society, the Nairn fishertown
museum, and the Scottish Fisheries Museum. In Anstruther, David Smith
and James Tarvit have been especially helpful in explaining the very
complex workings of a fisherman’s life. I thank them and also apologize
for never being able to keep straight the differences between a Zulu and a
Fifie. The errors and omissions here are mine alone.
I cannot find words to express my affection for and gratitude to James
and Olive Halliday of Broughty Ferry. They have been my true friends,
surrogate family and key interpreters of Scottish life and politics for
a quarter of a century. We have logged many miles on Scottish roads
together. Also, Sheila and Richard Suddaby of Buckie have been good
friends and hosts.
The research has been generously supported by grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities; first through their Summer Stipend
program and later through the College Teachers Fellowship program. I

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 Acknowledgements

must also thank the Faculty Research Program of Trinity College, which
has supported this effort with funding and leave time. In Scotland, I wish
to thank the following at the University of Edinburgh: the International
Social Science Institute for giving me office space and institutional affil-
iation; the Department of Social Anthropology (particularly Alan Barnard,
Charles Jedrej, Iris Jean-Klein and Jean Cannizzo) for their warm rec-
eption of a foreign colleague; and the School of Scottish Studies and its
Director, Margaret McKay, who gave me full access to the School’s
wonderful library.
In writing this book I felt the difficulty of my position as ethnographer,
knowing full well that, no matter how sincere and strenuous my attempts
to present my informants’ points of view as I think they would want them
presented, I have made mistakes and committed serious transgressions in
reflecting their views of truth. For this, I can only apologize.
Our daughter, Cory-Ellen, who almost became an anthropologist but
wisely chose instead to be a poet, endured many fieldwork absences
during her childhood, but also learned many obscure Scottish folk songs.
I dedicate this book to Brad and to Cory-Ellen, with all my love.

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 –1–

Archetypes, Fantasies and

Ethnographic Destinations

“In Viking days they put all the social anthropologists to the sword”
Cooper, The Road to Mingulay

Introduction

Some might think a book on Scottish fishing villages to be a mite esoteric,

even obscure. How many could there be, after all, and why should we care
about them, other than as pretty places to visit on a holiday? I have spent
a quarter of a century studying these villages and the people who live
there, thinking about them almost daily. I have come to know many as
informants and some as friends, so I feel entitled to give an answer.
Actually, three answers.
The first is simply the one that any right-minded anthropologist or
humanist might give, that all people, “great and small,” deserve our
attention, not least because “human populations construct their cultures in
interaction with one another, and not in isolation,” as Eric Wolf said in his
preface to Europe and the People Without History (1982: ix). Fishers have
been part of the larger story of Scotland, Europe and the world beyond.
The second is that by studying Scottish fishing villagers we learn
something about the conundrums of modernity and perhaps of post-
modernity (should it exist); for in their histories and in their present
circumstances, they have experienced how capitalism can create and then
dismiss a way of life. Living in small places initially adapted to a small-
scale, decentralized industry, they now find themselves struggling to stay
afloat in a world run by much larger players. Adapting to these changes
over the years has given the fishers a toughness and resilience as well as
a sharply critical eye and tongue. As I have said elsewhere, they are not
about to watch their eclipse happen silently (Nadel-Klein 1991a). They see
themselves as survivors. They are not sure, however, what legacy they can
leave to their children.

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 Fishing for Heritage

Thirdly, I also know, as an anthropologist, that ethnographic investig-

ation can teach us much about the experience of what it is now fashionably
called globalism. To understand the consequences of public attitudes,
policies, national agendas and transnational economic forces upon local-
ities, we cannot afford to look only at statistics on employment and
migration. We must remember Geertz’s exhortation that ethnography is a
“craft of place” (1983: 167) and look at – and listen to – people. The
fisherfolk are fabulous – and generous – storytellers who can teach us
much about survival, integrity and strength in the face of hardship. By
listening to them and by setting their tales in present-day, as well as in
historical context, we engage with memory as a tactic that builds and
rebuilds identity. For it is not just the body that must perpetually renew
itself; it is our sense of self, as well.
The best way to find local experience is to live with people in the places
they call “home.” My strategy here is to let my informants speak about
identity, time, place and community and to set their views against those
of “outsiders” as much as possible. In this way, I examine how Scottish
fishing people define themselves, how others define them, and how these
contrasting perceptions shape an ongoing, but rarely equal dialogue,
similar in many ways to that encompassing Highlanders, Celts, Gypsies
and others who occupy stereotyped and often stigmatized categories.
Identity-in-dialogue is a never-completed process, rather than an
object, so my book is historical as well as ethnographic. Stereotype, stigma
and, indeed, marginalization, have molded fishers’ lives. Scholarly,
popular and touristic descriptions have, each in their own way, contributed
to that marginalizaton. Nonetheless, the people of fisher communities
have managed to construct a positive sense of their own value. They do
not regard the past as something to be transcended or forgotten but as an
educational resource, a school of hard knocks that helps them to endure
modern burdens. For them, the past is not so much a foreign country (cf.
Lowenthal 1985) as a familiar attic in which they rummage at will, pulling
out bits and pieces that can be recycled for present use. These bits and
pieces are not randomly chosen, but provide evidence of a strategy of
negotiation in the face of long-term social stigma and economic struggle.
The rise, decline and transformation of Scottish fishing villages pro-
vides the book’s framework. Each chapter looks both at material circum-
stances as well as at different ways that fishers have responded to power.
In this first chapter, I introduce the intersecting layers of discourse, the
community imaginings in which fishers are embedded (Anderson 1983).
To reach the local level, so as to achieve an anthropological understanding,
we must move through the national; we are helped along the way by

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

fictional and poetic, as well as ethnographic accounts. Chapter 2 addresses

cases, examining historically how the east coast fishing communities were
established as objects of social stigma. Gender forms the core of Chapter
3, where I look at how fisherwomen’s complex, public roles helped to
reinforce the idea that fishers were “different.”
In Chapter 4, I hone in on Ferryden, site of my first Scottish fieldwork.
It is a village whose claim to be a fishing community now hangs by a
thread, so eclipsed by others’ agendas that it has even disappeared from
many maps. In Chapter 5, I broaden the focus again to confront crisis, an
idea with which fishers everywhere are only too familiar. I set the current
moment of crisis in a more general North Atlantic context to show that the
Scottish fishers’ experience is not unique, but also to demonstrate the
enormous complexity of their current predicament.
Finally, in Chapter 6, I tie these threads together, reprising themes of
representation by looking at how tourism and the “heritage industry”
(Hewison 1987) are producing new imaginings about fisher people. While
these allow local voices to be heard in new venues, the fishers seldom get
to control who hears them, where the message goes, or how it is interpreted.
As Sharon MacDonald (1997: 246), in her book on cultural “reimagining”
on the Isle of Skye, points out, “People are being called upon to revive,
maintain and express the cultural particularity that it is assumed that they
have somehow lost touch with: they are being called upon to expressively
individuate themselves as ‘cultures’.” In the tensions that arise during this
process along the east coast, we can see the latest in the series of struggles
that have, in some measure, pitted fisherfolk against those who would
appropriate cultural resources for their own ends.

Situating the Ethnographer: a Brief Cultural Autobiography

I wish to ground the following discussion in a little cultural autobiography,

to say something about some of the factors that have influenced my choice
of topic as well as the approach I take to it. This is not a confessional, but
an exercise in context building, a bow to the importance of reflexivity,
particularly when examining others’ ideological constructions. As I began
this work as a graduate student, and am writing this book over a quarter
of a century later, it seems appropriate to say something about how the
field has changed in that time, particularly the field of British ethnography.
But more is needed: ethnographers, like other people, do not live in
protective bubbles. We travel, read novels and newspapers, see films,
listen to (and sing) songs, and watch television. So here, as well as

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 Fishing for Heritage

elsewhere in the book, I will also refer to some of the popular, as well as
scholarly, sources of ideas about British and Scottish society that have
provoked me, one way or another, into thinking about identity and repres-
entation. From this beginning, I will reflect upon the dialogue that has
emerged between fishing villagers and those who describe and objectify
them, to deconstruct the assumptions underlying that dialogue, and then
to consider how the whole conceptual apparatus of difference actually
impinges upon fishers’ lives.
Scotland is a hallowed place for many North Americans. The country
attracts tourists like a magnet, many of them apparently expecting to find
the ghosts of ancestral Celtic clansmen striding the hills and bagpipes
skirling on every corner. A place so laden with fodder for the foreigner’s
imagination can prove a special challenge for the ethnographer. I have
learned in recent years to take seriously the question I am so often asked:
“how did you choose Scotland, and Scottish fishing villages, for your field
research?” A part of the honest answer (which I sidestepped for years) is
that twenty odd years ago, as a graduate student, I simply loved the
country for my sense of its romance: for the folk songs and the heather,
the bleak hills and the ever-present sea. The picture of Scotland I held then
was built upon many of the images that travel agents and tourist boards
so lyrically promote, upon those myths and dreams of venturing to a land
of spiritual allure and exhilarating scenery that make tourism today one
of Scotland’s most important industries. As Michael Russell, Chief Exec-
utive of the Scottish National Party, says, “It has never been difficult to
travel in an imaginary Scotland” (1998: xiii).
Unlike many sojourners in this realm, I have no Scottish ancestry.
Acquaintances – particularly Scottish ones – often assume this in queries
about my ethnographic choice: must I not be engaged in a quest for
Scottish “roots?” But I have never been tempted to see myself as the scion
of some lost Russian-Jewish branch of a clan, complete with “docu-
mented” genealogy – the MacHurwitzes, perhaps. From childhood,
however, I had clung to another kind of legacy: an imagined world
constructed chiefly through literary and musical sources as miscellaneous
as stories of bravehearted (and extraordinarily intelligent) collies, some of
Robert Burns’ politer songs (for years, I wondered what a gloaming was),
and tales of twentieth century children encountering ancient sources of
Celtic wizardry.1
A visit to the Scottish Highlands in 1967 brought to life all my adolescent
imaginings and readings about a wild and older world still somehow
accessible to the adventurous traveler. Succumbing to the all-too-common
conflation of Scotland as a whole with its northern and western parts, I saw

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

the country, then, not only in purely Highland terms, but also as a place
outside of modernity, a place where humans had stepped lightly. It seemed
no less than magical.
Such fantasies concern me now. Ethnographers today are expected to
be reflexive, to reveal something of their own intellectual and emotional
subjectivity in the course of writing about some “other.” Acknowledging
oneself and one’s position as a writer in the course of writing is key to
approaching the partiality (in the senses both of bias and of incomplete-
ness or provisionality) of the “truths” (Clifford 1986; Rosaldo 1993) that
we portray. However, my early images of a romantic, somehow timeless
Scotland – of a maritime Brigadoon (see Bruce 1996; Carrier and Carrier
1987; Gold and Gold 1995; Hardy 1990) – were not merely idiosyncratic.
They were part of a much larger, historically and culturally constructed
scenario that has itself been the occasion for significant social transform-
ation in many Scottish communities. We have only to consider, for example,
the vast unpopulated estates of the north, kept “cleared” for lucrative, open-
air leisure pursuits (Callander 1998, McEwen 1981; Wightman 1997).
Indeed, with respect to the distribution of land, Scotland appears
downright archaic (Callander 1998; McEwen 1981; Wightman 1997:
189). In fact, Callander tells us, “Scotland is both the only country in the
world with a feudal system of land tenure and the country with the most
concentrated pattern of large-scale private estates” (italics mine; Callander
1998: 7; see also Short 1997: 310–32). Characterizing a late twentieth
century European nation as feudal may seem like invective. Such usage
stems, however, from the complex history of relationships between
landholders and the general population. A small number of landowners has
wielded great power, buying and selling enormous estates that may
include a number of villages and that affect thousands of people.
In the western Highlands, for example, a community organization
representing the seventy residents of Knoydart finally managed to buy the
estate, which had deteriorated sadly over the past fifty years. They only
managed to do so with outside help donated by lovers of nature and
wilderness. However, a local man put it in historical terms. “The people
of Knoydart are now free from the threat of suffering and injustice
which was once so brutally inflicted by its owners during the Clearances
of 1853 and the time of the land raiders” (Ross 1999: 7). Needless to say,
the event got considerable press. It also aroused the fears of many land-
lords (McBeth 1998). However, locally driven possibilities for economic
development usually remain extremely tenuous.
As the quote above reveals, sales of large estates, or announcements of
new plans to extract capital from the land continue to call up the spectre

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 Fishing for Heritage

of the Highland clearances and the prospect of displacement and land-

lessness. One often hears that the nineteenth-century era of mass evictions
has not, in fact, ended.
Ideas of what Scotland, and Scotland’s inhabitants, particularly in their
more rural manifestations, are supposed to be, have played a significant
role in how the political economy of many Scottish places has been
shaped. We can see these ideas at work in the goals of those eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century rural social engineers called the Improvers (whom
I discuss in the next chapter); in Sir Walter Scott’s powerful effect upon
public perceptions of the Highlands2 and the successful efforts of Thomas
Cook to lure tourists there; in the pastoral revels of Queen Victoria. This
last has been excoriated mercilessly by playwright John McGrath in The
Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1974) in which North Sea oil
development is depicted as a modern version of internal colonialism (so
quaintly represented in the gentle humor of the film Local Hero).
I cannot pretend that romanticism and/or the projection of my own
escapist fantasies had nothing to do with my later selection of a Scottish
fishing village – albeit one outside the Highlands – for field research. For
one thing, I have always been intrigued by the sea as a symbol of both
freedom and danger, of raw, untamed “nature” at the doorstep, proclaim-
ing the illusion of a frontier. For another, there is no denying that fishing
villages are probably as close as one can get in the eastern Lowlands to a
visual illusion that modernity has been kept at bay. These coastal com-
munities appear to be discrete, even autonomous, with their distinctive
architecture: narrow, winding streets, small, crowded houses and little
commercial life beyond a post office and village shop. They have no chain
stores – no Boots, no Marks and Spencer – and none of the ubiquitous
shoe stores that seem to line virtually every British High Street. While
many of them now house substantial populations of “incomers” who know
nothing about fishing as a way of life, the public image of these places as
fishing villages somehow survives. Indeed, in many places it is being
highlighted for tourist consumption, as we shall see in Chapter 6.
Contemplating my own early ideas about Scotland has led me to
consider more generally how romantic fantasies have informed the ways
popular and ethnographic ideas about the rural/peasant/marginal/peripheral
have affected the people designated as such. Each part of the world has
had its share of representations that have been variously described as
colonialist, romantic, orientalist, or occidentalist (Asad 1973; Carrier
1992, 1995; Clifford 1986; Pratt 1986; Said 1978), characterizations that
reveal these as stereotyped essentialisms. This prompts us to ask how such
images have conditioned ethnographers’ interpretations of what we see in

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

Britain, to search for points of articulation between the belief in “folk”

with more general ideas about British rural life. Specifically, we must
wonder whether we are yet free from Redfield’s unidirectional and polar-
izing paradigm of the folk/urban continuum (Redfield 1955). Do we still
subscribe in some subtle way to Frankenberg’s (1966) recasting of this
paradigm as a “morphological continuum” of the truly rural to the urban?
And what is at work here besides what Cohen refers to as a “powerful
compulsion of anthropologists, inherited from their Victorian forebears,
to taxonomy” (Cohen 1990: 204)?

Imagining Fishers: “Folk” Tales

Long before the current popularity of “heritage” as an economic resource

and nation-building device for Scotland, the fisherfolk have been con-
stituting themselves as a people of strength and adaptability. If they have
a totem, it is hard work. In daily conversation they argue, reminisce and
dwell upon the dangers and importance of their bygone occupation. They
cast themselves as the central characters in their own universe of meaning,
even as they remain keenly aware that others have not always appreciated
their skills and sacrifices. A difference now is that some of the fisherfolk’s
self-constructions are finding their way into the popular view. Emblems
of their identity such as dress, boat models, and songs (Macdonald’s nice
phrase for this is a “cultural ‘identikit’”; 1997: 246), in short, anything that
can be captured and used for display, are now being used to sell the idea
of fishing villages as desirable visitor attractions. This is not altogether an
unwelcome development from many fisherpeople’s point of view, as we
shall see, but it is one that, rather ironically, depends upon maintaining the
image of fishers as “folk.”
What is this rather archaic category of “folk” life, from which others,
particularly middle-class and urban others, are normally excluded? How
has it become an archetype and what use is being made of it in the present
day? And why are some folk “folk,” and other folk not? The prism of
modernity refracts “folk” into multiple meanings. David Buchan (1984:
1) glosses folk as referring to “anything old, or earthy or couthy or even,
in the Scottish context, vernacular”. McKinney (1999) adopts a similar
view, saying that the boundaries between what counts as folk music are
nearly impossible to pin down. Pre- or non-literacy has been invoked as
a criterion. Only oral tradition counts. Colls (1977: 19) tells us, for
example, that the great nineteenth-century folksong collector Cecil Sharp
insisted that folk culture must be uncontaminated by print, and averred,

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moreover, that “folk music is the product of a race and reflects feelings
and tastes that are communal rather than personal”. Boyes (1993: 3)
suggests that the counter-cultural folksong revival of the mid-twentieth
century relied upon idealized notions of folk culture. “Old, lost, rural
‘organic communities’, rather than newly developed urban existence
could, therefore, be held up as the only valid source of an alternative,
uncultivated art”. Folk have also stood as emblems of the nation. Herzfeld
(1987) notes nineteenth century nationalists’ belief that in folklife they
could find the essence of national character, reducing local and ethnic
differences to a single “a moralistic canon of texts that reduced diversity
to uniformity”. I will return to this question when I discuss the rise of folk
museums in Chapter 6.
“Fisherfolk” is an occupationally centered cultural identity marked
today by both dilemma and irony: dilemma because, as Chapter 5 will
show, North Atlantic fishing communities are economically threatened
as never before; and irony because, as we shall see in Chapter 6, their
salvation may well lie in transforming themselves into cultural showcases
or icons of one particular variety of Scottish “heritage,” where aspects of
the fishery are displayed and performed, yet where fish are no longer
locally caught and sold. As the source of fisherfolk identity moves from
fishers’ material status as primary producers of food to their symbolic
status as objects of “the tourist gaze” (Urry 1990), they come to stand “in
opposition to the aesthetic ideal of a creative producer” (D. Miller 1995:
1). Putting it another way, once they were fisherfolk; now they are becom-
ing fisherfolk, with all that the “folk” metaphor implies about essentialized
tradition, about authenticity and putative antiquity at the end of the
twentieth century (cf. Herzfeld 1987; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). What
it means to be a member of a stereotyped and marginalized category like
“the fisherfolk” in modern-day Britain, and how this stereotype becomes
grounded in locale, I take to be one of my central theoretical, as well as
empirical tasks. How long the fisherfolk can hold on to the idea of – and
belief in – themselves as fisherfolk, even with its newly transposed
emphasis, is a matter of considerable doubt and great local concern. In this
sense, Scottish fisherfolk can be added to the list of peoples for whom
cultural survival is an issue.
The “folk” label – highly loaded, indeed, antiquarian – says much
about the survival of our own folk models of the West, of which fishers
form a particularly instructive example (cf. Holy and Stuchlik 1981).
Whatever else they might be, “folk” are almost always rural. As I have
argued previously (Nadel-Klein 1995), images of British rural life as set
in pristine circumstances occupy a special and privileged niche in the

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

Western imagination of place. They provide an internalized, exotic other

that stands for a past of virtue and predictability. A comforting counter-
weight to the confusions and burdens of modern life, one can point to them
and say “Look! How wonderful that such simple places still exist; how
lucky we are to be able to visit them.”
“Folk” is a term that separates, one that implies a sense of difference,
not just of residence or occupation, but of kind, a difference resembling
the equally vague, but more academically respectable, notion of ethnicity.
But “folk” is clearly not a neutral term and carries with it some heavy
cultural baggage about backwardness. Folk are most widely known
through two organizing ideas. The first is the notion of the country
bumpkin: folk are simple. The second is the notion of special material
culture: folk look and act different from the rest of us. As an American
schoolchild in the 1950s, I can remember learning about European “folk”
through textbook images of quaint, ceremonial peasant dress. Starched
Swiss aprons, lederhosen, and kilted bagpipers come immediately to
mind. Such images conjured up not only foreignness, but festivity. The
people in the pictures always looked “historical,” though no one ever said
that they were dead or even obsolete.
Anthropologists of Europe need to address the folk category head on
and consider how it resonates within our own discourses of Europe, as
Herzfeld (1987) has said. While it may appear to be an archaism on one
level, on another, it is very much a part of present usage within Europe
itself and cannot be dismissed as a Tylorian “survival” within academia,
a point that Herzfeld makes powerfully with respect to the ethnography
of Greece and the idea of how we construct the very boundaries of the
West (Herzfeld 1987).
More often, attention to problems of social marginalization and cultural
survival has been directed to those places and peoples of the “Third” or
“Fourth” Worlds, where Europeans have ventured and whose land and
resources they have, in various ways, appropriated. Herzfeld’s ground-
breaking contribution was to redirect some of those concerns towards
Europe itself. In Anthropology Through the Looking Glass, Herzfeld
brought us “part-way home” (pace Cole 1977), as it were, to look at
Greece as not-quite-Europe, not-quite-”Other.” Standing on the margins
of the continent, at the crossroads of many cultural encounters, Greece has
had the ambiguous distinction of embodying both ancient (Western) glory
and premodern (Eastern) backwardness in the eyes of its European neigh-
bors. In a world where to be European has been to be presumed powerful,
such conceptual marginalization has social and public policy consequences
(Herzfeld 1987).

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Malcolm Chapman (1992: 128) takes this line of reasoning both north
and west, noting that “romanticisation of internal ethnic variety is a British
invention” of the nineteenth century, particularly as applied to those rather
amorphous creatures known as Celts. He examines their construction as
an other worldly and primitively-derived folk survival within modern
Britain, Ireland, and France. He takes it as “no surprise, then, that ‘Celts’
and the ‘folk’ should often seem virtually co-terminous categories” (1992:
116).
One does not have to go to the geographical periphery to find the
cultural margin, however. The “other” may be found whenever class and
power differences become conflated with localized identities. At such
junctures, “locals” easily become either vilified or exoticized (or both).
Thus in their stigmatized and dependent positions, they resemble other,
less localized, but even more marginalized or pariah groups, such as the
Gypsies of Europe (Barth 1969; Gmelch 1985; Okeley 1983). They
remain the objects of fantasy, scorn or charity rather than empathy. The
symbolic boundaries that define their communities are constructed in a
chronic dialogue between “inside” and “outside” (cf. Cohen 1985), where
being “inside” confers both rights and deprivation. In Britain, localized
identities are often presumed to reside in villages, sites that have become
virtually coterminous with the concept of the folk but that also provide
microcosmic examples of the wider class system.

Encountering Villages

Margaret Mead once worried that villages, like tribal societies, might be
endangered in the modern world. She saw in them a special kind of social
value perhaps unavailable elsewhere (Mead 1980). She has not been alone
in her concern. It has been widely observed that the British – particularly
the English – seem to worship the pastoral. Contemporary scholars of rural
life have approached the subject from different critical perspectives and
with various degrees of skepticism. Newby (1987: 3) sees in the romantic-
ization of villages something pernicious, a refusal to acknowledge the
brute impact of the social inequalities underlying rural life that he calls
“one of the major protecting illusions of our time”. On the other hand,
Raymond Williams (1973), regarding the polarities and contrasts of city
and country in constructing the pastoral perspective, sees an ambivalence
about rural life unfolding through many centuries of Western literature,
vacillating from the idea of the idyllic pastoral to the notion of rural
parochialism, or even idiocy.

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

In my mind’s eye, the popular image of the British village is a pallid,

two-dimensional watercolor sketch rather than a robust oil painting full
of color, depth, perspective and variety: white-washed cottages and
gardens signal a community that is small, self-contained, and family-like
in its dense web of harmonious relationships. It sits securely within its tidy
lanes. The sketch itself, however, is a metaphor for all kinds of messages
that are both widely disseminated and very seductive. They come to us
strongly through many sources. Investigating these sources is an anthro-
pological challenge of no mean significance; indeed it is at the core of the
reflexive dilemma and of debates about the ontological status of cultural
authenticity. Ethnographers are as susceptible as anyone else to the
pictures that are drawn for them. The advantage of fieldwork is that it
provides the chance to explore how these pictures have been drawn – and
who is drawing them.
Literature, whether high, low or academic, has contributed substant-
ially to this vision. Murder mysteries are one of my favorite examples
because I am personally quite addicted to them. For years, I was partic-
ularly fond of the classic “English village” genre that depends upon a
small community setting for the unfolding of its plot and characters (see
Nadel-Klein 1995). Indeed, it is the stereotypical English village, with its
nucleated settlement, resident squirearchy, and Norman church that
informs the image embedded in what Raymond Williams (1973: 249)
calls the “middle-class detective story”. Here a timeless and traditional,
comfortingly hierarchical social order is taken for granted. Such stories
are, as he says, sometimes “combined with middle-class fantasies about
the human nature of the traditional inhabitants” (1973: 249). In such
stories, villages embody social stability and intimacy. Newby (1987: 1)
describes this view as “the pastoralism of merrie rustics, safely-grazing
sheep and stolid yeomanry”. Villages thus appear to stand, not only for
mystery readers but for a wider public as well, for the survival of our
essential, “good” past, the place and time when social relations were safe,
or at least predictable. In this view, inequalities are traditional and thus,
somehow, inconsequential.
My naive, Edenic vision of Britain was also reinforced through my
anachronistically constructed experiences as a tourist. Visitors anywhere
in rural Britain, after all, are encouraged to sidestep anything that mars
their preconceived, pastoral visions of unchanging village simplicity.
Those who trumpet British destinations play this note very loudly. Con-
sider, for example, the following advertisement that appeared in The New
Yorker:

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 Fishing for Heritage

English Adventures. Travel back in time on our luxury tours to the enchanted
villages and spectacular mountains of Wordsworth’s Lake District, including
visits to the Roman Wall and Yorkshire Dales. (28 September 1992; italics
mine)

The British National Trust, which preserves over half a million acres of
historic properties in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, also embraces
this approach, assuring readers of their magazine that “the British remain
one of the most past-loving societies on earth” (Lohr 1989: 45). And
where else but in a “village” could one find the living past, shored up by
old walls and old ways?
However, it is not only tourism developers, mystery writers and wistful
singers who have been obsessed by the village. By the 1960s, villages had
begun to surpass tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study, our
disciplinary preserve in the then largely sociological wilderness of “com-
plex societies.” Searching for manageable units in which to practice
participant observation, ethnographers not surprisingly have gravitated to
small communities with visibly accessible boundaries. Pioneered by
Arensberg and Kimball in County Clare, early British and Irish studies
focused on distinguishing rural from urban communities, identifying their
salient structural and functional features (Arensberg 1959; Arensberg and
Kimball 1968).
For them, as for Littlejohn in his study of the Border parish of Westrigg,
village-ness and rurality apparently inhered in kinship ties, an egalitarian
ethos, and a relatively “undifferentiated” economy, as well as in the shared
built environment. Littlejohn appears to have found Westrigg somewhat
disappointing in this respect (Littlejohn 1963). It was undeniably located
in the countryside, but was distinctly lacking in gemeinschaft or com-
munity (Tonnies 1955 [1887]). Similarly, Frankenberg’s revealingly titled
chapter, “The Town That is a Village,” expresses the notion that village-
ness has an essential, moral quality. As he says of the Welsh mining town
of Ashton, “It remains a village, but combines multiplicity of ties and sense
of community with urban values and environment” (1966: 139; emphasis
mine).
As Arensberg (1961) noted, such communities were recognized not
merely as encapsulated “objects” in and of themselves but as “samples”
of a wider social context. However, discussions about how to define that
context, about the ways in which a part could stand for the whole, and
about the relationship of locality to nation have never ceased to tax us.
The very word, “village,” suffered for years from very nearly the same
epistemological ambiguity that has bedeviled the notion of “tribe” (Fried

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

1975). That is, everyone used it, and few bothered to define it. What
assumptions were tacitly made about the nature of villages? Was the
concept being reified according to some essentialist archetype?
A paradigm of village-ness is difficult to pin down. Nineteenth-century
attempts to classify villages tended to take an evolutionist stance. Gomme
(1890: 2), for example, insisted that “the village community is of primitive
origin . . . its later existence a survival.” Matless (1994) suggests that these
ideas may not have disappeared as thoroughly as one might expect. He
subtitles his Foucauldian genealogy of postwar geographical writing on
the English village, “An Essay in Imaginative Geography”. Such writing,
he argues, colludes in an effort to present the village as a place of peace
and stability, where form is valued over function and where tradition
persists for its own sake. Behind this is the ideal of the rural as “a site of
potential and actual [aesthetic and ecological] redemption” (1994: 49).
Astutely questioning the meanings behind this representation, Matless
also points to the idea that a village is situated within a rural landscape,
highlighting its perception as a bounded, separate place, the non-urban
and the non-suburban (1994: 77).
Size might be another vague criterion: Westerners think of villages as
small places. However, village populations and areas vary considerably;
there is seldom any problem in distinguishing them from cities, but they
sometimes approach the dimensions of what might ordinarily be thought
of as a town. But this is to objectify and essentialize the concept of size,
which of course is itself relative to context and the experience of the
observer. A village may be the largest or the smallest residential segment
a person or society recognizes or experiences, depending on whether
we’re talking about Anglo-Saxon or nineteenth-century England, for
example.
Most problematic is the notion of a village boundary. The word “village”
conjures up an immediate impression of geographic coherence and limit-
ation. A settlement called a village may be seemingly isolated – accessible
only by sea, perhaps – or it may be obviously engulfed within an urban
matrix. But the significance of geography is quickly changing, with
electronic communications making it possible for computer operators in
Ireland or the Philippines to deliver text to publishers in New York or
Edinburgh and thus to help sustain their local economies. Where do cyber-
commuters really work? Social boundaries are no clearer. Villages today
house farmworkers, coal miners, and/or commuting stockbrokers, multi-
parish vicars and retired physicians.
But the characteristic most often presumed intrinsic to village life
remains the idea of community, of shared, overlapping ties and roles, of

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an ethos of “belonging” (Cohen 1982). Redfield spoke of it in terms of a

way of “living, thinking and feeling” (Redfield 1955: 147). Certainly this
was my unconscious mind set when I embarked upon my first fieldwork
experience, which was not in Scotland but in England. As I was only an
undergraduate at the time, my memories can have neither the richness nor
the layering of Barbara Anderson’s instructive memoir about First Field-
work (1990). Still, I recall them here as a backdrop to my later encounter
with Ferryden, my first Scottish field site and the subject of Chapter 3. It
was in Puttenham, a small village in Surrey, that I first became truly aware
of class and power. Following my junior year at Barnard College, I set off
in 1967 to spend a summer in this prosperous little Green Belt village
about 30 miles south of London. Puttenham fulfilled most fantasies: small
and intimate, with flowers at every front gate. There was a Manor, a
Squire, and even a thatched cottage or two. I kept expecting to meet Miss
Marple. (And to this day, whenever I recall Agatha Christie’s descriptions
of St Mary Mead, I see Puttenham.)
A nucleated village, its single street (called, in fact, The Street) linked
an 800-year-old church at one end with a tidy Council housing estate
tucked away at the other. The Street wove past The Good Intent (a white,
half-timbered pub that mystery writer Martha Grimes would appreciate).3
Set back from The Street along a couple of meandering lanes, some newer
and more affluent looking modern houses bespoke the influx of what
Watson (1964) called the Spiralists, members of the post-war, upwardly
mobile business class now seeking country living and gentility at a
comfortable remove from the City. In keeping with Laslett’s (1984: 25)
observation that the English “still seem to want to live in the structures of
the pre-industrial world as the proper place for the proper Englishman to
dwell in”, residents of Puttenham took great pride in having won the
coveted “best-kept village” award for Surrey several years running (see
Dugmore 1972 for a resident’s account). They earnestly swept up litter and
pruned the roses. I had never seen anything like it in my home state of
Connecticut. A self-conscious discourse of rural “villageness” animated
so much of this benevolent busy-ness. Villagers were determined to keep
Puttenham both green and genteel even as it was changing from an
agricultural backwater to a middle-class commuters’ haven (Newby 1987:
222). Through numerous voluntary associations, they joined together to
fulfil their image of how rural society should be.
But there is nothing like fieldwork to sweep away the veils of glamor.
I was still enchanted by the lanes and hedgerows, as well as by the kind-
ness with which I was treated. However, I quickly found that Puttenham’s
image was preserved in large measure through social practices predicated

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

upon a relentless insistence upon social hierarchy. No number of murder

mysteries could have adequately prepared me for the English class system:
how, for example, the nuances of class were built into every speech event.
Not just a matter of vocabulary or pronunciation, the higher ranked person
held the reins in every conversation. I have never forgotten, for example,
how the word “Quite,” spoken softly but authoritatively, can end a dis-
cussion.
Now, as I began to ask what underlay this image of pastoral simplicity,
the critiques of functionalist community studies I had read in graduate
school hit home. Puttenham was not a closed, static or self-regulating
social universe. Its 600 people were clearly and sharply divided into social
groupings that reflected national hierarchies and history. Class in Putten-
ham was made manifest through occupation, education, dress, speech,
dwelling and membership in voluntary organizations. Living standards
ranged from affluent to poor. Some households still lacked indoor toilets
whereas others had swimming pools. The landowning gentry; the affluent,
London-commuting stockbrokers (See Newby 1987: 221); the shabby-
genteel cottage dwellers; and what was once unproblematically described
as the “working class” (Thompson 1968); all lived in the same village, but
inhabited largely separate social worlds.
So while Puttenham fulfilled my immediate expectations of charm, in
the long run, it also raised questions about the kinds of costs such an image
entails. The experience of living there, albeit for only a summer, left with
me a strong sense of unease, not least because I became aware that my
American, undergraduate university-student identity, along with my
natural shyness and reserve (the English seem to like these qualities) had
saved me from the slights of class; indeed, it had given me access to a
much broader range of people than the village inhabitants themselves
normally enjoyed. So later, when I went to do fieldwork in Scotland, I was
already predisposed to question the idea of community as homogeneous
and to ask about the sources and effects of power.

Finding Ferryden

In 1975 I set out to examine the social impact of North Sea oil develop-
ment on the community, identity and boundaries of the east coast fishing
village of Ferryden and on its relations with the neighboring market town
of Montrose. For a graduate student brought up in the early 1970s political
economy tradition of anthropology, with its emphasis upon power and the
making of the modern world system (Wallerstein 1974), the chance to

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study local responses to multinational corporations, and to do so in a rich

historical context, was enticing. My graduate training at the City Uni-
versity of New York had emphasized the importance – and the difficulty
– of studying the ways local and regional elites negotiated processes of
change. It also emphasized the importance of working in Europe, a very
distinct, even radical, point of view for the discipline at that time. Thus I
had not yet quite realized just how marginal the study of Europe still was
within conventional ethnographic research.
Actually, my initial goals were somewhat vaguer than I have just
presented them. When I first left for the field, I wanted to examine a
Scottish coastal community but had no idea which one to choose. I knew
only that I was going to the northeast, rather than to the more distant-
seeming Highland and Island areas, despite my earlier yearnings for
remoteness. For one thing, with a couple of exceptions, that was where the
bulk of North Sea oil development was taking place and where its most
immediate impacts were likely to be felt. For another, what little Scottish
ethnography there was at that time had been done either in the Borders
(Littlejohn 1963) or in the Western or Northern Islands (Parman 1972;
Goffman 1963).
True to the traditions of our novelty-oriented discipline, I also wished
to carve out new ethnographic territory. By that time, of course, I was
better versed in Scottish history and wanted to address inequality and local
struggles for survival. It seemed apparent that the small communities most
directly affected by multinational oil operations would have little to say
about the changes swiftly overtaking them. I wished to know what that
would mean in people’s lives and how they would respond. Would local
culture persist in any significant way after the Texan oil drillers had
marched through?
My discovery of Ferryden village itself was, in fact, purely serendip-
itous. After flying from New York to London, I boarded an early morning
train to Aberdeen, hoping to consult with scholars at the university there
about a possible research site. Previous experience had taught me that it
would be unwise to arrive anywhere in Scotland after five or six in the
evening (when the tourists’ accommodation office had closed) and I hoped
to make Aberdeen early enough to secure a bed-and-breakfast through the
local tourist board. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the train would
become stuffed full of people in Edinburgh heading north to Carnoustie,
the site that year for the British Open Golf Championship. Despite the
collective wish of hundreds of golf enthusiasts and one anthropology
graduate student for the train to speed along, it crept ever more slowly
along the tortuous coastal route. By the time we reached Carnoustie, I

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

began to worry that I would arrive in Aberdeen far too late to find accom-
modation. Now the train began to make sudden and inexplicable stops.
Finally, word trickled through the compartments that the train ahead of
ours had derailed.
Luckily, as it turned out, I had fallen into conversation with a college
student on his way home to the town of Montrose, which we were then
approaching. Along with a capsule description of the town, he told me that
an offshore oil supply base had been recently established there. As we
pulled into the station, I made a quick decision. It would be better to get
a night’s sleep thirty miles from my destination than to be stranded
overnight in Aberdeen station. Reaching the Montrose tourist office just
minutes before closing time, I was directed to the home of a salmon
fisherman and his wife who provided bed-and-breakfast accommodation.
Their hospitality proved to the best introduction I could have had to the
area. They took pity on the “American lassie” who was traveling all alone
and saw to it that I had company, rich, warm food, and tea – a lot of tea.
Mr and Mrs Inglis urged me to stay in Montrose for the weekend so that
they could take me for a sightseeing drive up into the glens and around the
neighboring inland villages.
Our last stop was Ferryden, a place across the river from Montrose that
they had described to me as a fishing village. As we crossed the bridge,
my hosts pointed out the new Sea Oil Services Base that abutted Ferry-
den’s northern flank. Built in 1973, just two years previously, developers
had filled in the tidal “burn” or stream that had flowed past village
doorsteps to make a site for the project. The Base gave the village an oddly
compressed look. Its cottages seemed huddled together as if for protection,
separated as they were only by a narrow road from the warehouses and
construction equipment that occupied most of the Base’s 40 acres.
The following Monday morning I went on to Aberdeen to spend a few
weeks there conferring with regional planners and scholars at Aberdeen
University’s Center for the Study of Sparsely Populated Areas.4 They
confirmed my suspicions that much of the area north of Aberdeen (where
most oil-related development was then located) was already being rather
intensively studied by British researchers, primarily sociologists and
economists. Little attention was being paid to developments further south,
however, and no one had yet looked at the Ferryden and Montrose area;
they encouraged me to begin work there. Wishing to avoid a turf war, but
also intrigued by what I had seen of Ferryden, I agreed.
In retrospect, I must admit that I was drawn in part by Ferryden’s
relative obscurity. In my initial visit, it had become apparent that the Sea
Oil Services base had wrought major changes in the village that seemingly

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had gone unremarked by outsiders. For example, I could not help but
notice that everyone I met in Montrose, including my hosts, had referred
to Ferryden as a fishing village, and yet I had glimpsed no signs of an
active commercial fishery. I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out, for the
fishery itself had gone a generation earlier) that the oil development was
directly responsible for this absence.
The immediate task of figuring out “when is a fishing village not a fish-
ing village” required attending to a problematic set of issues involving the
formation and persistence of community identity. A complex historical as
well as ethnographic trail lay ahead as the objectives of my research ram-
ified quickly. Instead of looking at Ferryden village as a “thing” to which
other “things” happened, I began to seek a more processual exploration
that took into account how social and economic power was constructed
and organized beyond the village level, and yet articulated within it. The
significance of multinational oil companies began to recede somewhat in
the context of a dense regional network of landowners and entrepreneurs
who had brokered developments in the coastal economy for centuries.
Since the 1970s, Scotland has remained my primary site for fieldwork.
I have returned many times over the years for research stays of varying
duration, though never in the Highlands. Rather, the eastern and north-
eastern Lowlands have become my ethnographic bailiwick. I returned to
Ferryden in 1984 to find that little had outwardly changed. However,
several of my older informants had died and this left me with a curious
sense of urgency. It was time to go further afield, to learn more about the
wider world of Scottish fishing communities and particularly to invest-
igate ones where the industry was still alive to some degree. So I ventured
southward first, to the Fife coast; then I went north to the Moray Firth. A
brief stay in the town of Nairn (12 miles east of Inverness) showed me how
tourism was beginning to collide with fisher interests. Several longer stays
in Buckie (another 20 miles eastward) taught me much more about these
collisions.
These later trips (four in all) were, of necessity, shorter. Now I had a
young daughter and a teaching position. In 1999, however, a sabbatical
afforded me the chance to spend another half year in Scotland. This time
I based myself in Edinburgh. I needed to look at things from the instit-
utional and financial center of Scotland. There I learned more clearly than
ever how “remote” fishing villages seemed to people outside them.
This book has emerged in part as an attempt to confront my early
illusions of romantic Scotland without relinquishing my fascination with
the country’s extraordinary diversity of place, speech, community, and
representation.

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 Archetypes, Fantasies & Ethnographic Destinations

In this sense the book is also, in part, an anthropologist’s answer to

several modern travel writers. I refer here to two writers of very different
dispositions: Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson. Each has written a memorable
survey of travels around mainland Britain. Each speaks almost entirely in
terms of what he saw, rather than of what he heard or learned from the
people he met. Theroux, in Kingdom by the Sea (1983) writes rather
sourly, to say the least:

I came to hate Aberdeen more than any other place I saw . . . it was an awful
city . . . It was only in Aberdeen that I saw kilts and eightsome reels and the
sort of tartan tightfistedness that made me think of the average Aberdonian as
a person who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.
(1983: 350)

To be fair, Theroux traveled through Thatcher’s Britain, when unem-

ployment had skyrocketed and attention to the quality of life had plum-
meted. Nonetheless, his account reeks of disappointment, of the failure of
places to live up to his expectations.
Bryson penned Notes from a Small Island when memories of Tory rule
had begun to fade and a lighter spirit prevailed. He wrote hilariously and
with great affection. Like Theroux, he found Aberdeen a letdown, but for
different reasons.

If I had come to Aberdeen fresh from another country, it would probably have
seemed pleasant and agreeable. It was prosperous and clean. It had bookshops
and cinemas and a university and pretty much everything else you could want
in a community. It is, I’ve no doubt, a nice place to live. It’s just that it was so
much like everywhere else. It was a British city. How could it be otherwise?
(1995: 317)

In his own way, each author homogenized his experience because in his
travels he did not spend enough time anywhere to get a sense of local
knowledge and the particularities that form the substance of people’s self-
definitions. Places remained inanimate objects, foils for the writer’s larger
agenda (to critique; to amuse). Each writer is governed by preconceived
notions: regarding a site as pleasing or not, according to what it ought to
look like.
Britain is an entirely modern state, participating in a transnational
capitalist economy, so signs of that economy conspicuously affect many
towns: chain stores, malls, and some unfathomably ugly architecture.
Certainly there is no excuse for the block-like British Home Stores build-
ing on Princes Street in Edinburgh, and the appearance of a Blockbuster

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Video in Montrose does jar the senses (although everyone has long been
used to Woolworths). It is not hard to see how visitors might be disap-
pointed when the timeless images promised them either fail to materialize
or are so conspicuously surrounded by reminders of the less picturesque.
Where Theroux and Bryson see the obliteration of the local, however, the
anthropologist may – no, must – see a more complex reality, one in which
people negotiate both the sublime and the ridiculous, the preindustrial and
the postmodern. People in the fishing villages are experts in such negot-
iations.
So now I will turn to the fishing villages themselves: their origins and
development as a genre of place, as well as particular localities. Here we
will see how fisherpeople became economically and socially marginal-
ized, as well as how they became stigmatized as different and disreputable.

Notes

1. M. Pardo’s Curtain of Mist, where English children travel to pre-

Roman Scotland, was my earliest encounter with our world’s porous
border with that of Celtic legend; see also multivolume stories by
Cooper (The Dark is Rising), Garner (The Weirdstone of Brisingamen);
O’Shea (The Hound of the Morrigan); and Yolen’s The Wild Hunt. All
of these are set in vaguely Celtic territory (mostly Cornwall and Wales)
and involve desperate battles between good and evil.
2. In 1999, Jeanne Cannizzo of the University of Edinburgh, curated a
wonderful exhibit on Scott and his influences for the National Portrait
Gallery in Edinburgh.
3. Many of Grimes’ books are named for pubs: The Horse You Came In
On (1993), The Old Silent (1989), for example.
4. I owe thanks to the people associated with the Aberdeen University
Institute for Sparsely Populated Rural Areas, particularly Dr Robert
Moore and Dr Deirdre Hunt for giving me advice and encouragement
at this time. For those interested in following some of the relevant
literature on offshore oil, see, for example, Button 1978; Hunt 1976;
House 1986; Moore 1982; MacKay 1986; Nadel 1983).

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 –2–

Stigma and Separation: Fisherfolk as

a “Race Apart”

Introduction

Walk into one of the villages poised along the eastern coast of Scotland
and see how the houses cluster close together, each facing the sea. With a
slight reach of the imagination, they look like old men and women hunch-
ing their shoulders against the rough wind – or is it against the land? The
village seems a closed society, with a wary, watching face behind each
lace-curtained window. The “clannishness” of fisherfolk is common
knowledge. It is also said that fisherfolk are different from other people,
perhaps even an inferior breed.

Even at an early age, one was aware that fishing communities were different.
Adults talked about “close brethren” and the singing of fishermen in mission
halls; the way the exterior of their houses seemed to sparkle because of their
white-washed or painted walls; their lifeboat service; and their habit of only
marrying within their own communities; until they almost seemed a race apart
(Lockart 1997: xi).

When a middle-class, university-educated man at a Scottish National

Party gathering in 1993 said to me that the people of Ferryden village were
“odd” and closely inbred, he expressed a widely held stereotype that has
a long ancestry. Penelope, an upper-class woman whose house overlooked
the village, decried “prejudice” but admitted that “there are some around
here who would still disapprove of farmers’ sons marrying Ferryden girls.
That’s one reason they send their boys away to school.” Jenny, a young
woman from Montrose who had married a salmon-fisher, told me that
when she and her husband announced their plans to go house hunting
across the bridge in Ferryden, their friends protested that the village was
backward, that it didn’t even have even indoor plumbing, and joked that
she’d have problems because her “ass was too big to fit into a bucket!”

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 Fishing for Heritage

Such comments reveal that Scotland’s fishing communities have

been assigned to an “invidious” social category (Berreman 1972). Like
members of low-ranked castes, classes, races, and ethnic groups in strat-
ified societies around the world, the fishing people of Scotland have been
stigmatized. Popular – and formerly, even scholarly – attitudes towards
them have been based upon explicitly essentializing understandings of
their presumed innate character deficiencies.
This chapter details the early historical context of economic depriv-
ation and dependency within which members of fishing communities
became marginalized. In so doing, it reveals how localities may be formed
as the unintended consequences of the systemic requirements of capital-
ism. Along the way, however, such localities take on their own dynamics
to become forces in a larger setting. As I said in the first chapter, my task
here is to elucidate how this history of marginality has underpinned
fishers’ identity as a special kind of “folk” who are attached to special
kinds of places. With this historical understanding, we will be better placed
to see how fishers have been and continue to be caught between compet-
ing rhetorics of hierarchy and equality in the modern Scottish nation.

Fishers, Land and Power

To tease out the particular cultural and institutional factors that have
made fisherpeople who they are today, I take a long-range, historical
view of fishing as an economic enterprise in Scotland. Fortunately, I have
help: several people have intensively examined the details of the fishing
industry itself, particularly its technological and economic development
over the last three centuries (including Coull 1969, 1972, 1986; Gray
1967, 1978; Miller 1999; Thompson, Wailey and Lummis 1983); others
have taken a more ethnographic and contemporary look at specific com-
munities (Baks and Postel-Coster 1977; Cohen 1987; Byron 1986; Dorian
1981; Knipe 1984). My task here is to coordinate these analyses in a syst-
ematic way so as to place the commonalities of modern fisher culture and
experience within a wider Scottish context.
Some 150 fishing communities once were sprinkled along the Scottish
coast from just north of the English border to the northeast corner of the
Scottish mainland at Caithness (Anson 1930).1 Each had its own fleet of
boats that brought in the community’s livelihood. Today, a small fraction
of those living in these communities retains any viable connection to
fishing, though many still cling to an image of themselves as fisherfolk.
Moreover, many fishermen who still reside in these communities must

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now commute to work in the larger ports. As we shall see in Chapter 5,

only a handful of harbors today provide the kind of market and support
facilities that the modern industry requires.
Thus, only a few places appear to have a clearly viable long-term
future. Some of the smaller, moderately busy ones may not even be oper-
ating a generation from now, depending upon how the industry adjusts to
continuing ecological limitations, international competition, and spiraling
costs. In short, what was once a widely dispersed, village-based occupation
is giving way to the apparently inexorable logic of late twentieth-century
capitalism, under the centralizing tyranny of economies of scale.
However, the decline in numbers of fishermen or fishing communities
is not yesterday’s artifact, or even that of the day before. If we look back
before the days of “scientific,” state-directed fisheries management, we
can see lights along the coast flickering and dimming much earlier in this
century, even when there was still, in the lovely words of Orkney writer
George Mackay Brown (1995: 78), a “fish-fraught sea”.
The early period of east coast, village-based Scottish fishing can be
divided into two overlapping phases, marked by different degrees and
kinds of community involvement. Roughly speaking, we can identify the
first as the time, during the medieval era, when most fishing was carried
on within a feudal context, and from a few scattered places along the coast.
These fishers often combined fishing with farming, doing both on a small
scale. The second phase began in the eighteenth century with the efflor-
escence of specialized occupational communities. Men from these settle-
ments pursued both “white fish” (an indigenous category referring mainly
to cod, ling, haddock, and whiting) and herring. It was during this time that
we find observers commenting upon the fishers’ “peculiarities.”
The modern period that followed these phases began during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Here we find these specialized communities
increasingly engaged in long-distance, more highly mechanized, com-
mercial fishing that also entailed more proletarianized relations of work.
Currently, fishers find themselves in a time of contraction and concen-
tration of the industry, with its associated problems of economic and
cultural survival for many villages. But these later developments will be
discussed in succeeding chapters. Here I wish to provide the historical
background for the fishers’ modern predicament.
A proviso: it would be simplistic to regard these phases as marking any
straightforward rise and fall or boom and bust of an entire industry. From
village to village, they correspond only roughly to a common chronology
and must not be considered in any sense as clearly demarcated or absolute.
Different communities entered and left different stages of the fishing

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 Fishing for Heritage

industry at different times and not all have participated equally in each.
Yet, it is the case that the parameters of these phases comprise the eco-
logical, technological, legal and market forces that connect the fisherfolk
to their marine resources, to the state, and to the world system of power
and organization. Fisherfolk have experienced and interpreted these
connections as part of their place in the world, sometimes even as their
destiny. This has contributed powerfully to their deeply felt sense of
special character and separateness, as well as to their identification by
others as a group of people that embodies “difference.”
As we shall see, the early history of the fishing communities clearly
shows that popular notions of the independent, entrepreneurial and care-
free fisherman, cocking a snook at land-based conventions and free of the
peasant’s burdens of deference, do not work for Scotland. Never in
Scotland’s recorded history were fishing resources truly common prop-
erty. Nor were fishermen ever “free,” in the sense of having economic
autonomy. Whatever the era, the historical record shows a long-standing
pattern of landed dominance and fisher subordination. It is only in the
latter part of the twentieth century that a few fishers have become truly
prosperous when compared to some other segments of the Scottish popul-
ation. Their most common experience has been that of disempowerment
and cultural marginalization.
This low status has come with considerable symbolic baggage. East
coast fishers have been seen as society’s ragged edge. They have been held
up as a contrast to Scotland’s emerging modernist preoccupation with
respectability, predictability, and social order. The people of the sea have
stood for the backward, or even, perhaps, for the wild. Such representations
have, of course, said as much about the wider culture in which fisherfolk
have been embedded as they have about the fisherfolk, themselves.

Phase One: The Medieval Era and the Prelude to Modernity

Scotland’s ancient coastal riches played a significant part in establishing

the hierarchies of wealth and power that began to encapsulate fishing
people in medieval times. Records of a trade in salt herring between
Scottish or English ports and Europe go back at least a thousand years, as
do references to the importance of salmon, shellfish, and near-shore white
fish along the east coast. Archaeological evidence reveals that fishing in
various forms was practiced at least 9,000 years ago (Coull 1996: 2).
Certainly shellfish (limpets, winkles, whelks, mussels, oysters, and
scallops) have long been vital to the survival of many coastal populations
in times of famine (Martin 1995: 5).

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The period from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries warrants
scrutiny as the backdrop to later occupational specialization. The emerg-
ing circumstances of fishers during this period provide a view into how
growing elites relied upon their ability to manipulate maritime resources.
The evidence from so long ago inevitably gives us a rather top-down picture
of what was happening, but it forms the only entry point we have towards
understanding how and in what ways fishers became so vulnerable to
power.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Scotland was thinly settled and
deeply rural, the total population being estimated at something well under
half a million people (Dodgshon 1980: 47). However, this was no open,
frontier society, with land and resources free for the taking by any intrepid
settler, but already a fiercely contested, increasingly feudal realm. Sea
resources were seen as an extension of land rights and not as common
property, as modern Americans often perceive them “naturally” – though
problematically – to be (McGoodwin 1990: 97; McCay 1989: 207). Rights
to fishing in rivers and from the coast, along with access to pasturage,
arable land, and forest, were eagerly sought for political and economic
ends, and laws were drawn early to restrict access.
Salmon were particularly prized because they were so popular on con-
tinental European tables. Rights in salmon fishing from river, estuary and
sea were, even at that early date, owned by the Crown or by the Crown’s
feudal vassals and were inherited along with an estate. Legislation regu-
lating their catch and possession was introduced in 1318 and then again
in 1449. Poachers were vigorously prosecuted (Association of Scottish
District Fishery Boards 1977).
The people who worked farm, field and coast formed an essential part
of the property and power-making process that supported the rise of
Scotland’s landed elites. Like farm workers, most fishing people lived as
tenants on large estates. And like the farmfolk, they had fixed obligations
of work and rent to their landlords.

Holders of Crown charters held possession of “Fishings, hawkings and

huntings” and we know that many fishermen were obliged to hand over part
of their catch to their overlord. A feudal due of one night’s fishing a week was
common. The court book of the Barony of Urie in Kincardineshire tells us
fishermen in the seventeenth century were obliged to pay a yearly custom to
the laird’s lady of a hundred haddock and a pint of oil. (Lockhart 1997: 3)

In some places, fishers as well as farm workers were essentially enserfed,

though not yet entirely dependent upon the sea. Following a common

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 Fishing for Heritage

North European pattern, they had access to a little common ground for
growing root crops and rights to graze animals and gather firewood
(Byron 1994; Coull 1969; 1971; Lofgren 1972, 1976). Fishing provided
a crucial supplement to their meager land income. Thus there was little to
distinguish these unspecialized crofter fishermen from the poorest of the
subtenants in their conditions of work or dependence (Coull 1969). All
starved equally during times of famine, when grain became unavailable.
Thus we can read that in 1696, white fishers in Kincardine sought relief
from the Poll Tax, “for they are beggin through the countrey this winter
and spring and have not to cover their nakedness” (Flinn 1977: 167).
Some of what these fishing tenants caught went from net to household
table, or was exchanged locally. The rest of the catch went to pay their rent
in kind and found its way into a much larger nexus of trade. This nexus
involved both the Crown and its feudal vassals, including barons and
religious houses; the Scottish monarchy’s control over the countryside was
still relatively weak and its authority was continually challenged by the
various rivalrous barons who built fortified houses to assert and protect
their domains. Thus, beginning in the twelfth century, kings adopted a
strategy of seeking out or creating allies in the countryside – more partic-
ularly, in the Lowlands – whose own vested interests would encourage
them to resist the power of the nobility (Webster 1975: 12).
Among these allies were the monastic houses that had obtained Royal
charters granting them land and fishing rights in return for their support
against the nobles. The monks formed a powerful presence in the country-
side and “possessed various exclusive privileges of trade and fisheries”
from the twelfth century, if not earlier (Taylor 1859: 219). In the East Neuk
of Fife on the Firth of Forth, for example, “the lands of Pittenweem and
Inverin [St Monans] were given . . . to the monks of the Isle of May . . .
in about 1143” (Martin 1991).
A Crown grant to an abbey or baron, however, did not ensure that all
parties would assent peacefully to the division of the land in question.
Access to the coast was often a contentious issue. For instance, in the
following, rather picturesque account, we read about a conflict waged with
both brute force and supernatural threat between landowner and monks
in the thirteenth century:
. . . the Lord of Dundas, on the south side of the Firth of Forth, having
asserted a right in his own person to certain rocks along the shore con-
venient for the landing of boats, interfered with the servants and boats of
the Abbot of Dunfermline when attempting to use them. The abbot main-
tained that the rocks were the exclusive property of his monastery, and
launched a sentence of excommunication against his opponent, who

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 Stigma and Separation

finding himself compelled to yield, “humbly supplicated the abbot, sitting

along with some of his council on these rocks as being in possession of
them, that he would absolve him from the sentence of excommunication,
and he should abstain from molesting the men and boats in future . . .”
(Taylor 1859: 175)
Near the English border, in the southeast region of Eyemouth, Bene-
dictine monks owned the rights to sea fishing from that coast by the end
of the thirteenth century (Anson 1930: 51). Northwards, in Auchmithie,
in the fifteenth century:

the fishermen were bound to the Abbey of Aberbrothock [Arbroath], providing

a regular supply of fish for the monks, their guests and the cluster of habitations
outside the Abbey Precinct. (King: n.d.: 4)

Of even wider significance for the Scottish economic landscape than

contesting lairds and monks were the chartered market towns known as
Royal Burghs. Beginning with King Alexander I (1107–24) and his son,
David I (1124–53), Scottish kings attempted to consolidate control over
rural resources by giving special trading status and rights to a number of
these fortified centers. As legally privileged sites, they became pivotal
nodes in organizing rural development, including both agriculture and
fisheries. Their charters entitled them to monopolize trade over a wide
hinterland. Within Burgh domain, only Burgesses – that is, only tradesmen
who were recognized by the Burgh as members of the Merchant Guild –
could buy and sell commodities.
Burgh control over the fish trade provided a source of revenue for the
Royal purse through a series of taxes imposed from the thirteenth through
the fifteenth centuries.

The fact that a tax had been imposed on fish indicating [sic] that it must have
been carried on to quite a large extent, and could provide a substantial source
of revenue to the perpetually impoverished Scottish kings . . . (Sutherland n.d.:
13).

Given the increasing profitability of fishing, it is not surprising to learn of

efforts to encourage more shipbuilding during the fifteenth century:
“. . . Lordes, Barrones, and burrowes gar mak schippis, busches [large
boats] and great pink boats with nettes . . .” (Sutherland n.d.: 13).
Many of the early Burghs, such as the North Sea ports of Aberdeen,
Fraserburgh and Montrose, had their own fisher districts (Coull 1996: 35).
However, few separate fishing villages existed at the time. In fact, before

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 Fishing for Heritage

the eighteenth century, according to a survey of British fishing history,

relatively few “small independent fishing communities proper, of the
village type” had as yet appeared anywhere in Britain (Coull 1983: 13; see
also Coull 1969). “There is evidence . . . that fishermen had settled along
the coast in huddles of earth and thatch houses by the mid-seventeenth
century, about a century before the first planned fishing villages appeared”
(Millman 1975: 166).
Every foot of coastal ground in Scotland was owned or controlled by
Crown, Burgh, religious house, or laird, so rural development was stymied.
According to Millman (1975: 153), “until the sixteenth century [the
Burghs] were largely responsible for the lack of village communities until
the second half of the eighteenth century.”
Later on, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a number
of smaller market centers, chartered by nobles as Burghs of Barony, arose
to compete with the Royal Burghs. All in all, seventy Royal Burghs and
some two hundred others were eventually established, mostly in the
Lowlands (Lenman 1981: 3). The merchants of these Burghs not only
dominated local trade, but also carried on a substantial long-distance
business with English and European ports, exporting such goods as grain,
hides and skins, wool and coal, as well as fish (Lenman 1977). It was not
until the latter part of the fifteenth century that fish became increasingly
important to the Scottish economy, in part because trade in wool and hides
declined. This trend continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
if by fits and starts (Lynch 1992: 71).
The growth of Scottish fisheries was also prompted by envy of more
successful European fleets. But it was also hampered by inconsistent laws,
uncommitted investors, the dominance of lairds, an unskilled labor force,
slowly developing technology and burdensome taxes. In the late fifteenth
century, cod fishing efforts by Portuguese and English sailors off the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland were spectacularly successful. North
Atlantic fisheries in many places quickly became big business and,
increasingly, the subject of governmental regulation. In a prelude to
modern debates over coastal domain and territorial waters, fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century monarchs worried that Scotland was losing out to
foreign competition. The Dutch, in particular, who maintained a mono-
poly over the herring shoals and the Continental market, maddeningly
sailed unchallenged into Scottish waters off Shetland, Aberdeen, and Fife.2
In the fifteenth century, James IV’s answer to this threat was to promote
the building of harbors and ships on the Firth of Forth. Along the way, he
made use of what were widely seen as the “surplus” poor:

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 Stigma and Separation

Among various laws that were passed in his reign was one ordering that “all
maritime burghs should build busses, or vessels of at least twenty tons burden,
to be employed in fishing, and all idle persons should be pressed into that
service”. (Anson 1930: 1)

Small-time fishermen on many coastlines found themselves being

coerced or enticed (or both) to fish more and to venture further offshore
(Lofgren 1972). Such efforts to coerce “idle persons” were vigorously
pursued:

“In ilke [each] Burgh of the Royaltie, that officares of the burgh make all starke,
idel men within their boundes to pass with the said schippes for their wages,
and gif [if] the said idle men refuses to passe, that they banish them the burgh”
. . . and if the officers of the burgh omitted to banish reluctant fishermen, then
they in their turn could be fined 20 pounds . . . for neglect of their duties.
(Sutherland n.d. 15)

Despite such pursuit, Scottish fisheries in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries continued to remain relatively undeveloped. It was not that
fishermen were recalcitrant, but that such development was not under their
control. Though serfdom as an institution had generally died out in
Scotland by the middle of the fourteenth century, the system of land
tenure, labor and residance remained staunchly feudal. Moreover, certain
classes of workers were re-claimed as serfs in 1606 when Parliament
passed laws creating a “system of life binding for coal and salt workers”
(Whatley 1988: 237; see also Wallerstein 1980: 93).
In some places, fishermen were similarly bound. King, for example,
notes that those Auchmithie fishermen enserfed to the Abbey at Arbroath
were not released at the formal and final abolition of serfdom in Scotland
in 1799 (King n.d.). Summers (1995: 39) says that “in Northeast Scot-
land . . . It was also an offence for anyone to resettle, harbor, or entertain
the fishers and boatmen who belong to another”. Hay and Walker (1985:
18) provide an example where the spirit of the law apparently outlasted
its letter:

An earlier migration into Arbroath at the beginning of the eighteenth century

“clandestinely and under a cloud of night” by a family named Cargill, had led
to a judicial decision in 1805, granting in favour of the Earl of Northesk, the
right to look upon his white fishers as serfs or thralls. [and note that the date
follows the act of 1799]

Smout (1969: 170), on the other hand, argues that efforts to enserf
fishermen in the northeast failed because the fishermen simply “sailed

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 Fishing for Heritage

away.” He contrasts fishers with colliers and salters who were enserfed in
part because the localized nature of their work made such bondage easy
to impose (1969: 170). Whether enserfed or not, however, medieval
fishers were tied to the domain of a landed proprietor and subject to strong
control. The lairds of many coastal estates claimed “exclusive rights to
land fish, beach boats, and gather bait . . . on their respective foreshores
(Summers 1995: 39). Thus, the popular image of the fishermen roaming
the seas (like the fish they pursue) is a rather misleading one. True, they
might sail where they wished, but where could they land, and what would
await them there?

The New Fishing Specialists: Objects of Improvement

Scottish fishing can be said to have entered its second phase in the eight-
eenth century with the rise of specialized communities. It took a remark-
able complex of ecological and economic developments to organize
coastal society on an entrepreneurial basis and to create specialist fishers.
Chief among these were: migrations of herring away from their old Baltic
haunts into North Sea waters; infusions of Royal and mercantile capital
into boat building, fish catching and marketing; and a new ethos of
agrarian commercialism that transformed the entire countryside from a
post-feudal economic torpor to a new, aggressive capitalist search for
profit. This new ethos was strongly stimulated by a crucial political devel-
opment, namely, the Union of 1707, in which the Scots relinquished their
rights to a separate Parliament, essentially ceding sovereignty to England.
This led to the lowering of trade barriers and to new opportunities for
foreign investments that inspired a rising generation of entrepreneurs.
In their efforts to develop the fisheries, landowners thus had help both
from organized capital and government. An important turning point was
the recognition by George I in 1718 that the lingering “shadow of the
Dutch” (Gray 1978: 5) might be lifted by stimulating fishing through a
new set of institutionalized incentives. These, including bounties to fisher-
men and curers and subsidies to build fishing boats, as well as “detailed
regulations as to the time and season when fishing was to be carried on”
(Anson 1930: 2), proved somewhat more successful than the earlier efforts
of James IV to build harbors and boats. In 1750, more bounties were
introduced, specifically targeted at increasing the herring catch. Yet, these
still met with limited success. As Scottish economic historian Malcolm
Gray (1978: 5) points out, few merchants were yet seriously committed
to the fishery:

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 Stigma and Separation

The merchants who took the financial risks were men for whom herring fishing
was but one of many interests; the vessels were designed for more than one
purpose and were turned into trading ships for a large part of the year; and the
labour force was created by attracting, for a season, men from different districts
and occupations. When profits failed the whole enterprise was threatened with
extinction, leaving no solid interest or community. But, at the end of the
century, public money still brought the annual creation of a fishing fleet,
artificial and rootless as it might be.

The opening of the Baltic market in the middle of the eighteenth

century finally turned the tide (Fraser 1971: 70). After this, fishing became
an organized industry. Indeed, in 1786, the British Fisheries Society was
founded, “promoted by men of the landlord and merchant classes with an
over-riding interest in social development, particularly of the western
Highlands” (Gray 1977: 5). In 1809, the British Board of Manufactures
established an adjunct Fishery Board to promote the herring trade (Coull
1992: 117). By the 1830s, fisheries on the east coast were well established
and the bounties were discontinued.
But progress tended to exact a price. Governmental efforts to develop
the fisheries operated at the expense of local autonomy and the poorer
participants. From the outset, small-scale, part-time fishermen, those using
small boats, were marginalized. Laws prohibited them from selling their
herring catch to the large-boat fleet that had been produced by the bounty
incentives. In addition, the salt laws mandated the use of expensive foreign
salt that was available duty-free only to fish-curers, or middlemen. By and
large, “ordinary fishermen were hampered rather than helped by legislation”
(Gray 1978: 6).
All over rural Scotland, the poor were becoming marginalized in other
ways as well. After all, changes in the fishing industry were but one part
of a much larger set of changes being set in motion during the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians refer to this period as the
Improving Movement or Era, which was intimately linked both to new
economic ambitions and to the philosophical, scientific and social devel-
opment of the Scottish Enlightenment or Renaissance (Phillipson and
Mitchison 1970). Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, historian
Thomas Buckle (1970: 150) saw the new, progressive spirit of entrepren-
eurship and systematic inquiry resulting in “two powerful and active
classes, whose aim was essentially secular; the intellectual class, and
the industrious class”. Membership in these classes overlapped and
included philosophers, inventors, and scientists such as Adam Smith,
Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Joseph Black, Frances Hutcheson, Lord

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 Fishing for Heritage

Kames, and James Hutton, to name just a few of the well-known lumin-
aries. Benjamin Franklin, who visited Scotland several times, found it to
be much in sympathy with his own ideals (Sher 1993).
The entire country seemed caught up in the social philosophy and
capitalist goals of the Improvers. These men believed that rural life in
particular, and Scottish life more generally, would be greatly enhanced by
reorganizing the rural population. In so doing, new sets of distinctions
between laborers and landowners were also introduced. Mitchison notes
a growing emphasis at this time on domestic cleanliness, for example, as
well as more demands upon farm tenants to provide labor and service.
Master and servant now kept their distance from one another, instead of
mixing freely and even eating together as had formerly been common
practice. “So we get social divisions, temporary or permanent, sharpening
into class” (Mitchison 1978: 84–5).
Moreover, what amounted to an agricultural revolution began to excise
“excess population” from the countryside and draw it to the coasts.
“However rational the basis of the change, as it came about it involved in
many cases the compulsory movement of unwilling population to a place
and type of life they had no experience of and to a new system of hard and
regular work” (Mitchison 1978: 110). People from both Highland and
Lowland regions were moved into planned villages dedicated to particular
occupations. Many of these places were laid out according to principles
of hygiene and efficiency on privately owned land, thus providing local
labor reserves, particularly for agriculture and fisheries, but also textile
manufacture (spinning and weaving), salt and sea-coal production (Houston
1948; Gray 1984: 19). Smout (1969) estimates that about 130 commun-
ities were established in this manner, most of them east of the Highland
line.
Many landowners were also convinced that by establishing villages,
they were providing a moral service to the nation in civilizing the rude and
uncouth denizens of the countryside. After all, as Carter (1981: 9) has said:

Until the end of the eighteenth century ruling class attitudes to the Scots
peasantry were universally hostile. Peasants were sub-human, mere beasts of
burden who produced rents upon which a gentleman might live in comfort.
When, under the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment’s brief efflorescence,
ideas of scientific agriculture began to circulate in genteel circles, then the
peasantry moved from being simply irrelevant to being positively awkward . . .
they represented a major obstacle to the rational – and for landlords and proto-
capitalist farmers, highly profitable – reorganisation of agriculture.

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 Stigma and Separation

In Smout’s (1970: 79) view:

[Landowners believed] that a village community, properly conducted, offered

the ideal moral environment in which to keep a working population virtuous
and respectful, the perfect mean between the indolence of the deep rural
peasantry and the profligacy of unregulated life in the big towns.

Such settlements were thus meant to produce a new class of worthy and
industrious – and, of course, profitable – poor. The surpluses extracted
from their labor would feed the trading appetites of the lairds, who would
reinvest back into rural industries. Eventually, Scotland’s share of inter-
national trade would grow. The whole nation would thus be “Improved,”
or modernized.

The eighteenth century village was developed in response to and also to assist
a revolution in the economy of the estate and of the nation: it was expected to
provide a completely new framework for human life in the countryside. (Smout
1970: 75)

This framework entailed a radical reconfiguration of the working

landscape.

In both the Lowlands and the Highlands the old clachans [hamlets] and run-
rig farming were swept away and replaced in the broad straths and Lowland
vales by a more or less regular pattern of large square fields in individual
holdings. Hedges, sporting coverts, ornamental woodlands and shelter belts
were laid out by Improving Lairds who often vied with each other in their
planting activities. (Millman 1975: 103)

In a rather anodyne summary of a process that must have caused the

pain of dislocation to many working men and women, Phillipson and
Mitchison (1970: 4) write that:

A whole ruling class, the great nobility, country gentlemen, lawyers, ministers,
educationalists, philosophers and men of letters singly, but more often collect-
ively, can be seen trying to adapt a given social, economic, political and
ideological infrastructure to promote economic growth and social progress.

In addition to the planned settlements, many others were simply

“planted,” that is, established for similar purposes but with less invest-
ment. Coull (1969: 17) summarizes the process as it played out in the lives
of the fisherfolk:

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 Fishing for Heritage

In the rise of the fisheries, the lairds of coastal estates were the prime movers
as organizers and entrepreneurs, and the fisherfolk on their part eventually
developed into distinctive communities separate from their farming neighbors,
and in them the work was organized on a family basis (Coull 1969: 17).

The east coast saw the greatest proliferation of new fishing villages.
According to Gray, efforts to found west-coast fishing settlements were
generally less successful, despite the best efforts of the British Fisheries
Society.3 Few west-coast landlords took much interest in developing the
fisheries, perhaps because herring shoals appeared less “reliably” in
western waters (Coull 1971: 4). West-coast fishers were generally spread
out on widely spaced smallholdings and they continued to mix fishing
with farming. Thus the radical division of fisherfolk from farmfolk never
took hold there, though Czerkawska indicates that some fishing villages
on the Ayrshire coast were once “isolated from the agricultural com-
munity” (Czerkawska 1975: 1).4
Thus the Improvers were crucial to giving Scottish fishing industry a
vital injection of capital and attention. During the Improving Era, fishing,
like agriculture, became increasingly commoditized and many households
were reorganized in its service. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
days of mixing farming with fishing were over for east-coast commun-
ities. By this time, few fishers there had even the meagerest access to land
for gardens. Indeed, that was the point. People with no land would fish and
fish hard. “With his very existence depending on regular and reasonable
returns from his fishing, the drive to find the best system of fishing was
correspondingly more intense” (Gray 1978: 7). Like early Newfoundland
fishermen who were prohibited by law from owning land, lest they divert
their energies in unprofitable ways, Scottish fishermen could – and did –
provide a new resource for landowners and merchants eager to participate
in the rise of European capitalism (Sider 1988: 112).
It thus became common in the eighteenth century for a laird to own a
“fish-toun,” as he might a “ferm-toun.” In the Moray Firth region, for
example, we find that, in 1716, Findochty “was built by one John Ord for
thirteen fishermen and eleven boys” (Wood 1991: 26); Portgordon “was
founded in 1797 by the 4th Duke of Gordon” (Wood 1991: 44); “William
Young . . . in 1806 founded Hopeman as a fishing port” (Seton 1985: 7);
and Portessie was founded as a fishing station in 1727 by the local laird,
Hay of Rannes” (Seton 1987: 20), and

. . . by the 1790s an entire seatown, home to “ninety-three families”, pre-

sumably mostly fishers, had grown up [in Avoch], the families moving in from

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other parts of the Moray Firth coast. Macduff grew from a small place in 1732
with only a few fisher houses to a large village of 1000 people by 1790, with
well-laid-out streets and a harbour on which the laird, Lord Fife, had already
spent l5000 . . . Eight fishermen in Elie were granted rent-free houses on the
condition that they supply the town with fish at least three times a week. (Millar
1999: 8)

Lairds also owned the very boats in which the fishermen sailed. Summers
(1995: 39) notes, for example, that

in Buchan [the northeast] in the late eighteenth century, the laird let the rights
of the fishings to a ‘tacksman’ who then purchased boats and contracted a crew
to fish in each boat for a specified numbers of years for rent . . . fishermen were
only free agents when their contract expired, at which time they could enter a
new contract or move elsewhere.

Over time, new lairds built new fisher settlements, sometimes recruit-
ing fishermen with incentives advertised in local newspapers (Summers
1995: 41). Fisherfolk began to migrate from one village to the next, looking
for better harbors and working conditions. Talking about the recruitment
techniques that landowners employed, Lockhart (1982: 38) says that they
or their agents

travelled to existing villages to bargain with boat crews. The system of tenure
in older maritime villages favoured such visits. Leases were granted for a
period of seven years, the expected life of a boat hull supplied by the proprietor
to each crew. In return, a combined rent was paid for the boat and cottages
occupied by the fishermen. At the end of each period the crew was free to re-
engage or alternatively leave in search of lower rental terms or better harbour
facilities.

Lockhart’s analysis of migrations to planned villages shows that the

fishers seldom moved very far, usually less than twenty miles: “it seems
probable that a desire to remain in personal contact with friends and
relatives and to continue fishing in familiar waters influence migration
decisions” (Lockhart 1982: 42). There were some exceptions. The fisher-
folk of Ferryden, for example, claim that their forebears came from much
farther away. They emigrated from the Black Isle, on the Cromarty Firth,
enticed by the landlord with promises of good fishing and financial
support.
From the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century,
however, there was another source of labor for the fisheries of the northeast,

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particularly along the coasts of Sutherland and Caithness. These were the
evicted clansmen from the Highland glens, the victims of the Clearances.
Taking place at a time when a “mercantile and money-making spirit was
diffused to an extent formerly unknown” (Buckle 1970: 144), the Clear-
ances were really the last gasp of the centuries-old enclosure movements
depriving peasants of access to land in both Britain and the European
continent.
Beginning in the 1780s, encouraged by the prospects for profits to be
made from the wool trade, Highland clan chiefs, lairds and aristocrats
began the process of ejecting entire communities to free up land for
grazing. Landlords drove sheep onto land that had been used for cattle
pasture and crops. Thousands of people in communities from Sutherland
to Skye felt the scourge of the eviction notice. The process was often
violent, always brutal. Prebble (1963) records that landowners’ agents,
called factors, did not hesitate to pull recalcitrant tenants from their
cottages or even to burn them out (see also Hunter 1976).
Although many of those displaced made their way to Glasgow, or
sailed for Canada or the United States, the outflow could not be entirely
absorbed by urban or overseas emigration. Something had to be done with
those left over. Luckily for the lairds, a precedent was available: James
IV’s decree that “idle persons” should be pressed into the service of the
fishery. Some of the population for the new fisher settlements, particularly
in the regions north of Inverness – Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross and
Cromarty – were thus drawn from inland areas of the Highlands:

. . . in Sutherland in the early nineteenth century it was largely the erroneous

belief that the population could find employment as fishermen, within the
estate but on the coast, that led the Countess to allow the clearance of several
thousand tenants from potential sheep farms lying inland. (Flinn 1977: 32)

Families who had known only subsistence agriculture and cattle drov-
ing were forced, virtually overnight, to learn the rigors of fishing. Green
(1936: 111) refers to some places along the Moray Firth as having been
settled by “squatting” on land that was of no use for farming (1936: 111).
Many died in this attempt. Others adapted, in a struggle which has been
compellingly recounted in Neil Gunn’s romantic novel of the northeast
coast, The Silver Darlings:

They had come from beyond the mountain which rose up behind them, from
inland valleys and swelling pastures, where they and their people before them
had lived from time immemorial. The landlord had driven them from these

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valleys and pastures, and burned their houses, and set them here against the sea-
shore to live if they could and, if not, to die. (Gunn 1941: 12)

Once settled into a fishing village, fishers, whether there voluntarily or

not, found themselves bound up in a set of obligations to the laird. As
already seen, the laird generally owned or held mortgages on the boats,
which were rented or sold to the fishermen in shares. The fisherfolk paid
their rent in kind. But by virtue of the debt they had incurred, they were
not free to leave. They also had little control over the conditions of their
work and could be forced to face dangers for which they were ill prepared:

This persisted into the latter part of the eighteenth century, as is instanced at
Fraserburgh, where the fisherman was bound to serve for a fixed period in a
boat . . . and at Buckie it is reported that the laird Dunbar drove his men to sea
when they were reluctant to go out in adverse weather. (Coull 1969: 24)

Also, in Buckie, “fishermen who did not go to sea often enough to please
the laird were put in the ‘joogs,’ or manacled with irons” (Hutcheson
1888). The laird, of course, had his eye on the profits to be made from the
fishermen’s risk.
Whether the new residents were novices or experienced fishers, the
creation of the Scottish fishery entailed a radical separation of fisherfolk
from land people. Many of modern Scotland’s fishing communities thus
originated as occupational enclaves, surrounded by farms, perhaps abutting
towns, but always as distinct places. Their inhabitants were, moreover,
usually derived from the poorest segments of the agrarian population
(Byron 1994).
Now wholly dedicated to fishing, by the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the villages of Scotland’s east coast had taken on a distinct
character and rhythm of work. First the white fish, and later the herring,
dominated their economies. Some northern communities also sent lobsters
and crabs to the London market. Dogfish, a generic term for small sharks
used for oil and fertilizer, were also valued (Coull 1969: 26–7).
Whatever they pursued, fishermen had to be highly skilled. Their basic
technique was hand-lining, which took two forms. Most common was the
inshore, or sma’ [small] line fishing, which used a lighter weight line to
catch fish found relatively close to shore. For these, men made daily trips
five to 10 miles offshore. Some communities, notably Buckie and Peter-
head, also had a spring “great-line” season that took men much farther
away for days at a time in their sail-powered, wooden vessels to pursue
larger species (Elliott 1978).

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Like their peers elsewhere around the North Atlantic, crews often
comprised brothers and their sons. This generally made for good working
relationships but, of course, it also meant that the loss of a boat could mean
the loss of an entire family (see Britain 1974; Lofgren 1972; Nemec 1972).
(This was an occupational hazard rarely visited upon farmers.) As coastal-
dwellers, they faced danger from yet another source: this was the threat
of the press gang. During the Napoleonic Wars, boats at sea might be
boarded and the young men essentially kidnapped for Navy service (P.
Smith 1985). Many of these, of course, never returned.

Fishermen were lifted from the beach as well as being forced from their homes
and sobbing families to be put in irons until taken aboard the man o’ war
needing their services. Horrible as that was, one’s fury rises more when it is
learned a favourite trick of the press-gang was to wait in hiding for a boat
returning from the fishing grounds and grab the crew in their exhausted
condition. No wonder the spies who would secretly mark the house of a good
seaman were so detested. No wonder secret warning signs were put up by
wives when the presence of press-gang was noted. Many a fisherman had a
secret recess or bolthole he would make for when there was an unknown knock
at the door. (Lockhart 1997: 8)

Along with risk, fishermen shared whatever profits there might be.
Typically, the catch was divided on what was called the Scottish share
system. Details of this varied around the coast, but in general meant that
each fisherman received an equal share of the profits, if any, after allo-
cating two-thirds of the catch to the boat and gear. No distinctions were
made according to the success of each man’s line, or to his seniority, with
the exception of boys just starting out. This practice ensured continuing
equality both on board and on shore – even though this might be an
equality of dearth:

This plan was sufficiently flexible to allow a man to become a crew member
although he had no fishing gear; usually it was the skipper who would put in
an extra deal and the share-out would be adjusted accordingly . . . The other
side of this system was that poor fishing could mean weeks of work with no
earnings, and even being in debt at the end of a season, with the fishermen
having to “pay-in” to cover the main expenses. (Murray 1986: 5)

By the end of the eighteenth century, the laird’s power began to give
way to that of the fish curer. The rise of entrepreneurial capitalism meant
the erosion of feudal control as fishers came to rely upon the cash sub-
sidies and advances the curers offered in exchange for exclusive rights to
the catch, sometimes for an entire fishing season. Reportedly, curers

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 Stigma and Separation

favored village ale shops as places to make these transactions because a

befuddled fisherman might be a less-than-shrewd bargainer.
Curers, it seems, were everywhere. Thompson estimates some 400 of
them along the east coast by the 1830s. A few of these became powerful
merchants, eventually founding dynastic family firms such as Joseph
Johnston & Sons of Montrose. However, many were quite short lived,
suffering the usual fate of undercapitalized small ventures.

Indeed, a typical firm lasted less than five years. A curer needed little fixed
capital: a cooperage, barrel and a salt store, a farlin (trough) and an open space
– which could be hired – for the gutters to work; and sufficient work for just
one full-time cooper making barrels through the year, and a dozen fishgirls and
labourers for the season . . . (Thompson, Wailey and Lummis 1983: 152–3)

According to Thompson, Wailey and Lummis (1983: 152) herring

fishermen from the north-east had

already secured ownership of their boats and gear by the 1820s. Instead of
working for landlords, they engaged themselves seasonally to curers, fishing
for pre-arranged prices, provided certain quantities were reached. Settlement
was at the end of each season . . . After an unsuccessful season a fisherman
would be in debt to the curer, and after a run of bad seasons could lose his boat
to him. But while this happened in individual cases, the rising prosperity of the
industry meant that it was not the general pattern.

It must be said, however, the for the white fishermen further down the
coast, boat-ownership was still highly elusive.
As they penetrated deeper and deeper into the lives of fishing com-
munities, curers developed a widespread reputation for rapacity and sharp
dealing. “The fish-curer is the enemy of the fisherman,” was the phrase
repeated to me often in Ferryden. But there is an irony here. From a longer,
historical perspective, curers were the advance guard of modernity. They
were indispensable in generating the capital without which the herring
fishery and the many villages supporting this fishery along the east
coast would not have arisen or grown (Gray 1978: 29). These communities,
still visible today, have come to constitute “real” or archetypal fishing
communities in the contemporary popular imagination. Thus, as we shall
explore later on, without the lairds, the Improvers, and the curers, there
would now be no villages for tourists to visit. But I am ahead of myself
here. Chapter 6 takes up this more recent development.
For now, it suffices to reiterate the chronic poverty and hardship that
fishers endured during these early days. What we have seen up to this

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point is that fisher people and fisher communities, right from medieval
times, were subject, first, to feudal and then to mercantile control. In
addition, the special conditions of their work and its localized encapsul-
ation on land also left them vulnerable to stigmatizing ideologies of
difference and inferiority, ideologies already implicit with the Improving
movement, but made increasingly explicit later on.

Putting Fishers in their Place: Stigma

By the end of the eighteenth century, fishing specialists lived in clearly

identifiable settlements with sharply marked boundaries. These were
occupational communities, or single-industry places that were small and
homogeneous. Within them, virtually every member of the community,
male and female, relied directly upon the success of the catch. Villagers’
neighbors knew the details of each others’ lives inside and out. Everyone
shared the same standard of living and everyone’s life chances were
roughly the same. More often than not, co-workers were kin. More than
just accidental concentrations of workers, villages were solidary, multi-
generational enclaves of fishery specialists. People lived their lives within
dense social webs that could sometimes extend outward to include fishers
from other villages, but that were otherwise tightly contained.
Among the many aspects of life they all shared, regardless of which
village they inhabited, was the stigma attached to their way of life. Fishing
enclaves were held in very low esteem by most non-fishing people.
Fishers were marked as a peculiar kind of “other,” an alien breed of people
inhabiting the coast. At first glance, this seems curious. After all, no part
of Scotland is more than 60 miles from the coast. The mainland can be
regarded as a large, heavily indented peninsula continually dampened by
the cold and turbulent waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic.
Scotland’s economic history has been perforce a largely maritime one:
coastal and long-distance trade, shipbuilding, and, of course, fishing, have
been of paramount importance in building the Scottish economy. None-
theless, a saying that I heard in Ferryden has also been reported for other
fishing villages going back many generations: “The corn and the cod
dinna mix” (Coull 1969: 23).
Many studies of Scottish fishing communities (Baks and Postel-Coster
1977; Byron 1986; Gray 1978; Knipe 1984; Postel-Coster and Heijmarin
1973) have tended to ignore or underplay the role that social exclusion has
played in the ways fisherfolk see, and have seen, themselves in relation
to the rest of Scottish society. This omission is all the more curious because

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the wider literature on fishing peoples suggests that identifying fisherfolk

as different and strange is remarkably common throughout Europe and
elsewhere in the world. Coull (1972), for example, claims that in many
parts of Europe, fishing “has been regarded as an occupation of the lowest
social classes”. Smith (1977: 8) notes that fisherfolk often appear to be “a
denigrated, if not despised segment” of the societies in which they live.
Ward points out that the sea-fishermen of Kwangtung (Hong Kong) “have
been despised, placed at the bottom of local systems of social stratif-
ication” and even believed to be physiologically peculiar (1965: 117). In
some, though not all, parts of Japan, people are reported to have regarded
fishermen as “unclean” (Norbeck 1967; Kalland 1995: 19). Fishing stigma
has also been reported for parts of Korea (Brandt 1971). Moerman says
that fishers are often aggressive and individualistic as a way of keeping
their communities tightly bounded and that outsiders interpret this as “bad
manners” (1984: 53).
In Scotland, explicit references to fishers as different and undesirable
emerged in the eighteenth century along with the rise of specialization
(Coull 1969; Dorian 1981). The relationship between fishing and non-
fishing people varied considerably from region to region, so that not all
communities experienced the same degree or intensity of social rejection
(Gray 1978: 7). We saw, for example, that west-coast fishers were rarely
denigrated to the same degree as those of the east coast. However, the
status of most fishing people throughout the east and northeast of Scotland
was sufficiently low that one might add them to Barth’s list of European
pariah groups, a set that includes “executioners, dealers in horseflesh and
leather, collectors of nightsoil, gypsies, etc.” (Barth 1969: 31).
Coull (1969: 23) ascribes the social separation of fishers and farm
people to the striking differences between their ways of life, as well as to
fisher endogamy. However, for social differences to become boundary
markers, people must invest value in them. The mere existence of differ-
ences does not explain how or why they are ranked or even remarked
upon. How, then, have these differences been evaluated? One way to
approach this is through the peculiar notion of race, an idea that conflates
body, language, locality and custom in effort to construct hierarchy.
While their Scottish neighbors may have been content with seeing
fisherfolk as merely peculiar or dirty, outside observers of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries often attempted to place them within con-
temporary racialist understandings of difference. Victorian scholars were
quick to rank peoples and to discern “types,” racial and otherwise. Their
theories became popular ways of explaining and justifying inequalities
between the English and their various subject peoples, both abroad and at

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home. Ideas that physically observable differences were tied to character

and behavior widely prevailed. Racialist list making assumed that heredit-
ary characteristics were important in many different kinds of communities,
including those defined by occupation.
Science used race to construct internal or domestic “others.” Exotic,
colonized peoples were not the only ones to have their skulls measured
and their habits observed. Urry tells us that plans for an exhaustive
anthropometric survey of Great Britain were launched early in the twent-
ieth century. While such a survey was never completed, some attempts
were made to carry out such investigations, including “the work of the
Scottish Committee studying the pigmentation of school children” (Urry
1984: 99). Photographic technology was also employed. Hundreds of
photographs from Wales, Scotland and Cornwall were taken between
1875 and 1883 in an effort by the British Association for the Advancement
of Science “to investigate . . . the ‘national or local types of race prevailing
in different parts of the United Kingdom’” (Taylor 1994: 22).
We can instructively compare the classification of fishers as backward
with similar views of Celtic peoples as “barbarians.” Chapman asserts that
from the perspective of many Europeans, Celts occupy a disturbing terrain
in which order is challenged and upset (Chapman 1992: 161–4). Survey-
ing classical historical texts, he finds the Celts associated with themes of
violence, sexual promiscuity, inebriation and superstition. This, despite the
fact that, as Stocking (1987: 235) says, Celts were included among white
Indo-Europeans:

all manifestations of otherness within British society were contained within the
bounds of what had long been regarded as a single large linguistic-cum-racial
group – the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans being all white-skinned
members of the Indo-European family.

However, Celts occupied a distinctly lower stratum than the others

within this group and, in fact, were not always thought to be entirely
“white.” In Chapman’s words, they were a group that “represented, and
still represent, in the European order, manners and habits which are ‘old-
fashioned,’” or even primitive (Chapman 1992: 3). The Irish Celts were
commonly evicted from this “family” altogether, as Stocking (1987: 229)
himself notes. Popular nineteenth-century cartoons in Punch magazine
depicted them as grotesque, shambling and swarthy figures, and claimed
that in evolutionary terms they ranked somewhere “between the gorilla
and the Negro” (Lebow 1976: 40). Solomos (1993: 43) makes the import-
ant point that

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 Stigma and Separation

Images of the racial or cultural inferiority of the Irish were based not only on
particularly ideological constructions of the Irish but on a self-definition of
Englishness or Anglo-Saxon culture in terms of particular racial and cultural
attributes.

It is clear from some remarkably similar comments on fishers’ “natural”

character that the British, like other Europeans, were willing to find other
internal groups to characterize in a comparable vein. Miles links this to the
project of nation-building, which, he says

is a history of a multiplicity of interior processes, including those of racial-

isation and civilisation . . . In the interstices of this articulation . . . the
“backwardness” and “insularity” of rural peasants, and the “savagery” of the
urbanised working class were often interpreted as biological attributes which
obstructed their incorporation as “races” into membership of the nation. (Miles
1993: 47)

We can find a compelling example in the Swedish middle class of the

Oscarian period (roughly contemporaneous with the Victorian). Accord-
ing to Frykman (1987), they constructed boundaries between themselves
and the peasants who formed their significant Other. In the bourgeois
view, peasants led polluted lives by engaging directly with dirt and
disorder. Lacking manners, cleanliness and propriety, these rude spec-
imens served to remind people of what civilization should not include. In
Scotland, fisherfolk were cast in the same light.
Historical accounts, novels, poems, memoirs and modern remin-
iscences, as well as recent conversations all richly attest to the attitudes
that set fishers apart. These show clearly that the fisherpeople have had
to contend with condescension, at best, and hostility, at worst. To pick
from a couple of well-known Scottish novelists, we find John Buchan
referring to “yon queer folk from Pittenweem” (The Free Fishers 1936:
23) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon speaking of the “coarse fisher brutes” of
Gourdon in Sunset Song (1971: 99).
Outsiders branded fishers as backward, dirty, inbred, superstitious and
intrinsically disreputable. Their villages were cast as dangerous places that
strangers would do well to avoid. With this ambiguous, but generally
seamy reputation, fisherfolk found their engagements with others –
particularly with fish dealers, employers, landowners, social workers and
bureaucrats of all stripes – to be fraught with difficulty (Nadel 1984; see
also Coull 1969; Dorian 1981). In Ferryden, for example, a nineteenth
century schoolmaster wrote that “I did not think I could endure their
society” (Douglas 1857: 5).

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Not surprisingly, people thought to be of such alien character must also

be given alien origin. Like the Traveller-Gypsies of England, fisherfolk
were widely assumed to be of foreign descent (0kely 1983). Popular
stories of how fishers somehow appeared de novo, as it were, confirmed
local people’s convictions that fishers were inherently other, perhaps not
even fully British. An eighteenth-century minister insisted that some Fife
fishers were descended from stranded Dutch sailors from the time of
Philip II (Anson 1974 [1930]: 86). A report of the International Fisheries
Exhibition of 1883 claimed Scandinavian blood for the fishermen of
northeastern Scotland and Phoenician [!] blood for those of Cornwall
(Levi 1883: 27).5

Newhaven was reputed to be Flemish in Character. Mrs George Cupples, who

wrote an account of Newhaven’s history and origins in 1888, identified the
people of Newhaven as descended from the Flemings who had fled from
religious persecution Her argument was based on a cheerfully romantic view
of the village, rather than on historical evidence: “To any one who is personally
acquainted with their village ways, customs, idioms, family names, and
costumes, it is often noticeable how much they resemble Flemish and Dutch
fisherfolk . . .” (Stevenson 1991: 19)

Green says that “the fishers appear to have been long regarded as
foreigners by the inhabitants of the ‘landward areas’” (1936: 110). The
favored explanation for the arrival of these putative Dutch, Scandinavian,
Flemish, Spanish, and even Phoenician ancestors on Scottish and English
coasts was, not surprisingly, shipwreck (Mather 1969: 3).
In fact, the genealogies of Scottish and English fishers cannot be extri-
cated from those of farm workers and townspeople. Like the pescadores
of northwest Portugal, who also form a subordinate class, Scottish fishers’
genealogies intertwine with those who work on the land (Cole 1991).
Even in the most closed-in villages, fisher intermarriage is generally no
more than 200 to 300 years old, despite the myth’s insistence that fishers’
inferior or degenerate nature has been due to generations of inbreeding.
Implications of incest are but thinly veiled, if at all. One social worker
insisted to me that many fisherfolk have been genetically damaged by in-
marriage. Modern villagers often hasten, defensively, it would seem, to
assert that while they share a common surname with their affines, they are
not, in fact, “related.”
Language has sometimes played a role in differentiating fishers from
their neighbors. Dorian details the importance of Gaelic as a marker for
fisher identity in eastern Sutherland in her book, Language Death. These

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fishermen, she says, suffered a double stigma since Gaelic was widely
regarded as inferior to English (Dorian 1981: 62). However, most fishers
in eastern Scotland, like the rural and town-based people, have long
spoken various dialects of Lowland Scots, a heavily Germanicized dialect
of English. Nonetheless, in 1922, Barclay stressed both dialect and
intermarriage as evidence that fisherfolk were “a race apart. Their differ-
ence of dialect has already been noticed. Remarkable, too, is the way their
communities have maintained a continuity of family names . . .” (Barclay
1922: 66).
Fishers were seen as different not only for their way of life but for their
general appearance, including physiognomy, dress, and facial expressions.
Erving Goffman helps us to understand why this was so with his discus-
sion of stigma as “spoiled identity”: those with such identity are less able
than others to participate in the negotiations of everyday life (Goffman
1963). Their “face value” has been lessened. As Goffman is looking here
at people with various physical infirmities, his approach tends to stress the
visible and this suggests the circular logic of stigma. After all, if physical
differences are the mark of social inferiority, then those who are socially
inferior must have some distinct physical trait one can see.
More than one writer has described the fishermen in what sound to
modern ears as racially suggestive terms, stressing physiognomy as well
as dress, facial expression and supposed character. Descriptions of Scottish
fishers that refer to dark features are intriguing given the widespread belief
that skin color was a particularly important marker of a group’s evolut-
ionary status. Observing the fishermen and women who attended the 1883
International Fisheries Exhibition in London, Levi (1883: 27) claimed to
notice

several characteristics of their character and peculiarities. Many of the men had
a face which seemed to have defied a thousand storms – a dark, sallow
countenance, yet bold and firm features, indicating daring and adventure.
Whilst the women, whether Scotch, French or Dutch, had evidently a taste for
all that is gaudy, showy and gay. Go a little deeper into their nationalities and
you find them everywhere a peculiar people. [italics mine]

The following year, Hugh Miller sounded a similar essentializing note

when he wrote that fishing villagers were “stationary . . . sluggish, inert,”
and their actions “appear rather automatical than efforts of volition . . .”
(Miller 1884: 30, cited in Mather 1969: 2). All that is missing from such
comments is an anthropometric assessment relating these traits to anat-
omical peculiarities or perhaps to an overabundance of phlegm (cf. Gould

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1996; Urry 1984). In all cases, these descriptions mark fishers as innately
separate from the “normal” population.
The highly subjective and culturally constructed process of racial typing
is most popularly thought of in such contexts as apartheid in South Africa
or segregation and the “one-drop rule” in the United States. Whether one
is “black” may have less to do with skin tone than with what is known or
surmised about one’s genealogy. The category precedes the ascription.
Similarly, if members of a group behave differently in terms of occup-
ation, belief, language or dress, and particularly if they are also poor and
powerless, how easy it is to fit a lens over the eye and see them as differ-
ently “colored.” Berreman (1972), in analysing caste systems in wider
context, notes that “societies with birth-ascribed status hierarchies dramatize
and legitimize these crucial differences by attributing to them innate
biological, hence ‘racial’ differences”. In other words, descent is often
seen as a necessary explanation for cultural difference.
Such lines of thought did not, alas, die out with the Victorians. Signif-
icantly, a postwar travel narrative of Scotland echoes earlier accounts
concerning the inhabitants of the east coast fishing villages:

Apparently of a different race from the other people of the country, with
separate traditions and customs of their own, they have kept by themselves and
intermarried among themselves for many centuries . . . Possibly these stalwart,
tan-skinned dwellers by the deep are Danish in origin, and represent, by pure
and direct descent, early settlements of Scandinavian sea-rovers. (Eyre-Todd
1947: 46)

Interestingly, however, in this last comment we see that denigration is

not the only form that the vision of fisherfolk as “other” may take. In the
nineteenth century, fishers also fulfilled, for some, a vision of the noble
savage, standing as an icon of primitive, if domestic, “otherness” that
contrasted favorably to the demoralizing effects of industrialization. In
this way, they were not so different from other internal primitives con-
structed by British society.
Chapman (1992: 122) points to “an apparent counter-current” in
depictions of the previously mentioned Celts; with the rise of romanticism,
they were also described as a people of ancient lore and wisdom. Further-
more, as James (1999) argues, canonical historical and archaeological
assumptions also drew upon romantic ideas of Celtic unity. Claims that
bearers of ancient Celtic culture came from “elsewhere” and spread by
invasion throughout Western Europe have supported a monolithic belief
in a singular Celtic culture of foreign origin.

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 Stigma and Separation

Such essentializing romanticism has indeed been applied to people

from small villages throughout Britain, who have often been stereotyped.
Stripped to their foundation, they become simple local “yokels” assumed
to be lost in history’s slipstream: to be uncorrupted, unmaterialistic
incarnations of humans close to nature. And so it has been with fishers.
Some writers, in fact, portrayed them as seaborne hunters of undoubted
courage, though of simple character. Sir Walter Scott, that great purveyor
of a romanticized Scotland, sets fishers in a place he calls “Mussel Crag”
(based upon the actual village of Auchmithie, 10 miles south of Mon-
trose), in The Antiquary. In the Mucklebackit family, we see not only a
comic rendition of fishers as “clarty” (dirty) and uncouth. We also see an
appreciation of what they must bear when sea and rocks become murderers
of men. “It’s no fish ye’re buyin’, it’s men’s lives” (1907: 107). Report-
edly, Scott was so fascinated by coastal life that he planned to set another
novel there.

During the brief residence of Sir Walter at the fishing village of Auchmithie,
on the Forfarshire coast, he had many opportunities of studying the daily
round of fisher life. Twenty years ago there were persons in Auchmithie
who remembered the illustrious visitor, and who took note of his anxiety to
make himself acquainted with the eccentric people who formed the little
community . . . In the rude fishing village, the fisher folk were unchanged from
the days of a far back period and even at this day they are still much as they
were then – a peculiar people. (Bertram 1883: 2)

The romanticized fisher also provided a compelling visual subject. As

early as the 1840s, photographers Hill and Adamson memorialized the
fishers of Newhaven (on the Firth of Forth) in a series of pictures that depicts
them as stalwart, pensive and industrious (Stevenson 1991). George
Washington Wilson, a noted Scottish photographer of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, found fishing villages and fisherfolk aptly
picturesque subjects that appealed to his growing tourist clientele (Durie
and Ingram 1994). Winslow Homer spent 20 months in Cullercoats, a
village in northern England, where he painted the fisherfolk in a simple,
naturalist style (Cooper 1986). Painters from the Glasgow School of Art
could be found on the Fife shore rendering images of the fishers there in
deep rich colors. Their faces and figures bespeak endurance, strength, and
often, beauty. As we shall see in the next chapter, painters lavished
particular attention upon fisher women.
Fisher culture, much of it labeled superstition, could be portrayed in
either romantic or derisory fashion. An entry in the Dundee Courier dated
31 July 1907 remarks on the peculiarity of fishers and talks about how

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fishers assign blame for a transgression within their community by opening

the Bible to a page at random. After placing keys that faced in different
directions on the page, a culprit’s initials could be identified by observing
the letters to which the keys pointed. To render an account of northeast
fishing villages more colorful, a postwar travel writer said “We are
delighted to find queer superstitions persisting, men refusing to say
‘rabbit,’ or to refer to salmon as other than ‘red fish’” (Scott-Moncrieff
1949).
Even writers deeply concerned for fishing communities cannot resist
such engaging and colorful detail. A modern case in point was Peter
Anson. Anson (1889–1973), was a monk, an artist and an ardent chron-
icler of fisher life. He spent years living in various fishing villages in
Scotland, including Ferryden and Buckie, and lovingly portrayed them
in beautiful, meticulous line drawings and watercolors, as well as in
numerous books (Anson 1974 [30]; 1975 [32]; 1965; 1969). Yet he also
devoted many pages to magical practices and ways of warding off harm.
Thus, fisherfolk apparently have long both repelled and intrigued. They
have stood as an exemplar for popular beliefs about ancient folk survivals
lingering in out-of-the-way corners of the British isles. Regarded as more
primitive than urban Britons, and thus preserving what had otherwise been
lost, they were enfolded into the lower rungs of a hierarchy of rationality
and truth.
I will say more about this subject in Chapter 6, when I take up the
subject of fishing people as tourist attractions. For now, it is enough to note
that whether the commentary is harsh or kind, being stereotyped as exotic
is seldom a benign condition. Gypsies and Travelers (in Scotland, known
as Tinks), are the quintessential example of this (Okeley 1983). Renowned
as fortune tellers and dancers, they are also reviled as thieves, seducers and
despoilers. They are will o’ the wisps, here one day, gone the next. Like
them, fishers also have seemed suspiciously detached from land and
property, with limited commitment to such presumably agrarian and
industrial values as prudence, reliability and piety leavened with reason.

Conclusion

This chapter has taken a primarily historical look at the period in which
fishers emerged as occupational specialists. It has laid the background
necessary to understand fishers’ vulnerability as well as the irony of their
position. Their very livelihood was rooted in Enlightenment values of
industry and rationality. Yet, fishers themselves have experienced a public
image that depicts them as backward and prerational.

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 Stigma and Separation

The next two chapters take us into the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to explore how stigma, stereotype and marginality continued to
affect fisherfolk identity as fishing became industrialized. In the pages that
follow, we shall see how gender and localism became crucial factors in
isolating fishers from “mainstream” society.

Notes

1. A comment about this number is in order. To reach it, I counted up the

communities specifically referred to in Anson’s Fishing Boats and
Fisher Folk on the east Coast of Scotland (1974 [1930]), because this
appears to be the most comprehensive account available. It was not
possible simply to count the settlements identified on any map, as I
have found no map of the east coast that agrees with any other in
naming fishing communities. There are several reasons for this. One
is that several fishing communities are attached to larger towns, and are
only locally distinguished as having a separate identity. An example is
Cellardyke, which looks like part of Anstruther, but which any local
person can tell you is a separate community. Some communities are
basically extinct, or derelict. And another reason is that authors are
selective about the communities they consider significant for their
history of fishing. Ferryden, for example, appears on very few maps
of the fishing coast.
2. Wallerstein (1980: 39) attributes Dutch success to “the invention,
around 1400, of the haringbuis, or buss, a fishing boat whose high
length-to-breadth ratio” gave it greater speed and maneuverability.
3. Exceptions include Ullapool and Tobermory, built by the British
Fisheries Society. Tobermory, however, did not thrive as a fishing port.
4. In Scotland, this economic mix continues in the west and in the northern
islands. In the Western Isles, the complex rules of crofting legislation
(see Parman) have sustained this marginal economy since the 1880s.
In the north, it is sometimes remarked that Orcadians are farmers with
fishing boats, while Shetlanders are fishers with farms.
5. The myth of foreign origin for east coast fishermen does not stop at the
Border. Clark (1982: 23) reports that the fisherfolk of Staithes, in
Yorkshire, are regarded as “strange and slightly different” and that
some believe that the village has Scandinavian roots (1982: 21).

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 –3 –

Fisher Lassies: Gender, Stereotypes

and Marginality

Wha’ll buy my caller [fresh] herrin’?

Oh ye may call them vulgar farin;
Wives and mithers maist desparin’
Ca’ them lives o’ men
Lady Nairne

In the previous chapter I examined the rise of fishing communities as

stigmatized, as stereotyped and as marginalized occupational enclaves.
This chapter explores the gendered face of stereotype, stigma and margin-
ality. In effect, women’s prominent, public roles in the fishing industry
helped to brand them and their families as odd, indeed, as less respectable
than most other Scots.
During the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, respect-
ability had been a core bourgeois value. It was determined, in part, by
adherence to gender-appropriate social convention: sober industriousness
(for both sexes) and the expectation that women be the exemplars of
domestic virtue in their roles as caretakers of the home. Of course, many
working-class women outside the fishing communities had to labor
outside the home during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They
could be found in a number of industries, including mining, spinning and
factory work, as well as agricultural labor (Devine 1984; Houston 1989).
And Whatley (1988: 240) notes that

Many females in Scotland, as elsewhere, made (and continued to make)

“hidden” contributions to production within the context of the family economy,
acting as carriers, sellers, organizers and wheelers and dealers in occupations
which were apparently male preserves, but which in fact were wholly depend-
ent upon the female contribution.

However, the work of fisherwomen was anything but “hidden.” Rather,

women were seen as very different because of their roles in the marketing

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and processing of fish. In fact, outsiders often saw them as matriarchal,

which meant that they were too bold and assertive, too dominant to be
“proper” women. Their husbands, by implication, could hardly be proper
men, no matter how hardy and daring their exploits on the sea. Thus, as
we shall see, fisherwomen’s anomalous gender behavior became one of
the key points around which outsiders’ ideas of fisher disreputability were
organized. Before I explore these outsiders’ ideas, I must elucidate the
significance of women’s work from the fishers’ point of view.

Home is Where You Bait the Lines

When I began my fieldwork, I did not immediately recognize the import-

ance of women in the fishery and certainly had not yet thought about what
the role they played there meant. Nor had I considered how stereotypes
of women contributed to fisher stigma. I held the usual stereotypes of
fishing as a purely masculine occupation, an image reinforced by much
of the existing literature, including romantic poems such as this one by
Robert Louis Stevenson (from Lockhart 1997):

Some think of the fisher skipper

beyond the Inchcape stone
But I of the fisher woman
That lies at home alone . . .
The foolish fisher woman!
Her heart is on the deep.

For many years, scholars writing about fishermen of the North Atlantic
had, apparently, also assumed that women were restricted to domesticity
and prone to worrying, while the fishery itself was run only by men (Davis
and Nadel-Klein 1988). Certainly, many in Scottish universities held this
view. When Margaret Buchan, a student from a Peterhead fishing family,
set out to research women in Scottish fishing, she found that

. . . a Reader at the University said to me that he thought that no one had ever
considered talking to a humble fishwife. Most academics were more interested
in the men and the fishing methods which they used and the contribution which
they made to the national Economy. (Buchan 1977)

In fact, in the 1970s, little had yet been written about women in the
wider Scottish workforce. As Hendry points out:

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 Fisher Lassies

In Scotland, the anthropologist/historian has come in with his notebook, right

enough, but being a male person, he will unthinkingly record what is important
according to masculine values: the affairs of state, “intellectual” discourse,
great inventions – the things obviously of the public domain . . . The female
expression of a national character is vital, indeed indispensable: O gentle
dames, Scotland hath need of thee. (Hendry 1992: 136)

By the early 1990s, when Hendry wrote this, some female anthropo-
logists had, in fact, anticipated her call and had already arrived on the
Scottish scene (Armstrong 1976, 1977, 1978; Dorian 1981; Ennew 1980;
Forsythe 1974, 1980; Macdonald 1987; Nadel-Klein 1988; Neville 1979;
Parman 1990; Renwanz 1981). Some of these specifically focused on
women; others did not but were nonetheless sensitive to gender issues.
Indeed, some folklorists had even earlier “seen” women, perhaps
because they had a tradition of strong interest in the material and the
symbolic details of domestic life. However, being folklorists, they tended
to receive rather short shrift from many academic departments – partic-
ularly those in Britain (see Buchan 1984: 9) – concerned with national and
international agendas. Evidence for this can be seen in the relative paucity
of citations from their work (see Aitken 1973; Grant 1961; King 1992–3)
by other students of Scottish life.
Nonetheless, Hendry’s point remains valid. Historical, sociological and
economic studies of work and community have, until very recently, tended
to elaborate male roles, relegating women’s labor and lives to secondary
positions (Gray 1978; Payne 1967; Carter 1979). Today, studies of women
as weavers, textile mill workers, domestic servants and farm laborers have
done much to rectify the gender skew, though there is still a long way to
go (Breitenbach, Brown and Myers 1998; Devine 1984; Gordon 1990;
Gordon and Breitenbach 1990).
During my initial research, my concern with identity, power and
politics had not yet led me to explore women’s lives and the significance
of gendered cultural constructions. I should have known better. My
training in graduate school had already taught me to look at women’s roles
in agricultural change around the world (see especially Boserup 1970;
Mencher 1982). But fisheries seemed such an obviously masculine domain,
more like hunting than horticulture. In other words, my consciousness, as
we used to say, had not yet been “raised.”
The fisherfolk themselves convinced me that this androcentric bias
simply would not do. Not that they did this in any conscious or deliberate
way. They, like most other Scots of the 1970s, were scarcely in the
vanguard of the women’s movement. Scottish society is typically, and, I

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 Fishing for Heritage

think, fairly, characterized as quite male dominated. McIvor (1992: 138),

for example, sees Scotland overall as “an intensely patriarchal society
[with] . . . Deep-rooted patriarchal concepts of the ‘lesser value’ of female
labour”. Indeed, Scots may have held on even longer, and more closely,
to the ideal of women’s domestic duties than the English. According to
McCrone (1996: 109), “Until well after 1945, the economic activity rate
for married women in Scotland was only two-thirds that of the rest of
Britain . . .”
However, when explaining to me what the fishing life had been like in
their childhoods or in their parents’ youths, fisherfolk talked often and
proudly about women’s work: what their mothers and grandmothers had
done and how their labor, strengths and skills had sustained both family
and fishery. Their emphasis forced me to re-evaluate my own assump-
tions, as ethnographers must so often do. Women’s tasks could not be
regarded in a merely functional or utilitarian way that ignored their
meaning within the fishing communities; nor could they be submerged as
mere “curiosities” (see Nadel-Klein 1988).
As we saw in the previous chapter, east coast fishers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries pursued both white fish and herring from small
boats. Like peasants, classically defined, they harvested natural resources
within a subsistence as well as a cash nexus. They also relied heavily upon
kin-based labor (Wolf 1969). This mode of subsistence shaped the com-
plementary division of labor characteristic of fisher households, an
arrangement well summed up by the phrase, “a fisher laddie needs a fisher
lassie.” So this is where I will begin.
It must be made clear at the outset that gendered ideas pervaded the
fishery. The sea itself was female, as is common throughout the North
Atlantic. So were the fishing boats. These, however, could only be inhabited
by males, perfectly illustrating Ardener’s insight that spatial arrangements
of people and objects may express cultural notions of gendered spheres
(S. Ardener 1993).1 Even more than in the House of Parliament, which
Rodgers wittily dissects as a Western version of a New Guinea men’s house,
fishermen at sea were – and are – very uneasy at the thought of women’s
presence among them (Rodgers 1993).
Fisher folklore is replete with taboos concerning women’s contact with
boats or with fishermen on their way to the shore. Thompson says that “in
the past fishermen might take it as a bad omen, and perhaps even turn back
home, if they met with particular women [some of these were said to be
witches] on their way to the harbour. Sea work was men’s work and for
women to have any place in it would be a pollution” (Thompson et al.
1983: 173). Women did not even have to go on board, in fact, to damage

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the outcome of a trip. Livingstone, in a comment that suggests a resem-

blance to menstrual taboo or “blood pollution,” says that “No woman,
especially a bare-footed one, should step over the nets or they could not
be used” (1996: 107; and see Anson 1975). Anson (who, as we shall see
in Chapter 6, took a great interest in fisher “superstitions”) reports a number
of other beliefs concerning women’s power to affect men’s chances of a
good catch, or even survival. A woman had magical power when her
husband was out to sea and could, wittingly or unwittingly, keep him from
returning. For example, it was said that a fishwife must never comb her
hair after nightfall while her husband’s boat was out to sea, for if she did,
he would surely drown.
These gender-focused anxieties notwithstanding, women made essential
contributions to the economic and technological requirements of white
fishing. Each household needed a man to catch the fish and a woman to
undertake shore-based tasks before, during and after the voyage. Thus a
wife and mother had two full-time jobs: one in the fishery, one in the
household. She raised the children and managed the domestic economy;
she also made it possible for her man to fish. So now, let us take a closer
look at how this work was organized.
In both the sma’ and the great-line fishing for white fish, described in
the previous chapter, a man would take on board a woven basket or “scull”
packed with coiled fishing lines. Each line could run up to a mile in length
and carry from 600 to 1200 baited hooks. The hooks hung from snoods
(variously spelled snids or snuids), which were short lines made from
horsehair, spaced a few feet apart. Each member of a four to six man crew
“shot” at least one line in every voyage (for more detail, see Adams 1991;
Hay and Walker 1985: 53–4).
But first, women had to prepare these lines: a complex, dirty, smelly
and time-consuming process involving many steps. Fishermen preferred
to use mussels for bait. However, these did not grow on every shore. Nor,
as we shall see in the next chapter, were they a free resource, for curers
or lairds usually owned the mussel beds. In Ferryden, where the mussels
were near at hand, women raked them up from the mucky sands. Every
few days, small groups of women left the village at low tide. Working in
hymn-singing groups of two or three, they hauled thousands of the black,
shiny shellfish up the bank to the village. They then dumped them into
scaups, shallow pits dug on the foreshore to keep them fresh.
Then the women began their long and monotonous labor of shelling the
mussels and baiting the lines. This often began at dawn and continued till
nightfall. We read that in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee:

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After gathering the bait, the women then went for ‘bent’ (dune grass) which
was used to layer the lines. After they arrived home they then had to bait lines,
sometimes to twelve o’clock at night . . . The women did three times the work
of the men, and yet it could come to nothing if wind and tide kept the fishermen
ashore. (McMillan, n.d.)

Old Mrs. Potter of Ferryden remembered her mother’s endless work and
said to me, “It took oors and oors tae sheil the mussels and bait the lines,
and if it came away bad weather and they couldna’ use the lines for a few
days, ye had to undae the hale thing.”
Children were also expected to help, regardless of all other obligations,
including school (Coull 1989: 38). Older daughters often had to take over
such household tasks as cooking and child minding. Always, the fishing
came first. Boys typically went to sea with their fathers by the age of 14,
but before that, would also be expected to help their mothers.

William Smith of Cellardyke, Fife, as the oldest child in the family, would rise
with his mother about four o’clock on winter mornings to do the shelling. “I
have seen her,” he wrote, “when she had a baby in the cradle, with the cradle-
string tied to her foot rocking the cradle and with her hands baiting the line”.
(Martin 1995: 17)

Christian Watt (1833–1923), a woman from Broadsea, by Fraserburgh,

left a memoir of her life as a fisherwoman that is rich with detail con-
cerning women’s work. She remembered how such work had looked to
her as a small child:

I hated the small lines for this meant so much more work for the adults, shelling
the mussels, baiting the lines . . . My parents’ day began at three in the morning
and often ended at midnight . . . I have seen both of my parents fall down with
exhaustion at the end of a day, after my father had come in from the sea. (Fraser
1983)

Christian Watt’s granddaughter, Christian Watt Marshall, also from

Broadsea, was born in 1896. In her own memoirs, she counted herself
lucky that she “didn’t have to suffer the poverty of the 1880s when folk
were no more than galley slaves in every walk of working class life”
(Sutherland 1994: 2). Still, she had to bait the lines and liked it no more
than had her grandmother.

Nobody liked doing the small lines in winter. It was a messy job shelling
mussels and baiting lines, but it was our living . . . We had to be careful – a lot
of folk got blood poisoning by catching their fingers on the barbs of the hooks.

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It was hard and weary work with little reward. The drudgery was relentless.
(Sutherland 1994: 9)

While each woman was responsible for her family’s boat and gear,
women often worked in groups, preferably of female kin (thus paralleling
the fishing crews). In this way, they kept each other company through the
long hours of painstaking labor. Margaret Buchan quotes an old woman
from the Peterhead area:

She said if the weather was fine we all sat outside and baited lines on the
pavement, my mother, my sisters and myself. If the weather was bad, we then
had to work in the kitchen, and then the place was in a right “steer.” However,
she said if anyone needed help it was given gladly. (Buchan 1977)

Line fishing also provided some women with their own source of income.
Writing about the coastal stretch between Arbroath (12 miles south of
Montrose) and Gourdon (7 miles north), Hay and Walker tell us that many
fisherwomen became quite entrepreneurial; they also note the unusual
degree of autonomy that fishwives possessed.

Fishermen’s wives were often in business for themselves as fish merchants and
would purchase fish from the local market and prepare them for sale. This
could simply be a small quantity prepared each day and taken to Dundee, or
some other town, in rips or creels to be sold. The “rounds” were often in the
suburbs and landward areas where there were no established fish shops, but
some families also prepared fish for established fish shops. This activity
resulted in the wives being much more independent of their husbands than in
most types of community and in times of low quayside fish prices the fisher-
men’s wives often made considerably more money than their husbands. (Hay
and Walker 1985: 82)

Gourdon, on the Kincardineshire coast, became the last Scottish

community to use the old hand-line method. Undoubtedly, the line fishing
survived there because it could provide a special market niche: line-caught
fish were always in better condition than those brought in by the net, and
therefore “were particularly prized for the manufacture of smoked fish
along the east coast” (Hay and Walker 1985: 81). The Gourdon women
could be found baiting the lines in the old way into the 1980s and there
“the men freely admitted that they owed their prosperity to their women-
folk, who each day baited 1200 hooks with mussels” (R. Smith 1991: 10).
However time-consuming, baiting lines was only one portion of
women’s obligations to the household fishery. They were often expected

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to take ballast (frequently in the form of heavy rocks) and lines out to the
boats; then, they might have to help launch the boats and later drag them
back to shore. “Fishing used to be very hard. There were no engines.
Women had to haul the boats up river over the rocks,” I was told in
Ferryden. “Women had to be marvelous workers,” said an old lady from
Cellardyke. Later, when drift-netting for herring became part of the
fishermen’s routine, women took part in net-mending, as well.

Fishermen’s houses were always work-places as well as homes, and it was

usually the woman’s job to do the actual mending of . . . the easily torn nets . . .
The end of a herring season away from home, when each man brought home
twenty or more nets to be mended, left little free time for anybody; one net,
measuring sixty yards by about twenty yards, could take three hours or three
days to mend, and there were no short-cuts. (Murray 1986: 5)

Murray lists still more tasks in which women were involved: preserv-
ing the nets by a technique called “barking,” in which nets were dipped
in a hot resin or an alum solution; water-proofing the oilskin clothing and
boots; and, of course, washing huge amounts of clothing.
Most of the older villages at that time had no piers from which the men
could walk dry-shod to their boats. This gave rise to what was, at least
from an outsider’s perspective, women’s most unusual job: they carried
men piggy-back to, and often from, the boats. To do so, they waded
through waist-high water to protect their men’s feet, subjecting themselves
to the biting waters of the cold North Sea. The cover of To Work and To
Weep: Women in Fishing Economies, which Dona Davis and I co-edited
in 1988, shows an old drawing of fisherwomen standing in the tide. The
muscular fishwives, skirts tucked immodestly up to their waists carry
relatively small, but heavily clothed fishermen hoisted on their backs like
creels. This practice struck many outsiders as bizarre, gender-defiant
behavior that provided further evidence of fisher peculiarity. Bertram
describes the scene for the neighboring village of Auchmithie, along the
south Angus coast:

I have seen the women of Auchmithie ‘kilt their coats’ and rush into the water
in order to aid in shoving off the boats, and on the return of the fleet carry the
men ashore on their brawny shoulders with the greatest ease and all the
nonchalance imaginable, no matter who might be looking at them. (Bertram
1869: 444)

Informants generally agreed that the practice was clearly meant to keep
the men’s feet, encased in heavy leather sea-boots, dry before setting out

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on a long sea voyage. Before the first half of the nineteenth century, east-
coast fishing boats were undecked, so that fishermen had no shelter from
the constant wash of the chilling, salt spray. Even with the later intro-
duction of decked boats, fishing was always cold, wet work. Pneumonia
was a common way for a fisherman to die. Yet, explaining this practice
in an exclusively instrumental manner would be partial. For, as we have
seen, women sometimes carried the men back to shore again when they
returned, which makes the dry-feet rationale a bit suspect (King, n.d.: 5;
see also Anson 1975 [1932]: 212).
A structuralist interpretation that unifies opposites might suggest itself
here. By carrying them from the dry land of the foreshore to the boats,
the women raised the men above the liminal tidal zone, the ambiguous
beach (sometimes land and sometimes water) to the safety of the land that
floats on the sea – namely the boats. Thus women kept the men out of the
water which the men feared to enter, lest they never leave it again. Just as
they gave birth to children, delivering them to safety, so too did women
bear their men, delivering them onto their boats. The fishermen’s wives
both literally and figuratively negotiated their passage between land and
sea.
Regardless of how we explain the custom, one thing is clear: women
certainly had to be strong. They carried both the fishermen and the fishery.
Even after childbirth, a woman had scant time to rest. The grandmother
of one of my elderly informants, herself an octogenarian Ferryden woman,
had told her that “women would go out to rake mussels less than a week
after giving birth. The water was red around them.” And in a novel written
about nineteenth century northeast fisherfolk, a fishwife continues to work
and refuses to see a doctor, despite the agonizing pain of a mysterious and
ultimately fatal disease, because “in the Fishertown you had the doctor
only when you died” (Patterson 1950: 37).2
Idle hands were regarded with disdain and work did not stop even when
the boats had sailed away. For one thing, there were the family’s clothes
to make and mend, including the heavy, knitted ganseys (jerseys), stock-
ings and long underwear the men required. Many informants said that
women knitted endlessly, needles flashing even as they walked. To this
end they wore wiskers, small leather pouches strapped around their waists
that were pierced with holes to stabilize the needles (Bochel 1979: 18).
When the boats returned after grueling, 12 to 14-hour trips, the exhausted
men would unload the catch and then head straight home to sleep. People
in Ferryden remembered how, as children, they were turned out of their
beds in the small, crowded houses to make room for their fathers and older
brothers when they returned before dawn.

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If all had gone well, the sailing boats could bring back huge catches.
Anson claims that, as early as 1840, “in the summer months it was not an
uncommon event for fifteen or sixteen boats at Ferryden to come in . . .
with a thousand haddocks each,” and that these would sell for roughly a
farthing per pound (Anson 1974 [1930]: 117). Not that the fishermen saw
much of this. Obligations to laird or curer came first. Then the fishermen’s
wives took the rest of the fresh catch to sell in the countryside or towns.
What remained became women’s preserve – literally so, since they
smoked or pickled much of it. In all the villages, women were responsible
for transforming the slippery, raw resource into a saleable commodity. For
example, in Auchmithie,

There followed intense activity by the whole family around each fisherman’s
cottage. One woman would decapitate and gut the haddocks, another would
slit and clean them, another put them in salt in a tub and yet another tied them
by the tails in pairs on a pole. The fish were then hung on a scaffolding to dry
before being sent for sale . . . (Gray 1978)

Further north,

The fish were taken from the small market by the fisherwives themselves and
then they smoked some of them over fir-cones ready for the creel. There were
no fish shops round Golspie at that time. It was just the women trudging round.
(Blair 1987: 129)

Some women carried heavy loads of fresh or preserved fish for miles,
straight to rural households; stories of their stamina appear in many
accounts. For example, fishwives from Dunbar, near Edinburgh, were
reported to have “trotted” with a full creel, twenty-six miles in five hours
(Bertram 1883).
Each fishwife had a regular clientele among the farm workers of her
territory. These, too, were poor people and, with some of them, she might
develop close and affectionate relationships (see Fraser 1983). Usually,
they paid her in kind with butter, eggs, cheese, turnips and grain. “The
creel was often carried home heavier than it was carried out” (Anson 1965:
139). One observer of the fishwives, succumbing to the stereotype we saw
in Chapter 2 of fishers as mentally limited, believed that the women
irrationally added to their own burdens:

These poor drudges will thus travel fifteen miles before breakfast . . . such is
the force of habit, that they would think it a punishment to be obliged to return
home without a load in their baskets, equal in weight to a third of their outward-

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bound cargo. If so they have neither goods nor provisions to carry home, they
generally take in ballast of stones . . . (Knox [1784] in Anson 1965: 141).

This seems singularly unlikely. However, it is true that inland journeys

were not always profitable. “Towards the end of the six-monthly period
after payment of their wages, rural laborers’ incomes were insufficient to
buy fish regularly and the fishwife would have a walk to the nearest town
in an attempt to sell off surplus stocks” (Hay and Walker 1985: 37). There,
the remainder could be sold to itinerant cadgers for cash or hawked directly
to customers on the street. The return for this labor was usually quite poor
– a hundredweight of fish fetched only a few shillings. Importantly, the
fishwives’ street cries (“buy my caller [fresh] herring,” made the Newhaven
fishwives famous, for example) earned them a reputation for aggressive
verbal ability. In fact, the stereotype of being loud, shrill women, as in the
phrase, “shrieking like a fish-wife,” remains alive today.
Women setting off to market fish often preferred to travel in groups, for
these expeditions could be dangerous as well as exhausting. “Fishwives
were often attacked both for money and carnal knowledge. All carried
sharp gutting knives,” recalled Christian Watt (Fraser 1983). Children of
both sexes occasionally went along, and “by fourteen a daughter was able
to cover the round on her own” (Hay and Walker 1985: 37).
Before the railways penetrated the Scottish coast, beginning in the
1840s, all these marketing expeditions had to be made on foot. Trains
enabled the fishwives to extend their range and made an enormous differ-
ence to the fishery. “The Great North of Scotland Railway had special fish-
wife concession fares which allowed the women to reach considerable
greater distances from home” (Coull 1989: 41). However, although the
trains broadened women’s vending opportunities, they did not eliminate
their pedestrian burdens.

My grandmother walked the two mile from home, got the train at Macduff at
six o’clock in the morning, got off at King Edward and then went to a’ the
different farms, walking all the time. Then she’d come back with the train at
night. Sometimes instead of money she’d get fresh butter and bring that home
to salt down for the winter. She enjoyed that life. She was a big strong woman,
my granny. (Blair 1987: 129)

The itinerant fishwife became a “kenspeckle [well-recognized] figure

in traditional Scottish life” (Coull 1989: 41). She continued to be a noted
symbol of the fishing community, even after the fisher communities had
begun their inexorable decline and fishers began to mix more freely with
townsfolk.

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There was a time, said a policeman, when the fisher folk rarely mixed much
with the townspeople, but now many a pretty fisher girl who bears a creel on
her back during the day appears in the evening in silk stockings and a smart
costume. “But,” he said, lowering his voice, “ye can aye tell her because of her
walk. She bends forward, ye ken, from bearin’ the creel.” (Morton 1933: 339)

Others may have been able to recognize Scottish fishwives for bearing
the creel, in addition to their fortitude and willingness to sacrifice them-
selves for the good of their husbands and families. But how did they view
themselves? What were the women’s own vulnerabilities and fears.
Although they may often have appeared to be stoical, surely they had their
preferences, their likes and dislikes, even if they seldom had choices about
the lives they would lead. It is to explore these preferences that I turn in
the next section to songs, poems, memoirs, and historical accounts, as well
as to the stories of my informants.

“Work and Wait and Dree Your Weird [Dread Your Fate]”

A newly married fisher couple would have had no illusions of a secure,

stress-free existence. To the contrary, their childhoods would have pre-
pared them well for a future filled with danger and unpredictability. But
no amount of preparation could inure them to the emotional costs of
“living from the sea” (Smith 1977). Doubtless, men bore the greater risks
to life and limb. However, women were forced to endure dangers of their
own, as well as continual anxiety and stress with little relief. In those days
before ship-to-shore communication, women would have had no way of
knowing how their men were faring.
In matter-of-fact voices, the older women I spoke to talked about the
uncertainties of life on shore. They never dramatized their fears, but said
that, of course, they had watched the weather and worried. They had to
face the ever-present threat of losing their husbands, brothers and sons to
the menacing sea. The lifeboat was often busy; sometimes, a boat would
sink in sight of land. Even after a rescue, a man might still succumb. The
Ferryden lifeboat records, for example, make stark reading: “Alexander
Paton died of exposure and shock after being thrown overboard. Left
widow and two children” (Duncan n.d.: 25).
The words of Christian Watt, who lived from 1833 to 1923, bear
eloquent witness to the toll these experiences could take. She spent the last
45 years of her life in Aberdeen’s Cornhill Asylum, a victim of what would
probably now be called depression. Reading her criticisms of power and

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oppression, however, I have to wonder if she was labeled mentally ill in

part because she was so outspoken. I have, of course, no way of knowing.
Like Nisa, the independent-minded !Kung woman of the Kalahari desert
described by Shostak (1983), Christian did not get along with everyone
around her and had her own ideas of how to live her life. Like Nisa, she
watched the familiar conditions of her life be transformed by powerful
outsiders. And, like Nisa, she resisted marriage. Indeed, Christian most
especially did not want to be a fisherman’s wife:

I dreaded being landed with a fisherman for (I will tell no lies) I hated the chave
[work] from morning to beyond night, and I dreaded marriage like the plague,
but unfortunately I fell head over heels in love, and knew it was the right one
whenever I set eyes upon him, so all my own plans for the future came to
nought. (Fraser 1983: 67)

Her fears were realized. Christian’s life was filled with poverty and
loss. Her husband died at sea 18 years after they were married. Of her ten
children, seven predeceased her, as did numerous grandchildren, nieces
and nephews. In her often rambling but sharply observant account she
provides us with an intimate, critical view of a Scottish fisherwoman’s
world that is unparalleled by any other source:

The Congregational Minister came to the door. I asked him which one of my
folk was lost, he said, “It is the husband” . . . It was the 21st August, exactly
three years and two weeks to the day since my son Peter was drowned and in
that time I had lost five of my nearest . . . My son James was 17, so Maritime
laws would not allow him to skipper the boat, which meant I would have to
pay somebody to do so. Shortly afterwards I was to lose another son and
daughter . . . I had my trust in Christ the Man of sorrow, and knew what he felt
as he stood before Pontius Pilate the Procurator of Judea. (Fraser 1983: 101)

Many songs have been written to express fisherwomen’s fears of

bereavement. I quote from three here: the first is a traditional song, voiced
by a fisherman’s daughter; the second is a modern interpretation, this time
sung by the fisherman’s wife; the third, also modern, emphasizes how
tragically a marriage based upon romantic love could end. The latter two,
in particular, make it clear that fisher marriage could be more than a
merely utilitarian arrangement, as it has sometimes been depicted: “A
bride had to be selected in much the same manner as a new boat, a net, or
any other kind of fishing gear. She was regarded not only as a breeder of
children, but also as a human ‘tool’” (Anson 1965: 145).

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“When father’s out upon the sea

We’re out upon the pier,
For we must dread in terror
And we must dread in fear,
Lest he should meet a watery grave
And be snatched from our grasp,
And we’d wander broken-hearted,”
Said the bonnie fisher lass.
(The Bonnie Fisher Lass, traditional, from Buchan and Hall 1973: 78)

Work and wait and dree your weird [suffer your fate],
Pin your faith in herrin’ sales,
And oftimes lie awake at nicht
In fear and dread o’ winter gales.
But men maun wark tae earn their breid,
And men maun sweat tae gain their fee,
And fishermen will aye gang oot
As lang as fish swim in the sea.
(Fisherman’s Wife by Ewan MacColl, from Buchan and Hall 1973: 33).

By the storm-torn shoreline a woman is standing,

The spray strung like jewels in her hair.
And the sea tore the rocks near the desolate landing,
As though it had known she stood there.
(Chorus): For she has come down to condemn that wild ocean,
For the murderous loss of her man.
His boat sailed out on a Wednesday morning,
And it’s feared she’s gone down wi’ all hands
(The Fisherman’s Song by Andy Stewart 1981).3

Elaborating a similar theme in a poem entitled, To Suffie, Last of the

Buchan Fishwives, a girl from the countryside pens her sympathy for the
burdens of a fishwerwoman’s life:

We nivver hid to flee demintit

Tull [to] the pier-heid,
Nor harken tull the heerican at midnicht,
Caul’ wi dreid.
Spring efter Spring, or the teuchat’s storm [wintry March weather] wis past
Ye wannert [wandered] the road,
Heid tull the sleety win’ an boo’t twa-faal [bent over]
Shoodrin [shouldering] yer load. (Garry 1988)

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These songs, poems and stories (and many others quite similar) tell us
several things about the preferences – the likes and dislikes, vulnerabilities
and fears – of fisherwomen: they longed for security, but found the sea
unpredictable and unforgiving; they acceded to hard work, but desired
more leisure and less loneliness; they would be stoic and stolid, but never
safe. These songs, poems and stories also attest to another important aspect
of the lived experiences of fisherwomen, namely their full partnership in
productive labor. They were not skippers, but they were not subordinate.
Their work mattered, and they knew it did, even if they had too much of
it to do and with too little security to show for it.

A Fisher Laddie needs A Fisher Lassie

During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and the early twentieth century, and in
sharp contrast to modern times, fishermen and their wives relied directly
upon each other. Marriage was a significant factor within the economy of
fishing. And most fishers married other fishers, often within the same
village.
The usual explanation given for in-marriage among fishers from the
same village was that “a fisher laddie needs a fisher lassie.” Indeed, this
was not merely a euphonious aphorism or romantic ideal. Fishermen
consciously sought wives who would be effective helpmates. As one man
said to me, “Ye had to marry wi’in the fisherfolk. Ye needed a wife who
knew the wark.”

A fisher-girl had, in addition to innumerable household tasks, to mend the nets,

bait the hooks, gut the fish, wash the offal from the street, and, after marriage,
run the family single-handed while the man was away from home for long
periods at sea. It bred great independence of character, and it was not thought
that a farmworker’s daughter could ever learn what was required . . . inter-
marriage between country families and Buckie fishing families was practically
unknown before the Second World War; nine-tenths of those interviewed in
Buckie had found their wives either from within the town itself or from similar
villages along the coast. There was such a sense of apartness that farm children
were held by fisher children to smell bad. (Smout 1986: 176)

Intriguingly, this quote reveals an instance where stigma was reversed,

the “bad smell” coming from the farmers, rather than the fishers. But I
digress.
The fisher laddie formulation sees marriage only from the male point
of view and cannot be taken solely at face value. To do so would be to

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accept, without further thought, a purely male model. It would be akin to

viewing alliance-making as “the exchange of women” or of women
depicted as “zeroes” on the kinship charts (Porter ). It can just as well be
said, in fact, that a fisher lassie needed a fisher lassie, for, as we have seen,
female work groups were also organized around core groups of kin. Like
men, women said that they felt more comfortable working with family
members. They also relied on each other for moral and emotional support.
Mother-daughter ties were particular strong. Ferryden’s parish records
showed that many women delivered their first and even their second
children in their mothers’ houses, even if they had married away from the
village. Some even returned from North America to do so. “When the men
were away, as they often were, for eight to ten weeks at a time [during the
herring fishing] then the women and children had each other for company
and protection” (Buchan 1977: 4).
Such bonds made women understandably reluctant to marry out of the
village. The only way to resolve the tension between agnatic and uterine
bonds would have been to keep marriage within the village as much as
possible. Endogamy was not a hard and fast rule, of course, and many a
fisherman or woman found a spouse from another fishing community,
particularly after herring curing took women away to work (as we shall
see shortly). But in general, people preferred to avoid the conflict and to
remain close to their natal families. As one author says, “none of the
communities would easily absorb outsiders, whether male or female”
(Gray 1978). Buchan further suggests that an out-marrying woman might
have been less than keen to work with her mother-in-law: “If a fisherman
married from outside the community, then usually his mother took over
and instructed the outsider in her duties. Sometimes this situation worked
very well, at other times it led to bitterness and rancour” (Buchan 1977: 5).
Indeed, the fishing community of Peterhead was known for women’s
insistence on remaining, forcing “foreign” fisher husbands to move in.
So village endogamy provided the ideal solution: men and women
were assured of mates whose skills and values were compatible with their
own while intra-sex solidarity could persist unchallenged. Furthermore,
as we shall see, it reinforced local solidarity in the face of social stigma.
Ironically, stigmatizing notions drew upon these practices to find further
evidence of fisher difference from everyone else. The strength of women’s
kinship bonds no doubt contributed to these communities’ reputation for
matriarchy, a subject I take up later in this chapter, just as endogamy
helped to brand them as inbred.
Scotland is a small country, but kinship practices are not identical
everywhere within it. For example, Hebridean Gaelic kinship involves

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different terms for maternal and paternal kin, even though clan member-
ship was acquired ambilineally (Parman 1990) and people take these
distinctions seriously (see Ennew 1980). Among Lowland Scots, on the
other hand, mothers’ and fathers’ sides of the family are generally assumed
to be equivalent, in a manner quite similar to that of American kinship
(Schneider 1968). Most Lowlanders see themselves as living within a
bounded group of relatives whose importance varies with personal close-
ness. This also applies to fishers, but a distinct tendency for women to be
closer to their mothers’ kin, men their fathers’ relatives, is clearly visible.
Take, for example, the business of naming.
Fishing villagers knew each other lineally as their mothers’ daughters
or fathers’ sons: one might be Mary’s Catherine’s Betty, for example, or
Williamina’s Rose’s Elizabeth (and see Wilson 1980). This genealogical
reiteration stressed the continuity of same-sex lines and encoded life
history narratives in a way that outsiders could never comprehend. For
women, it helped to counteract their submersion in patrilineally acquired
surnames. Married surname use also allowed a woman’s natal identity to
persist. Women retained their maiden names for all but official purposes,
or for dealing with outsiders. When I first went to Ferryden I found this
quite confusing. A woman would be introduced to me as, say, Mrs James
Watt, but from then on would be referred to as Agnes Coull.
There is one further point concerning kinship and community: in
addition to endogamy, fishers might use inheritance to ensure that children
stayed close by. Sons were not the only heirs. A woman might inherit not
only a house, but also a boat, even though she could not sail in it herself.
An early example comes from a 1792 will from the northern village of
Broadsea, where an ancestor of Christian Watt, the fisherman James
Lascelles, left

all my worldly goods and chattels whatsoever and wherever situate to my great
grand daughter Helen Noble or Lascelles widow of Andrew Noble a White
fisher and to her eldest child . . . to be left in fee in her Mother’s lifetime in time
to be her own absolute property. (Fraser 1983)

This property included not only household goods, but fishing gear: “my
great lines and my small lines.” Clearly, the hope would have been that his
widowed descendant would remarry a local fisherman who could make
use of them.
Female solidarity persisted as the fishery itself began to change. As we
have seen, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the emphasis in
Scottish fishing had begun to shift from white fish to herring, and from

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small family-based boats to larger craft in which most men were employed
by boat owners. The transition did not take place all at once; nor did all
abandon white fishing. However, many men now made longer voyages,
sometimes lasting months at a time. The impact upon the small commun-
ities was severe. “By the second half of the 19th century, when the fisheries
expanded, the family as an autonomous economic entity was untenable”
(Telford 1998: 2).
Women also found themselves with new roles to play. With the rise of
the herring fleets, a host of shoreside workers was needed to process and
pack the highly perishable fish for transport and sale. Thousands of
women responded to this new opportunity to earn money. This did not
mean, however, that they deserted their home villages for good. Rather,
like the fishermen and coopers (male fishing barrel makers), they became
seasonal, migrant laborers. Often, groups of related women traveled and
stayed together. In this new setting, they became known as herring lassies.
It is to this new activity, one crucial to understanding the relationship
between gender and stigma, that I turn now.

Herring Quines and Gutting Lassies

There’s coopers here and curers there and buyers, canny chiels,
And lassies at the pickling and others at the creels,
And you’ll wish the fish had been a’ left in the sea
By the time you finish guttin’ herrin’ on the Yarmouth quay.
(Song of the Fish-Gutters by Ewan MacColl, from Buchan and Hall 1973:
99).

As I have already indicated, herring were not a new species to all

Scottish fishermen. For many years, particularly in the northeast, men had
been pursued them from small boats.

Herring fishing . . . had been spreading over several sectors of the east coast
since the late eighteenth century . . . Through the eighty years up to 1870 it was
carried on by men drawn from more than a hundred fishing communities . . .
Line fishing, mainly for cod and haddock, had been the occupation of their
ancestors from a much earlier time and, when they turned to herring fishing
in the nineteenth century, the more traditional line fishing still continued to
occupy a good part of the year. Herring fishing, then, was a nineteenth century
innovation in communities which had long depended on other forms of fishing.
(Gray n.d.: 1).

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The big curing firms began to change the rhythm of work by hiring
fishermen to spend several months a year in large fleets, following the
shoals around the British coast. Fueled by demand from Germany and the
Baltic, and encouraged by changes in the terms of trade, the herring
industry grew exponentially, reaching its zenith in the 1880s and declining
slowly until the First World War, when many of the boats were command-
eered for battle. Markets, too, became inaccessible. At first, only a few
places had the large boats and enough investment capital to make herring
fishing the primary activity (Coull 1969: 27), and most communities
continued to include white fish in their yearly rounds. Following the end
of the war, some men went back to fishing, but the boom was over. The
consequences of this decline are still unfolding, as Chapters 5 and 6 will
explain.
During this period, however, women added herring curing to their
already full work loads. As the fleets went further and further offshore, the
herring fishery made periodic and increasingly significant interruptions to
the village-based labor patterns that had been based on short trips. Herring
shoals are migratory and not always predictable. Maturing in northern
waters, they swim southward to breed. They could be caught at many places
along the coast, but the richest waters were those off Great Yarmouth, in
England, Scotland’s Western Isles, and the Shetlands. Thus men would
join herring crews on a seasonal basis. Along the Fife coast, for example,
men went out to the late summer herring (known as “the Lammas Drave”)
and to the winter herring (Smith 1985). Boats left for weeks or even
months at a time to join the “great and mobile herring fleet which by 1870
amounted to over 4000 boats” (Gray n.d.: 1).
Curers owned much of the fleet, and drew their crews from all around
the coast.

This practice meant that the price of herring per cran [a standardized measure
of fish: roughly 700-1000 cured fish] was fixed and the quantity to be landed
agreed on. Once the complement of crans were landed, the fishermen were free
to go home, or stay and fish at a much less price. Being engaged to a curer had
the advantage that money was received in advance, this was commonly called
Bounty, and was sufficient to keep the wives and children alive while the boats
were away fishing. If herring were scarce it meant boats in some cases would
be away for as long as twenty weeks from home before catching their comple-
ment. (Stewart n.d.: 11).

Gray further estimates that when east coast fishing was at its height in the
1870s, “some 30,000 fishermen and about the same number of shore

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workers were thus employed” (1967: 187). By this time, the herring
industry was a very different, capital intensive “kettle of fish” than the
small-scale efforts that had preceded it.
The profits now generated for curers firmly ensconced many in the
solid middle class; fishermen did not do so well. Thus emerged a radically
new, more proletarianized, and increasingly class-conscious division of
labor. Christian Watt, whose political views, as we have seen, were more
radicalized than many, reflected bitterly on the disparity between curers’
and fishers’ profits from the trade.

We now had to work terribly hard, for herring prices were so poor. Fisherman
chaved [worked] their guts out for nothing but to line the curers’ pouch. The
herring boom hit the Broch [Fraserburgh] like a thunderbolt. They were gutting
and packing on the streets . . . It was a scandal folk were so poorly paid; we
managed to give our bairns a pair of shoes and rig out for Sunday, but they had
to go barefoot to school through the week.
The 1870s were a bad time for the working class. The industrial upheaval
was well under way. As fishers we felt the pinch, for most folk had gone over
to herring fishing completely. You could not barter herring for dairy produce
the same way as you could do with white fish . . . We certainly were very poor
in my childhood, but my own children had far less to eat than we had for times
were now geared to put all the profit into the curer’s pocket . . . In truth we had
been robbed of our independence . . . (Fraser 1983: 88)

In this next passage, she embeds her observations in a critique that

mixes class inequity with religious consequence:

whatever is said of the Victorians in the future, be they Empire builders or what
have you, they were certainly not champions of humanity, as so many shall one
day have to stand before an angry God and testify. It seemed hordes of bullies
had been rounded up to take on foremen’s jobs in gutting yards, to drive the
women as hard as they could. (Fraser 1983: 89)

Thousands of women were recruited to cure the “silver darlings,” as

herring were commonly called in the northeast. Labor demands were so
great, in fact, that men and women from the Highlands also sought work
on the coast. The women became variously known as fishgirls, herring
girls, herring lassies, or gutting quines (women). This new work had
significant domestic consequences: traveling to distant places away from
village confines, men and women encountered attractive strangers, and the
strong tendency to marry only from within the village began to weaken.
The new spouses were usually fisherfolk, however, so occupational
endogamy, at least, still prevailed.

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However, not all curing operations were done in far-away places.

Joseph Johnston’s of Montrose, a curing firm about which we will learn
more Chapter 4, was said to have originally sent several Ferryden women
to Sweden to learn Scandinavian herring curing methods so that they
could teach others in the village. The firm then began to hire Ferryden
village women directly as wage-earners. “My mother stayed guttin’ herrin’
till two or three A.M.,” recalled one Ferryden woman. During the summer
months, Johnston’s sent coopers around the village to gather the women
for work, crying out, “A’body! A’body!” Another Ferryden woman recalled
that her mother would return home, exhausted, at two or three in the
morning. “A woman was finished at fifty in those days.”
A former herring lassie from Peterhead remembered working hungry
in her home town during her teenage years, before the post-War unions
brought some improvement in working conditions:

When I was a girl in Peterhead, in the old days before the First War, a man
would come round tae the house and tell ye that the herrin’ would be in the yard
at nine o’clock, and sometimes we didna stop till three or four o’clock the next
morning. Gutting all the time. Ye got nothing tae eat unless someone brought
it. (Butcher 1987: 12).

For most, however, being a herring lassie meant leaving home, village
and family boat for long periods of time. For the first time, significant
numbers of women from the fishing communities were working outside
of the domestic economy.

Herring fishing’s demand for ancillary labour was not contained within the
framework of the family group . . . during the fishing itself the crew would
operate without the direct aid of their women-folk. Nets had to be spread
for drying but it was done either by the crew or by laborers hired for the
purpose. The transport of fish from boat to yard was the responsibility of the
curer and he would engage specialized carters for the purpose. The women, on
the other hand, finding employment within the yards as gutters and packers,
did not directly support the crews in which their men-folk were organized.
Rather, they were hired as wage-earners by the curers to share impersonally in
the work of a yard into which the catches of many boats might be discharged.
(Gray 1978)

To reach the herring stations, women journeyed by train or boat, most

commonly south to the East Anglian ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowe-
stoft, west to the Hebrides or Ireland and north to Lerwick, in the Shetlands.
Reaching Lerwick involved a long, often fearsome crossing by ship.

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The voyage to Lerwick was feared: the overnight crossing of sixteen hours
from Aberdeen could make many sick, the ship was too crowded for everyone
to have a bunk and many lay on deck under tarpaulins. Some women might
have some whisky but many of the fisher girls came from temperance com-
munities and refused this solace. (Miller 1999: 109)

One of my Ferryden informants remembered that when her mother had

gone to cure herring in Shetland, “the boats were filthy and people were
pushed in among the cattle.” Another told me that the women were sent
out in small open boats, lashed in to protect them from being washed over-
board in heavy seas.
With their belongings packed in heavy wooden kists (chests or trunks)
that could double as tables or chairs, they went to live in rude, unfurnished
huts near the quays. Their communal lodgings were spartan and even
unhealthy. “The huts were overcrowded and the women were overworked
so if disease struck it took a terrible toll” (Buchan 1977)
Girls could start in the gutting as early as the age of 10, although they
usually waited until they left school at 14. “They were often taught their
trade by their mothers who ensured their daughters carried on the family
line of work” (Taylor, n.d.: 63). Both unmarried and married women went,
and Telford (1998: 3) tells us that “It was common to have sexagenarian
grandmothers at the gutting”.

They were always referred to as fisher girls regardless of age, but as the Jenkins
collection of photographs shows a high proportion of them were goodlooking
young women. It is not surprising that quite a number of today’s Norfolk and
Suffolk grandmothers first came south after the herring and stayed to marry.
(Elliott 1979: 50)

Some women followed the fishing virtually year round. Bochel, a

woman from the fisher community of Nairn, writes that others

whose homes were well supported by menfolk owning a fishing vessel, did not
work all the year round and usually chose to go to Lerwick in the summer and
Yarmouth in the winter. For the remainder of the year they were busily occupied
with their mothers at home on the never ending tasks of knitting, washing and
repairing clothes, mending nets and generally helping to sustain, at a distance,
the trade by which their families lived. (1979: 2–3)

Some of the older women along the east coast today remember those
days with a mixture of pride and pain. They recall being wakened to the
cry of “get up and tie your fingers!” (Miller 1999: 110). For the long hours

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working in barrels of brine, they wrapped their fingers in cotton rags, called
cloots or clooties, because gutting made sores and the brine inflamed
them. The salt alone cut holes between their fingers and they remember
hands cracked, raw, and bleeding. “Even in the late autumn they were
expected to continue working in the open ‘exposed to rain, sleet and wind,’
standing into the night ankle-deep in quagmires of mud, sand and fish
refuse” (Thompson et al. 1983: 172).

With their razor sharp knives flashing at lightning speed they could deal with
as many as 50 herring a minute. The fish were first sprinkled with salt other-
wise they would have been too slippery to handle at such speed. (Elliott 1979)

To protect their clothes, they wore heavy oilskin aprons, wellington

boots, headscarves or caps, and rolled their sleeves back to the elbow.

They typically worked in groups of threes, two gutters and one packer to a
barrel. The gutters stood over the troughs, or farlans, of fish, eviscerating them
at lightning speed. The packer filled the barrels with layers of fish graded by
size and condition. Each layer of fish was then covered with a layer of salt. The
packer was also responsible for keeping track of all financial transactions.
(Buchan 1977)

At the time of hiring, curers advanced a small sum, called arles, which
bound a girl to stay for the entire season. This was never more than £1 and
usually less. Curers also paid gutters’ travel expenses plus a small, subsist-
ence wage (Elliott 1979: 50). Pay rates were poor. One writer described
their work as “slave labour as workers on the quay were not protected by
the factory Act” (Wood 1998: 53).

In the early years of this century the women received 8d. between the crew [in
other words, to be divided three ways] for each barrel of herring packed and
gutted [from 850 to 1000 fish]. Later it rose to 10d., then to 1/-. The most
anyone ever remembers receiving was 2/6d. per barrel. My mother says when
she received L40 for working at the summer fishing she thought that she had
made a fortune. (Buchan 1977)

As indeed, she had. “Before 1914 the average wage for a herring girl
was 25s a week . . . But by 1924 the girls were only earning 20s a week
wages [which went for food and lodging], plus one shilling between three
girls for each barrel filled . . . a crew filling about 30 barrels a day”
(Telford 1998: 5).
Some women remembered their days as members of gutting crews as
a time of adventure and camaraderie.

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Crews remained intact for many fishings and only illness or marriage broke up
a partnership. Close friendships were made, and the unselfish devotion of crew
members to each other endured through all the changing fortunes of their future
lives. (Bochel 1979: 13)

Others, however, recalled great hardship, belying claims – usually by

people who were not there – that gutters were always cheerful (the way
African-American field hands were supposed to be, perhaps). In an
example of how representations can be deceiving, Lockhart (1997: 17)
interprets group photographs of the lassies’ smiling faces to mean that the
gutters were always happy. Given their conditions of work, this seems
rather unlikely, and becomes even more suspect when we read that “Dress-
ing up to be photographed was one of the first things they did after settling
in for the season,” suggesting that many of these illustrations were less
than candid (Bochel 1979: 5). The lassies were not exactly “shucking and
jiving,” but the smiling photographs might well have been taken at least
partly to convince family back home of their daughters’ wellbeing. In any
case, fisherfolk bairns were raised not to “greet” (cry or complain) over-
much.
Other evidence suggests significant suffering. Given the speed at which
they worked, cuts and infections were commonplace, sometimes forcing
them to leave the herring stations and return home with nothing to show
for their efforts. The cold and wet could be a major source of misery, as
the following account from a Shetland girl (in Shetland dialect) reveals:

When we wir in Yarmouth we hed dat ‘black frost’. Whan we gied oot da lapels
a wir coast wis frozen stiff . . . Sometimes, da ice wis on da top a da barrels an
we hed to staand wi wir hands ida barrels ta get wir hands osed to do cold. Da
tears wir streaming doon wir faces fir we got osed to da cold in wir hands.
(Telford 1998: 24)

An oral history of fishing in the Aberdeen region gives us a clear

example of the risks involved in working under such conditions. (Note:
R.R., C.O’C. and S.M are women; B.W., a man):

R.R. ‘. . . Jessie got her finger caed aff . . . Ye didna get peyed if ye didna
work, an if the herrin didna come in ye’d nae pey. Ye’d maybe aboot
five shillins guaranteed . . .
D.A. [interviewer] So if you were choppin fish and you chopped your
finger off you didn’t get paid?
B.W. No, it was your fault. Compensation? Never heard of compensation.

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C.O’C. Ye did get sick pey, but it wisna hell of a much. Jessie jist come doon,
she didna ken, she was spikkin [speaking] . . .
S.M. Ay, her hands had been that caul [cold].
C.O’C. Knifes were that sharp that ye didna ken ye’d cut yersel . . . (Atherton
1992: 30)

As “slaves to short-arsed curers,” as the poet Derick Thomson put it,

women faced hardship together, doubtless putting a bold face on poverty
whenever they could (Thomson 1997: 18). Nonetheless, some rebelled
and even took collective action. A short-lived class-conscious rhetoric was
beginning to penetrate the proletarianized ranks of both sexes.
Protests were stimulated not only by poor wages on the quayside but
by a growing sense that fishing communities generally were in peril. One
source was the threat to the small-scale white fishery posed by the large,
new steam drifters coming out of large ports like Aberdeen. Fishermen
immediately perceived the threat these posed to fish stocks. In some
places, fishers even threw stones at the trawlers and refused to sail in them.
They also saw, correctly as it has turned out, that this new marriage of
technology and capital presaged trouble for community-based fishing.
Signs of decline had already begun. As early as the 1890s, demand for
herring lassies began to slacken, in part because trains became more and
more effective transport for fresh fish packed in ice, obviating the need for
pickling the fish in brine (Sutherland n.d.). A few years later, many such
chilly cargoes from the southeast coast were being sent by ship to Baltic
ports. The steam vessels that made these trips were nicknamed the Klon-
dykers (after the Yukon gold rush), because of their owners’ aggressive
entrepreneurial behavior in buying fish and because of the fortunes their
owners made (Gibson 1994: 47).
Meanwhile, steam drifters with their vast nets were finding shrinking
catches. The decline did not happen all at once. In 1912, one author says
that 21,749 fishermen and 10,818 gutters and packers were still working
from Shetland to Yarmouth (Miller 1999: 108). In 1913, a fishermen’s
union organizer spoke of

The grip of the capitalist . . . Capitalism has no sentiment about villages and
no attachments to any place . . . It is only a question of time before the
centralisation is more complete and the depopulation of the herring fishing
villages as mournful as that of the villages of the white fish . . . (Thompson et
al. 1983: 157)

The women were listening. Thompson argues that they were often
quicker to adopt a combative outlook than the men:

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In fact the strike wave which was to sweep through the fishing industry in
1913–14 was heralded by the Aberdeen women fishworkers who struck for
increased wages in April 1913, parading the streets “singing and shouting
lustily . . .” (1983: 169)

Among the songs they sang, some undoubtedly stressed the difficulties of
getting by on a gutter’s pay. Here is one example:

I’m a fish gutting lassie gutting herring’s my trade,

But I’ll never be wealthy no fortunes are made.
For ten-pence a barrel is all we are paid,
Life is hard with the herring shoals.
(Ian Sinclair, in Bochel 1982: 39)

The words bear a strong (though less poetic) resemblance to another

working class women’s song, this one from the weaving mills, whose
refrain goes: “Oh dear me, the warld’s ill-divided . . . Them that work’s
the hardest is aye wi’ least provided.”
The First World War was a catalyst for radical action throughout
Scotland.

The pressures and circumstances of wartime thus strengthened independence,

confidence, morale and class consciousness amongst working women. At one
level, this advanced awareness was illustrated in rapidly rising female member-
ship of trade unions, with Scottish women contributing disproportionately to
the doubling of trade union membership between 1914 and 1920. Perhaps the
most tangible expressions of this heightened class awareness amongst working
women occurred on Clydeside. Witness, for example, the spate of female
workers strikes and spiraling demands for inflation-matching wage rises . . .
(McIvor 1992: 145)

The radicalizing climate of labor that intensified during the years

following Britain’s General Strike of 1926 clearly reached the northern
coasts. In the late 1920s, demand for gutters had fallen sharply; none-
theless, some of them protested poor wages and living conditions by
refusing to work. In 1931, gutters in Yarmouth, Peterhead, Shetland and
Stornoway struck for better wages.

At that time we were getting tenpence a barrel between three of us. You had a
lot of herring to gut before you got that. We were paid fourpence an hour when
we were doing other work . . . We were on strike for a week anyway and we
won. I think our pay went up to one shilling a barrel. (Miller 1999: 113)

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Further strikes occurred in 1936, 1946, 1949 and 1953, by which time
the herring yards were all but gone (Telford 1998: 6).
In considering the fish lassies’ willingness to strike, Thompson et al.
(1983: 172) argue that the women “had less to lose” than the men, being
young and working to provide “a family extra.” They go further to say that
“they were in a sense the unspoken voice of the men in the depression
years”. This perspective misses the mark for it presupposes that, no matter
what women did, men were still the “real” providers, and, moreover, that
women did not speak out for their own interests. On the contrary: poverty
and exploitation affected men and women equally. And, if we have seen
anything from the foregoing descriptions of women’s work in the fishery,
it is that women regarded themselves and their work as no less important
than that of their men.
During this period of proletarian labor and workers’ consciousness,
Scottish fisher women began to move closer in spirit to other working-
class women than they had been previously. Like other women of the rural
working class between the wars who found themselves unemployed or
forced into domestic service, the slump in the fisheries meant that many
herring and fisherlassies also had to find other kinds of work. However,
unlike the farm workers, most continued to live within the fishing com-
munity.4
“Guttin’ herrin’ on the Yarmouth quay” proved to be a relatively short-
lived way of life, the victim of a boom-and-bust cycle in fishing that has
never recovered. Both economics and technology were responsible. A
combination of foreign competition and the severe depletion of herring
stocks by the big steam drifters led to a long-lasting slump. By the middle
of the 1920s, the industry was in bad shape. At the larger ports, fishermen
continued to land herring with varying success, but for the smaller villages,
the era was already ending. One Fife coast historian reports that 1926 was
“the last time I saw gutters at work in Anstruther” (Smith 1985: 109).
Today, only a few women work in fishery-related occupations, chiefly
in fish-processing factories, where hot, steamy conditions have replaced
the cold, wet ones. How one interprets the historical evidence regarding
this development is open to debate. Byron suggests that women left the
fishery largely by choice. Indeed, if one were to look only at modern
fisherwomen’s perceptions of their mothers’ hardships, that might be a
logical conclusion. Writing of changes in the northern European (primarily
Scandinavian and Scottish) maritime household, Byron sees modernity,
in the form of alternative labor, as enabling women to “disengage them-
selves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise
their aspirations for domestic independence” (1994: 271). This statement

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also implies that women have wanted to remove themselves from the
“relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and
social resources” that continue, in Byron’s view, to characterize fisher-
men’s activities.
Certainly many women have, as the songs, poems and stories to which
I earlier referred make clear, longed for freedom from their hard work and
insecure futures. As another example, Carter discusses the dramatic drain
of female labor from the peasant farms of northeast Scotland at the end
of the nineteenth century:

The first group to leave peasant agriculture in large numbers from choice was,
as always, young women – for whom there was no hope of ever replacing
domestic servitude with the independence of the peasant farmer. By the 1890s
the trickle of young women . . . become a flood: “They seem to be running
away from the land,” “Our girls about the country are all getting an education
and finding their ways into shops as cashiers, and bookkeepers, and into
business.” (Carter 1979: 95)

During this same era, some fisher girls also sought other occupations
(Gray 1978: 81). Mrs Potter, a nonagenarian in Ferryden at the time of my
first fieldwork there, told me that when she saw how hard her mother
worked shelling mussels and baiting lines, “I used to think to myself, I
wouldna like to spend my whole life deein that.” And she didn’t. She went
out to domestic service, married the son of a railwayman, and only returned
to live in the village when he retired.
However, as we have seen, many Scottish fisherwomen remained
intensely involved in the industry. Clearly, Byron’s claim that women left
the fishery by choice must therefore be modified and contextualized. We
must ask what they lost, as well as what they gained. One thing is clear,
Scottish fishwives had their own cash income as well as considerable
domestic authority. They did not, in other words, have to wait for their
husbands to dole out part of a wage packet, as many do today. Thus, the
loss of their jobs as shoreside partners may well have meant less independ-
ence for them, not more.5
But the real answer to this question is to be found in women’s relation-
ships to their communities. Most Scottish fisherwomen left the fishery
only when the fishery, in effect, left them: that is, when its community basis
began to erode and when the herring curing collapsed (see Armstrong
1986). In fact, had women left the fishery in droves before this point they
would have damaged it severely, perhaps beyond repair. But this was not
really an option. Not only income, but home and family, as well as bonds

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 Fisher Lassies

with other women were on the line. Thus, “choice” may be a misleading
word, and certainly an ambiguous one.
It would also be misleading, however, to assume that before the fishery
failed, all Scottish fisherwomen were like Mrs Mucklebackit in The
Antiquary (about which I will have more to say below). Although they may
have been equal partners in a domestic mode of production, they did not
rule the roost. Yet, there is no doubt that this image of Scottish fishwives
as all-powerful matriarchs is quite ubiquitous. Indeed, many modern
fishermen describe their female ancestors in these terms. Just why and
with what implications, I explore below.

Exoticizing Women, Emasculating Men: Matriarchs in a

Patriarchal Society

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, my fisherfolk acquaintances saw

to it that I learned about women’s former importance in the fishery,
emphasizing their physical and social strength. For example, one fisher-
man from Fife said to me that

The women were right in at the heart of it; they were harder than the men. My
grandmother was a matriarch. She was ninety when I was 16. My father, myself
and three cousins who all owned boats, we all went to her house on Saturday
to smoke cigarettes and talk about the fishing. My grandfather was a placid
man who did what his wife told him.

Even Peter Anson, whom I mentioned earlier, stated flatly that “it was
the women who ruled over most fisher families” (1965: 27). Adams
concurred: “. . . in the old days they held the purse strings and doled out
pocket money to their menfolk and were usually boss in the house”
(Adams 1991: 9). Certainly, such a vision of women has come to dominate
the heritage industry. Thus, an exhibit text in the tourist-oriented Buckie
Drifter Project heritage center punctuates its comment with an exclam-
ation point: “the head of the family was a matriarch with a multiplicity of
roles!”
There are some dissenters, of course, King, for example, emphasize
equality over matriarchy.

Unlike some women of this period the fisherman’s wife was not treated as a
delicate ornament. The fisherwomen had a confidence and liberty which few
other women could enjoy. The man and wife relationship was a partnership of
equals, sometimes with the woman playing the dominant role. (King n.d.: 5)

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So, too, does an extract from the Aberdeenshire oral history to which
I earlier referred. In it shared responsibility is highlighted over dominance.
The male informant is talking about the 1930s:

I look at it this wye . . . your wife is yer partner, and it was your job to earn
the money, and her to organise the spendin’ o’ it. I gave my wife the money
and she would give me back 5 bob for my pocket money . . . If you were at sea,
ye didn’t need onything in yer pooch, there was nowhere to spend it! Yer whole
world was 110 feet long, by 22 feet broad. (Atherton 1992: 63)

Finally, one of the “Memory Lane” columns devoted to industrial

history in Scottish Fishing Monthly declares that “Fishing is often con-
sidered to be a trade run by men. However, certain aspects of it owe their
success to woman as much as men, for example, the herring fishery off
the east coast of Britain” (Harrison 1995: 13).
Yet, within the historical documents at least, it is the image of fishwives
as matriarchs that wins out. It is, perhaps, not surprising that onlookers
would conclude from fishwives’ public behavior that women ruled the
domestic roost. Through the middle of the twentieth century (and in many
cases, beyond), it was generally assumed that the breadwinner (normally
the man) was head of the house. And everything about the fisherwomen
– their voices, their muscles, their assertiveness – ran counter to middle-
class beliefs that women were by nature passive and best suited to stay
within domestic confines. They were far too “masculine.” For many
nineteenth century commentators, steeped in patriarchal, middle class
notions of the ideal female, equality was such an unthinkable idea that
translating it to “matriarchy” was an easy step to take.
The cult of domesticity which gathered momentum through the Victorian
period dictated that by 1900 the inalienable cultural norm in Scotland was
that the primary role of women in life was the servicing of a male “bread-
winner” within the home and family. (McIvor 1996: 189)
The meaning of matriarchy, for these commentators, was clearly far
different than it was for my twentieth-century Fife informant, who spoke
of his grandmother in almost reverential tones. Beliefs that matriarchy
revealed a state of social backwardness or even savagery permeated the
intellectual classes. Indeed, in scholarly circles dedicated to notions of
unilineal evolution (Bachofen 1861; McLennan 1865; Morgan 1877;
Tylor 1899), civilization was believed to have arisen with patriarchy.
Importantly, as Stocking points out, one could find pockets of savagery
alive and well within societies that had achieved civilization. Thus,
McLennan could label deviant behavior in his own society as savage
behavior (Stocking 1987: 202). Although McLennan dwelled on the

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deviant sexual behavior of city dwellers, others clearly applied the idea of
savages within the civilized world to the inhabitants of rural areas, as well.
Thus, envisioning fishwives as matriarchs could only have contributed
to the widespread stigmatization of fishers as a separate caste or race and
as a throwback to earlier times, as Chapter 2 has shown. In the spirit of
Victorian ethnology, observers often made their remarks about fisher-
women as law-like generalizations, voiced in a distanced, scientific tone.

It may not, perhaps, be generally known to those who are not in possession of
special sources of information, that in all fishing communities, the woman is
head of the house . . . She is ruler over her household and chancellor of her
husband’s exchequer. (Bertram 1883: 4)

Emphasizing men’s degradation even more strongly, Bertram else-

where declares:

Just now there are many fishermen who will not go to sea as long as they
imagine their wives have got a penny left from the last hawking excursion. The
women enslave the men to their will, and keep them enchained under petticoat
government. Did the women remain at home in their domestic sphere, looking
after the children and their husbands’ comforts, the men would pluck up spirit
and exert themselves to make money in order to keep their families at home
comfortable and respectable. (cited in Anson 1965: 142)

Similarly, Andrew Douglas (1857: 53), a nineteenth-century Ferryden

schoolmaster, noted in his memoirs that “Among fisher people in general
the women rule supreme”. And in the nineteenth century novel, Christie
Johnstone, a middle-class woman enjoins her infatuated son to break off
his liason with a fisher woman, saying that “It is a Newhaven idea that the
female is the natural protector of the male . . .” (Reade 1855: 78).
These were shocking commentaries, indeed, during the height of the
Victorian era, when, as I have said, the ideal woman was supposed to be
the modest and retiring keeper of the household flame. The fishwives
moving about the countryside so freely, arguing with curers and with
customers, and the herring lassies, covered in fish guts and surrounded by
strange men, struck many as degraded examples of the “fair sex.”
It must be said, however, that gendered notions of middle-class propriety
affected women in other outdoor occupations, such as field labor:

I must here make some allusion to those females engaged in outwork; surely
their lot is far from desirable and their far from effeminate. Many of the are
hired at very low wages to pull turnips during the winter. Conceive a female

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having to work in the open air all day . . . Is this fit and proper work for a
woman? (Smout and Wood 1991: 96)

Female farm workers also attracted notice as emblems of Britain’s

living peasant past. Gordon remarks, for example, that “Nineteenth-
century photographer loved taking pictures of women doing their domestic
work outdoors” (Gordon 1990: 210).
A number of nineteenth century observers seem to have subscribed to
the idea that extra-domestic, heavy labor led directly to women’s bodily,
as well as spiritual degradation, perhaps even to evolutionary backsliding.
Women employed in coal mining were believed to have acquired “a
peculiar type of mouth, wide, open, thick-lipped, projecting equally above
and below [like] savages in their lowest and most degraded state” (Miller
1856, cited in Mitchison 1978).
Thus, fisherwomen were not the only ones singled out for such remark.
However, identified as matriarchs and coming from communities already
stigmatized, the fisherwomen possibly seemed the strangest, most exotic
and least “evolved” of all.
Literature provides us with an example of how exaggerated the image
of the matriarch could be. In a passage from The Antiquary, whose setting
was modeled on the Angus village of Auchmithie, the stalwart Luckie
Mucklebackit describes her husband’s fear of her in response to a cust-
omer’s disdain for the hard lives of fisherwomen.

. . . Thae’s your landward and burrows-town notions . . . Fisher-wives ken

better – they keep the man, and keep the house, and keep the siller too, lass . . .
Show me a word my Saunders daur speak, or a turn he daur do about the house,
without it be just to tak his meat, and his drink, and his diversion, like ony o’
the weans. He has mair sense than to ca’ onything about the bigging [house]
his ain, frae the rooftree down to a crackit trencher on the bink [drain alongside
the house]. He kens well eneugh wha’ feeds him, and cleeds [clothes] him, and
keeps a’ tight, thack and rape [thatched], when his coble [boat] is jowing awa
[rolling] in the Firth, puir fallow. Na, na lass – them that sells the goods guide
the purse – them that guide the purse rule the house. Show me ane o’ your bits
o’ farmer-bodies that wad let their wife drive the stock to the market, and ca’
in the debts. (Scott 1923 [1816]: 247; also cited in Stevenson 1991: 20)

Scott’s fishwife expresses contempt for her man’s abilities to take care
of himself. In effect, she emasculates him and thus exemplifies the matri-
archal stereotype.
A milder, still humorous version comes from the memoirs of Fanny
Kemble, the noted actress. She visited Newhaven (south of Edinburgh) in

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the late 1820s. Wishing to go out on the Forth, she stopped at a fisher
cottage to find someone to take her. There met the fishwife, Sandie
Flockhart, for whom she developed a kind of fascinated fondness. None-
theless, it is clear that Kemble regarded her as a creature very different
from herself:

Ay, my man and boy shall gang wi’ ye’. A few lusty screams brought her
husband and son forth, and at her bidding they got a boat ready . . . The
husband was a comparatively small man, with dark eyes, hair and complexion;
but her ‘boy,’ the eldest, who had come with him to take care of me, was a fair-
haired fresh-faced young giant, of his mother’s strain, and, like her, looked as
if he had come of the Northern Vikings, or some of the Niebelungen Lied
heroes. (Stevenson 1991: 17)

Both depictions use humor to paint an exaggerated picture of fishwife

matriarchy. But herring girls were often even further denigrated, in fact,
they were sometimes rendered in animal-like terms, as akin to the birds
and fish among which they worked.6 In Weld’s description, for example,
one could even infer his belief that if Darwin’s theory of evolution were
correct, the primitive fishwife was working her way back down the
evolutionary ladder.

Wick harbour is surrounded on the land side by hundreds of . . . gutting

troughs. Round them stood rows of what close inspection led you to conclude
were women, though at first sight you might be excused for having some
doubts respecting their sex. They all wore strange-shaped canvas garments, so
bespattered with blood and the entrails and scales of fish as to cause them to
resemble animals of the ichthyological kingdom [italics mine], recently
divested of their skin, undergoing perhaps one of those transitions set forth in
Mr. Darwin’s speculative book, “On the Origin of Species.” And if a man may
become a monkey, or has been a whale, why should not a Caithness damsel
become a herring?

The author continues his analogy in this next passage and reinforces
the view that fish gutters are not proper women. This time, he does it by
noting the exceptions among them, girls who were inappropriately
employed because they were too pretty.

. . . the women, familiar called gutters, pounce upon the herrings like a bird of
prey [italics mine], seize their victims, and, with a rapidity of motion which
baffles your eye, deprive the fish of their viscera . . . At this rapid rate you no
longer wonder at the silence that prevails while the bloody work is going on,
nor at the incarnadined condition of the women. How habit deadens feeling!

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Who would imagine that a delicate looking girl could be tempted by even a
high wage to spend long days at this work? Such, however, is the fact; for
although the majority of the 2,500 women employed in gutting herrings are
certainly not lovely nor delicate limbed, still I observed several pretty and
modest-looking girls who would apparently have made better shepherdesses
than fish-gutters [italics mine] . . . the love of gain overcomes repugnance. The
damsel who kindly inducted me into the mysteries of the art of evisceration told
me that she had sometimes made £8, in a good fishing season, a large and
welcome addition to her annual wage as a domestic servant . . . (Weld 1860,
quoted in Smout and Wood 1991: 87)

If literature describing fishwives as matriarchs implied that they were

less civilized than decent (read docile) Scottish women, then the new art
of photography stereotyped them in manners that, while seemingly differ-
ent, were fundamentally the same. Indeed many early photographers
found fisherwomen to be apt subjects, both at the fishcuring and in the
village setting. Some photographs were taken for artistic reasons; others
for sale to the growing tourist market. Herring lassies were shown to be,
if not matriarchs, then strong women with powerful arm and shoulder
muscles. A few flashed rather cheeky grins, though most looked shy or
somber, intent on their work. Often, they were depicted standing close
together on the crowded quays, in settings that can only be described as
industrial. Always, they lacked the demeanor and accouterments of
Victorian femininity. Village fishwives, on the other hand, were portrayed
as, healthy, hardworking and either nubile or maternal. They were earthy
(or should I say maritime) examples of a life spent close to nature’s
bounty, archetypal visions of humanity’s connections to the source of life.
These images were, to the Victorian eye, of women as primitive as
those that Weld described. We can better understand them if we consider
Lutz and Collins’ (1993: 3) claim that “representations . . . are never
irrelevant, never unconnected to the world of actual social relations”.
Thus, images that connected women to the world of fish also served to
isolate them from the world of town and city. Rarely were they depicted
in conjunction with people from outside the fisher community. This
photographic practice reinforced the view that fishers constituted a
separate people, a backward race, as we saw in the previous chapter. As
Lutz and Collins (1993: 158) have noted for images of Third World people
that appear in National Geographic, such separation of peoples into
separate race-like categories of the developed and the undeveloped
in photographic images is not unusual (see also Nadel-Klein 1991b on
postcard images of Australian Aboriginal peoples). Such a separation
homogenizes and simplifies and, thereby, stereotypes.

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If exceptions prove the rule, then the picture captioned “Buyers and
onlookers at Cockenzie market” is very revealing (Gibson 1994: 48). Here
we see separation working through a different medium. The picture shows
a group of woman standing on the quayside. But wait, is this one group
or two? The answer comes quickly, told by clothing. Looking into the
camera are five women dressed in long skirts and heavy shawls; three
others standing among them wear much shorter skirts, white shirtwaist
blouses and brimmed hats. Clearly, the first are the fishwives and the
second are the “onlookers.” The two groups do not look at each other, but
at the camera; they occupy different social worlds, one seemingly pre-
modern, the other up to date. Their proximity is temporary.
Painters from the nineteenth and early twentieth century also stereo-
typed fishers as backward, but they often placed a different spin on this
evaluation. Their painting tended to evoke the theme of nature and a world
unsullied by industrialization. As we shall see in Chapter 6 many northern
Europeans at this time were discovering the peasant world as a source of
spiritual rejuvenation. Nature might be savage, but it could also be rejuv-
enating and full of fruitful promise. Comely lasses, from farm or fishing
village, became widely used symbols of this ideal:

Sea genre had come into prominence in the late 1850’s [sic] . Although the
English had practiced marine painting for some time, it was not until James
Clarke Hook, followed by Colin Hunter, Stanhope Forbes, and others, that the
picturesque aspects of the English seafaring population – rugged fishermen
in jerseys and sou’westers, and sturdy barefooted fisherwomen with tucked-
up skirts and ruddy faces – became the principal subjects of a picture. (Cooper
1986: 82–3)

In these portraits, young women emerged as figures of fecund sexual-

ity: of nature only partially modified by culture. Often, however, they
were shown as incomplete without their men. A favorite picture was the
worried, yearning woman standing on a beach, a cliff or a quayside,
looking out at a gathering storm with no boat in view. Such a lassie needed
her laddie. Her life was dominated by worrying and waiting.
In the 1880s, Winslow Homer, the American painter, also began to
immortalize the fisherwomen, concentrating on the Scottish lassies’
northern English counterparts across the Border in the village of Culler-
coats. Nearly 150 watercolors, drawings, and oils resulted from his
twenty-month stay:

The inhabitants of the small fishing port, particularly the women at their daily
tasks, gradually became archetypes for him, like ancient sculpture, imbued

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with a sober and noble simplicity. They seemed to Homer indivisible from
nature [emphasis mine] and, hence, became his connection to nature’s power.
(Cooper 1986: 92)

Between 1881 and 1883, Homer produced watercolors with such titles
as Fishergirls on the Beach (1881), Four Fisherwives (1881) Mending the
Nets (1882), Girl with Red Stockings (1882), and Inside the Bar (1883).
Previously, according to Cooper, Homer had depicted women in close,
confined settings. The fisherwomen provided a striking contrast:

At Cullercoats, the women are often alone or in smaller groups of two or three,
confronting the elements full face – standing on cliffs, walking on beaches,
climbing on rocks . . . Silhouetted against the broad sky, they are at risk in a
nature that is uncontrollable and inscrutable . . . This shift in thematic and
psychological perspective suggests Homer’s growing willingness to confront
the primitive elements in nature, [emphasis mine] and perhaps in himself, more
directly. (Cooper 1986: 118)

Returning to verbal fiction, for the moment, Reade’s (1855: 22) com-
ment in Christie Johnstone on fisherwomen’s figures is worth noting here
as it reinforces that contrast between confinement and freedom, artifice
and nature: ”These women had a grand corporeal trait: they had never
known a corset! So they were straight as javelins; they could lift their
hands above their heads actually!” As Davies (1982) has made clear,
debilitating, tight-laced corsets were the defining effort of middle-class
Victorians to mold women into ornamental objects. Such women would
have born little resemblance – in outline, at least – to the unbound,
“natural” fisher lassies.
Glasgow artist John McGhie spent a number of summers in the Fife
village of Pittenweem before the First World War. Older residents today
recall stories of how he would stand in the tide, sketching intently as the
water rose about his knees. One of his favorite subjects, a beautiful young
woman named Jeannie Meldrum, whom a few of my older informants
remembered, was portrayed straining against the shore wind, hair escap-
ing from her head scarf as she rested a heavy basket of fish against her hip.
The problem of all such imagery, of course, is that the degree to which
fishwives were seen as one with nature was the degree to which they were
seen as outside of culture. The Victorians believed that you could learn
from nature, but they believed as well that being of nature was being a
lesser kind of person. The civilized could learn from the savage, but not
vice versa (Bloch and Bloch 1980). Indeed, Stevenson (1991: 25) tells us
that the photographer David Hill explicitly sought in his photographs of

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Newhaven fisherfolk to capture that which was “the ideal, the heroic, the
poetic”. She also points to the above-mentioned Christie Johnstone
(Reade 1855), in which a young nobleman finds spiritual salvation by
going to live among the fisherfolk of Newhaven.

The village acts not merely as a model but as a source of practical inspiration
and knowledge – by listening to and by joining in the activities of the fishermen
and women, he [the Viscount Ipsden] acquires the understanding which makes
him a man. Reade described the village, and especially the fishwife, Christie
Johnstone, as a model of vigorous life, morality and culture in contrast to the
emasculating dependency of the rich. (Stevenson 1991: 25)

Fishwives themselves could be put on display, for example, much as

zoo animals were. I am referring here to sporting exhibitions. Here women
were shown in ways that traded upon their obvious femininity, but hinted
at their masculine side as well. For example, in the nineteenth century, the
worthy burgesses of Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, held special foot races
and golf tournaments for the fisherwomen of Fisherrow, awarding a shawl
and creel “to the best golfer amongst the fishwives” (Meikle 1947: 245).
Anson (1965: 140) records that the Musselburgh fisherwomen also played
an annual football match. All this activity brought not only painters and
photographers, but tourists.
Consider the following descriptions from those who those who wished
wish to see Scottish fishwives in their local habitat and what they saw:

By the 1840s, the rush of summer visitors from Edinburgh down to the seaside
. . . found the activities of the village of Newhaven a natural tourist enter-
tainment. The more numerous visitors to the city encountered the fishwives,
famous for their beauty and their picturesque dress, as a distinct and engaging
feature of the Edinburgh scene. This mild interest in the fishermen and women
is reflected in paintings, engravings, pottery figures and songs about fishing
life (Stevenson 1991: 17)

They were a hardworking and industrious class of women, a great assistance

to their equally hardworking husbands, and most surely an interest and a
pleasure to all who looked on their sonsy [comely, cheerful] faces and fascin-
ating costume, with the wide sleeve showing their strong round arms, and the
snowy cap that often surmounted a weather-beaten but still handsome counten-
ance. (Story 1911, quoted in Smout and Wood 1991: 89)

Even Royalty could be smitten:

. . . The Newhaven fishwife has become a celebrity, and she is indebted to King
George the Fourth for much of her fame. That monarch during his memorable

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visit to Edinburgh, in the year 1822, said to Sir Walter Scott, that some of the
Newhaven women were the handsomest he had ever seen, and her present
gracious Majesty has been likewise pleased to admire them. Indeed, since the
Queen’s first visit to Edinburgh, the Newhaven fishwife, with her picturesque
peculiarities and the dulcet notes with she charms the public ear . . . has been
painted in oil, modeled in card board, made up as a whisky bottle, given to
children as a doll, printed in numerous Cartes de visite, and generally has been
made much more public all over the world than other honest women. She is a
familiar figure in the Cafe Greco at Rome, as well as in the print shops of Berlin
and Venice . . . (Bertram 1883: 4)

In all of these portrayals – literary, photographic and painterly –

fisherwomen were cast in exotic terms: whether as matriarchs, as scaly and
unfeminine herring gutters or as fertile fisher lassies, they provided a
contrast between urban, middle-class modernity and its Other, the prim-
itive at home (see Nadel-Klein 1995). They were emblems of the fisher-
folk’s intrinsic difference. In other words, women were stereotyped and,
even when portrayed in flattering terms, that stereotype contributed to
fisher marginalization.

A Man’s World Now

What many saw as fisher oddity and difference was, as have seen, relative
equality and solidarity between men and women. With the demise of the
family boat and the curing yard, however, fishing communities have
changed dramatically from the days when women were full, complement-
ary partners in the industry. Fisherfolk now have become much like other
Scottish working-class families, where men’s and women’s spheres are
sharply divided and where neither sex seems to have much admiration for
the other.
Among the fisherfolk of my acquaintance, discussions about the
fishery were usually a distinctly gendered and hierarchical affair. The men
tended to be outgoing and talkative, but I found many of their wives to be
more reserved, certainly in their husbands’ presence, but out of it as well.
In fact, women’s attempts to participate in general discussions of the past
were often met with impatient corrections. One man, for example, consist-
ently reprimanded his wife for using local dialect in front of me, rather
than the more anglicized version of Lowland Scots generally adopted for
strangers. Some men simply interrupted their wives, amending details or
even changing the subject.
Yet, retired fishermen, affluent skippers, and even younger crew
members speak proudly about the importance of women in the days when

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they mended nets, knitted clothes, and gutted herring. They know that
women’s shore-based skills and labor had once been essential and often
contrast the supposedly easy and less important work their wives perform
with the arduous and crucial tasks of their maternal ancestors. It seems
now to be an unspoken assumption that men are the authorities on fisher
life and that women, who may be homemakers, office-workers, shopkeep-
ers, or teachers, are simply prone to trivial, domestic chatter. When I asked
a skipper what his wife did when he was away at sea, he responded by
saying: “she takes aerobics classes. Women have a soft life now. They
don’t have to do anything.”
When modern fishermen extol the virtues of their grandmothers, their
wives fare ill by the implied invidious comparison. “A fisherwoman’s
doorstep was always clean” (emphasis mine); “In those days, the wives
had the hardest job. There was nae a feminist movement.” Women are also
remembered as very resourceful. A widow facing poverty would “put up
a counter [open a shop], no matter how small.” However, the same
informants who describe their mothers as stalwart household rulers have
no qualms about telling their wives to provide tea for the guest.
After dispatching his wife to the kitchen, one retired northeast skipper
told me of his plans to take a fishing holiday in the Canaries with some
friends. “It’ll be a woman-free zone,” he said, clearly relishing the thought.
He then went on to say that “my wife has never seen anything of the
fishing except the money I brought home. I always tell her she’s had an
easy life, just taking care of the house and kids, though she wouldn’t agree
with that. I suppose you bein’ a woman would agree wi’ her.”
Being a canny ethnographer who wanted to preserve a good working
relationship I did not argue the point but I wondered to myself what his
wife’s response might have been. Unfortunately, I did not get the chance
to ask her. But other wives with whom I raised the subject agreed with men
that women years ago had a very tough time. However, they also quickly
dismissed the idea that they themselves had it easy. To borrow the lang-
uage of Dona Davis’s Newfoundlanders, they saw themselves as the
equivalents of “shore skippers,” or managers as well as worriers (Davis
1983, 1988). They had to run the household and make all decisions when
men were away, even while holding jobs outside the home. Even if they
had never handled fish, they still had plenty of work to do. Like their
predecessors, they also had to wait and wonder whether their husbands
would return each time they sailed away.
Indeed, women’s former positions as complementary workers in
processing and selling fish have all but vanished. Women still make up the
bulk of the shrinking fish-plant labor force, but are not necessarily recruited

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from fishing families. Successful skippers’ wives do not need to work

outside the home and have become housewives, the Scottish equivalent
of Cole’s (1991) donas de casa of northwest Portugal. Less affluent
fishermen’s wives may work in offices, shops, or schools – in jobs gener-
ally considered subordinate and unrelated to their husband’s occupation.
King (1992–3: 33) reports that some fishermen’s wives in Fife “still have
a dominant role in the handling of family finances and travel to various
places buying parts for the fishing boat”, but their number is undoubtedly
small.
Ironically, despite losing their central position in the fishery, Scottish
fishermen’s wives today may well experience marginalization less acutely
than their husbands and sons and may, in fact, be seen as more flexible and
adaptive to changing circumstances. Certainly, in their conversations with
me, they were far less inclined than men to dwell on the past. They were
far less nostalgic for the days when partnership meant sharing poverty as
well as grueling labor.
Nor has the political engagement of their fish-gutting ancestresses
survived. Unlike the fishermen’s wives of Gloucester, Massachusetts, who
assert themselves in fisheries politics, lobbying intensively to protect their
families’ livelihood against such threats as offshore oil drilling or foreign
fleets in coastal waters, Scottish fishermen’s wives tend to leave such
activism to the men (Clark 1988). While the Gloucester Fishermen’s
Wives Association has, as of this writing, just erected a public statue of a
fisherman’s wife looking out to sea with her children by her side, such
depictions of Scottish fishwives have generally been small scale and part
of male projects.
By definition, no modern woman can ever approach the idealized
image of the fisherman’s mother or grandmother because she no longer
works within his world. This is not to say that I agree with Knipe’s (1984:
141) claim that “the fishwife may never have existed.” However, I take
Knipe’s point that “the notion [italics mine] of the fishwife does represent
an idealized type”. It may even approach the status of myth, and a myth
is not an “objectively” historical report, no matter how much factual detail
is embedded in it; it is a story with a message, a device to explain and legit-
imate cultural expectations. Modern fishermen’s wives are caught between
cultural expectations derived from recent memory, and a way of life that
does not permit them to fulfil these expectations. This way of life is much
closer to the bourgeois standards of other Scots, particularly for those of
the middle class.
In stark contrast to the old days, the Scottish fishing industry today has
become a man’s world. Not only have women’s former roles all but

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vanished, but the catching side remains virtually closed to them, despite
Western women’s progress in infiltrating formerly male-dominated
occupations (including, in some places, the fishing industry: see Allison,
Jacobs and Porter 1989; Greenlaw 1999). It would be unthinkable for
Scotland’s premier fishing magazine, Fishing Monthly, to run a cover
titled, “Girls Just Wanna Catch Fish!” as appeared recently in the United
States publication, National Fisherman (June, 2001). As we saw earlier,
excluding women from the boats was never questioned. Attempts to
include them today draw much invidious speculation about sexual prom-
iscuity. Why else would a woman wish to spend her working life in such
an intimately and publicly male setting? Indeed, when I asked a fisheries
training specialist in Buckie whether any women had entered his program
he said dismissively that one had, but “she got pregnant.” End of story.

Conclusion

As many authors have noted, the segregation of the sexes and the deval-
uation of women tend to be quite strong in much of Britain (Whitehead
1976; Bell and Newby 1976; Jackson 1968). Work and endogamy helped
to give fisher women a higher status vis à vis men than that enjoyed by
women in most other sectors of Scottish society. However, fisherwomen
were not matriarchs; they were simply explained as such. As such they
came to stand for fisher difference in the eyes of the outside world.
Today, the gendered differences that once were stigmatized have been
transformed into identity-affirming stereotypes within fishing communities.
While women’s direct participation in the fishery has all but vanished,
women – in their former incarnations – remain prominent as present-day
emblems of how important fishing once was.
These emblems are, moreover, being appropriated by the tourist industry.
As we shall see more fully in Chapter 6, they are being used to announce
the presence of a culturally distinctive, even mysterious location. When
one enters the coastal area of Fife known as the East Neuk, for example,
one will find that road signs (“Welcome to the East Neuk”) are marked
with a colorful drawing of a woman in traditional fisher garb, including
an apron, striped petticoat and creel. Thus the traveler learns that this new,
“secret” cultural arena is a gendered one.7
In effect, the fishwife has come to stand as an icon of the fisherfolk. She
remains exotic, even if her granddaughters do not. When fishermen talk
about her, they reassert the centrality of their occupation and deny their
continuing marginalization. They leave stigma behind.

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Notes

1. An analogy within the farmers’ world was men’s total control over
anything to do with horses. While women worked in many parts of
agriculture, a ploughman was always male.
2. Doctors were not only expensive: they were not always trusted. Some
Ferrydeners recalled a sense of mistrust, for doctors came from the
middle classes who looked down on them. Certainly they mistrusted
medicine. Birth records from the earlier part of the twentieth century,
for example, reveal widespread refusal to accept vaccinations for their
infants.
3. Andy Stewart, of the folk group Silly Wizard, wrote this song after
living in Buckie. “This song is a tribute to the courage of the fishermen
and their families, though it is primarily a condemnation of the circum-
stances and pressures that force them into such a hazardous profession.”
4. Agricultural laborers in Scotland typically had six-month contracts. At
the end of this time, they might move to another farm. They did not,
therefore, have such strong attachments to particular villages, having
grown up under semi-nomadic conditions.
5. We might look to South America for an instructive comparison on this
point. As Murphy and Murphy (1974) argued for the Mundurucu,
replacing a foraging and horticultural subsistence base with the
“modern” mode of male wage work (tapping rubber) left women with
less domestic autonomy, not more. As herring fishing gradually came
to predominate in the east coast communities, the power of middlemen
and fishcurers grew, threatening the women’s domestic control over
the purse strings. As Ester Boserup (1970) pointed out and others have
continued to document, women’s status may decline dramatically with
the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture (Linares 1985).
6. This metaphorical strategy puts me in mind of similar analogies made
between colonial subjects and local fauna. Consider, for example,
Camus’ The Stranger, whose protagonist likens Arabs to lizards.
7. The Scottish tourist industry may be highlighting women’s roles in
fishing, but they continue to be obscured elsewhere. On a holiday in
1998, I stopped in to the Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Fisheries Museum.
I was curious to see how it compared with the many Scottish fisheries
museums in which women’s roles feature prominently. To my surprise,
its otherwise excellent displays omitted women entirely. When I asked
museum staff and local people why women were not represented, I
received a polite, but surprised response: “Why should there be women
in the exhibits? Women never had anything to do with the fishery. They
had to stay at home and raise the families.”
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 – 4–

Ferryden: Place, Power and Identity

From Ferryden- (ane place of housen vile,

Where Fishermen and fisherwives abide . . .)
Bowick et al, 1880: 35

Now we will look close-up at Ferryden, a place where “they used to be

fishers.” This chapter addresses the question of how villagers’ identity
articulates with place, as well as with occupation. As we shall see, place
is something Ferrydeners can no longer take for granted, any more than
they can take for granted the occupation of fishing. They have become
among the most marginalized fishers of all. This is so because of the direct
economic power that the town of Montrose has long held over them. Most
recently, Montrosians were even instrumental in making drastic changes
to the village landscape. Thus, the relationship between town and village
provides an excellent venue in which to see how people from outside, as
well as from inside, re-imagine community under circumstances in which
traditional connections to people, work and location have been under-
mined (Macdonald 1997; Rodman 1992).
This re-imagining began to become necessary in the 1970s, when
North Sea oil emerged on the Scottish scene. An elite group of town-based
entrepreneurs was largely responsible for wooing the offshore industry to
the area. The result of that wooing was an offshore support base that was
built not in Montrose itself but on Ferryden’s foreshore. This set the stage
for an unfolding drama in which Ferryden was either the star or an
understudy, depending upon one’s perspective.
This drama highlighted the opposing possibilities of how a place could
be re-defined. In fact, it raised the question whether Ferryden even had a
separate existence or was merely an extension of Montrose. As we shall
see as this chapter unfolds, this was not merely an abstract issue for
mapmakers, but one that cut to the heart of Ferrydeners’ concerns about
being able to claim that they lived in a fishing village, and therefore, to
see themselves as fisherfolk.

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Many villagers saw the development of an offshore support base as

unsightly, a recapitulation of past injustices and yet another example of
how the people “in charge” would get their way no matter what the
fisherfolk wanted. Meanwhile, Montrosians saw villagers’ objections as
an awkward and irrational impediment to the inevitable march of progress.
For them, Ferryden’s separate identity was a thing of the past, to be
consigned to the category of the quaint, the timeless, and the dispensable.
Each of these perspectives has had a long, dialectically constructed history
which this chapter will elucidate.
First, however, a word on “identity.” Identity is one of those slippery
concepts that everyone uses but seldom defines. I use here it in its two
linked senses of self-reference and ascription. These two senses of identity
face each other and “converse.” That is, the way people refer to them-
selves as belonging to a group is produced in part by the ways in which
others see them.
Identity – whether collective or individual – is never simply received.
It is learned, lived, transmuted and always contextualized. Thus it should
be regarded neither as a rigid blueprint nor as an imprisoning constraint.
In this sense, of identity-in-progress, “Ferrydenness” continues to evolve
in response to contemporary conditions. Local ideas of what the past was
like and what the future might become engage with those of others who
have different objectives. Thus identity is, by necessity, inventive. The
mutual subjectivities that produce it are malleable and porous; they may
be strategically, even combatively, deployed.
As we saw in the previous chapter, people talk about fishers in different
ways, but almost always in ways that stereotype and stigmatize. Fishers
themselves, however, deploy local knowledge to assert their special
importance. What Herzfeld (1987: 43) says about nationality or ethnicity
applies thus equally well to local identity claims, namely that the “lang-
uage of . . . identity is indeed a language of morality. It is an encoded
discourse about inclusion and exclusion.”
It is clear that, in Ferryden, the viewpoints of insider and outsider have
reinforced each other over the years like a tennis match of labels and
claims. We will never know who lobbed the original serve, but in this
chapter we will see how accusations of insularity have been met by
proclamations of solidarity. In short, identity has been manipulated to
serve a variety of ends, not least of which has been the claim to place.
Indeed, my informants were clearly preoccupied with “belonging” (see
Cohen 1987). In their view, they belonged to Ferryden and Ferryden
belonged to them. For years, the outside world had been content to leave
this formulation alone but with the advent the oil base, Ferrydeners were

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forced to confront the reality of what Tolkein’s wise Elf, Gildor, said to
the still-naive hobbit, Frodo of the Shire: “the wide world is all about you;
you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out”.
Indeed, Tolkein’s Shire is a wonderfully idealized example of how a
place can bind one to it. It is cozy, familiar and pleasant to look at. Trees,
hedgerows, streams and valleys all have a special, comforting signif-
icance. Even the smallest feature of the landscape has a name (see Gaffin
1996 on the Faroe Islands for a real-world example). People (or hobbits)
feel safe there. Ferryden was not so lovely, nor were its people so content
or so parochial. However, they cherished the place itself: the streets and
closes, houses and sheds, and most of all, the sea-lapped shore. There, one
could meet relatives and friends, work companions, lovers and enemies.
I do not mean to romanticize. The place could also be confining, the
poverty oppressive, the work smelly, cold and dangerous. There were
fights and feuds. Nonetheless, beyond the village, across the bridge or
over the fields, lay Montrose, a less welcoming environment. Previously,
the village had contained the predictable and the known. With the advent
of the oil base, villagers were forced to confront the increasing presence
of new inhabitants who were not part of this intimate realm. Ferryden’s
boundaries were blurring.
As I have argued elsewhere, village history can be read as a particularly
explicit and problematic demonstration of how a locality can be both built
and destroyed by forces of capital and power. Capitalism does not only
destroy locality, as contemporary observations of rural devastation or
depopulation might suggest. It also produces it (Nadel-Klein 1991a). To
put it in Marxian terms, localities themselves become commoditized in the
process of generating exchange-values. Ferryden has been no exception.
Its inhabitants have experienced it as home; its exploiters have seen it as
a source of revenue. The two perspectives have coexisted in a fragile
relationship that has now become undone.
There are those in Ferryden for whom localism remains significant.
They still define themselves as a group with a sense of commitment to a
particular place and to a set of cultural practices that are self-consciously
articulated and to some degree separated and directed away from the
surrounding social world. But they are living in a time of rupture. Before
I elaborate, one proviso is necessary. However “local” or attached to place
Ferrydeners might be, they have never been isolated. Ferryden, like any
locality in Scotland, has always been deeply embedded within many
interdigitating layers of social practice, its boundaries more elastic,
permeable and arbitrary than the villagers themselves might acknowledge.
A host of national-level institutions have been forceful players in their

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lives. To interpret their experience of identity and place requires an extra-

local and an historical perspective, as well as an ethnographic focus.

Ferryden: an Introduction

Like many villages discussed in the second chapter, Ferryden owed its
start to an Improver. According to Adams (1993: 228), Robert Scott, the
laird of Craig, “was among the earliest agricultural enclosers and improvers
in Angus in the early eighteenth century”. Ferryden was not a planned
village. Scott simply built a row of small cottages on the side of a hill
overlooking Montrose Harbor. He then induced a small group of exper-
ienced fisher families to settle there by providing them with boats and
gear.
The village was thus established as an occupational enclave. Over the
succeeding two centuries, its fortunes, along with its population, waxed
and waned according to the vagaries of fish, technology, and outsiders’
investment strategies. For a time, Ferryden became one of the most active
and important fishing ports in the greater Montrose region (Adams 1993).1
By 1777, according to the Old Statistical Account, the population had
grown to include 38 families, with six boats (four men to each boat). By
1815, the village held 500 people. And by 1885, at the height of the
herring boom, Anson tells us that the village had 156 boats, manned by
350 fishermen (Anson 1930: 118). Following the First World War, how-
ever, the number of boats shrank rapidly and by the end of the 1920s
numbered scarcely more than two dozen. Today, there are none. But
before I can relate how these changes have been interpreted and exper-
ienced, let me walk you through the village, as I first did in 1975, to a get
a sense of the place.
Ferryden’s 800-odd people inhabit a mile-long line of houses near the
northern end of what used to be called the County of Angus (in 1975, the
county system was abolished, so Angus is now a district). This is about 30
miles south of Aberdeen, one mile south of Montrose, or 90 miles north
of Edinburgh. The land of northern Angus is well watered, drained by the
streams and rivers that flow out of the upland lochs. The South Esk River
rises in the Grampians above Loch Esk. Fed by numerous small streams
that empty into it on its way down from the Highlands, the South Esk
flows through Glen Clova, angling down to the town of Brechin, some 15
miles west of Montrose. After leaving Brechin, the river broadens, taking
a slower and smoother course to its North Sea destination at the Basin, or
tidal estuary, of Montrose and Ferryden.

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In the distance, a line of hills signals the edge of the Grampians, the
mountains of the eastern Highlands. Rocky and barren, stripped of trees
for many centuries past, their slopes are covered with gorse, heather and
rough hill grasses. Sheep wear narrow trails along their sides. Piercing the
edge of this bleak expanse are the glens, or narrow river valleys that lie
like green arrows in the folds of the hills. In winter, deep snows may cut
off the glens from the market towns and coastal villages for weeks at a
time.
In contrast to the harsh, sparsely populated uplands, the coastal topo-
graphy of Angus is varied and densely settled; the climate, mild. The rich
farmland is painted with broad green fields of raspberries, strawberries,
potatoes and the virulently yellow, EU-subsidized expanses of oilseed
rape, delineated by dark-green hedgerows. The coast is an unforgiving
one, notorious for its danger to sailors. However, the old, well-worn lava
flows that formed the rocks here are rich in semi-precious stones, such
as agates and carnelians, making the area popular with lapidaries and
amateur jewelry makers.
As for the estuary at low tide, some call the Montrose Basin a mud flat,
or, more poetically, “a barren expanse of glutinous glue” (Henderson
1990: 72). When filled with water, it is an gleaming, eddying expanse of
blue-grey motion. The Basin is nationally famous for the varieties of
waterfowl that gather there: eider ducks, pink-footed geese, mute swans,
cormorants, among others. (It is also a place where one can witness the
perverse sight of swans snaking their long necks up into the sewer pipes
that end just below the water line. Their up-ended white bottoms look like
agitated feather dusters.)
Of the three ways to enter Ferryden – from the sea, from the rural
inland parish of Craig, or from the main coastal route – the last is the one
most used today. But Ferryden does not get many visitors. From the main
road, the village appears to be little more than a line of postwar, council-
built cottages that face a bleak industrial site, making it look like a seedy,
outflung suburb of Montrose. Neither charm nor quaintness (both major
tourism desiderata) are immediately in view.
Nor does anything immediately suggest a distinctive character or
history. Tourists usually give it a miss, as it is mentioned in few travelers’
guidebooks and has even been left off the Scottish Tourist Board’s map
of “Scotland’s Fishing Heritage Trail.” (This trail is taken up in detail in
Chapter 6.) A modern guidebook even refers (in passing) to the village’s
“demise” (Henderson 1990: 73), though, to paraphrase Mark Twain, such
rumors are exaggerated. Even fisherfolk in other villages seem to have
forgotten Ferryden.

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As one ventures farther into the village, a different scene emerges. It

seems as if there are two villages, one new and one old. Beyond the
council houses on the south side of the road, a block of handsome and
substantial-looking brown and gray stone houses signal modest prosperity.
However, a few yards farther east, in the middle of the village, the houses
become conspicuously smaller and older, examples of the type once
known as “but and ben.” But-and-ben houses have two rooms, one front
and one back. In most, external stairways lead to identical layouts above,
constructed for separate households.
Behind them runs a cluttered alleyway flanked by black-tarred sheds.
From there it is an easy step down to the shingled beach. Occasionally, a
pile of weathered lobster traps presents itself, or an old rowing boat.
Washing hangs on lines that stretch out over the tideline, flapping noisily
in the relentless wind.
Rossie Square, at the center of the village, holds the post office (a one-
room affair, converted from the old village wash-house), the village store
(which sells a little bit of everything, at high prices), and until recently, the
village branch of the Scottish Cooperative Market. Across the street, two
pubs sit side by side. One is large and shabby, its peeling grey paint
testifying to the passing of better days. In 1975 it was known locally as
Diamond Lil’s, for its colorful proprietor. The other pub presented quite a
contrast. It was then new and sparkling, a glass-and-concrete box that
beckoned to the young, the affluent and the outsider. By 1995 however,
it too had taken on an air of mild decrepitude. (When I stopped in for lunch
one day the bar was occupied by a small group of youngish working men
who were clearly curious about my presence there. I said that I was
visiting and that I had stayed there 20 years earlier. “Well, we’ve got
indoor toilets now,” they offered, snickering. (Indeed, most people had
them during my earlier stay, but many of the older folk could still remember
the days of the village “lavs” and the communal wash house.)
Eastward from the Square, the village splits. One road leads along the
shore (the Low Road) and the other (the High Road) winds “up the brae.”
At the village’s far western end (“wast the toon”, as Ferrydeners say),
windows look directly across to the Montrose harbor mouth and thence
to the North Sea. On a clear day, the St Cyrus cliffs (famous for nesting
birds) are easily visible, five miles away to the north. But if the haar, the
impenetrable, treacherous, North Sea fog comes rolling in, then the house
next door can vanish almost instantly. Standing securely on land, this is
merely rather disconcerting. At sea it can be deadly.
Hence the importance of the lighthouse for this rocky coast. It occupies
a rocky promontory about a quarter mile past the last dwelling. The light

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was built in 1870, after years of pleading from local shippers and fisher-
men (Adams 1993: 49), to warn unwary vessels away from the menace
of the rocks. My informants were very proud of the lighthouse and their
own part in building it:

James’s grandfather was skipper of a barge that brought the bricks to build the
lighthouse over a hundred years ago. The light was visible twelve miles out to
sea. They burnt an old boat on the high road to celebrate the installation of the
lighthouse.

From Scurdyness, both Montrose and Ferryden are invisible and only
the cries of gulls can be heard over the constant wind. The occasional
visitor clambers around the rocks, perhaps looking for agates, which are
easily found by their glassy, bluish translucence when wet. But generally,
it is a lonely and forbidding spot. Once ensconced in these outer reaches,
it is easy to imagine that Ferryden occupies an isolated space and looks
only seaward. This, of course, is an illusion. Just across the river lies
Montrose.
In the middle of the 1970s, when I first visited Ferryden, the new
offshore oil and gas base already abutted the village, occupying a space
that had once been a tidal stream called the Inch Burn. The former water-
front had come to resemble a jungle of blocky office buildings, low-lying
warehouses, towering cranes, lengths of pipe and piles of other industrial
debris. A forbidding, chain-link fence encircled the whole, making if off-
limits to all villagers, except those few who had (very low-level) jobs
there.
This liminal space, neither in the village nor of it, but very much a
presence there, had become the site of an ongoing drama over Ferryden’s
identity as a “fishing village.” Before we can understand just what was at
stake, however, we must become acquainted with the people and their
history. In particular, we will look at three arenas that have informed
Ferrydeners’ interpretation of and responses to power, as well as their
attachment to the place where they lived. These are their commitments to
kinship, their memories of living on parish relief, and their engagement
with dissenting religion.

Finding True Ferrydeners

Offshore oil did not destroy Ferryden. In demographic and social terms,
Ferryden had already been utterly transformed by the 1960s, long before
the first wells were drilled in the North Sea. Most of the fishermen’s

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children had gone by this time, following the local dictum that “you have
to get out to get on.” They left behind a largely elderly population. Indeed,
when I arrived in 1975, nearly one-third of the population was retired from
active age-work and subsisted primarily on the old-age pension. Most of
this group, along with the children and grandchildren still remaining,
defined themselves explicitly as the “True Ferrydeners” in self-conscious
distinction to the “incomers” among them.
Kinship is vital to understanding this critical division. Simply put, True
Ferrydeners claimed direct lineal descent from one of the families that had
settled the village in the eighteenth century. Here, as so often happens, the
inhabitants’ version of village origins diverges from academic history.
According to Adams (1993: 228):

The Perts and Patons probably came from Usan in the same parish. Records
and family traditions show that the Coulls came from Buckie and the Wasts or
Wests from Crovie in Banffshire just before 1700, while the Mearns and
Findlays, two less common surnames, ordinate in the Mearns coast fishertouns
south of Stonehaven.

My informants, on the other hand, while agreeing that the Coulls, Wests
and Perts had all come from the Black Isle (a peninsula on the Cromarty
Firth) sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, said that the
Patons had come from Usan shortly thereafter. Usan itself was said to have
been settled by migrants from Orkney and Shetland. Regardless of the
“truth” of the matter, what counted to my informants was their ability to
demonstrate consanguineal connections to one of these four families.
Thus, they could lay claim to the village by virtue of long association. One
could say that this was the fisher version of the upper class idea of the “old
family.” That is, depth of descent lent a person both prestige and authority.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, generations of village endo-
gamy, combined with occasional out-marriage to fishers from other
communities made such claims to prestige and authority possible. Names
were crucial to establishing them. A villager might say, “My name is Watt
but my great-grannie was a Pert,” or, “That woman is Annie Mearns Paton
West.”
Yet another naming mechanism underscored boundaries. This was
the use of by- or tee-names (nicknames). This practice was not unique
to Ferryden, being noted for fishers all along the coast (See Knipe 1984
on Gamrie (Gardenstown); Anson more generally). The usual explanation
for this was that, given the limited stock of surnames within any village,
as well as the common practice of naming children for parents and

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 Ferryden

grandparents, several people in any given generation could be identically

named, and thus needed another way to be distinguished. But it was also
clear that by-names provided a kind of shorthand about personal histories
for members of the community (they were often assigned on the basis of
personal quirks, appearance or habits). Thus, outsiders did not have by-
names, nor could they understand the significance of “Coddlin’ Davie,”
“the Provost,” “Young King,” or “Skinem.”
In order to comprehend the Ferrydeners’ dense consanguineal system,
I collected many genealogies. Older villagers generally already had these
written down, keeping them in drawers or boxes along with old, faded
photographs. Others, like Mrs. Potter, a nearly blind, nonagenarian
woman, kept the names, birth dates, and places of residence of literally
hundreds of relatives, both living and dead, stored in her capacious
memory. This memory took us back to the latter part of the eighteenth
century. (When I went to study the parish birth and death records, I found
that her account matched them amazingly well.)
True Ferrydeners invoked kinship to explain their putatively instant-
aneous network of gossip. “We’re all forty-second cousins,” True Ferry-
deners often said. “Don’t say anything about one of us that you don’t want
the rest of us to hear. If you tell one of us something in the morning, we’ll
all know it in the afternoon.” They used this idea of consanguineal solid-
arity to explain what they saw as their like-mindedness and preference for
each other’s company.
They also believed that most outsiders did not like or approve of them.
“They don’t speak to you in Montrose, even if you’re standing in a bus
queue,” said one. “They all think they’re toffs.” I saw this belief confirmed
when my Montrose landlady professed to know no one in the village. As
her cleaning lady was a member of the Ferryden Old Age Pensioners’
Lunch Club, I knew this could not possibly be true. However, such
anecdotes were counterbalanced by the stories they told of their ancestors’
perseverence, bravery, ingenuity and loyalty, stories that, in effect, inverted
stigma. They went further, maintaining that fishers worked harder, had
cleaner houses and were more pious than other folk.
Such lineal claims came loaded with heavy symbolic baggage and
explicit social consequences. Villagers’ claims of kinship were readily
interpreted by others as evidence of their peculiar character. Often they
were suspected of practicing incest and therefore of possibly being feeble
minded. “True Ferrydeners are queer, shy. They peer from the door at
strangers and hide,” as one disgruntled incomer said to me. Mrs Black,
who hailed originally from a more northerly fishing village, complained
regularly about the way “true Ferrydeners” drew their boundaries. “My

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grandchildren were born in Ferryden, but when they were little, other
schoolchildren told them, ‘you don’t belong to Ferryden.’” Other incomers
claimed that they got along well enough with the Ferrydeners, but that
“you never really get to know them.” One of the village ministers com-
mented to me that Ferrydeners would not easily accept outsiders, even
from tiny Usan, a half-mile away.

The Ferryden people are only interested in their own community. I’m kept at
arm’s length because I’m not from Ferryden. There’s a mystique. The relation-
ship between Ferrydeners is intense and you can’t break into it. They’re all in
the know. They change dialect when they speak to me. Their kin from Canada
and the US keep in touch more than other people’s do.

Others confirmed that kin who had long since moved away, as well as
their children or even grandchildren, still “belonged” to Ferryden. Exiles
were expected to keep in touch, to write letters and pay visits. In Cohen’s
(1987: 21) terms, they were still seen as bound by “the ideology of close
social association”. Each summer would bring the return of kin on holiday
for two weeks or more. Frequently, they would stay in the empty houses
that their families still owned. Additionally, many retirees had come home
to live; others were planning to do so. Nonetheless, Ferrydeners spoke of
themselves as a dying breed. No wonder, then, that they kept such careful
track of people.
No wonder, also, that changes in the physical nature of the village were
such a threat. If Ferryden were to disappear or to be radically altered by
new developments, there could be no point of focus for group cohesion,
no place for sentiments to condense and coalesce. Indeed, some who had
planned to retire back to the village changed their minds when they saw
what the oil base looked like.
I first learned about this critical distinction from the members of the
OAP’s Lunch Club, a group that since 1973 (around the same time that
work had begun at the oil base) had gathered each Wednesday at the
village Primary School. A local social worker revealed that setting up the
club had not been easy. For example, it been difficult at first to procure a
van to transport the old people. The Montrose Soup Kitchen Committee
refused to loan their Social Services minibus, saying tartly that “Ferryden
is outwith the area of Montrose. It is unconstitutional.” My informant
suspected that the old antagonism between town and village was behind
this answer because he had no difficulty getting a van from the inland
town of Brechin. He also said that, when the OAPs first went to the Lunch
Club, they were surprised, but pleased, to find that the meals were not free,

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but cost them 12 pence each. Free meals would have smacked of charity
and they would have deeply resented that.
The 20 to 30 people attending ranged from their middle sixties to their
early nineties. This routinized setting afforded me an excellent chance to
get to know people in a non-intrusive manner. First came lunch, with eight
people at each table. Then we all took chairs around the periphery of the
room and chatted, played card games (the women) or dominoes (the men).
Some napped. Others took turns entertaining the group by playing the
fiddle, singing or reciting poetry.
Much of the music and many of the poems were strongly sentimental,
evoking images of village life as warm and harmonious, even Edenic. A
particular favorite was the Ferryden Anthem, with the following refrain:

Don’t let us be strangers,

As long as we are together.
Friends we’ll be, we’ll all agree,
‘Tis far the better plan.
Life is very short,
So let us all remember,
To be as good and kind to one another as we can.

The chorus of another cherished poem, written by Thomas Coull Pert,

a Ferrydener who had died shortly before my arrival, echoed:

We won’t forget to tell our friends

how kindly you have been.
We’re no awa’ tae bide awa’,
we’ll soon be back again.
The summer breeze and sunlit seas of dear old Ferryden.

(In one of the more daring – or rash – moments of my fieldwork, I set

the poem to music and, having brought my guitar along, sang it to them.
Mercifully, they soon joined in.)
Few had actually spent their working lives at the fishing, but nearly all
had been born into fisher families and had much to say about their child-
hoods and the lives their parents had led. In fact, a number of these
supposedly insular people had spent much of their working lives else-
where, only returning to the village upon retirement. Among them, they
numbered a former railway engine driver in Motherwell; a joiner in
Aberdeenshire; two dressmakers in Montrose; factory workers at the
Montrose flax mill and then at the “jammie” (Chivers jam factory); a nurse
in Aberdeen; and a widowed homemaker who had lived some years with
her husband in Glasgow.

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In general, people seemed quite happy to talk with me, though I am

afraid most never quite understood what I was doing there. I first presented
myself as a sociologist (knowing that the word “anthropology” would
mean nothing to them). In their minds, this rapidly translated to social
worker, for why else would I spend so much time listening to them talk?
As one of my informants triumphantly announced, years later, “I ken what
anthropology is. It’s the study of auld men!” Finally, I simply announced
that I was writing a book about the fisherfolk and the village. This appeared
to satisfy them. Certainly, I had chosen an important topic. Also, the
recently built oil base gave them much to discuss and criticize. So they
kindly allowed me to participate in many revealing conversations, listen
to their opinions and their stories, and generally learn what it meant to be
a Ferrydener.
I must stress that their knowledge, although grounded in memory and
the lore of many generations, did not represent a purely “oral” tradition.
The old folk were literate, if not highly educated in a formal sense (most
had left school by the age of 14). Some of what they related was derived,
sometimes second- or even third-hand, from a variety of written sources.
These included a popular column on local history in the weekly Montrose
Review and the writings of Peter Anson, the aforementioned artist, monk
and scholar of European fishing who had lived among them for several
years. Of course, those writing about the village had mined these same
memories, so the chicken-and-egg question of which came first can never
be answered.
Like other fishers I came to know over the years, they were intensely
interested in anything to do with fisher history and avidly collected all
manner of pamphlets, books and poems. In fact, though they never used
that word, they were deeply involved in “heritage.” (At that time, “heritage”
had not yet taken on its instant association with tourism and exhibit that
Chapter 6 discusses.)
Not surprisingly, their accounts during Lunch Club meetings were
sporadic, rambling, and often mutually constituted through a process of
free association. In other words, they were rendered in a completely non-
linear fashion. One incident would remind them of another one, so the
connections would be made thematically rather than chronologically. Any
specific question – about an individual, a boat, or an event – was likely
to spark intense discussion or debate. My search for information set me
in motion from one person to the next like a billiard ball.

Go see old Joe over there. He kens a’ aboot the storm that kill’t Jim’s uncle
William. His own uncle was ane o’ the crew . . . Jim’s grandfather’s boat was

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M.E. [Montrose] 555. She was the ‘Alexandria’ and she was caught in a storm
in 1890. She was struck by lightning, and it killed Charley Coull when it ran
down the mast.

For men, in particular, being a fishing villager meant being fairly

obsessed with the sea. They recalled the names of fishing boats and fishing
grounds, even though few of them had ever sailed:

There was Shald water (Shallow Water), about 15 miles off the Lighthouse due
east, and Castle Ness, southwest 10–12 miles. The Reef, 25 miles offshore, was
a great herring ground once, but there are none left now; Kaillie, 6 or 7 miles
out, was a bank formed when they dredged the river in 1905-6 and dumped the
dredgings out to sea.

Hard times were another favorite topic. I heard about the great typhoid
and cholera epidemics that had swept through the village in the 1870s,
killing hundreds. “Every family kept what they called ‘dead funds’ to pay
for funerals; otherwise the parish would have to bury them and that was
a great shame.”
In 1911, government reforms improved their lives to a degree. “Lloyd
George established the National Health. You could get free medical care
for men, but had to pay for the wife and bairns. In the thirties we got free
milk for the under-fives.” In 1918 gas street lights were introduced. The
first public telephones at the post office and police station arrived in 1938.
Still, no amount of modernization could erase their awareness of inferior
status. “We used to have to touch our caps when the laird came by.”
It was clear that, for these people, the past was hardly “a foreign
country” (Lowenthal 1985), but a well-known, often visited, and some-
times longed-for second home. When they recounted how, “in the old
days,” the young men would throw stones and fish refuse at Montrose
boys who ventured over the bridge, little smiles would cross their faces.
They smiled, too, when recalling how:

As children Rossie Castle [where the laird lived; up the hill, about a quarter
mile from the village] was a place we villagers went only on special occasions.
We got a bun with our tea, ran races, and played games at all ages . . . Another
highlight of summer was going to Lunan Bay [three miles down the coast] on
the train. We would save up money for the jaunt. We collected rags and bones
and scrap metal to sell to hawkers who came to the village on Saturdays . . .
And there was a free breakfast on New Year’s morning in the kirk hall . . .
Captain Stansfield went around the primary schools in Ferryden and Craig and
distributed an orange and an apple to each student.

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What struck me as the conspicuous face of patronage was, for them, a fond
memory of good times.
Of course, children had to work: their labor was a necessary source of
household income. In addition to household and fishery-related chores,
children supplied casual harvest labor for local farmers.

Before the First War, we used to go tattie howking [potato lifting; in the 1970s,
schoolchildren still got a two week autumn holiday so they could help with the
harvest]. In 1912 I got a shilling a day. My mother got two shillings. In 1920s,
the berries started, and we could go pick those.

A local historian who lived nearby in Craig showed me a picture of the

Ferrydeners pulling “tatties” from that era and said that a van was sent
around to collect villagers for this purpose. The driver was instructed not
to go into the village, but to stop at the edge and make them walk out,
because “Ferrydeners were funny folk.”
But when none of these supplements sufficed, families would be forced
to ask for credit, or “tick” from the shops. Some bakers and grocers are
still remembered for their generosity in extending credit to destitute fisher
households. Most people relied on this, and there seemed to be little shame
involved. They were far more unhappy at being forced to accept parish
relief. This institution, perhaps more than any other, undermined their
sense of self-worth.

The Burden of Relief

In 1976, a village man loaned me a set of the old parish relief records that
he had unearthed from his attic. Their sepia-toned, hand-written pages
chronicled the bare facts of poor relief from 1897 to 1912 in Ferryden –
from the point of view, that is, of those administering assistance. These
tantalizingly limited accounts invited Dickensian speculations about
workhouses and sadistic applications of power. In fact, few hints of
anything like this appeared. If Oliver Twist Coull lived in Ferryden, his
misfortunes were not recalled in this chronicle.
The relief records did reveal that prominent landowners and officers of
the fish curing company invariably chaired and dominated the proceed-
ings of the committee that dispensed relief, though two or three fishermen
also sat on it as village representatives. So relief applicants endured close
personal scrutiny from those who already exerted significant control over
their lives. Such scrutiny was, moreover, conditioned by a long legacy of
ambivalence towards those applying for help.

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 Ferryden

Parish relief was not a nineteenth-century invention. It began much

earlier and its history offers us as a way of viewing the impact of national
institutions upon local experience. Scotland had begun to pass laws
regulating (generally harassing, punishing and restricting) the poor during
the fifteenth century. In 1574, an Act establishing a category of legal poor,
that is, those who were allowed to beg, was passed (Cage 1981: 3). In
1597, the kirk session – the local ecclesiastical court of the Church of
Scotland – was made responsible for administering relief in conjunction
with the heritors, or property-owners, of the parish. “Besides their legal
responsibilities towards the poor, the session also supervised the religious
and moral character of the parishoners” (Cage 1981: 5).
Mitchison writes about the impact of an increasingly rigorous form of
parish relief upon class relationships within rural parishes of the eight-
eenth century:

Control by landowners of the money of a parish led to a basic change in the

accepted poor law . . . By the 1780s a new interpretation of the law was gaining
acceptance, that poor relief was only for those incapacitated permanently from
earning their living and that even for these it should not be enough to live
on . . . To a needy man the kirk session had become a ‘them’, a representative
of civil government, allotting him, if he qualified under the new rigorous rules,
a small sum from either rates or collections . . . Almost at the same time that
the Scottish poor law became generally effective, it ceased to be the organ of
a real sense of community. (Mitchinson 1978: 90)

Such attitudes would only increase the hostility and suspicion Ferry-
deners already felt towards the landowners and the merchants of Montrose.
From 1845 to 1894, poor relief was administered by parochial boards that
comprised elected members, heritors, and representatives from the kirk
sessions. From 1894 to 1929, these were superseded by parish councils,
elected by the ratepayers (Kellas 1968: 159).
During the early part of the twentieth century, the Craig parish council,
which administered Ferryden, appears to have been well-regarded by the
General Superintendent of Poor, who stated that

the Poor Law seems to be administered with much care and attention . . . that
pauperism, as regards the number on the Roll, has been much the same for the
last few years, that many of those in receipt of relief are upwards of forty years
of age and that they seem to be well seen to and cared for. (13 May 1905)

Looking backward, of course, it seems curious that the numbers of paupers

would have remained stable at this time, since the fishing was declining

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and unemployment generally was on the rise. One has to wonder whether
criteria for relief were not simultaneously being made more rigorous.
Members of the Council examined the lives of the fisherfolk through
their aptly titled agent, the Inspector of Poor, as well as through their
personal connections to the community. Approvals depended not only
upon physical need, but upon moral worthiness or being found “deserving,”
which required both disability and proper attitude. Administrators of the
Scottish Poor Law had always taken a dim view of the poor, particularly
of those deemed able-bodied. If the latter were destitute, it was due to their
own shortcomings and moral failures.
Not all applications were granted. Members of the Council were clearly
skeptical about a number of petitions. Orphans or those deemed the “sick
poor” might be given such items as a flannel shift or a pair of boots. But
in 1898, for example, we read of an application from a woman “for
clothing for two of her children . . . Owing to her circumstances [which
are not recorded], it was agreed to refuse her application.” Sometimes a
pauper’s allotment was increased; at other times, it might be decreased or
terminated.
Many of the councillors’ deliberations seem to have centered on the
details of what was then called “outdoor” relief, meaning a minimal
subsistence afforded to non-institutionalized paupers. In addition, how-
ever, they were also responsible for Ferryden individuals institutionalized
in Montrose, either in the asylum, as “lunatic paupers,” or the House of
Refuge (for children, the elderly, and the otherwise infirm). In the case of
one man applying for outdoor relief, it was suggested that “the offer of
indoor [asylum] relief should be made to him as a sort of test, and that [the
councillor’s] impression is that the offer would remove him from the roll.”
Ian Levitt, writing about the Poor Law, remarks that the bourgeoisie
“needed to create welfare institutions which, while offering assistance, did
so in a way that bound the less fortunate to capitalism’s predominant
ethos” (Levitt 1988: 3). In Scotland, this implied the ethos of Calvinism
– that hard work would save your soul and reveal your state of grace – and
meant that the needy were bound to see themselves as suffering society’s
scorn. An intriguing entry in the parish minutes of 1906 revealed the
attempt by two daughters of a pauper to discontinue their father’s assist-
ance, “they maintaining that such relief was not necessary”.
Perhaps the most poignant example of the emotional legacy of parish
relief for modern villagers was offered when I visited a very old woman
who was spending her last days in the Montrose nursing home. Her niece
brought me, thinking, rightly, that I would be interested in her aunt’s
reminiscences. Frail and wrinkled, her sparse white hair neatly combed,

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she lay propped up on pillows to receive her guests. “I never thought I’d
end up in the House of Refuge,” she said. “No, no, Auntie,” her niece
hastened to reassure her, “It’s Dorward House, now.”
While at any given time, no more than 10 per cent of the village was
forced to accept relief, no family was untouched by its threat. Income from
fishing was unreliable and they were, more often than not, deep in debt.
As the next section will show, the uneasy and unequal relationship between
themselves and the fishcurers, a relationship we have already probed in
Chapter 2, played a large role in this. The family firm of Joseph Johnston’s
& Sons was especially important. Johnston’s had established itself as
the most powerful fishcuring company in the greater Montrose and,
Ferrydeners said, effected much misery.

“The Fishcurer is the Enemy of the Fisherman”

This next discussion takes us into the murky realms of myth, partial truths,
and contested histories. If any single story in village lore could be said to
have critical symbolic status, it is the tale of how Johnston’s robbed the
fisherfolk. As with the rendering of village origins, academics have their
version and the fishers, another. In this case, the fishcurers have yet
another still. The truths embedded in each reflect the different social
positions of their tellers. It is not the ethnographer’s task – nor, indeed, is
it anyone’s – to adjudicate among them. What matters for our purposes
here is what the fishers’ version tells us about their worldview.
When Ferrydeners spoke to me about Johnston’s place in their history,
their voices took on an edgy tone. They claimed that the company had
stolen something precious from them long ago. They said that in the early
years of the village, the laird had promised them that they would always
be entitled, free of charge, to gather mussels from the “Back Sands” of the
estuary to use to bait their lines.
But the laird’s control over the Back Sands was, at some point in the
early nineteenth century, transferred to the Montrose Town Council.
According to village lore, Johnston’s had bribed or talked the Town
Council into giving them the rights over this vital resource. The firm
already controlled salmon fishing throughout the area and so it was easy
for it to extend its water patrols to guard the mussels, as well. Poachers
would be fined or jailed. “Johnston’s stole the mussel beds of the Back
Sands from the fishermen. They gave a dinner for the Town Council, with
a bottle of whisky for each member. The Council gave them the rights to
the Back Sands.” Another version was that Johnston’s somehow got the

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fishermen themselves to “sign away” the rights to the mussel beds. As one
of my informants put it:

On the title deeds [to the laird’s estate] it said that the Back Sands belonged to
Ferryden fishermen as long as water runs and grass grows. He [the laird] also
gave them the feu rights to Ferryden.2 But there was jiggery-pokery with
Johnson’s over the area where the fishermen got their bait.

Malcolm Gray’s account, which focuses on the economics and ecology

of mussels, rather than the politics of fishermen and fishcurers, explains
why mussels were such a critical resource for white fishing and why
Johnston’s would have been eager to control the supply:

Until the middle of the century the needs of Montrose and its nearby villages
had been met by natural growth on the local mussel beds where the fishermen
leased beds for their supply. But the increase in the number of boats . . .
threatened the exhaustion of natural supplies of bait . . . The South Esk with
its wide tidal basin had at least two sectors suitable for the cultivation of
mussels . . . and production was organised sufficiently to supply not only local
needs but also to allow export to more needy sections of the coast such as the
north-east. . . . The Dun beds were developed and carefully managed by the
Montrose curing firm of Joseph Johnston, but even more interestingly the
Rossie beds were managed on behalf of a fishermen’s association. This
contained almost all the haddock fishermen . . . of Ferryden and Usan and these
met about two-thirds of their needs in this way; the remainder of their supply
came from Johnston’s . . . (Gray 1993: 247–8)

We also learn from Walker that the fishers of Arbroath, to the south and
Gourdon, to the north, also relied upon Johnston’s:

Joseph Johnston and Sons ltd, Salmon fishermen, Montrose, organized the
mussel trade in the Montrose basin in the 1850s . . . In addition to establishing
a mussel fishery, J. Johnstons set up a delivery service to supply their customers
with fresh mussels daily . . . (Hay and Walker 1985: 60)

However Johnston’s obtained control of the mussel beds, no one

disagreed on the outcome: the fisherfolk now had to pay Johnston’s for
bait. Thus they joined the ranks of other fishing villages where bait cost
money. “My grandmother [in Burghead, to the north] was once in jail for
stealing mussels from Lady McGregor. They all belonged to the laird,”
said Mrs Smith, an incomer widow of a Ferryden fisherman. By the late
1800s, then, Johnston’s held not only the mussel grounds and local salmon
fishing rights, but a virtual monopoly over the commercial fish trade,

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including both white fish and herring. Ferryden became, quite literally, a
company town. One elderly man summed it all up: “the fish-curer is the
enemy of the fisherman.”
From the fishers’ point of view, Johnston’s was continually exploiting
them. In 1857, the company persuaded the Ferryden fishermen to fish
further out to sea, thus increasing the yield, but also the risk (Butchart
1968: 47). Soon they also engaged them directly to fish for both white fish
and herring. The latter endeavor required larger boats and even longer
stays at sea. In 1884: “Montrose was one of the chief places . . . which
supplied the largest quantity of haddocks and cod and yielded the largest
quantity of mussels” (Butchart 1968: 48).
For a time in the 1880s, the boom in herring meant relative prosperity
for Ferryden. Fishermen were able to buy furniture and to bring back
souvenirs of china and silver from distant ports, lending fisher houses a
new air of gentility. Of this time, fisherfolk today boast that the water was
so crowded “you could walk across the harbor on the backs of the boats.”
But prosperity was a fragile and fleeting thing. The fishers nearly
always owed money to Johnston’s. The company’s practice of extending
credit subsidies led to it holding mortgages on the fishermen’s houses. It
also sold them boats which were to be paid for over time. With a few bad
seasons during the depression of the 1890s, “the fishermen could not pay
their debts. The boats were repossessed and a lot of ill-feeling was created
and many people left the industry” (Butchart 1968: 51). One man con-
firmed this, telling me that his grandfather had been part-owner of a boat,
but that “Johnston’s didn’t like to give up the largest share of a boat. Though
boats were family run, they were mostly owned by Johnston’s. Fishermen
paid them back with interest. The fish went to Johnston’s . . .”
Furthermore, villagers believed, Johnston’s had undermined the Ferry-
deners interests by buying large steam trawlers in an (ultimately unsuc-
cessful) bid to compete with Aberdeen:

The fishermen threw stones at them and refused to go on them because they
said they would ruin the fishing. Johnston’s had to hire men from Montrose . . .
There used to be a portrait of one of the Johnston’s family. They’d hung it in
the Mason’s Hall, but somebody took it down.

And around this time, villagers said, an effigy of the company chairman,
Joseph Johnston, was hanged and burned in the village square.
By 1904, herring catches were already declining; only 50 to 60 men
from Ferryden were now involved in the fishery. Numbers on the relief
rolls began to rise. The First World War, of course, sank fishers’ fortunes

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even lower as the seas became even more perilous and markets were cut
off. In 1919, an attempt to sustain a new fishing company in Montrose
lasted only two years:

The company bought trawlers from the Admiralty and reconditioned them. But
just after the war fish prices were low and the fleet was also laid up for more
than a month due to the coal strike. There was also an increase in railway rates
which put Scottish ports at a disadvantage compared to English ports. (Butchart
1968: 50)

Meanwhile, Johnston’s was laying off fishermen and other workers.

“Ma faither was a cooper at Johnston’s. He had to make one barrel a week
for nothin’ to pay for the gas he had to use to see to work. There was no
union.” But after WWI, Johnston’s stopped making herring barrels, so
there was no more need for coopers. In 1936, Butchart (1968: 50) tells us,
Johnston’s stopped supporting white fishing as well.
Indeed, having blamed Johnston’s for their continual impoverishment
and indebtedness, Ferrydeners also blamed the firm for ending their role
in the industry. Only the work of salmon fishing remained. However,
according to my informants, Johnston’s, having resented the villagers’
defiant gestures, systematically refused to hire them. “My uncle tried to
get a job there in 1918 but they told him they wouldn’t hire anyone from
the village.”
By 1928, only 94 men and boys listed fishing as their occupation, and
only 28 boats still lodged on Ferryden’s shore. Unemployment soared, as
did emigration. Unmarried women found work in the jute mills and the
Chivers jam factor in town. Some boys and men became builders’ laborers.
But fishing, it appeared, was gone for good.
The Great Depression, of course, intensified these trends. Many Ferry-
deners, seeking better opportunities, had left for the Clyde shipyards even
before the First World War. Some of these returned in the 1920s to work
in boat construction on nearby Rossie Island, but were soon forced to
return west. Many kept on going, all the way to North America. “Until
1938, we were knocking from job to job.” Mrs Johnson, born in Ferryden
around 1910, recalled, “My father was a fisherman, but there was nothing
for my brothers to do. Father decided to move the family to Clydebank to
get opportunities for the boys in the trades.”
Even before their economy soured, Ferrydeners were conscious of
feeling trapped by circumstances, helpless in the face of overwhelming
power. Like others who have seen themselves as dispossessed, Ferry-
deners found solace in messianic religion. Encouraged by a series of

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roving evangelists, they turned to Jesus as a kindlier, if more distant,

patron. They did not, however, turn to the Church of Scotland.

Salvation and Dissent

During the early days of the village, Ferrydeners reportedly saw the
Established Church as a forbidding place, with its pews filled with land-
ward folk and the wealthy. They were so averse to attending there that,
through the early nineteenth century, Ferryden was known as a “heathen”
site. Its inhabitants were notorious for superstition and drink. Beginning
in the 1820s, however, evangelical Presbyterian missionaries took an
interest in saving these domestic pagans, the fisherfolk, along with those
in isolated rural districts and the urban poor (Donaldson 1972: 98).
Ferryden’s first religious emissary appeared in the 1820s. This was the
Reverend Dr Brewster. According to the memoirs of a nineteenth century
village schoolmaster, this intrepid evangelist met with significant resist-
ance. Fisherfolk hid under carts, sheds, and upturned boats when word
spread that he was on his way to collect a congregation. Women pleaded
that they had to stay at home with the bairns, or insisted that “‘I hae nae
claes’” (Douglas 1866: 8). Gradually, however, Brewster prevailed.
He established a Fishermen’s Society to encourage worship and insisted
that all must be baptized, teaching the fisherfolk that the unbaptized were
merely God’s creatures, not God’s children (Mitchell 1860: 43). On the
Sabbath, all work, including fishing, washing, cooking, firelighting,
mending – and nearly everything else – was prohibited. Only spiritual
activities, such as Bible study and prayer, were allowed.
The minister was not simply a quixotic individual. Unbeknownst to
them, Ferrydeners were being caught up in Kirk politics of a national
scale. At that time, the Establishment was divided into two hostile camps:
the dominant Moderates and the dissenting Evangelicals. The latter
wanted to do away with state patronage and to eliminate the role of
landowners in choosing ministers and paying their salaries. Moderates,
including the aristocracy and rural gentry believed that the state should
continue to support the Kirk and, in fact, to allow it autonomy and auth-
ority on a par with its own.
In 1843, in an act of tremendous consequence for the Highlands and
for many Lowland parishes, as well, the Evangelicals seceded from the
Establishment. The Great Disruption, as this was known, took “thirty-nine
per cent of the ministers of the establishment, followed by about a third
of the people” (Donaldson 1972: 98). They founded the Free Kirk and
dedicated themselves to a program of exhaustive moral rigor.

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The Great Disruption was far more than a factional dispute between
rival theologians. It was a sweeping social movement that reached down
into the lives of the working class and provided an outlet for the frustr-
ations and angers of the disenfranchised. When Brewster led them out of
the Established Kirk, Ferrydeners rightly construed this to be an act of
open defiance against the holders of privilege, specifically the laird of
Craig parish and the fish merchants of Montrose. Brewster’s following
grew.
During the next half century, the village became famous in eastern
Scotland for intense devotion, in contrast to its pagan past (Mitchell 1896:
15). The evangelism that had brought them into the Free Kirk thus readied
them for a wave of proselytizing that began to sweep them off their
spiritual feet. Revivals – popular, public displays of new-found and
reaffirmed commitment to Jesus – had been sweeping the Protestant
English-speaking world from the 1820s onward (Carwardine 1979). These
were often inspired by itinerant missionary preachers from Ulster, England,
and the United States, but were frequently led by local men who had
undergone sudden and dramatic conversion experiences.
The Free Kirk brought Ferrydeners into the religious arena; the revivals
gave them a language and a forum for revitalization, as well as a voice for
protest. Their messianic formulations allowed the fisherfolk to achieve
some measure of psychological relief without directly venting their anger
and thus risking reprisals from their social superiors.
After all, the fishcurers cared less about the fishers’ spirituality than
about their profitability. As long as economic relationships were not
threatened and as long as public deference sufficed to maintain face, they
could afford to regard the villagers’ efforts with detachment or even
approval. The Ferrydeners could thus achieve a kind of internally exper-
ienced revolution by joining the elect and spiritual reality could invert
mundane hierarchy. In this sense, the religious movement in Ferryden was
truly a “religion of the oppressed” (Lantenari 1963), as well as a “weapon
of the weak” (Scott 1985).
William Mitchell, a shipowner, left a detailed account of events in
Ferryden. According to him, Ferryden and Montrose each claimed to have
held the first revival in the region:

As in the great Reformation, it is doubtful whether Luther in Germany or

Zwingli in Switzerland first saw the light and proclaimed the truth as it is in
Jesus; as betwixt the fishing village of Ferryden and Montrose, few, if any, can
accurately tell where the revival first began . . . the same causes that created
an interest in the revival in Montrose, produced here [Ferryden] a kindred
feeling, but much more intense. (Mitchell 1860: 7)

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 Ferryden

By the autumn of 1859, the fervor had reached a kind of critical mass
hysteria:

The burdened souls could not endure delay. People cried aloud for a meet-
ing . . . The preacher was discoursing in most tender strains of the love of Jesus
for fishermen, when a loud shriek for mercy broke the deathlike stillness . . .
like an electric shock it affected all who had sympathy. The speaker’s voice was
drowned amid the general wail . . . one after another shrieked aloud to Jesus
for mercy and falling prostrate, apparently dead, are carried out one by one to
the vestry, till it is filled. (Mitchell 1860: 8)

Ecstatic experiences, exemplifying Lewis’ (1971: 18) definition of

possession as “the seizure of man by divinity,” were frequent. Like the
Anastenaria, the poor and stigmatized Greek firewalkers who seek physical
and emotional healing through the power of the saints (Danforth 1989),
fisherfolk sought relief from anxiety by allowing Jesus to possess them.
During these episodes, the subjects could typically neither work nor eat.
They spoke in tongues, had visions and became euphoric or hysterical.
Typically, the possessed person felt him or herself to be a battleground for
the forces of good and evil, God and the devil. The subject was passive
but tormented, unable to make conscious decisions or control his or her
behavior. The battle raged on until God triumphed and the frenzied soul
knew that it was to be released from sin into salvation.
Mitchell’s records revealed the intimate relationship between inner,
emotional states and people’s perception of their mundane, as well as
spiritual status. In effect, each convert became transformed from a sinner
who deserved the fisherfolk stigma – of being a marginal and unworthy
person – to one who was lifted above the masses of the damned.
Evangelical Presbyterianism told Ferrydeners that the poor and oppres-
sed fisherfolk could transcend their earthly subordination and triumph
over worldly sinners who, they believed, were destined to occupy a lower,
and somewhat warmer, realm. Thus, consider the biography of Christian
Watt, the depressed fisherwoman I discussed in the previous chapter:

When I grumbled about my dress at school, my mother said the fishers were
the first chosen of Christ, so “Put on your creel in gratitude to his glory,” she
said. “Your fathers are grossly superior to these tradespeople who look down
on you [italics mine]. They can navigate small boats by oar and sail to the
Hebrides, Shetland, and Greenland, with nothing but the sextant set with the
noonday sun, and the stars to guide them at night.” (Fraser 1983: 17)

Moreover, the revivals served a performative function. Through public

displays of possession, Ferrydeners could demonstrate their moral worth

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to those who had scorned them. For the first time in village history,
outsiders praised them, giving them a glimpse of what it might be like to
be considered “respectable.” As I came to learn over years of talking with
fisherfolk, respectability has been highly valued and long sought-after.
Piety and zeal thus became prestige goods, costing nothing but emotional
exhaustion.
The Temperance movement that accompanied the revivals did much to
improve their reputations, as well. Long notorious for insobriety, the
villagers became almost entirely teetotal. This marked a significant change
in Ferryden’s public image, for the stereotypical fishermen had been a
reeling lout, his normally thick fisher dialect rendered unintelligible by
drink. There was even a movement (ultimately unsuccessful) to rename
the central village square as Teetotal Square. But for all this, the commun-
itas engendered by enthusiasm suffered a blow, when, once again, the
winds of national kirk politics came blowing through village and rent apart
its precious spiritual unity.

Wounds of Division

In 1900, The Free Kirk (outside the Highlands) united with the United
Presbyterians, a group whose forebears had also seceded from the Estab-
lished Kirk in the nineteenth century. The resulting United Free Kirk saw
itself as remaining true to the principles of the Disruption and stayed
outside the Establishment. In 1929, however, a nationwide movement to
reunite the sundered Presbyterian factions embroiled Ferrydeners in a
bitter contest.
Individual congregations throughout Scotland were asked to vote on
whether to merge with the Established Church. In Ferryden, two votes
were cast. My informants said that the first vote defeated the proposal, but
the second reversed it. The stalwart United Frees refused to accept this and
claimed that they were the only legitimate descendants of the “real” kirk
of Ferryden. This left the village with two congregations and much resent-
ment.
The reunion split friendships, sibling ties, and generations. People
continued to argue over what had happened. Many claimed that the
minister’s wife and her brothers reminded him of the financial advantages
of working for the Establishment. “They got him turned,” my informants
said. Another common accusation, voiced not only in Ferryden but in
other fishing villages as well, charged that names of dead parishoners had
been added to the winning side. Each of the current village ministers also

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 Ferryden

mentioned this to me, though neither could commit himself as to its

accuracy.
However, many members of the United Free Kirk were certain it was
true. According to them, the decision could only be explained as the
working of evil within the village. The minister was “turned,” the congreg-
ation was not religious enough, and/or certain key elders were sick and
unable to fight the proposal. One old lady vehemently insisted that had her
father not died shortly before the vote, everything would have turned out
differently.
Some people still found ways of fanning the flames. One elderly
Established Kirk lady was well known for standing at her window, shaking
out her rugs over members of the UF congregation as they walked to the
evening service. Others still steadfastly avoided those who had been (or
whose parents had been) on the opposing side. Members of each congreg-
ation generally declined to set foot within the purlieus of the other. When
the two ministers organized a joint service one Sunday with the United
Free minister presiding, a UF elder was heard to exclaim, “Fancy the
minister of the Kirk setting under the minister of the ‘separated brethren!”
and, of course, refused to attend.
Thus United Free Kirk fisherfolk, devout abstainers and prayerful
pietists, saw themselves as the only ones worthy of God’s grace. Those
who had “fallen away” and joined the Establishment had abandoned not
only their Church, but their people. For their part, the Church of Scotland
congregation, which now numbered quite a few incomers in its fold, saw
the UFs as stubborn and divisive. Clearly, this event had shaken the
foundations of their solidary edifice, partitioning it into two factions and
undermining the identity of the whole.
The intense bitterness resulting from the reunion that split the village
can be at least partly explained by the fact that Ferrydeners could no
longer maintain a common front. The division between the congregations
represented a “family feud,” a breach that could be healed only by elimin-
ating one side. No compromises, no negotiations, no peace offerings could
obscure the wound of division itself. Ultimately, the mistrust engendered
by this event was to undermine Ferrydeners’ ability to speak with a
collective voice about the oil base. But I am jumping ahead here.

Social Class and Public Voice

Talking as I have been about unity and identity, an obvious question to

raise at this point is how Ferrydeners have perceived themselves in terms

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of class: did they see themselves as sharing the same class interests?
Talking about life within the village, they stressed the importance of
kinship and mutual aid. They subscribed to Presbyterian beliefs that all
those who are saved are equal in the sight of God. They cherished belong-
ing to the fisherfolk, sharing a common past and a commitment to in-
group equality. They often acknowledged their common circumstances by
quoting a popular Scottish saying about equality, “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s
bairns.” Divisions of wealth were not the only way to rupture such equal-
ity. Indeed, anyone who put himself or herself forward in a public situation
was likely to encounter some suspicion and be the object of gossip. Thus
kirk elders, county councillors, and even the woman who organized OAP
events all were targets of cutting remarks. As we shall soon see, this
attitude was to inhibit their ability to respond to changes proposed for
Ferryden.
They also held somewhat contradictory beliefs about Scottish society
as a whole. At one point, they might appear to subscribe to what has been
called the myth of Scottish democracy, or “the belief that Scotland is a
more egalitarian society than England, and that social mobility is some-
what easier” (McCrone 1996: 113; see also MacLaren 1976).3 This belief
that a “lad o’ pairts” (talents) can succeed if he only works hard enough
is modeled on the image of the working-class youth schooled by dedicated
teachers. Armed with piety and a fair amount of Greek and Latin, he (it is
always a “he”) goes out into the world to make good. The fisherfolk might
cite examples of local lads who had done just that. But they were canny
enough to realize that only a very few actually scaled the class ladder.
Much more evident in their discourse, however, was the belief that the
wealthy and the powerful almost always call the shots. They frequently
spoke of “those in charge,” a category that usually referred to people in
Montrose or to rural landowners; it never included the villagers, them-
selves.
They would speak freely in these terms, but it was far more difficult to
get them to speak about party politics. Many were immediately wary of
such conversation. Some balked altogether when asked to reveal political
preferences. As one anonymous informant said in a questionnaire I admin-
istered with almost total futility, “it is not etiquette to ask these questions.”
Apparently, by asking about voters’ choices, I was violating the sanctity
of the secret ballot. Someone remarked to me that it was actually easier
to talk about sex.
Not everyone felt this way, thankfully. Joe and Elizabeth were a polit-
ically vocal, elderly couple and regular attenders of the Lunch Club. They
taught me much about local political allegiances. Like many Ferrydeners,

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 Ferryden

they were staunch supporters of the Scottish National Party’s efforts

towards independence. Indeed, their son was at that time beginning to
build a political career within the SNP. In fact, the SNP was then widely
popular with fishing communities who saw Scottish independence as way
for their industry to get some freedom from British regulations and greater
protection for their interests. Other parties, for a variety of reasons, were
generally rejected.The Conservatives currently held the Parliamentary
Seat from North Angus and the Mearns, where Ferryden was located.
However, they were seen as party to all the social burdens villagers had
had to bear over the years.
Nor did many endorse the Liberals, even though Ferryden had been a
stronghold of Liberalism before the First War. According to Kellas and
Fotheringham (n.d.: 146), “Scottish Liberalism was able to project itself
at this time as a working-man’s creed, and it linked up to Presbyterianism
in preferring the ideals of libertarianism to ideals of class representation
and collectivism”. By the 1970s, however, many fisherfolk dismissed the
Liberals as ineffectual.
The Labour Party, by far the most popular in Scotland overall, had
some adherents among the fisherfolk, but was generally distrusted as the
party of unions, cities, and Catholics. Indeed, as E. P. Thompson (1968)
has famously impressed upon the readers of The Making of the English
Working Class, class and class consciousness are not the same thing.
Fishing communities, as marginalized enclaves, have had a complex and
ambiguous relationship not only to bourgeois society, but also to the rest
of what is objectified as the “working class.” While fisherfolk clearly
identified themselves as poor and downtrodden, they did not desire any
alliance between themselves and other workers, whether of city, town,
farm or mine. This attitude stood in sharp contrast to earlier days.
In the 1920s, Ferryden apparently underwent a temporary radicaliz-
ation. It was known as a “red” village for supporting the Independent
Labour Party, a socialist radical group that was part of a growing Labour
coalition. The ILP was best known in the Clydeside area around Glasgow.
Joe and Elizabeth said that the ILP had had “roomies” in the village “on
the King’s Roadie halfway up the brae on the left.” Several factors might
explain the ILP’s popularity in Ferryden after the First World War. For a
start, many villagers had begun working in the Clyde shipyards during the
War, where they would have been exposed to the ILP during the heydey
of Clydeside radical activity; they would have brought the message back
on their many visits home (Lynch 1992).
Secondly, with fishing mostly gone, the villagers had nothing to lose
in voicing political opinions. Inasmuch as they had lost an employer, they

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had also lost a local enemy. Third, in some ways, the ILP’s fiery message
echoed the evangelists’ messianic appeal, promising a new world order.
Knox (1990: 155) tells us that ILP leaders were also

linked to the Free Church and the United Presbyterian. These churches, as a
consequence of being locked out of the corridors of power, if not wealth, took
a more critical attitude to the status quo and to the dominant institutions of
Scottish society”.

The ILP also advocated a national Prohibition act, which the Temperance-
minded fisherss would have strongly endorsed (Smout 1986: 147). But the
ILP was short-lived, reabsorbed into the Labour Party by the Second War
(Kellas 1968). Its socialist radicalism was largely forgotten by the time
that I arrived in the village.
Thus, it seems that Ferrydeners did not consistently identify themselves
in class terms, nor did they consistently support Labour. And perhaps we
should not be suprised. After all, as long as Ferryden’s existence depended
exclusively upon fishing, class-based action was not really an option. The
overwhelming power of the fishcuring company and looming presence of
Montrose made Ferrydeners feel extremely vulnerable. They had no allies.
The effigy-burning incident mentioned earlier might be likened to a bread
riot, a moment when anger and frustration became unbearable but which,
having found an outlet, were quickly bottled up again.
But if a transcendent class consciousness could not flourish, place
consciousness could. It was in Montrose, not in Ferryden, that the fish
curers lived. It was that place that united Ferrydeners together in comple-
mentary opposition against outsiders. So it is to Montrose that we must
now turn.

In the Shadow of the Royal Burgh

To get from Ferryden to Montrose, one must cross the juncture of the river
and the estuary. This is both a physical and symbolic divide. For Ferry-
deners, the Basin represents a contested space and calls up memories of
old injustices. Its tidal flux mirrors the fluidly ambiguous nature of village
boundaries, sometimes clear, sometimes effaced. On the one hand, Ferry-
den appears to be an easily definable, encapsulated social entity. On the
other hand, it looks like an outpost of the town. And indeed, Montrose has,
over the years, imposed its power to draw the village ever more tightly into
its orbit.

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 Ferryden

I choose this last word deliberately, for I find it useful to situate the
relationship between village and town in terms derived from 1970s
dependency theory: that is, of Montrose as a regional metropole and
Ferryden as one of its satellites (Frank 1969). A satellite is to a metropole
as a moon is to a planet. That is, the smaller body is caught by the larger’s
gravitational field. However, while unevenly sized astronomical bodies
presumably coexist in a benign or neutral relationship, sociogeographical
ones always entail power relationships. The satellite prospers only insofar
as its activities benefit the metropole.
Any control over land base or resources that the satellite might claim
remains contingent upon the needs and desires of its larger, more complexly
organized and more affluent neighbor. The metropole therefore system-
atically “consumes” the satellite. For over 200 years Montrose has used
Ferryden, dominating it both economically and politically. This history
makes the conjunction of village and town an excellent vantage point from
which to consider how place and power articulate and how place and
identity intertwine.
A thousand years ago, Montrose was a small, fortified trading center
built around a castle. In the thirteenth century, it received its Royal charter
and became a Burgh (see Chapter 2). For the next several centuries,
“Montrose was servicing a hinterland which marched to the south with
that of Dundee and to the north with that of Aberdeen but which, inland
and westward, had no competitor” (Lythe 1993: 91). But the merchants
of Montrose looked seaward, as well. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, local fortunes were built upon salmon, tobacco, slaves and
smuggling (Fraser 1974).
The castle has long since crumbled away, but the town’s strength as a
market center has remained. Its position derives from its command of a
dangerous but navigable harbor, as well as its accessibility by road and
rail. The town’s coat of arms, carved above the lintel of the Public Library,
reads, “Mare Ditat . . . Rosa Decorat” (“The Sea Enriches, the Rose
Adorns”). Sure enough, nearly every front garden today, no matter how
small, contains a rose bed. The stiff, upright stems planted neatly in bare,
brown earth culminate in petals of yellow, peach and red. They make a
striking color contrast to the grey or dun-colored stone houses that stand,
equally upright, behind them. When I first arrived there, during the height
of the offshore oil boom, it seemed to me that an odor of bourgeois self-
satisfaction filled the very air.
However, preceding years had not dealt kindly with the town. Despite
the presence of two multinationally owned factories (Glaxo Pharm-
aceuticals and Cadbury-Typhoo), unemployment was high. By the end of

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 Fishing for Heritage

the 1960s, harbor trade, the town’s lifeline, had sunk to a new low. Thus
when North Sea oil and gas came on the scene, the town’s businessmen
were more than eager to exploit new opportunities.
The Montrose Harbour Board of Trustees was critical in shaping the
course of events. This exclusive and exclusionary, self-perpetuating body
held unlimited authority over all harbor-related matters. Within its domain,
it was virtually autonomous, answerable only to the Crown and to Parlia-
ment. Members of the Board were thus very powerful people, and fairly
typical of Scottish entrepreneurs more generally in their involvement with
local affairs (Slaven 1994: 163). Representatives of the town’s major
commercial enterprises, they were also active in local and district govern-
ment, civic groups such as the Rotary and the Round Table, the Chamber
of Commerce, various charitable institutions and the Montrose Review.
They formed a clique, a core group of (virtually all) men linked by class,
kinship, friendship, clientship and economic cooperation.
Clearly, to comprehend the sources of power over Ferryden, I would
have to follow Laura Nader’s advice (1972) and “study up”. Thus I spent
considerable time interviewing members of the Board, as well as other,
closely linked individuals. The Harbour Master was one of these. He
had played an instrumental role in luring the offshore industry to the area
with promises of a cooperative business climate. I also spoke to local
landowners, representatives of the Sea Oil Services Base and its client
companies and local investors in the various businesses that had sprung
up to service the new development. My goals were to learn the language
and assumptions of entrepreneurship, especially with regards to Ferryden,
to identify key players and, most fundamentally, to understand what the
village had been up against.
In general, people were very free with information, including some
about activities that skated rather close to the legal line, although it must
be said that some of their generosity may have been predicated upon their
apparent belief that I, a young, female, American graduate student, would
not understand much of what they told me. Perhaps they were right. But
I became privy to some extraordinarily candid musings on the joys of
holding power. For example, one wealthy local farmer wished – with no
trace of embarrassment or even tongue-in-cheek – that he could have been
a plantation owner in the old American South because slaves, unlike
modern Scottish farm workers, had to show “proper respect.” Another
landowner took a different, but complementary, view when he opined that
the local countryside had remained “delightfully feudal” in its unspoiled
character and in the deferential attitudes of its inhabitants.
But even my less brash informants did not hesitate to share details of
their involvement in oil-related developments. It became clear that the
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 Ferryden

single most important mechanism that kept the clique together was the
sharing of information. When I asked how new entrepreneurial projects
had gotten started, I would hear something like, “Well, I was having a
drink at the Albert Hotel and James came over and we started talking. He
suggested I might be able to get together with so-and-so, and get a new
business going.” Indeed, along with capital, information was the coin of
their realm. News concerning potential buyers for land or property moved
like lightning among them.
The timely communication of this information was facilitated by some
common social characteristics. All of these men were local power brokers,
though not all could, strictly speaking, claim membership in the upper
class (as defined by the conventions of birth, education, and dialect, at any
rate). They were also linked by ties of contract, kinship and clientship to
more powerful individuals in other parts of Britain, including Edinburgh,
Glasgow and southern England. Some also maintained social and econ-
omic contacts with members of the Angus aristocracy, such as the Earls
of Southesk and of Dalhousie, each of whom had, as part of much more
extensive estates, large holdings near Montrose. (A few even claimed gen-
ealogical connections to Royalty, though these ties went back many
generations.)
In addition, most were well-connected to the Conservative Party. For
example, the Tory Member of Parliament for North Angus and the Mearns,
Alick Buchanan-Smith, owned farmland near Edinburgh and his wife
came from an old Montrose family. Not all were ideologically driven,
however. One of my more gregarious informants said, “I’ll vote for Tory,
for Labour, or even the bloody SNP, if they can get me what I want.”
Moreover, each member already owned at least one substantial, well-
established concern that did business regularly with national and multi-
national firms. Some traded in soft fruit, others in potatoes, still others in
timber or salmon. Finally, they solidified their local presence by sitting on
the boards of directors of local charitable and financial institutions.
So cohesive a group thus had no difficulty responding to an exciting
new prospect that promised to lift the town out of its recession-based
doldrums and bring new opportunities for profit-making. They knew that
Aberdeen, then known as the “Houston of Scotland,” could no longer
contain the North Sea oil boom. The offshore supply industry had begun
to reach outward to less crowded, less expensive, and, preferably, non-
unionized east coast ports. Knowing this, they used their firm control over
land, labor and local information to prevent established, Aberdeen-based
Scottish offshore support companies from moving in to set up branch
offices.

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 Fishing for Heritage

The Montrose group had its own plans. Several local farmers, builders’
suppliers and fish merchants, all of them members of the Harbour Board,
formed new companies to supply the offshore market with food, housing,
laundry services, and local transport (“rope, soap and dope” in industry
lingo). One local chemist (not a pharmacist) even set up his own business
in oil field lubricants. Another boasted that he expected to set up his
own merchant bank and, in a moment of masculine bravado, this same
individual revealed that he and his friends liked to refer to themselves as
the “Montrose Mafia” and had even written up a humorous document
purporting to be a dossier in the files of “S.E.M.E.N. – the Society for the
Extermination of Mafia Executives in Montrose.” He reminded me of the
small boys I had seen in Aberdeen, swaggering down the streets in the
footsteps of a large-hatted Texan. Perhaps the urge to mimic American
business stereotypes had simply proven irresistible.
In any case, the ambitions of the Montrose elite depended upon the
success of a partnership formed between the Montrose Harbour Board and
the Sea Oil Services Company (SOS), a subsidiary of the multinational
corporation, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation (P&O). The goal
was to build an offshore rig and boat service base at Montrose. It was
agreed that the Harbour Board would lease the site to SOS which agreed
to relinquish its rights when it was ready to depart. (The Harbour Master
told me he had dreams of turning the base into a major container port, but
this never materialized.)
Since no suitable site near the existing commercial docks was available,
they fixed upon the Inch Burn, the tidal stream that ran along Ferryden’s
north-facing shore, to which I have already referred. This choice was
revealing, not just of the group’s determination to make the project work,
but of its frontier view of Ferryden, a Lockean view that village land was
really an underutilized territory free for the taking. As we shall see shortly,
this attitude can be seen as the obverse of the Ferrydeners’ belief that they
were being treated like a colony.
The Board then secured a government loan to dredge the harbor and
use the excavated material to create 37 acres of landfill. However, in their
haste to invest in offshore developments, the Harbour Board overlooked
an obstacle which, for a time, appeared to threaten all its hopes of renewed
maritime glory. As it turned out, their legal right to use the Inch Burn was
not altogether clear. When the Trust was established in 1837, it

was granted authority over the whole estuary including the tidal Basin, which
was essential to its well-being, though no harbour works were to be built west
of the bridges, and no authority was given over the south bank of the river
[Ferryden], only within the water. (Adams n.d.: 42)

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 Ferryden

Construction projects in Britain require a formal planning permission

process that allows – in theory, at least – for a period of time in which
objectors may lodge complaints before work commences. At the District
Office in Forfar, the former County seat of Angus, I found records that
showed just how controversial the base had been from the outset. Among
other things, there was a rather irritable correspondence between the
County Planning Officer and the Harbour Board solicitor debated whether
the Inch Burn lay within the Board’s domain.
Many villagers had claimed that the Board had no authority to construct
anything in Ferryden. In order to build quays along the edge of the base
site, the board was therefore required to seek special permission from
Parliament in the form of a “harbour revision order.” Despite the Board’s
solicitor’s intensive efforts, the order did not immediately appear.
Then an officer of a local company that claimed salmon fishing rights
in the Inch Burn claimed that the disputed quays were already under
construction and that they were interfering with his livelihood. The Board
denied this, saying that the site merely contained the sheet pilings required
to protect it from erosion. A public, Parliamentary inquiry in Aberdeen
ensued and investigators found the Board guilty of proceeding in advance
of permission and further rebuked it for offering “misleading statements.”
They ordered that all work stop until the revision order came through.
The base promoters were clearly nervous and began to pay attention
to public relations. In order to “sell” the base project in Ferryden and
forestall more objections, they launched a carefully coordinated campaign
directed at both young and old. To the former, they promised jobs. To the
latter, they emphasized the importance of “progress,” of Ferryden’s
potential contribution to the regional and national economy. Those who
would oppose such progress, they implied, were backward-looking and
selfish. They wooed the old age pensioners with meals, gifts of glossy oil-
field literature, and a bus trip to Aberdeen. Executives from firms like
Hydrotech, Baker Oil Tools and Sea Oil Services also made a point of
showing up for charity events such as the OAPs’ annual sale of work.
P&O also did some huffing and puffing, threatening to pull out and go
north to Peterhead if their schedule were not kept. But despite the mild
scandal and the halt in construction, objections were “cleared” and work
on the base was finished in time to satisfy their urgent demands. Montrose
looked set to become “an east coast oil town” (Fraser 1974).
The base was operating by 1974. At any given time, 20 to 30 companies
– many American-based – were in residence. At least 400 people worked
there full time and more jobs were promised – particularly for Ferry-
deners. Crucially, from the Montrose elite’s point of view, business began

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to spill over beyond Base limits. More companies established construction

and training centers elsewhere in town. At the commercial docks, trade
increased. Bars, restaurant, retailers and hotels began to flourish as never
before. The local press waxed ecstatic, touting Montrose’s entry into the
glamorous world of the offshore oil industry.
Through all of this, Ferrydeners were given virtually no voice. That
does not mean, however, that they did not have plenty to say – to each
other or to anyone else who would listen.

Sold Down the River: The Sea Oil Services Base

If anyone had listened, they would have heard some Ferrydeners say that
they had been “sold down the river.” Actually, the river had been sold out
from under them. The Inch Burn was quite literally transformed from
water into land. In 1973, a Dutch-built cutter-dredger ship entered the
harbor mouth and moved up the South Esk to deepen the navigable
channel and then to haul the resulting landfill to the village foreshore. For
months, work went on non-stop as the Inch Burn began to disappear.
Villagers complained about the noise, the dirt, and the arc lights that shone
into their windows at night.
These were temporary annoyances, however. The real issue for many
villagers was the abrupt transformation of Ferryden from a quiet little
community where the maritime memories could be relived with a glance
and a gesture, to a dormitory suburb and “light industrial” site.
However, these views were not immediately available to me when I
began my inquiries. The Montrosians I spoke to were unanimous in
claiming that Ferrydeners overwhelmingly favored the project. Some had.
William, a retired fisherman then in his late sixties or early seventies, was
the village representative to the County Council and had allied himself
firmly with the developers. Some said that he had sold or rented his old
boat to the offshore industry. He insisted to me that the only opponents
were “incomers, holiday-home owners . . . people with no real interest in
the future of Ferryden.” William considered himself the village spokes-
man, so he was greatly insulted when I continued to ask other people what
they thought. By the end of my fieldwork he would have nothing to do
with me, and was reported to have stated publicly at a Community Council
meeting that I was “a spy.”
Other villagers spoke with enthusiasm of the new jobs for the younger
folk, although they did acknowledge that there were only 20 of these jobs,
and 14 were for cleaners. Others voiced some regrets but said they “would

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 Ferryden

not stand in the way of progress.” The powers that be had made their
decisions and they were only little people in a little village. It was no good
fighting the “higher-ups” in Montrose.
A small number of villagers were openly angry and had voiced their
opposition from the start. They had tried to organize some collective
action either to stop the base from being built or at least to weigh in on the
details of its appearance. But in contrast to the 1920s, openly defiant
behavior was no longer considered appropriate in Ferryden. “Fanatic” was
the name given to one particularly vocal incomer, who had lived in the
village for only a few years and who had engaged in a lengthy corresp-
ondence with planning officials and government representatives. Despite
the rejection of organized opposition, however, some villagers expressed
their sense of loss. I heard many of these at the OAPs’ Lunch Club.
In a letter written to the County Planning Committee, one elderly
woman who had returned to Ferryden after years of living and working
elsewhere, voiced her dismay:

I feel that I must protest at the sacrilege which has been and is still being
perpetrated against our once lovely village of Ferryden . . . My husband and I
had looked forward to the time when we could retire back to Ferryden and this
we did eleven years ago. We were lucky enough to purchase a house directly
facing the river . . . Today, our view has gone forever, the value of the house
has slumped, for we are the nearest house to what was once the river and now
we are faced with the prospect of looking into the back of an unbroken line of
sheds . . . My husband is an invalid confined permanently to the house, and the
only thing which gave him pleasure was watching the bird life in our burn and
the boats on the river . . .

Many complained about the way in which information had been presented.
During the four or five public meetings held at the village, Ferrydeners
were shown slides of other onshore bases, models of the proposed work,
and descriptions of the construction process. Many of the blueprints and
models were highly technical – impressive, but not easily comprehended
by the layman. The local newspaper claimed that all questions were
answered and that no serious objections had been raised, but some of the
villagers with whom I spoke recalled things differently. They said that a
number of queries were ignored, or answered falsely, and that several very
specific objections to a variety of planning details had, in fact, been
voiced. These people said they felt “hoodwinked” and claimed that
attempts to include the villagers in planning decisions were no more than
a farce designed to satisfy government regulations.

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 Fishing for Heritage

The oil base stirred up feelings about autonomy and community bound-
aries, causing much talk and controversy, reawakening old disputes, and
confirming the importance of fisher identity for a substantial section of the
population. Few viewed the changes as merely topographical. Most
understood that, at least on some level, the new industry threatened to put
the final nail in the coffin of Ferryden’s independence and sense of itself
as a place of fishers. By annexing the village foreshore and eliminating the
tidal burn, the base became a potent symbol of Ferryden’s marginalization,
not only from non-fisher society, but from the rest of the fisherfolk, as
well.
Why, then, were protests not more vehement and better organized at the
time of the original proposal? It is never possible to determine precisely
why something did not happen. Nonetheless, several key factors were
clearly at work in this case. First were the social divisions among the
villagers: true Ferrydeners and Incomers; United Free and establishment
congregations. In each case, animosities and mistrust constrained any
possibility for collective effort. Second, was the sense of not being able
to stand up to the “big folk” in Montrose, a legacy of dependency and
powerlessness. In all cases, opposition only left you worse off than you
had been before. Speaking out was futile and cast doubts upon your
respectability. Third was the hegemonic ideology of progress so skillfully
adopted by the oil base promoters. Always, the fisherfolk had craved
approval from the outside and they could not abide being labeled “back-
wards” once again.
The sadness and bitterness it had all engendered were summed up to
me twenty years later.

The Last Ferryden Fisherman

In April of 1995, I sat in the living room of the last Ferryden fisherman,
the man who literally embodied the end of an era. In a dry voice, almost
without affect, Andrew recounted how, two years earlier, he had sold his
boat, and in so doing, had closed the two-century-old chapter of Ferryden’s
commercial fishery. His career had spanned nearly 50 years. During that
time, he had watched the fish stocks decline, and faced greater and greater
demands for new technology, as well as ever-increasing competition.
Andrew began fishing at the age of 14, in 1947, joining the crew of his
father’s boat. In 1969 he built his last boat, the Angus Rose. In the 1970s,
he moved from a house in an older section of the village into a new dwel-
ling “up the brae,” located in a modern and architecturally homogeneous

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 Ferryden

housing estate. In material terms, he had done well – the signs of prosp-
erity were evident in his well-built house and neat furnishings. But that
day Andrew did not want to talk about his success or about his time at sea
so much as his sense of where the village had gone and where Scottish
fishing was going.
Our conversation was short and unsentimental: on my part a set of
questions and gentle prodding; on his, a set of reminiscences tinged with
bitterness. Andrew was not sorry to retire from the strain of hundred-hour
work weeks at sea, but he regretted that no others would follow after him,
and that the fishing village in which he grew up was no longer the same
kind of place. He also knew where the blame for this should fall. A long
series of rapacious entrepreneurs and incompetent bureaucrats had, in his
view, managed to take a once-busy and productive place and transform it
into a somnolent dormitory for “incomers.” Andrew thought the local
Council should have bought up and modernized vacant dwellings so that
the Ferrydeners’ children could live there, instead of leaving to find work
and affordable housing elsewhere.
In fact, Andrew could think of few other people his age (61) from the
old fishing community left in the village. Most of his peers and their
children had left for distant places – England, North America, Africa and
Australia – or for other parts of Scotland. The older folk whose memories
had kept “the fishing village” alive were dying off. “We’ve just lost two,”
he said, implying a collective bereavement.
In short, the Ferryden Andrew knew had been done in by greed and
indifference, by tricks and lies. Ferrydeners had no voice in the changes
that beset them, and powerful people had made bad, self-interested
decisions that left villagers in the lurch. The consequence has been, he
said, that “Ferryden’s biggest export is people.”

Conclusion

What, then, can we say about the ways in which identity articulates with
place among those who “used to be fishers?” First, let us return to the old
age pensioners. Just how did they re-imagine their community in the face
of drastic change? They did this by telling stories about themselves, an
activity that helps to constitute a continuing sense of importance and self-
worth. The stories reflect upon both past and present and taken together,
form a tightly woven narrative of injustices done to a subject people. Two
themes emerged in their conversations. One was the idea of themselves
as survivors, even heroes in a Christian sense of triumphing – if only

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morally – over evil doers. Discussions of the most recent injustice – the
oil base – sometimes took on an eschatological quality, a final reckoning,
as it were, for Ferryden.
In another vein, their rhetoric evoked striking parallels with the losses
suffered by Native Americans. More than a hint of indigenizing inflected
the way True Ferrydeners rendered the distinction between themselves
and incomers. The former possessed the right to speak for the village; the
latter did not. Of course, the further back one could go to establish such
claims the better. Ferrydeners could not claim to be the first people in the
wider area, but they could and did claim descent from the first residents
of the village itself. Pace Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), we might speak
here of “the invention of autochthony”.
As indigenous people the world over have found in contending with
the various powers that oppress them, claims to land that rest upon history
and “truth” draw upon different, generally incommensurate, kinds of
evidence (see Bodley 1990; Clifford 1986). Indeed, the villagers’ tales
were more than suggestive of such land claims. They depicted powerful
landowners and merchants as villains who would rape the village and its
site for greed and profit. They, on the other hand, were the native fisher-
folk, whose “ownership” of Ferryden was predicated not upon titles and
state-sanctioned authority, but upon heritage and historical right.
The True Ferrydeners gave their account of village life and history a
mythic quality: mythic in the sense that its shape and substance conveyed
meaning and identity, not in the sense that it was false. As myths do, it
established a charter for inclusion, a rationale, as it were, for the social
dichotomy of insider and outsider. It also revealed the points at which
fishers must negotiate tense and sometimes conflict-laden relationships
between themselves and others. People did not always like each other or
get along, but, with the exception of church politics, their differences were
personal, rather than structural.
Sahlins’ (1976) point about the locus of symbolic production might
be applied here. Ferryden was a small, encapsulated, and face-to-face
community enmeshed within a set of capitalist production relationships.
In many ways it was in bourgeois society, but not of it. Certainly not
“primitive,” it nevertheless generated an internal value-system based in
maintaining “the set of social (kinship) relations” (Sahlins 1976: 13). The
relationship between the larger society and the small community, as
between these two symbol-systems, was one of tension and contradiction.
Although the fisherfolk were forced to submit to the demands of the
larger society in political and economic terms, and although they desired
respect from the bourgeois society of, for example, the Montrose elite,

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 Ferryden

they resisted complete submersion in its value system. The Free Kirk and
the revivals made possible a wider appreciation of their virtues. These
imbued their identity with a religious dimension that enabled it to became
idealized as a defense against stigma.
The Ferrydeners’ locally and occupationally based commitments to
equality within and loyalty to the village can be explained in part as
reactions to stigma, as establishing a framework in which notions of
inferiority could be inverted. By generating pride in themselves and the
rigors of their occupation, they could endure, withstand, and transcend the
perceived inequities and iniquities visited upon them by the outside world.
Only within a localist framework, where people had a sense of commit-
ment to a particular place, could fishermen and women expect some
recognition of their worth as persons and producers.
Even before the oil base, True Ferrydeners knew that the fishing was
gone for good and that incomers were penetrating the village. They knew
that their cherished community had not very long to live. Still, they could
use the ties of kinship and memory to invoke its presence within a familiar
setting. When the base was built, however, they began to lose even that
ability and could no longer ignore the loom of a future in which the fishing
village would play no part.

Notes

1. The others were Usan, Gourdon and Johnshaven.

2. Feu-rights would mean that the fisherfolk had security in the village
land, not just in their actual homes.
3. McCrone notes that in some respects, the myth is “not totally at odds
with reality” (1996: 115). For example. Carter (1974: 274) tells us that
a nineteenth-century farm servant in the northeast of Scotland could
reasonably expect to move up the agrarian ladder as he matured, an
opportunity “in strong contrast with arable areas of southern England,
where most men in a cohort of young labourers entering agriculture
could expect to be agricultural labourers at fifty”.

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 –5 –

Perpetual Crisis and the Making of

the Fisherfolk

Well, what will we dae when the herrin’s a’ finished?

And what we will dae when the whitin’s a’ done?
And whaur will we gang wi’ oor pursers and trawlers?
And how will we ever pay off the bank loan?
(Whaur Will We Gang? As sung by Cilla Fisher,
Songs of the Fishing 1983.)

Here come the Clearances my friend; somehow our history is coming to life
again . . . and up and down this coast, we’re waiting for the wheel to turn.
(Capercaillie)

When people talk about the state of the world’s fisheries today, they
regularly invoke the idea of crisis. Images of sterile oceans compete with
those of burned-over rainforests in public imaginings of ecological
collapse wrought by giant multinational corporations. This sense of crisis
reflects a modern understanding of global unity and the notion of a
collective planetary future. However, it fails to engage with the exper-
iences of those who must live with the daily and immediate consequences
of resource depletion and high-tech competition. Small-scale fishermen,
like miners and loggers, face immediate and dire problems as bureau-
cracies, politicians, and special interests of all kinds compete to dominate
the policy agenda. Fishers are also concerned with the long run, but they
must, nonetheless, pay their mortgages and send their children to university.
Their view of what constitutes the crisis, therefore, is likely to be signif-
icantly different from that of policy makers, much less of those who only
click their tongues over depressing headlines, or worry that their favorite
vacation beaches might be polluted.
Nor does this general view of global crisis consider how world-system
economics interact with cultural particularities in specific locales to
produce socio-ecological moments, except insofar as to bemoan a suppos-
edly universal human propensity to mismanage the “commons” (Hardin

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 Fishing for Heritage

1968). Some have criticized this perspective concerning local ineptitude

for its ignorance of the difference between capitalist and small-scale
resource use (Cordell 1989; McCay 1989). They argue that indigenous
management systems often work very well to preserve and distribute
resources. Rather, it is the endless expansionism, competitiveness and
ruthless insistence on efficiency of capitalist-driven extractive processes
that more often result in the depletion, or even the exhaustion, of suppos-
edly renewable resources.
This chapter and the one that follows home in on the local experience
of crisis, exploring what the current socio-ecological moment means to
people of Scottish fishing communities caught up in the processes of
modern commodity production. What Habermas (1973: 1) points out in
the context of advanced industrial capitalism has great force here, namely
that “the crisis cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is
undergoing it”. Fishers’ interpretation of crisis is conditioned by a number
of historical and social processes that no simple analysis of catch statistics
or fisheries biology can reveal.
Specifically, we need to ask what is the meaning of crisis for those who
have been chronically insecure. The idea of crisis normally implies a
sudden shift, an imminent make-or-break moment threatening potential
cataclysm, which cannot be avoided because, as Habermas (1973) also
says, the means of resistance have themselves been undone. However,
modern Scottish fishers see themselves both as persistent veterans of a
more extended or chronic kind of crisis, and as active agents of history.
In fact, the dread of disaster is never far from their minds. They express
in a variety of ways a collective level of ontological anxiety that is rooted
in the history and the discourse of their occupation. For centuries, each
generation of Scottish fishers has, in its own way, seen its situation as
critical. They speak frequently of how each cohort has learned from its
elders never to take its livelihood for granted.
Yet, their confidence in themselves as fighters is never forgotten, as
Cohen (1987) also notes for the fishermen of Whalsay. However, for the
fishers of my acquaintance, taking “crisis in their collective stride,” as
Cohen puts it (1987: 150), seems to be an overstatement. Perhaps the
Whalsay folk’s further remove from mainland hierarchies and less exper-
ience with stigma as well as their scornful attitude towards “da Sooth” help
to explain the difference. Cohen says that for them, the outside world
(most directly, mainland Scotland)”was held at bay by a subtle inversion.
The powerful centre was treated as inferior in terms of local values and
as peripheral to local interests” (Cohen 1987: 27). Mainland Scottish
fishers might also look down on the moral character of others but rarely
had the luxury of regarding those others as peripheral.
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 Perpetual Crisis

Crisis may be fairly said to be a guiding theme of fisher life, and a

theme that is invoked with increasing frequency. Scarce fish, heavy debts,
and ever-sharper competition from foreign fleets have combined to make
fishing an even more uncertain livelihood. In part, such uncertainty
reflects the material and economic conditions under which fishing com-
munities have always worked: the danger, unpredictability and usually
precarious financial situation. In addition, this uncertainty also reflects the
fisherfolk’s consciousness of their social isolation and historically inferior
status. Most believe that if they do not look out for themselves, no one else
will. Or, as one fisherman said to me, “There have always been a lot of
sharks in fishing.” This wary consciousness permeates the ways they view
the possibilities for both individual and social efficacy.
In this chapter, I will explore the current moment in the contemporary
crisis, moving between written analyses of the fishing industry, modern
observations of the fishing scene, and the ways fishing villagers them-
selves talk about it. Focusing on loss of life, livelihood and location in the
world, I will investigate the question asked in the song with which I
opened this chapter: “what shall we dae?”

Crisis and the Fisherman’s Work: Danger at Sea

My father came home,

His clothes sea-wet,
His breath cold.
He said a boat had gone.
George Bruce, fisherman-poet from Fraserburgh (b. 1909).

No one ever describes fishing as a secure way of life, either in terms of

economic prospects or in terms of physical safety. As we saw in Chapter
3’s discussion of women in the fishing villages, anxiety was a very real
dimension of their existence. Each community has its own memories of
disaster:

In the north east and north the fishermen’s settlements clustered round the
creeks and bays on that rock-bound coast. These natural harbours were quite
inadequate to give protection in gales and there were disastrous losses in 1839,
1845 and 1848. In an official report in 1849 it was stated that along the miles
of coasts of Caithness the fisheries were carried on by 1200–1500 open,
undecked boats, manned by 6000–7000 fishermen and that there was no
harbour that could be entered at all states of the tide or place of refuge in a gale.
(Grant 1961: 264)

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 Fishing for Heritage

Isla St Clair, in her BBC program, Tatties and Herring, described the
conditions at Wick harbor during the 1848 storm, blaming not only wind
and waves, but human failure to provide proper lighting and moorings for
the loss of many boats.
In fact, commercial fishing still has one of the world’s highest mortality
rates, despite radical changes in technology.

There are 10–20 times more deaths [in fishing] than in other high-risk industries
such as mining, construction or agriculture. In the last ten years 224 lives have
been lost, typically around 24 each year . . . already in 2000, 13 deaths had
occurred by mid April . . . (Fish Industry Yearbook 2001: 54)

According to the Banffshire Advertiser (4 August 1998) “In 1995/6, there

were 77 fatal injuries per 100,000 fishermen. This is compared to 23.2 per
100,000 employees in the second placed mining and quarrying industries”.
Like miners, fishermen may face death singly or in groups. But unlike
miners, who never own the mines in which they work, those fishermen
who do own their own boats live with the possibility of losing the very
means of production. Livelihoods, as well as lives, are at risk. As McGoodwin
(1990: 29) points out, “few land-based occupations present individuals
with the risk of losing all of their productive capital – as well as their lives
– every time they go to work”. Anyone who has read Sebastian Junger’s
(1997) The Perfect Storm, about the doomed Gloucester swordboat, the
“Andrea Gail,” or who has seen the film made from it, will understand
immediately what this means. To find similar stories, one has only to scan
the pages of Scotland’s premier fishing trade magazine, Fishing Monthly.
A harrowing tale – with a happier outcome – was reported there in 1997:

The fishing was good and the weather was fair to moderate . . . Spirits were
high . . . when suddenly the sky blackened. The rain came down in sheets and
the thunder roared as the lightning ran across the sky. Everybody was absol-
utely terrified as the massive lumps of water which were shown up by streaked
lightening crashed down on the vessel’s deck. It was though the very devil
himself was present . . . The huge wave hit the vessel and lifted it clear out of
the water, like someone shaking a wet rug on a rainy day. It all happened so
quickly, human bodies and tangled fishing nets everywhere. When at last the
vessel surfaced from its deluge of water and foam; five very crumpled and very
scared men were clearly shown to be still on after deck; but where was the sixth
man? (Fishing Monthly, 8 December 1997)

As it turned out, the sixth man had been washed overboard and was
only rescued with great difficulty. The North Sea takes a steady toll, its

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 Perpetual Crisis

rocks and storms snuffing out fishermen’s lives with frightening regul-
arity. Ferrydeners told me that fishermen did not learn to swim, for they
believed that once the sea had gotten its hold, it would not let go again.
Given the cold waters they sailed in this was not an entirely irrational
belief. No matter how well built the ship, no matter how sophisticated the
navigational instruments, the fragile shell housing men and gear remains
at the mercy of the hidden undersea wreck, rocky shore, shifting sandbar,
rogue wave or wild tempest.
My conversations with fishermen and their families often featured
reminiscences about hair-raising danger. These were generally presented
in tones that laced casual commentary with dramatic flourishes. In one
conversation, an elderly man from the northern town of Buckie told me
of a particularly bad day when he was shoveling coal during a trawling
voyage:

We was taken in an awful storm very near Cape Wrath. We didn’t know what
to do but run before the wind. It took two men to lift the hatch. The man I was
lifting the hatch with looked at my face and said, “Jimmy, this is the last day
you have to live.” I was about twenty-three. If it hadn’t a been for my good
eyes, we would all have perished in the Pentland Firth. I happened to spot the
light at Scrabster. I can see that man’s eyes yet. We was the only boat shot our
nets that night. The rest of the fleet kept in. The Pentland Firth is about the
wildest place on the coast.

Some storms have been memorialized in poem, song and story as

emblems of catastrophe and loss for fishing communities, or even, as in
the case of the North Sea gale of 1881, for the entire coast. John Watt wrote
Windy Friday, the saga of the storm that took 129 men from Eyemouth,
on the southeast coast:

Two score and five sailed out that day

For the ‘deep hole’ they were bound.
With all sails set from Eyemouth Bay
None better could be found.
And fourteen score o’ fishers brave
Sent out one heartfelt plea,
That they’d be spared upon the wave
To reap the white fish from the sea . . .

From the Orkneys to the Channel Isles

On that October day,
The wind it blew two thousand miles

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 Fishing for Heritage

From Hoy to Newlyn Bay.

And seven score Mother’s Sons and nine
They died off Eyemouth’s shore.
These bonny boys who held the line
Would plough the seas no more.

The grinding turn o’ the hearse wheel

In October Eighty One,
Made every man and woman kneel
In prayer for Eyemouth’s Sons.
For this was the price they had to pay
The living and the dead,
And the price that Eyemouth paid that day
To earn her daily bread.

Such losses are hardly ancient history, as I was reminded by a retired

skipper who now is active in fisheries politics.

There was a while when we were losing a lot of boats and crew in North Sea.
This was in the 1970s. There was a lot of bad weather. Buckie lost two or three.
That makes a big hole in a small community. Boats have got bigger, but that’s
not the whole answer. The “Acacia Wood” was lost recently and she was a top
class boat from Lossie [Lossiemouth]. Boats would disappear and not be
reported for a day or two. I spoke to the skipper of the ‘Kestrel” who said he’d
been speaking the night before to the “Nonesuch” and had a bad feeling he
knew she wouldn’t last the night.

And such devastating events still afflict coastal communities, some-

times raising questions of responsibility and of blame. In 1997, the town
of Peterhead saw four crewmembers die when the trawler, the Sapphire
sank in three hundred feet of water some twelve miles from land. Only the
skipper escaped. This tragedy was, sadly, common, but its aftermath
revealed some changes in the way those bereaved are reacting to such
losses. Once, it was widely accepted that drowned sailors were never seen
again. However, the families of the Sapphire’s crew demanded that the
government raise the boat and recover the remains. The families’ actions,
taken in part because of allegations of mishandling on the part of the
skipper, did not sit well with everyone, particularly with the skipper’s
friends and kin. Within Peterhead, as well as within the fishing industry
more widely, people debated the wisdom of such a demand. Many doubt-
less feared the rifts to the community that might arise in the face of an
investigation. Newspaper columnist Tom Morton commented:

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 Perpetual Crisis

When I wrote last year expressing concern about what flew in the face of
fishing community tradition, the reaction from throughout Scotland indicated
that within maritime circles, if not political ones, attempting to raise the
Sapphire was considered a mistake. (Scotsman, 24 March 1999)

The government was, in any case, reluctant to comply, doubtless

confirming some fishers’ beliefs that politicians were not their friends. On
4 August 1998, the Banffshire Advertiser quoted shipping minister Glenda
Jackson as saying that

The Government regard the sea as an honourable last resting place . . . We

believe this is consistent with the traditions of seafaring which recognises the
sea-bed as a grave. But we recognise that modern technology makes possible
the recovery of relatively small vessels, although these operations will often
be dangerous and costly.

Fishermen are aware that human error plays a strong role in their
chances of returning from sea alive. In an article on industrial safety
issues, Fishing Monthly (June 2000: 17) reported that “over a three year
period in the early 1990s, an average of one fisherman was killed every
eight days around the UK.” Not all these were the result of bad weather.

Almost 30 per cent of fishing vessel losses were the results of collisions or
vessels going aground, and the majority of these accidents occurred in cond-
itions of adequate visibility . . . Dr. Malcolm Findlay of the University of
Plymouth Marine Studies . . . was reported in Safety and Health Practitioner
magazine arguing passionately for a culture of safety to be introduced into the
industry.

Many skippers would argue that they are highly safety conscious but
also acknowledge that they do not always stick to the rules. I heard many
tales of bravura and corner cutting that suggested a rather macho ethos of
challenge and daring. One man spoke with pride about his days as a
determinedly entrepreneurial fisherman, setting out in weather the other
boats refused to face. With a strong sense of self-confidence and a willing-
ness to take risks, he repeatedly won distinction for being Scotland’s top-
earning whitefish skipper.
Fishing Monthly frequently reports on safety issues such as the wearing
of life jackets. Most fishermen have traditionally refused to wear these,
arguing that they impede their ability to work comfortably and efficiently.
Thus, if a man’s foot is caught by a line and he is dragged overboard, he
must depend on the quickness of his crewmates to observe his disappear-
ance. The following article illustrates this quite starkly:

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 Fishing for Heritage

The crew of a 23 metre crabber were hauling in a fleet of pots during the late
evening in heavy weather and snow storms . . . The vessel pitched heavily and
the back rope, on to which the crab pots were secured came off the hauler. At
the same time the pot which had just been placed on the table, was suddenly
pulled back overboard before it could be released. As the pot went overboard
it knocked one of the fishermen, who had been standing with his back to the
hauling hatch, into the sea . . . [the skipper] swam 20 metres to the fisherman
who was floating face down in the water . . . A rope was thrown to the skipper
but he was unable to hold on to both the rope and the fisherman. Unfortunately,
the fisherman was lost.

And if, as has often been reported, a man falls overboard when out alone
(as is sometimes the case in lobstering), he has no chance at all.
An article in a northern weekly compared the risks of fishing to those
of other dangerous industries, claiming that things are getting worse rather
than better:

Fishing communities have always known the dangers the men who work in the
industry face. Casualties have always been high. But now the industry has a
worse safety record than any other sector of business. Over the past five years,
the accident rate for all UK fishing vessels has increased significantly. And now
the industry is No. 1 in the casualty stakes.
In 1995/96, there were 77 fatal injuries per 100,000 fishermen. This is
compared to 23.2 per 100,000 employees in the second placed mining and
quarrying industries. And though the number of vessels has been reduced
significantly, there is no corresponding fall in the accident rate. (Banffshire
Advertiser, 4 August 1998)

Articles from the same issue reported two local fatalities: a deckhand
who died in a fall overboard and a crewman who drowned when his boat
capsized.
If fishermen have symbolic practices designed to improve their chances
of survival it is hardly surprising. Most accounts of fisher life from
anywhere in the world emphasize the special belief systems and ritual
practices of fishermen (Anson 1974 [1930], 1965, 1975 [1932]; Christensen
1977; Cook 1987; Gill 1993; Kalland 1995; Mullen 1978; Nadel 1986;
Robbens 1989; Thompson et al. 1983). Graham Rich reports, for example,
that Scottish fishing boats are deliberately kept plain because “the myth
is that the sea can become envious of boats which are too beautiful. The
sea will want to possess the boat for herself” (Finlay 1998: 86).
As I noted in Chapter 2, this focus on “superstition” has been frequently
used to define fishermen as backward or primitive. However, it is common

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 Perpetual Crisis

for those engaged in risky livelihoods such as farming, mining or fishing

to employ mystical defenses. Doing so has nothing to do with an inher-
ently pre-rational mentality. It has everything to do with a universal need
to control the essential, but uncontrollable (Malinowski 1948).
The fishermen I met often mentioned the prevalence of what they
themselves labeled superstitions, practices they believed were old fash-
ioned but persistent. Among those that they mentioned, ritual avoidances
predominated. We have already seen that women were bad luck for boats.
Many also believed that ill-luck would follow the utterance of certain
words on board, such as salmon, hare or pig. Some fishermen wouldn’t
even allow these words to be spoken in the home: “In oor hoose, ye
coudna’ say salmon. Ye had to say, ‘the red fish.’ A rabbit was a ‘mappy,’
and if ye met the minister, ye’d run and touch cauld [cold] iron.” What
struck me about these revelations was the mixture of embarrassment and
pride in their voices. If such practices were seen as superstitious, they were
also indices of the courage and luck necessary in the fishing profession.
Their perils involved more than the fear of drowning. As stigmatized
people, fishermen have had to negotiate an often hostile social environ-
ment. They were also chronically beset by economic woes. Lummis
claims that some East Anglian fishermen were more concerned with
economic uncertainty than with the possibility of dying at sea, and that the
numerous ritual practices they employed were strongly motivated by the
volatility of their income (1983: 195). Well before the recent era of bank
loans, computerized gear and restrictive fishing policies, a fisherman
could drown in debt as well as in salt water. An older woman from Buckie
recalled this along with the seriousness with which people took their
obligations: “My father’s boat was lost in 1929.There was no insurance,
so we lost everything. My mother paid back every farthing the boat
owned; the gear had been bought on tick [credit], along with the stores,
the nets.”

Profit from Loss; Loss from Profit

Repeatedly, in conversations throughout the 1990s with men from Fife

and from the Moray Firth, I heard that things are “out of control.” The
notion of “control” represents a tension, if not a contradiction, in their
concepts of causation and outcome: on the one hand, the fishermen are,
overall, a devout group, and believe that God, luck, and fate ultimately call
the shots. On the other hand, raised in a Calvinist tradition that links
individual merit to hard work, they are always striving to prove that they

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 Fishing for Heritage

leave as little as possible to chance. By “control”, then, they mean a sense

that the parameters of difficulty are recognizable and that enemies are, at
least, familiar, rather than that fishermen ever truly can manage all the
conditions of their lives.
And these conditions have grown ever-more complex. Writing in the
Glasgow Herald, Thomson and McIntosh speak of three nails in the coffin
of the village fishery: the European Union, new technology, and capital
intensification. Modern fishers, like modern farmers, are inextricably
embedded in global capitalist relations and up-to-date technology. Just as
the small farmer struggles – and often fails – to survive in an era when
agribusiness runs the show, so, too, does the small fisherman encounter-
face serious disadvantage in the face of bigger players (Fitchen 1991;
Thompson, Wailey and Lummis 1983;). As McGoodwin (1990: 10) points
out, “because small-scale fishing implies a small-scale capital commit-
ment, it also usually implies small-scale power”.
Indeed, given the advantages of size and new technology, it might
fairly be said that investment capital has replaced labor as the fishermen’s
most indispensable resource. Actually, it is important to recognize that this
trend is not so new: it can be seen as early as the 1880s, when, with the
introduction of steam engines, trawling began to challenge line fishing as
a commercial technique. Of course, these larger, more efficient boats
threatened the livelihood of smaller operators. Fishermen were immed-
iately concerned about the dangers of such competition, as well as of
overfishing, but their protests went unheeded.

The 1880s found the fishing industry in the grip of change and controversy as
it had never been. Trawling, and the anti-trawling movement, were daily
reaching new heights as the steam trawler began to make its presence felt.
Aberdeen began expanding. Wick was visibly slipping from its position as
premier herring port, and Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Buckie, Whitehills, Lerwick
and Stornoway all grew rapidly . . . The 34 or so years between 1880 and 1914
were the most prosperous and eventful years the fishing had seen or ever will.
Already fewer people were actually fishing but the catching power and size of
the boats were increasing . . . All of this meant that the villages lost their most
able fishermen to the nearest town with a safe harbour . . . the changes were
ringing the death knell of such as Whaligoe, Clyth, Skateraw, Collieston,
Pitulie, Portessie, Balintore and many others . . . (Sutherland n.d.: 70–3)

Today, without a state-of-the-art boat or combine harvester, neither

fisherman nor farmer can compete in the modern market. But fewer and
fewer people are needed to operate such sophisticated and expensive
equipment, and fewer still can afford to purchase and maintain it. And so

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 Perpetual Crisis

both farming and fishing households are disappearing or are being assim-
ilated by larger enterprises. “Compared to farming as it is now conducted,
fishing remains a labour-intensive industry – but only where boats continue
to work” (Butcher 1987: 117). As a result, the community basis of fishing
is also disappearing.
Another, corresponding change in the profile of Scotland’s fishers
is the growing class division between the successful and the not-so-
successful. Two generations ago, most fisherpeople shared a substantially
similar standard of living. Even the skippers – at least in the small-boat
fishery – were not noticeably more affluent than those who worked for
them. Skippers in this group, who were normally owners or part-owners
of the boats, worked alongside their crew. In part, this was due to the
Scottish share system, a practice of distributing income to all members of
the crew after each trip. First, roughly one-half of the catch was set aside
to meet boat expenses. Then, each member of the crew got an equal share
of the catch (Baks and Postel-Coster 1977: 29).
Fishermen have taken pride in this arrangement, which they call the
Scottish share-system, feeling that everyone puts forth his best in a truly
collaborative effort that stands in sharp contrast to the practice of large
factory trawlers, where skipper and crew are merely employees of distant,
impersonal owners. But some of the new boats are introducing these more
proletarian and alienating relations of production. Reports of firms like
Asda signing fishermen up to exclusive contracts have hit the press as this
book is being written. Such contracts are eerily reminiscent of the times
when fishermen were bound to fish for a particular curer in order to work
off their debt. “We were share fishermen. Now it’s wages.” Moreover, as
the industry becomes more concentrated, it’s wages only for some.
When I explain my research to people outside the fishing community
as focusing upon the demise of the community-based fishery, they are
often surprised. Many insist that “the fishermen are rich.” They point to
the elaborate and expensive (“Dallas”) weddings reported from Peterhead
and Fraserburgh – with stories of fishermen’s daughters who travel to Italy
to have their gowns fitted. They comment on the big houses of some fisher
families. Everyone seems to know, or to know of, a fisherman with an
enviably large income who drives fast cars, spends ostentatiously, and
takes vacations in Portugal. Some also insist that the young fishermen are
better off now. “There’s mair fat on their backs,” I heard one man say.
Fortunes are indeed being made. Reports of million-pound-plus boat
investments are not uncommon. Since the late 1970s, those with sufficient
capital and access to the industry have been doing very well, indeed. In
particular, a few families from Peterhead and Fraserburgh own large

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purse-seiners that are reputed to be catching what some call “an obscene
amount” of herring and mackerel. However, they are widely regarded
and resented as exceptions. “They’re the big fellows. An exclusive club;
a closed shop.” It is often remarked that a small number of families have
bought up half of the available commercial licenses for the open-ocean
pelagic species (fish that swim freely through the upper levels of the sea,
such as herring and mackerel, as compared to the lower-dwelling, or
ground fish). One fisherman commented, “there’s enough fish for their
need, but not for their greed. The purse net just catches everything.”
Writing in the Glasgow Herald, (Glasgow Herald, 17 December 1998;
internet version from www.AlastairMcIntosh.com) McIntosh claims
that

some 3 dozen millionaires scoop-up Scotland’s entire catch of herring and

mackerel. Indeed, just 45 pelagic ships with 450 crew now monopolise an
erstwhile community resource which, at the end of World War II, supported
over 1000 boats, 10,000 crew and an even greater workforce on shore.

Thus we see how the rich get richer while the poor leave fishing: the
number of people and places involved in the fishery has shrunk, leaving
high profits for a few and decreasing opportunities for many, particularly
the younger men. Those fishermen and families with sufficient capital,
entrepreneurial skill, and a fair share of luck are doing extremely well and
are steady consumers of high-end goods and services. As one Fife fisher-
man summed it up, “the boats are doing better in the last year or two, but
there are fewer boats.”
Overall, investment in new boats has fallen dramatically over most of
the coast. One informant estimated that, in many places, the average boat
is now at least twenty-five years old. An ageing fleet leaves the future
gravely in doubt, as few young men can afford the extraordinary invest-
ment required to buy a new one.
It is clear that the fishermen are up against heavy odds. One obstacle
is the sheer cost of entering the fishery. An article in Fishing Monthly
(January 1998: 15) reports:

A number of skippers in the Pittenweem-based Fife fishing industry are

advising their sons not to go to sea but to obtain another trade . . . Apart from
skippers telling their sons not to go to sea, another major barrier to entry to the
fishing industry is the difficulty in obtaining licences. In some cases, licences
can cost as much as, or even more than, the fishing vessels themselves, with
the result that those without substantial financial resource cannot afford them
while others who do buy have a heavy debt burden . . . There has been a one

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third fall in employment since 1990 with a decline in the number of larger boats
and an overall trend towards fewer and smaller boats.

On the other hand, a few fishing locations do appear to bear out the
impression of industrial vitality. Aberdeen and Peterhead, on the northeast
coast, have been top fishing ports in the United Kingdom for a number of
years. They also cohabit with the North Sea oil industry, whose presence
drives up both property values and harbor costs. Their western neighbor,
Fraserburgh, is another striking example. The town suffered a “10 per cent
fall in catching sector employment” between 1993 and 1997 (Fishing
Monthly September 1999: 15). Nonetheless, Fraserburgh’s multi-sectioned
harbor area, known as “the Broch,” hardly gives a hint that fishing is in
trouble. The dockside is filled with vans and storage sheds. Forklifts
shift rough wooden boxes lettered with the names of various processing
companies. Boats – some of them immense trawlers – crowd the harbor.
Fraserburgh, in fact, regularly records large whitefish and herring
landings. James Miller (1999: vii) writes of watching a catch being
unloaded in 1995:
the stream of herring seemed unending, as if one vessel had swept up in one
excursion what several zulus and drifters [two older types of fishing boat]
would have considered a week-long bonanza.

Fishing Monthly devotes considerable space to news of Fraserburgh’s

activities. It describes the town in vibrant terms, celebrating the latest
harbor development project, such as the new refrigerated fish market built
to EU regulations; the top European net maker who is relocating to the
town (March, 1998: 17); or the deepening of the harbor channel to make
it accessible at low tide (Scottish Fishing Monthly, January 1997: 10).
However, Fraserburgh’s relative health is no guide to the overall state
of the fishery and, indeed, it participates in a zero-sum game. Like Peter-
head, the port has successfully captured a major share of a shrinking
resource base and this has necessarily come at the expense of the small and
mid-sized ports.
For most fishermen, affluence is elusive. Even those in work may be
struggling, as a letter to Fishing Monthly from a Shetland fisherman points
out:

A young fisherman who is employed aboard what used to be a top-earner

informed me that he is earning less than he would get on Jobseeker’s Allow-
ance . . . That is the truth from Shetland – hardly a picture of a thriving and
prosperous industry. Since 1995 the Shetland fleet has been reduced by 21
working boats . . . (April 1999).

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Where have the boats gone? Many perfectly good boats have been
decommissioned (scrapped) in a concerted EU conservation effort to
restrict access to fishing grounds. In 1995, a fisherman in Buckie told me
that nine local boats had been decommissioned within the previous year
alone. Fishermen watch all this with great dismay.
Those who remain in fishing often fight just to pay the bills. Many will
soon be forced to leave for other kinds of work. Consequently, the industry
is being beset not only by declines in stock, but also in loss of labor.
Fishing Monthly (July 2001: 13) reported a serious crew shortage in
Peterhead:

A Peterhead-based fish selling agent has admitted that the white fish fleet is
battling to plug the haemorrhaging of crewman to other industries in North-
east Scotland . . . the problems currently blighting the white fish sector are
forcing many young people to take up employment in the oil and construction
industries where they can be guaranteed regular earnings . . . There is a lack
of fish on the grounds and quotas are tight. There’s no money in the industry
. . . (even) the owners of many demersal vessels were seeking work with the
oil industry as guard ships simply to ease the pressure on the fishing grounds.

A butcher in Anstruther left the fishing when he was in his forties. “I

couldn’t take it any more. Nine out of ten fishermen would take a job
ashore if they could.” “It’s all changed now,” said the wife of another
retired fisherman. “My husband left the fishing a few years ago because
it was such a hassle with quotas and all. We were losing money and not
making it.” Another said that her son had a boat. “But it’s almost impos-
sible to get into the fishing now, when boats cost over a million pounds.”
In a harborside pub in the Fife village of Pittenweem, I spoke with a young
fisherman who was morosely waiting for incoming tide so that he could
set sail with his crew. I asked him, given his gloomy comments about the
state of Scotland’s fishery, what young men entered the trade nowadays,
rather than pursuing other careers. “The stupid ones,” he said.
Such dour assessments are not hard to find. They convey recognition
of the hard economics of modern fishing and the realization that these
economics are unlikely to sustain an acceptable lifestyle for many. Few
think matters will improve. A Buckie fisherman blamed the fishers’ own
shortsightedness: “Fishermen are mair greedy noo. In the past twenty to
thirty years, they’ve nae been thinkin’ aboot the future. Religion’s been
thrown overboard. Deep down, some of them are very stupid and think
it’ll come a’richt. But it wilnae’ come a’richt. The boats are gettin’ bigger,”
he said, “but the crews are gettin’ smaller.”

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Evidence to support his view comes from the small village of Lossie-
mouth, only miles to the west of prosperous Fraserburgh. Lossie is an
example of the communities whose days of fishing are close to ending.
Here a magazine photo caption tells us that: “The building of new flats on
a site which was formerly home to fishing gear stores is a telling reminder
that Lossiemouth’s days as a fish landing port are almost over” (Scottish
Fishing Monthly, November 1997: 11).
Lossiemouth is a typical example, but not the most extreme. In some
places, the fishing, as we have seen in the case of Ferryden, has long been
gone for good. Frequent warning calls for revitalization characterize
references to those smaller ports that are still in the game. A headline such
as “East Neuk fleet upgrade call” is followed by the claim that “The
current economic conditions facing the village-based fishing industry
simply do not permit investment to bring the fleet up to date . . . without
modernisation, the industry will suffer a slow and inevitable run down”
(Scottish Fishing Monthly, July 1995: 6).
To experience the scale and scope of this decline one has only to travel
outward from Fraserburgh, which stands at the north easternmost point of
the Scottish coast. Westward, the road spills out along the Moray Firth;
southward, it coils around the headland called the “Knuckle of Buchan”
along the North Sea. Most visitors know little about the more obscure
ports that dot these coastlines. Many of the smaller settlements are barely
visible from the road, as the A98 motorway dips inland periodically,
sweeping one quickly (well, relatively quickly) along. To reach them a
traveler must embark on narrower, more winding and often precipitous
routes, some of which scarcely seem to admit the possibility of cars.
A list of these places cries the roll call of Scotland’s maritime history.
Their names ring out to those whose families have made their living
anywhere along the coast. I like to repeat them, giving them (when I can)
their proper local pronunciations. First, going west: Britsea (Broadsea),
Sandhaven, Rosehearty, Pennan, Crivie (Crovie), Gamrie (Gardenstown),
Macduff, Banff, Whitehills, Portsoy, Sinine (Sandend), Cullen, Port-
knockie, Finnechty (Findochty), Portessie, Buckie, Buckpool, Portgordon,
Lossiemouth, Hopeman, Burghead and Nairn. Of these, only Gamrie,
Macduff and Buckie remain significantly active. Gamrie is a highly
religious community whose family-based fishing fleet is still going strong
(Knipe 1984), although they must now land their fish at Fraserburgh.
Macduff’s boatyards still get new orders to build and repair. Buckie, which
now relies heavily upon shellfish, is still listed as one of Scotland’s top 25
ports. But tiny Pennan is known today not for its fishing but for having
provided the location of Local Hero, a film whose story flirts with the

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romantic idea of the quaint but impoverished fishing village lost in the
slipstream of progress. Findochty and Cullen are heavily occupied by
summer people. Portsoy (once also a source of the famed Portsoy marble)
attracts tourists to its dramatic looking harbor and the crafts shop, but the
water is generally empty of working boats.
The story repeats itself going south: Stonehaven, Bervie (Inverbervie),
Gourdon, Johnshaven, Ferryden, Usan, Auchmithie, Arbroath, Crail,
Cellardyke, Anster (Anstruther), Pittenweem, St Monans, Largo, Buck-
haven, Granton, Newhaven, Fishherrow, Cockenzie, Port Seton, North
Berwick, Dunbar, St Abbs, Eyemouth, Burnmouth, Ross. Of these, Pitten-
weem, in the East Neuk of Fife, and Eyemouth, near the Border, have new,
up-to-date fish markets, but even these, like Arbroath, in southern Angus,
fall into that ambiguous middle-range of ports whose future is unclear.
Some of the other villages on the list are now simply of historical, or
even archaeological, interest from a fisheries point of view: Usan, for
example, is simply a cluster of ruins on a narrow, rocky inlet; Ferryden
ceased to be a working fishing port a generation ago; Auchmithie is best
known for its role in The Antiquary (Scott 1907); and, as for Cellardyke,
by Anstruther, where “every house was a fisherman’s sixty years ago,” its
fleet is long gone. In sum, most of these villages are known today as places
where “they used to be fishers.”
Many articles in Scottish Fishing Monthly have emphasized the peril-
ous position of the smaller ports. For example:

Scotland’s small fishing communities are in danger of being wiped out unless
urgent action is taken to stem their decline. The situation is so serious that this
month Scottish Fishing Monthly is calling on Scots Secretary Michael Forsyth
and Fisheries Minister Raymond Robertson . . . to give our fishing villages
valuable breathing space . . . At Pittenweem, for example, 2,672 tonnes of cod,
haddock and whiting were landed in 1986. By 1994 this figure had slumped
to only 783 tonnes, and the fall is continuing. In 1989 there were 318 regularly
employed fishermen, but by 1994 this had fallen to 230. Billy Hughes of the
local Fishermen’s Mutual Association believes Pittenweem may no longer exist
as a fishing community in 10 years time (Scottish Fishing Monthly, December
1996).

A school teacher from the local high school in the neighboring town
of Anstruther, who is descended from a Pittenweem fishing family, says
that “Pittenweem was once the center of the world.” He has seen its
decline reflected in the school curriculum. “Until 10 years ago, boys took
a course in navigation [as part of their regular studies]. They stopped that
when they could no longer get teachers.”

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But there is more to it than that. “The young lads want a better quality
of life,” says a middle-aged Fife fisherman. In Buckie, the North East
Fishermen’s Joint Group Training Association has been attempting to
address this issue, working with an Aberdeen college to provide the
sophisticated training for new recruits that would help ensure them
relatively good paying jobs. In 1995, 65 young men were in training to get
their deckhands’ certificates. “So far we’re managing to get all these boys
berths, though it’s getting harder,” said an official of the Association.
However, further south, in Eyemouth, a community development worker
told me in 1999 that “seventy or eighty boys a year graduate from the High
School and not one has gone into the fishing lately.”
In large white type set against a black background, a headline in
Scottish Fishing Monthly screams “Save our fishing villages!” The story
inside warns of the “mortal threat to our villages” from the UK govern-
ment’s refusal to enact sufficiently protective policies:

It is already too late for many villages, and most of those that do survive are a
pale shadow of their former selves, with landings well down on the glory days
of the past. It now looks as if the writing is on the wall for even these villages
unless something is done to arrest the slide. (Scottish Fishing Monthly, July
1996: 6)

“Slide” is an apt word. It is very difficult to pinpoint the exact position

either of the industry in general, or of many communities in particular. The
process can be said to have begun at many points in time, and it is not
finished yet. Some observers believe that the village-based fishery need
not inevitably end, but merely awaits the appropriate adjustment.
However, just what must be done to save it remains in contention. The
“industry” is neither harmoniously integrated nor self-regulating. And the
fishermen’s antagonists are numerous, distant and impersonal. Every-
where, now, the talk is of insufficient quotas, expensive licenses, bureau-
cratic regulations, poor fish prices, foreign competition, decommissioned
boats and satellite surveillance. News accounts in local papers and industry
magazines regularly employ a rhetoric of crisis, repeatedly employing
such terms as crisis, catastrophe, and disaster. Calls for government
assistance or policy changes have routinely sounded the death knell, not
only of the small communities, but of whole fisheries sectors, even the
entire industry.
For example, Aberdeen’s daily newspaper, The Press and Journal (16
July 1975), ran an editorial saying that the United Kingdom Government’s
White Fish Authority was correct in speaking of “our fishermen being

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close to economic catastrophe”. A few months later the P&J reported a

“crisis facing the Scottish fishing industry . . .” and said that Tory Minister
Iain Sproat “is convinced the industry is at death’s door” (13 February
1976).
No longer do fishermen sing songs like this one from the Berwickshire
coast:

It’s net after net is pulled from the sea

With the hauling, the shaking, the one, two and three,
And the herring that are climbing around your seaboots
And slithering and sliding down into the shoots
(Wood 1998: 55).

They are far more likely to sing – or listen to – songs like The Final Trawl
by Cilla Fisher,

For it’s heave away for the final trawl,

Singing haul away, my laddie-o
It’s an easy pull, for the catch is small,
Singing haul away, my laddie-o
(Cilla Fisher)

Or, the angrier verses of Matt Armour’s The Grey Flannel Line, sung on
his album, ‘Memories and Rage’:

What bastard decided that I wilnae wark,

Tae bring the fish in fae the sea?
What bastard dressed up in a grey flannel suit
Is making decisions for me? Dear God!

Armour, who hails from the Fife coast, says of this one: “Not all the
vicissitudes inflicted on the fishing trade arose from our friends in Europe.
Our own elected governments had to agree to them, and impose them with
a rigour not seen in too many other community lands” (Armour 1998).

Foreigners, Regulations, Bureaucrats and Protests

Hesiod: an Epigram on the Common Fisheries Policy: All that we did not want
to catch, we kept, and all that we wanted to take home we threw over the side
(Finlay 1998).

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Many fishermen seem to agree with dire predictions of the industry’s

demise, indeed, they have been voicing them for years. From their persp-
ective they remain perpetually engaged with irrational, hostile and even
malevolent external forces: many of them human. For at least the past 50
years, they believe things have grown worse as a shrinking resource base
has pitted them ever more intensely against fishermen of different national
fleets, from the Spanish to the Norwegians. The infamous Cod Wars of the
1950s through the 1970s between Great Britain and Iceland were one
example.1
The mid-1970s produced another conspicuous crisis-point. In the
1960s and 1970s, Scottish fishing had enjoyed a brief boom period, when
“the problems were those of adjusting to rapid success” (Cargill 1976: 2).
In the mid-1970s, however, when OPEC tightened controls over oil
production and a recession began to hit, fishermen had to face sudden rises
in fuel and equipment costs for which they were ill prepared. Simult-
aneously, demand for fish dropped, lowering prices. And, with ever more
efficient technologies, overishing became a serious concern. By 1974, the
boom had ended.
The increasing bureaucratization of fishing had produced a reaction
among the fishermen, however. No longer were they content to let others
manage their affairs. Many had been successful entrepreneurs and had
gained considerable confidence in public arenas outside their own villages.
Moreover, they were convinced that EEC policies regulating who could
fish where, as well as compensation for skyrocketing fuel prices, were
making everything worse. In March of 1975, fishermen from all around
the coast (and in England, as well) decided on radical action. Lining up
their boats one next to the other, they held a three-day blockade of all the
major ports (Cargill 1976). The blockade ended after meetings between
fishermen’s groups and the government, with the fishermen feeling that
some gains had been made. However, Cargill (1976: 52) concludes that
many of these gains were illusory, but says optimistically that

it is generally agreed that fishing gets a greater priority in negotiations and

general debate than it did previous to the Blockade . . . Therefore it could be
that the benefits of Blockade ‘75 which achieved so much in publicity and by
public sympathy will be seen over the years to come.

Cargill’s comment provides another example of the fishermen’s need

for public respect. From their perspective, when scientists and policy
makers made decisions for the fishery without consulting fishermen, this
was further confirmation of their marginal status in Scottish – and now,

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in European – society. By undertaking the blockade, fishermen were

refusing any longer to have their views ignored. However, more recent
reports about EC regulations and British government responses indicate
that the battle had just begun.2
As resources shrank and competition increased, other countries began
to enact protectionist coastal policies by asserting wider offshore territorial
domains. These were accompanied by an ostensibly successful United
Nations effort to reach mutually agreeable arrangements among states to
allocate marine resources (including fish, seabed mineral deposits and
offshore oil and gas) through the International Law of the Sea Conference.
In practice, however, things have not worked out well. Accusations of
cheating, lying and all forms of skulduggery abound.
It is, therefore, not surprising that Scottish fishermen charge what they
perceive as the lawless fishermen of foreign fleets with creating many of
their problems. They complain that the foreign fleets ignore regulations
and catch – illegally – much smaller fish. “They’re building their fleet up
while we’re runnin’ doon. We’re conservin’ oor fish for they guys.” The
catching shortage has led to disputes of many kinds and on many levels,
including quarrels between boats of different national registries and media
campaigns against selected fleets. These quarrels have revealed and
exacerbated existing tensions. The Danes are blamed for over-exploiting
the stock of sandeels, a major food source for other species, particularly
cod and haddock. But it is the Spanish who seem to arouse the greatest ire.
In 1995, Canada nearly set off a “fish war” with Spain when it detained
a Spanish trawler beyond the 200 mile limit. The trawler, it claimed, was
violating quota and size regulations while landing halibut from the Grand
Banks. In a show of solidarity, ports all over Scotland flew the Canadian
maple leaf flag, and Scottish fishermen spoke scathingly of the “greedy
Spaniards” and alluded to the affray as a “moral battle.” Scottish Fishing
Monthly quickly blamed the Spanish for having “little regard for adhering
to fishery rules and regulations” (May 1995: 4).
Anti-Spanish feeling clearly had not cooled much by the end of 1996,
when the magazine blazoned “Spanish Shame” on its front page, in
response to a report that the Spanish were openly flouting European Union
minimum landing size rules. “The findings will come of little surprise to
anyone in the UK and Irish industries where it is widely known that the
Spanish fleet regularly lands undersized fish . . . with impunity” (Fishing
Monthly, October 1996: 1). Some comments betray an envious tinge: “The
Spanish fishing industry is huge and has a lot of political clout. They have
taken full advantage of this to expand and modernize the fleet,” said a man
standing on the pier in Buckie. This comment reflects Scottish fishermen’s

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convictions that they are marginalized not only within Europe, but by the
British government.3
Unquestionably, many fishermen in Scotland today believe that they
are being seriously disadvantaged by the current European Union’s
Common Fisheries Policy (the CFP, established in 1983), with its quota
and management regimes, though it seems that most prefer to remain
within the CFP and work for change. The CFP sets species quotas for each
national fleet, allowing the Danish, the Spanish, the British and others
their shares of cod, saithe, haddock and so on.

The CFP uses the concept of quotas to share out the fish catch among the
member states. This is done according to the principle of ‘relative stability’:
the share-out is based on the track records of each country’s fishing pract-
ices . . . The EC’s own scientists and those in the International Council for the
Exploration of the Sea give annual estimates of the size of the stock of the most
important species of fish; these figures are used to determine the Total Allow-
able Catch (TAC) for each species . . . The TACs are then subjected to debate
and negotiation, and are shared out, usually after much wrangling and horse-
trading . . . (Miller 1999: 213).

Not surprisingly, no one is ever satisfied with the allocations or with

the ways restrictions are imposed. “All Britain’s rights were signed away
to the EEC. Lots of us didn’t realize the long-term implications” said one
informant. Fish quota cuts proposed by the EC for the year 2000, for
example, provoked howls of outrage.

Employing 21,000 people in Scotland alone, fishing industry sources have

warned that jobs are in jeopardy because of the TAC cuts . . . “A lot of fisher-
men are going to go to the wall. I can’t think of any other industry that would
be expected to make such a sacrifice without any kind of solution or form
of compensation”. (Dr Ian Duncan, secretary of the Scottish Fishermen’s
Federation, quoted in Fishing Monthly, January 2000: 1)

Along with the CFP, fishermen widely resent the scientists who provide
the basis for management decisions. They claim, among other things, that
scientists pay no attention to the vast store of knowledge the fishermen
possess and that they derive their data from abstract models, rather than
real experience. “There is a credibility gap,” said one producers’ organiz-
ation leader (SFM, February 1996: 16). While no one has yet to burn a
fisheries biologist or an EU official in effigy, as we saw the Ferrydeners
do to a fishcurer, it is clear that scientists and bureaucrats have now
become “the enemy of the fisherman.”

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Fishermen’s policy concerns are articulated through a number of

interest-based associations. One of the main ones is the Scottish Fisher-
men’s Federation, founded in 1973, just two years after the introduction
of the Common Fisheries Policy. Members gather regularly in often
contentious regional meetings where personalities and politics come to the
fore. Some fishermen worry about the extent to which the industry has
become politicized, perhaps, as one skipper suggested, because all the
foreign competition was causing the Scottish fleet to turn inward against
itself. “A proud industry like the fishing industry cannot be run simply on
sound bites and back biting” (Sutherland 1998: 18). In 1990, this in-
fighting became apparent when a sizable group of Scottish and English
fishermen formed a breakaway group called the Fishermen’s Association
Ltd (FAL). They launched a campaign called “Save Britain’s Fish” (SBF)
to lobby for Britain’s withdrawal from the Common Fisheries Policy,
which would have entailed withdrawing from the EU itself. Their rhetoric
depicted British participation as evidence of blind obstinacy in the face of
obvious solutions that lie in the power of the nation state.

For British fishermen, the very existence of their industry and way of life
demands that Parliament repudiates the foolish surrender of this vital national
interest to a foreign power. No politician had the right to surrender these
immensely valuable natural resources, which rightly belong to the British
people, according to international law. (http: 222.savebritfish.org.uk/solfsh.htm)

SBF has proved to be a source of contention among Scottish fishermen,

as tough times make for hard lines and strong politics. Some fishermen’s
groups have been staunchly supportive, others wary at best. “At first,
people just laughed,” said a prominent political figure in the fishing
industry. However, SBF could not be ignored. In 1995, the Scottish White
Fish Producers’ Association publicly broke ranks with SBF, creating
considerable bitterness among erstwhile friends.
In addition, many members of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation felt
that those leading the anti-CFP campaign were fanatics who were damag-
ing the communal spirit and sense of common cause that had always char-
acterized the greater fishing community. As with the blockade, there was
also, I suspect, a concern with how SBF was affecting the fishermen’s
public image. Given their history of stigma and marginalization, and in
particular their reputation for excess religious zeal, many fishermen feel
that their representatives need to appear modern, thoughtful and thor-
oughly rational. By contrast, one of SBF’s chief activists is widely known
for his intense, evangelical rhetoric. One of my informants said of him that

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he “starts with the book of Revelations. He sees a seven-headed monster

from Rome destroying Europe.”
Many, nonetheless, remained in sympathy with the organization’s
goals. “I don’t like the EU. I would vote for coming out. Then we could
control our own fishing. Brussels has taken too much power. Our fishing
minister should represent us. They’re probably right, but, if it’s politically
impossible, why waste time? We need to be released from the CFP without
leaving Europe.”
The British government is also high on the fishermen’s list of trouble-
makers. In their eyes, the government does not pay the fishing industry
enough attention or respect. “Fishing is just a cottage industry as far as the
government’s concerned,” said one. Echoing this sentiment, Scottish
Fishing Monthly regularly criticizes government policy as ineffectual or
worse. Warning that growing numbers of skippers are leaving the industry,
Hamish Morrison, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation
was quoted as saying:

I can’t think of any other industry which is so important for employment and
wealth generation to be treated this way. If a few jobs are lost in the textile
industry, then the Government does all kinds of things to help out, but fishing,
it appears, is treated differently. (Fishing Monthly, September 1999: 5)

Morrison’s claim that fishing is disproportionately disadvantaged in

government policy may be debateable, but it is highly consistent with the
fishers’ belief that non-fishers are fundamentally unsympathetic to their
needs. The conviction that fishermen are “treated differently” echoes years
of perceived low status.
Hopes that the newly established Scottish Parliament would change the
fishermen’s standing were dealt something of a blow when it immediately
agreed to a new set of fishing boundaries with England in 1999. According
to members of the Scottish fleet, the new configuration substantially
reduced their control of coastal waters, “effectively ceding over 5000
square miles of traditional Scottish waters to the control of English
authorities” (Fishing Monthly, August 1999: 2). They “called upon the
[newly devolved Scottish] government to admit it has made a serious
blunder” (Fishing Monthly, July 1999: 4). The Scottish Fishermen’s
Federation also claimed angrily that its members were excluded from
discussions. It is hard to know whether this boundary revision has any
practical significance, but its symbolic importance is undeniable. From the
fishermen’s point of view, it is yet one more indication that no one takes
their views seriously.

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With their long history of marginalization, fishermen believed that only

drastic action would make officials listen to their grievances. Doubtless
with pertinent memories of the 1976 blockade in their minds, Scottish
fishermen waged yet another protest action in April of 2001:

The imposition of cod closures in the North Sea led to the biggest fishermen’s
protest in years. This culminated in an armada of 167 fishing vessels steaming
dramatically up the River Forth in protest at a lack of cash from the Scottish
Executive to allow boats forcibly displaced from the cod fishery to stay in port
with financial assistance, rather than being forced to plunder immature haddock
stocks . . . The industry won plaudits [but no cash] for being conscious of the
need to safeguard their future. (Fishing Monthly, January 2002: 7)

The EU, the British government, and now the Scottish parliament may
be the most common targets for the fishermen’s wrath, but they are not the
only ones. We have already seen that fisheries’ scientists with their
unpopular, low estimates of sustainable harvests are widely derided. Even
greater scorn is reserved for environmentalist groups that, the fishermen
claim, are less concerned with human beings than with the fate of the grey
seals that eat fish right out of the nets. To mention Greenpeace invites
instant rage. “Everyone’s in sympathy with whales but the seals – shite.
We never saw seals in the Firth of Forth. Now seals are eatin’ cod. I reckon
seals are catching more fish than the fishermen,” said a Fife fisherman.
Fishing Monthly agrees. Policies protecting seals are “a symbol of every-
thing the green movement represents, and, it would seem, takes preced-
ence over everything else, including the interests and livelihoods of
fishermen and their families” (Scottish Fishing Monthly, July 1995).
Hence, when the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation met with World Wildlife
Scotland to discuss common interests, Fishing Monthly called the event
“historic.” Hamish Morrison, chief executive of SFF, saw the meeting
as an opportunity to improve the stereotype of fishermen as wasteful
predators: in effect, to reduce stigma.

Mr. Morrison said that families in rural areas of Scotland often had no option
other than fishing, and it was important that negative images of the industry
must change. On this line of argument, Mr. Morrison cited the government’s
belief that all fishermen were guilty of black fish landings . . . It is the per-
ception in this country that fishermen are victims. Victims of a perception
of guilt. It could be concluded from this that the government believe that
the fishing industry is full of dangerous criminals. (Scottish Fishing, April
2000: 4)

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The distribution and consumption sectors of the fishing economy are

also held to blame for changing the fisher way of life. Changes are even
coming to the fish market. The old-style fish auction, where buyers
congregate in the early morning to haggle over the fish boxes spread out
over the quay, may be on its way out now that some ports in Europe are
moving toward electronic marketing. This means that the large buyers,
like supermarkets, can pick and choose from catches all over the country.
As this happens in Scotland, the boxes of blue-veined shrimp, toothy,
monster-headed monkfish, and silvery whitefish may no longer be spread
out like a slippery cornucopia, to be picked over by discriminating buyers.
As one man told me:

People don’t move around the market floor. They can buy from different ports
at the same time. In fact, with the big boats and their satellite communications,
sometimes the fish are sold before they even get to port. This will mean the end
of the fish auction.

Supermarket firms like Tesco also contract with specific boats to fish
only for them. By such means, they acquire consumable fish through a
vertically integrated commodity system that reaches from the net to the
display case. Many Scottish fishermen are very uneasy about this, seeing
these super-owners as impersonal, absentee landlords with no loyalty to
any particular producer or locality. They set quality standards and price
structures and “cut off boats that don’t deliver.”
An Eyemouth man summed it all up by saying that

the problems of fishing include legislation, quotas, and prices, and there’s not
enough new blood. The scale of commoditization has grown and the fishermen
don’t like it. Fish sold by the ton instead of by the box give processors,
distributors, and retailers a bigger profit margin and fishermen lose control at
an earlier stage.

The same fishermen who complain about inadequate consumption,

management systems, and Green activists, however, also agonize over the
ever-growing imbalance between pursuer and prey. As more than one
fisherman said to me: “There are too many fishermen chasing too few
fish.” They see themselves as one of the last remaining hunters in a post-
industrial world and worry about what happens to the hunter when his
prey disappears. What will they become?
The above comments from Hamish Morrison about negative govern-
ment perceptions notwithstanding, some fishermen have, in fact, become
criminals. Fishermen know how serious the ecological situation is, but

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they openly acknowledge that no boat can survive without breaking the
rules. Some become adept at evading surveillance from the Fishery
Officers (a feat that is getting increasingly difficult) and landing “black-
fish,” that is fish that are undersized or caught over quota. Not all blackfish
have been specifically targeted for catching, but are, in fact, fish that
would otherwise have to be discarded.
As we have seen, EU fisheries management policy imposes species
quotas on each boat. Every year, a boat may take a certain amount of any
given species, depending upon its individual track record, based upon the
amount caught the previous year. Once the limit is reached, a boat caught
landing that species is subject to a heavy fine. While, in theory, this should
reduce pressure on vulnerable fish stocks, fishermen say that there is no
way of avoiding what they call a “bycatch,” that is, unwanted numbers or
species that get caught in the net. Once hauled up from the ocean, the fish
are dead. If they cannot be landed legally within the quota, they must be
dumped overboard or sold illegally, as “blackfish.” The fisherman may
run these into a non-registered port, sometimes selling them directly to
restaurants. I was told in one village that blackfish were routinely landed
there, “but we don’t talk about it.” So, as many fishermen see it, the choice
boils down to one of irrational waste versus much-needed income, of
complying with rules set by scientists and policy makers versus living as
modern smugglers. Many fishermen now regard themselves as outlaws
and indeed, technically, many are. They are firmly caught between the
devil and the deep blue sea.
In an example of the fishers’ need to defend their reputations, one
skipper rationalized blackfish landings in the face of criticisms from the
Scottish Fish Merchants Federation. The SFMF had labeled fishermen’s
catching practices as “reckless”: “All I can say . . . is you cannot make
wine out of water, you cannot make the available quota spin out all year.
If no one was landing black fish then everyone would been finished about
July” (Scottish Fishing Monthly, January 1996: 16).
Such stressful choices are enough to drive some men away from fishing
altogether. One skipper told me without embarrassment that his son had
been forced to give up the fishing because his nerves could not take the
constant pressure of choosing between flouting the regulations and
dumping perfectly edible fish. “He felt like an outlaw . . . He had a
breakdown.”
In 1995 I interviewed a retired skipper from the village of Portsoy, on
the Moray Firth. Sitting in the lounge beneath an oil portrait of his boat,
he mused about what he saw as an inevitable conflict between attempts to
manage fisheries and the innately unruly character of fishermen.

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I went fishing just after the war. I stopped fishing in ’84 when I was fifty-four.
My son is a chartered accountant in Saudi Arabia. He was never going to go
to sea, so we sold the boat and cut my commercial ties to fishing.
I used to love being a fisherman. There was something different in every
haul. It was like gambling. The white fish was exciting.
Fishermen are loners. All fishermen cheat. We could teach the Spanish how
to cheat. If I went out to sea now, I would catch above my limit. Conservation
and fishermen dinna mix. A fisherman is a hunter and he’s got to catch fish to
keep up his position and do his job. The better fisherman he is, the more against
regulations he is, because regulations takes everybody down to the same level.
There’s no good and bad skippers after that. At the end of the day, fishing is
cash. It’s bred into us that we’re hunters and the more fish we catch the better
we’re dong our job. We seem to be never satisfied, aye [always] looking for
something.

It may well be that the fisher hunter of today also sees himself as prey,
thus entitled to use any means possible to ensure his own survival.4
In sum, the problems besetting fishermen today proliferate at a rate and
on a scale that overwhelm the locally based producer. The odds are so
heavily against the newcomer and the smaller entrepreneur that it is not
surprising that the younger generation is less and less likely to see fishing
as a viable future. Few young men now find fishing an attractive career,
perceiving it as difficult, dangerous, and always a risky proposition. So
every slight to their integrity, every aspersion that calls up memories of
stigma and the persistence of marginality, hurts them all the more.

Misery Has Company: The North Atlantic Fisheries Crisis

Scottish fishers are not suffering alone, of course. An emerging global

crisis in the fisheries, of which the North Atlantic is but one part, gives
them plenty of company. In Plundering the Seas, Canadian biologist
Richard Berrill reports that “the picture is grim everywhere you look”
(1997: 2). Writing primarily, as he puts it, “from the point of view of the
fish” (Berrill 1997: ix), he acknowledges the impossibility of preserving
both fishing communities and communities of fish:

Fishing communities from Indonesia and China to West Africa, Western

Europe and North America are dying as fish stocks collapse and as high-tech
commercial boats make small-scale fishing operations unprofitable. Around
the world, 200 million people depend on fishing to make a living, and for many
that living is at risk. (Berrill 1997: 2–3)

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Thus, like their counterparts elsewhere, Scottish fishers are caught in

a cauldron of problems that has been bubbling up for some years. A quick
survey from Norway to Newfoundland reveals anxiety over stocks in
decline as well as about the often draconian management measures
imposed to deal with them. This process has been intensively scrutinized
by biologists, economists, journalists and anthropologists, and most agree
that the outlook is bleak (Berrill 1997; Blades 1995; Chantraine 1993;
McGoodwin 1990; Warner 1983). Berrill (1997: 2) says simply that “We
are obviously close to, and probably exceeding, the maximum global
catch that is possible to sustain.”
Official reactions to the crisis in various countries have been slow, often
bumbling, and always controversial. Controversy is inevitable, of course,
because any long-term measures one takes to insure the fisheries’ future
by conserving fish stocks hurt the short-term interests of the fishermen
themselves, who must “pay off the bank loan,” as Cilla Fisher sings in the
song which opened this chapter. In 1992, for example, the Canadian
government imposed a moratorium on the Grand Banks cod fisheries; in
consequence, life in many Newfoundland outports has subsided into a
jobless misery made worse with the consequent closing of fish processing
plants (Blades 1995; Davis ). In 1993, the once highly successful Faroese
fishing industry suffered a precipitous collapse in the face of declining
catches and international quota restrictions (James 1995). In October of
1994, the New England Fisheries Management Council recommended
that Georges Bank, a major fishing ground for New England and Canadian
fishermen, “be closed to fishing for flounder, cod, haddock and any
other stocks deemed to be depleted” (Hartford Courant, 27 October 1994:
A7). A typical headline for the American industry’s National Fisherman
now reads, “More Pain Ahead For New England: the Groundfish Crisis
Continues, Putting Fishing Communities From Maine to Alaska on Alert.”
The article warns that cod and haddock stocks are recovering far too
slowly, despite “painful sacrifice” and that “everyone knows what that
means. More regulations. More pain. More boats going out of business”
(National Fisherman 1997, 77: 30). None of this, of course, emerged
overnight.
Since the 1950s, boats from all over the industrialized world have
converged in the rich offshore grounds of the North Atlantic, leading to
intense pressure on a number of species. By the 1970s, fishing technology
had become so efficient and the rewards to fishermen so great that many
stocks were in an acute state of depletion, exhausted by the efforts of what
Warner (1983: viii) has called “the ultimate fishing machines”, those
immense factory trawlers that virtually vacuum the sea bottom and

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process or freeze the fish on the spot. Not only can they catch immense
quantities of fish, but they can do so for weeks or months on end.

On a clear day or night, some areas of the Grand Banks [off Newfoundland]
are like crowded floating cities, with concentrations of coursing trawlers flying
the flags of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the
United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations. (Andersen and Wadel 1972:
3–4)

Other factors besides over-fishing have contributed to the problem.

Pollution and habitat destruction, for example, have damaged salt marsh
fish breeding grounds along many coasts (Carson 1962; Teal 1969).
Changes in water temperature have also been implicated in some places.
In the North Sea, industrial fishing (for non-human consumption) wipes
out species, such as sand eels, which feed the fish stocks. Regardless of
the cause, the consequence for fishing people worldwide remains the
same: a competitive environment that makes village or locally based
fishing communities very hard, if not impossible, to sustain.

Vignettes of Loss: Nostalgia and Anger

If I had to choose one conversational theme that predominated over all else
in my years of fieldwork, it would be that of regret for these communities
and the way of life the fisherfolk remember. Here, I present here a series
of vignettes that illustrate this regret. These are not to be dismissed as
merely expressions of nostalgia. As people reconstruct and perhaps
romanticize their own past, they create a reality that guides and motivates
them in the present. Nor do they do this alone. The sharing of memories
is a profoundly social experience, creating and reinforcing bonds between
individuals and groups. It may also become the basis for communal action
and politics (Connerton 1989). For them, the recounting of memory also
became an implicit critique of progress, which they generally saw as
something that “happens” to their villages. For example, as we have seen
for Ferrydeners and their response to the offshore oil base, the past became
an interpretive guide for present action or inaction. What Boyarin (1994)
argues regarding how the politics of memory is employed to shape the
nation-state can apply equally well at the local or community level. We
shall see in the following chapter on heritage and tourism that fisherfolk
employ memory as a way of making claims upon the present.
During many of my encounters with the fisherfolk, people explicitly
pointed out their unhappiness with those aspects of modern times relating

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to the quality of community life. They lamented the loss of the fishing
industry that had sustained it. Sometimes a sadness pervaded their voices
as they compared present times with those of their youth. At other times,
the tone was one of resounding pride at what once had been.

David and Mary, in Nairn

One evening in the summer of 1993, I sat in the house of an elderly couple,
watching their videotaped copy of an old film called The Drifters. This
powerful documentary, made by film maker John Greirson in 1928,
chronicles the offshore fishing industry in Britain. My hosts had dubbed
in folk singer Cilla Fisher’s voice singing Whaur Will We Gang? so that
we listened to her lament for the modern fisherman’s dilemma as we
watched grainy, black and white, oilskin-clad fishermen wrestle with the
sea from slippery, windswept decks. Heroic hunters, they relentlessly
pursued their prey despite fierce winds, high seas and exhausting work.
As we sat comfortably ensconced in our armchairs, enjoying our tea
and biscuits, a small group of friends and neighbors commented knowl-
edgeably on the scenes unfolding before us, comparing older with modern
techniques and recalling their own days at sea. They saw no incongruity
in listening to a modern song play against the old film for they recognized
versions of their own experiences in the old pictures. Yet they did wonder
what, if anything, there was left “to dae” for an industry they saw as
teetering on the brink of collapse.
The house where we gathered was in Nairn, a substantial seaside holi-
day destination and market town about twelve miles east of Inverness, on
the large inlet of sea known as the Moray Firth. More specifically, we were
in a harborside district of Nairn called the Fishertown, which Anson
described in 1930 as “a little world all by itself” (Anson 1974 [1930]:
224). Although the Fishertown has no obvious boundaries demarcating it
from the rest of Nairn, its streets seem to close in on themselves and to
wind the walker into ever-narrowing spaces. I had first met David at the
Fishertown Museum, a crowded, one-room affair that one can enter for a
small fee. Except for myself, all those they had invited to watch the film
came from a fisher family and remembered the days when the water was
full of working boats, instead of the tidy yachts that occupy it now. That
was during the days before Nairn’s harbor was called (with a curl of the
lip) a marina. “We’re not over the moon about the change. It’s a’ yachties
noo. It would be nicer if it were fishing boats,” said one resident of the
fishertown.

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Bob, in Buckie

In 1995, when Bob asked me if I wanted a ride in the fish van going down
to Fraserburgh from Buckie, I accepted with alacrity. Not because I
expected a particularly comfortable ride in the cramped vehicle, but
because it was a chance to see a town I had heard much about. It was also
an opportunity to travel down the Moray coast with a man who had spent
all his life in the fishing industry and who had accumulated a vast store
of local knowledge and information.
Bob had first “gone to the fishing” in 1937 in a steam drifter with his
father. Back then, he mused, people’s lives were happier. “There was not
the covetousness. We bore things together. Ye were mair dependent on
God. The fishing community was together. If there was a bereavement,
everyone was all in sympathy. It’s no that way now. Everyone’s in compet-
ition wi’ each ither. Ah’m speakin’ truthfully.”
Bob left the fishing in 1962 because he had joined the Close Brethren,
a Christian sect found along the northeast coast of Scotland. “Ye had to
be home every night for meetin’.” Moreover, the Brethren had strict rules
about who could associate with whom. Members could not take meals
with non-members. “Ye couldn’t have an unbeliever in the boat.” Though
Bob eventually left the Brethren, he still valued piety and spoke approv-
ingly of the old days when no fisherman would even think of setting sail
on a Sunday. “They lived God-fearing lives. But nooadays it’s a’ changed.”
As we bumped our way around the bends and turns of the coastal road,
I pestered him with questions: what was the name of that hill? How big
was that village? When had the fishing died out in that community? Bob
answered all my queries in great detail and with many anecdotes: all of the
questions, that is, that had to do with places on the seaward side of the van.
For the landward side, he had little to say, unless it was about prominent
features of the landscape that provided sighting points for men at sea.
It was not that Bob was completely unaware or ignorant of non-
maritime landscapes and lives. Nor was he, and nor is any fisherman,
despite dense local ties, merely a “local,” that purely imaginary creature
who walks only village streets and dwells only in the cozy ‘face-to-face’
community of kin and lifelong neighbors. Bob was, after all, a citizen of
modern Scotland – a taxpayer, a consumer, and a television viewer. As a
fisherman, he had also participated in a highly sophisticated, internation-
ally articulated industry. But it was the sea and the coast that drew his
attention that day, as every day, for they provided him with the sense of
expertise, or cultural mastery, that marked him as teacher and me as
student. It was his seaside perspective that he was anxious to share with

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me and to elucidate, for this above all was his domain. Bob’s descriptions
and explanations of the fishing industry – its history, technology, and
social value – were more than his gracious acquiescence to a question and
answer dialogue initiated by an outsider. For him, they were claims to
ownership of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), assertions of authority and
attempts to ensure that at least the memory of fisher culture would be
preserved, despite what he saw as the industry’s decline.
Bob’s talk took us down the coast and also back through time. He had
a lot to say about harbors, markets and even whole villages that had
changed or disappeared. The sight of a tumble-down house, a boat-yard,
an old shed or even a stretch of empty sea set off a jumble of anecdotes,
recollections, stories and observations about the days when fishing and its
ancillary activities, including net-making and mending, coopering (barrel-
making), and fish gutting, packing and selling, occupied nearly all the men
and women of the villages that lined the Moray Firth:

At one time there were 400 drifters at Buckie. At one time there were 126 at
Portknockie. Buckie once had one-fifth of the whole British fishing fleet. They
did gutting here. In 1912, the herrin’ fishing was very prosperous. Fishermen
invested their money in houses. In 1913 there was 1163 drifters in frae
Yarmouth. Five thousand women gutters, mostly from Scotland. There was
1700 coopers. In the 1930s, there was a slump, and then the drifters were
commandeered for the war. After the war, there was real prosperity until the
1980s. But purse-netters replaced drift nets. They were far too efficient. They
say this is advancement, but modernization finished the fishing.

David and Jim, from Anstruther

Later that same year, I was farther down the coast in an area known as the
East Neuk of Fife. I stood in a Tayport scrapyard with David and Jim, two
older members of the Anstruther fishing community. David had fished for
longer than Jim, who had gone into fisheries management some years
previously. Both had agreed to show me around some old, derelict boats
that held special significance for them. As North Atlantic fishermen
generally do, they spoke of the boats as female and as individuals, telling
me, for example, that “She’s had a checkered career.” They described each
boat in loving, intimate detail: her length, type, engine and gear, who had
owned her, where she had sailed. One of them had belonged to Jim in the
1960s. Another, decommissioned (scrapped) in the government’s effort to
reduce fishing capacity, had never even spent much time at sea. “That was
the crime of the century.” They held the government responsible for its
wasted life.

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These were not inanimate objects that David and Jim discussed, but
living, breathing organisms with personalities and quirks. Looking both
thoughtful and rather depressed, the men mourned each loss as they
conducted their tour of the yard. In a very real sense, the boats had marked
the eras of their lives. Even an old wheelhouse, rusting in the sun, sparked
reminiscences. I did my best to follow the abundance of detail with which
they re-enlivened the wrecks, but of course I could not. You need a lifetime
in the fishing to appreciate the subtle differences between the way that the
bow rakes on one boat as compared to another. They had been trained to
it. In their generation, every fisherman worthy of respect was expected to
have an encyclopedic knowledge of fishing vessels. After all, a boat was,
in a sense, an exoskeleton or a carapace, an extension of the fisherman’s
body that must be understood and maintained to perfection. It had to be
“right.”
David remembered his early days as a young deckhand and the informal,
but continuous, training he had received. “The skipper would say, ‘what
boat d’ye think that is?’ I’d answer and he’d say, ‘Ye’re wrang,’ and I’d
say, ‘Ah’m no’.’ He’d say, ‘we’ll wager fifty cigarettes, then. The binoc-
ulars were never out of my hands.’ Each nuance of design spoke not only
of different possibilities for speed, stability and efficiency, but of where
the boat was built, and by whom. Boats were either ruthlessly criticized
or lavishly admired. A fisherman could tell the differences between boats
that would appear indistinguishable to a stranger. He knew that a builder
would introduce minor variations into each craft as a kind of trademark.
“There was no such thing as a standard drifter. They’re aye different in
some respect.”
On this day, David and Jim alternated between expressing their aes-
thetic appreciation of fishing technology and their rueful conviction that
only men from their own generation could truly understand. The social
fabric that had made such knowledge possible was long gone, they
thought. The overall quality of modern crews, as well as the ethics of
skippers, had irrevocably changed. “Fishermen used to be so intelligent
because there were so many people with brains who never had a chance
at education. Now, what young man wants the life?” Not many, they
believed. And those who did, moreover, generally lacked the patience and
foresight required to do the job right.

Jeannie, in Anstruther

In my landlady’s sitting room, I met Jeannie, the daughter of generations

of fishers from the Fife village of St Monans. As she spoke, she recalled
the hardships and hard work her parents had endured.
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Mum was a Dyker [from Cellardyke, next to Anstruther]. She was at Watson’s
oilskin factory. The war was hard. The government took the boats. There was
bombs dropped at Pittenweem [the neighboring village]. After the war [when
the fishing revived], they started the summer drave [herring fishing] off
Peterhead. Mum mended all the nets. There was a lot of jellyfish died on the
nets and they caused allergies. There was bad hay fever. Had to get the nets
ready after the men returned from Peterhead, because then they went off to
Whitby. I remember mending winter herring nets in the kitchen, Mum mending
till the small hours of the morning.
It was out and in for the fishermen every day for the winter herring. We had
to see them off, no matter what time of day. We could see all the lights out on
the Forth on a clear winter night. There was at least a dozen boats. All my Dad
lived for was a garret full of gear. It was a happy life when Dad came home
frae Yarmouth. He brought presents, a bicycle, a doll, and a wee sewing
machine. My dad was lost at sea coming around the Wash along the Norfolk
coast. A fisherman’s funeral was held on a Sunday. The men walked behind the
coffin, and the women stayed in the house. When someone died, they stopped
the clocks till after the funeral and drew the blinds.

These were hard days, but in the glow of recollection, Jeannie also saw
them as “golden.” She kept repeating that “those were happy times” when
people took care of each other. In her conversation there were repeated
hints that she had come to regard herself as an orphaned spinster, alone
and with no longer any clear role to play in life:

People keep to themselves more now. There’s a change in the wee com-
munities. There are so many outsiders, ye don’t know who people are. People
used to drop in and relatives used to come on weekends. Now they watch
television. I suppose that’s progress. When my mither died three years ago [a
centenarian], I went along to the fisheries museum. I was searching for
something, I didn’t know quite what, but I didn’t find it.

Alex and Peggy, in Buckie

Alex and Peggy were among the oldest folks I met in Buckie. Married for
49 years, he came from Buckie and she from the Black Isle, up north in
Cromarty. They have a daughter in California. When I visited them, I
found their small house filled with warmth and the smells of her baking.
Her chief delight in those days, now that she was frail with arthritis, was
to produce a profusion of fruit scones and ginger biscuits from her dimin-
utive kitchen. When I interviewed them, Alex did most of the talking,
comparing what life was like when he started fishing in 1931 with the way
things are now:

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 Perpetual Crisis

When I grew up, no one locked their doors. When our mothers sold fish inland,
the neighbors looked after you. Now there’s vandalism. My wife’s hands got
glued together after they put glue all over the door. Houses get burgled. You’re
afraid on the weekends.

After we talked, Alex showed me around the Seatown, the area where
most of the fishers used to live. The houses were all jumbled together, with
no streets or squares rationalizing the neighborhood. “You just built where
you felt like it.”

David, in Anstruther

In the spring of 1999 I heard yet more expressions of loss. My husband,

Brad, and I were in Scotland for a brief visit and had gone sailing along
the Fife coast with David, a recently retired and well-off skipper who now
went to sea exclusively in his yacht. “Everywhere I look, I see ghosts,”
David said, as he gazed toward shore. “This boat has never seen a fishing
net.” His yacht, clearly a sign of affluence, is also, ironically, a symbol of
loss, for yachts now outnumber fishing boats in many harbors. Looking
from sea to shore, Brad and I saw only little harbors, quays, and sand, and
the back gardens of comfortable, modern houses whose picture windows
overlooked the shore. David, however, knew the history of it all. Every old
building, every turn of the coast held memories: over here, his mother had
worked in the oilskin factory; over there, an uncle had kept his storage
shed and aunts had mended nets; further along, he and his cousins had
played on the rocks and gotten into trouble. They had also learned to
recognize their fathers’ boats as they came in at last with the hold full of
fish – or not, as the case might be.
David’s vivid memories make him proud. “You know, the modern
history of fishing is only 100 years, and I’ve been at sea for nearly half of
it.” For him, the chronicles of Scottish fishing are fraught with personal
significance. He sees himself poised in an unfolding story of hope and
loss, a story in which he recollects, for example, that “ I knew the skipper
who built the last sailing boat around these parts. That was Jim Tarvit’s
wife’s grandfather. He built it in St Monans in 1904. Someone in 1904
thought they could sail the rest of their life. It’s no that way now.”
Because it is not that way now, David spends much time trying to save
as many memories as possible, in particular by working to enhance the
collection of the local fisheries museum, but he has not entirely given up
on the future. Active in fisheries politics, particularly through the Scottish
Whitefish Producers Organization, he takes a keen interest in debates over

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pertinent EU policies, about which he has very strong – mostly negative

– opinions. But he does not place all the blame on outsiders. He also
criticizes the younger generation for lacking the frugality he and his fellow
fishermen practiced daily. “Every penny was a prisoner,” he says of his
long years of thrift.

Fishermen pay their tax one year in arrears. Young boys get the same pay as
older men on the Scottish share system. But the young ones couldn’t spend it
quick enough on cars and drink and one year later the tax man cometh. They’d
spent everything they’d got.

He also talks with pride of how his careful ways have led to comfort-
able circumstances. A favorite story is of the time that he and his wife
spent a weekend in a posh hotel, a place that would never have admitted
fishers in years past. Sometimes, he also counterposes his own rags to
riches story with a larger “riches to rags” theme of the Scottish fishery that
has outspent and outfished its capacity.
David has been fortunate. He had a very successful career and his son
now skillfully skippers his boat, which is fitted out with the latest elec-
tronic navigational equipment and fishing gear. When David was 62 and
his son was 21, David took him aside and said, “Right. This is my last trip.
Now you’re the skipper. I was scared, but I didn’t want him to keep
looking to me for advice. He’s doing well, though. He’s got what it takes.
He’s a shrewd skipper, very meticulous.”
Yet David is well aware that such continuity is exceptional and he is
rather doubtful about the future, feeling guilty that when his son took it
over, the boat was already 18 years old. He thinks it unlikely that his son’s
son will be a fisherman too.

Conclusion: Back to the Future

It can be said that the fishermen I got to know well looked at their time at
sea as fraught with crisis. Of course, they engage in an inherently danger-
ous and risky occupation that keeps the prospects of death or financial ruin
at the forefront of their minds. Risk itself represents a continuity in their
experience. Fishing has never been, and probably never will be, safe.
Catches will always be somewhat unreliable, the weather always treach-
erous. Thus it is not surprising that most of the (many) folk songs sung by
them and about them take up the themes of peril and ruin.
However, there is also the social crisis engendered by ecological,
national and extra-national policies that today preoccupies them at least

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as much. The social crisis reminds them of both stigma and marginality.
Stigma, because they believe that outsiders still regard them as having
nothing useful to say; marginality, because it threatens the entire social
fabric of their lives. It suggests that they may go from being on the margin
to being pushed right over the edge.
Today, fishermen find themselves buffeted by complex agendas and
market forces so large in scale, so distant and so unresponsive to local
concerns as to represent a real discontinuity in their experience. Moreover,
and perhaps most painfully as reflected in the vignettes I presented, for the
first time in their history, many fishermen’s work is detaching them from
the communities where they live and generating class divisions among
them. As we saw in the chapter on Ferryden, equality has long been ideal-
ized within the fisher communities. Their nostalgic recollections provide
them with a vantage point from which to critique the conditions in which
they now find themselves.
While the Ferrydeners knew that they were likely to be the last full
generation of fisherfolk within the village, the fishermen I got to know
over the course of a decade of visits to the Fife and Moray coasts described
themselves as the last of their breed, period. However, even as they
positioned themselves as emblems of the past, their activism within
fishermen’s organizations showed that they are not ready to consign that
past to oblivion.

Notes

1. These came about when Iceland, a country heavily dependent upon

fishing, extended its jurisdiction over coastal waters, first to 4 miles
and finally to 200 miles offshore, preventing foreign fishermen from
any access to the rich cod stocks that were flourishing there. British
fishermen were among those most significantly hurt by this prohibition
(Berrill 1997).
2. For a different perspective on the Blockade, see Cohen 1987: 292–321.
3. Warner (1977), writing on the New England fishery reports hearing
similar statements from men who made foreign competition “the chief
conversational topic of every trip”.
4. Miely (1984) discusses the relationship between a Calvinist upbringing
and the emphasis upon entrepreneurship in the Fife fishing village of
Pittenweem, arguing that skippers’ drive to succeed is strongly motiv-
ated by the need for independence.

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679(05).p65 170 11/18/02, 03:55
 –6–

Fisherfolk under Glass? Memory and

the Heritage Wars

“Our Future Lies in Our Past”

Motto of the Buckie District Fishing Heritage Society

Introduction

The last chapter explored the meaning of crisis for people in Scottish
fishing communities by presenting their views on the challenges of
industrial decline and the erosion of community life. Here I continue to
probe themes of loss and response but now I relate these more directly to
a wider politics of identity, memory and representation. I follow Boyarin
in arguing that we must bring both space and time into our discussion.
Boyarin’s (1994: 2) claim that nation states are constituted through a
“temporal politics of memory” applies to other kinds of imagined com-
munities as well. In addition to the Scottish nation and their own villages,
my informants inhabit a wider community of fisherfolk. This community
has now been permeated by the burgeoning “heritage industry” (Hewison
1987), in which fisherpeople’s social recollections become a contested
resource.
This chapter will look at the ongoing dialogue between “outsiders,” in
this case tourists, tourism developers, and museum professionals, and the
fisherfolk who seek to control how they are being represented. We shall
see that this dialogue in many ways recapitulates those that fishers have
had with other kinds of outsiders for many years. Now, as ever, the
arguments fishers make about their own importance and emplacement in
the world are influenced not only by local conditions and local history, but
by national and even international forces.
First, let me briefly recapitulate the circumstances that have led Scottish
fishers to this moment of engagement. As the foregoing chapters have
detailed, the fisherfolk are heirs to a long oral and textual legacy of
insecurity, an insecurity that stemmed not only from economic disadvantage

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but from fishing’s problematic status as a stigmatized occupation. Begin-

ning with the First World War, the industry went through a number of
critical turns, falling, rising and falling again but, as an employer of men
and women, ever shrinking. Many of its smaller sites were stranded: like
Ferryden, these became fishing villages without boats or fish.
Market collapses, expensive technology, and most recently, overfishing
and desperately complex regulatory systems have made fishing an industry
whose motto today might be “the survival of the fattest.” Only those with
solid capital to invest remain commercially viable. Like small-scale
farmers and the family farm in many parts of the world, small-scale
fishermen and their local places are struggling to survive in the face of
large, well-organized competition. Many fear that their way of life and
their identity as fishers are doomed and will be forgotten, that their
villages, as meaningful places, will be absorbed into anonymity. Hence
their memories are now taking on an almost painful significance.
The memories I refer to are both social and individual, although it is
hard to tell the difference. At the point where individuals share their
recollections with others, their memories become part of a collective
discourse about the past, a discourse filled both with argument and
agreement. However, the fabric of remembrance in common that Connerton
(1989: 17) imputes to village life has been stretched, and even torn. As he
also notes (Connerton 1989: 3):

to the extent that their memories of a society’s past diverge, to that extent its
members can share neither experiences nor assumptions. The effect is seen
perhaps most obviously when communication across generations is impeded
by different sets of memories . . . the memories of one generation locked
irretrievably, as it were, in the brains and bodies of that generation.

As we saw in Chapter 5, the older fishermen who provided so much of

my information about both past and present face a yawning generational
divide. When they talk about young people, their voices are either critical
or resigned. They are keenly aware that few sons and grandsons will
follow in their footsteps and that few daughters and granddaughters will
have any knowledge of the work that women once performed. In effect,
then, these fishermen are bereft of heirs. Who will inherit their legacy of
skills and sea lore? This is a profound question for men whose memories
are so deeply embodied that it is said of some that when they pace up and
down, they always turn at the length of a boat.
It would seem that their only recourse is to transform social memory
into historical reconstruction, to use Connerton’s (1989: 14) contrast. In

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

other words, they feel compelled to concretize and embody their mem-
ories in texts, collections, performances and displays – many of these
housed in museums and heritage centers – so that their own descendants,
as well as outside visitors, will not forget them. This is their defense
against the probability that the past that they embody will become a
“foreign country” to the future that is nipping at their toes (Lowenthal
1985). It is also a way of bequeathing something of value to a future that
looks increasingly bleak. (See Lowenthal 1992 on “The Death of the
Future”.)
As fishers involve themselves in the production of heritage they risk
ensconcing themselves in essentialized images of tradition and folk
culture. However, as we shall see, they are not imprisoned there. Nor are
they retreating into some mirror-image still life. As the previous chapter
made clear, many fishers are politically engaged in defending the fishing
industry at regional, national and European levels. However, just as we
cannot reduce fishers’ willingness to participate in public displays as a
capitulation to others’ desires, neither can we explain their efforts to
control these displays simply as some homogenizing notion of “resist-
ance” (Brown 1996). A more useful way of viewing fisher heritage is as
a negotiation: with local and regional authorities, with visitors, with
promoters of Scottish heritage, and most generally, with modernity itself.
At first glance, fishers’ interests in memorializing their way of life
might seem to dovetail perfectly with the rising national focus upon
heritage productions, as well as with Scotland’s dependence upon tourism.
But, of course, the reality is more complex. The object of this chapter is
to examine such articulations and to consider their consequences. I will
therefore begin by examining Scotland’s current heritage boom, one that
itself is part of both an international preoccupation with reclaiming,
preserving and reconstituting the past as well as a national quest for
defining identity.

Heritage and National Identity

Around the world, heritage is on many peoples’ minds.1 Lowenthal (1994:

43) even goes so far as to call it “a realm of well-nigh universal concern”.
Modernity’s ruptures and connections – from diaspora to digital tech-
nology – now make heritage desirable, particularly when it seems that
local objects, meanings and expressions are about to disappear. Comfort-
ingly, heritage depictions seem at first glance to be the quintessence of the
particular and the local, a statement of uniqueness. In this sense, heritage

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selectively appropriates the past for the present, providing a legacy of

tradition, invented or otherwise. Located in labeled buildings, famous
ruins, landscapes (“natural” heritage), endangered languages, historical
displays and reenactments (Handler 1985), heritage is especially conspic-
uous in museums devoted to local or national cultural expression.
Fisher museums and heritage centers reflect this preoccupation with the
particular and local. The museums have been established by local people
seeking to preserve their memories for their own communities, although
many tourists also visit them. Heritage centers are didactic displays
created explicitly to sell cultural authenticity and Scottish culture to an
internationally circulating audience. Ironically, however, people, goods
and ideas now move so far and so quickly that few experiences can be tied
solely to a particular site or a particular cultural milieu. Appadurai (1996:
4) characterizes the “global ethnoscape” as constructed of “diasporic
public spheres” which make an isomorphic equation of people to place
impossible. Gewertz and Errington’s (1999: 102–19) account of a law-
and-order rally held in Wewak, Papua New Guinea, epitomizes just how
globalized a local experience can be: Christianity, feminism, crime, class,
Coca-Cola and indigenous values were all present in a public discussion
about domestic violence. Thus the particular, the local and even the
national are caught up in cultural imageries that transcend place (Wilk
1995).
It has been a century since the heyday of “salvage anthropology,” when
ethnographers were frantically recording fast-eroding cultures, and
collecting as many of their objects as possible (see Stocking 1992). Yet,
our preoccupation with saving objects and memories, often out of context,
persists not only unabated, but among a much larger, non-professional
category of people – that is, cultural tourists (Wood and Deppen 1994).
Heritage tourism requires that tourists and heritage producers share what
Wilk (1995: 111) calls a “structure of common difference”. To consume
heritage, tourists must be committed to certain ideas, among them that: a)
the past is valuable and endangered; b) culture can be embodied, captured,
commodified and put on display; c) the past can be authentically repres-
ented, thus eliding the fact that “the past, as it is materially embodied in
museums and heritage sites, is inescapably a product of the present which
organizes it” (Bennett 1995: 129); and d) everyone can participate in and
compete for heritage and its economic benefits. Patrick Wright comments
that “this quasi-archaeological sense of the past as recoverable, talismanic
bits and pieces is linked with a supposition which lies at the heart of
contemporary tourism, that the past is really there to be visited” Wright
1985).

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

Some see this as a dangerous trend. Robert Hewison (1987), for example,
regards the many heritage centers and museums of folk life that have
blossomed in Britain as indicative of economic and cultural decay,
a commodified tradition substituting for the real, productive work that
once underpinned social life. Rosie (1992: 170) dourly seconds this for
Scotland and calls heritage museums “reminders of our failure to hang on
to the markets we once dominated”. “Historical Valium,” parodies Andrew
Mellor (1991: 93). Christopher Harvie (1992: 94) worries that not only
work, but even ownership of heritage productions, will be further alien-
ated from Scotland and that “present developments will turn us into a ‘rest
and recreation’ area, a theme park on a huge scale owned by trusts in
Switzerland and the Cayman Islands . . .” To see Scotland becoming a
theme park means not only that the images of Scottish peoples, industries
and ways of life produced and seen in museums and visitor centers are
inauthentic and essentializing, but also that the Scottish people must
increasingly accept and adopt these images as real or at least relevant. The
“tourist gaze” might disrupt a local culture that some see as inherently
fragile (Greenwood 1989; Urry 1990).
According to McCrone, Morris and Kiely (1995: 1), who write about
the way Scotland itself has become a “brand,” heritage is a

thoroughly modern concept . . . It has come to refer to a panoply of material

and symbolic inheritances, some hardly older than the possessor. We have
constructed heritage because we have a cultural need to so in our modern age.

Lowenthal (1998: 1) locates heritage practices further back in Europ-

ean history but agrees with McCrone et al. that the current popularity and
democratization of heritage is something new, a “self-conscious creed . . .
whose praise suffuses public discourse”.
The ideological aspects emerge sharply when heritage is employed
in the service of national identity. Lowenthal identifies heritage as a “
chief focus of patriotism” (1998: xiii). Charles Tilly (1994: 251) points out
that dominant populations within the new ethnically diverse states of
nineteenth century Europe began to establish the stuff of heritage in order
to reinforce their cultural supremacy. Thus arose “official languages,
monuments, museums, schools, histories, ceremonies, iconographies,
currencies, postage stamps, and a wide variety of other cultural forms”.
Nineteenth-century romantic nationalists were powerfully attracted to
notions of national character, or essence, that reductively tied culture to
the land. In northern Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and the Nether-
lands, the national soul was believed to reside in the countryside and in
nature, newly threatened by industrialization.

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 Fishing for Heritage

Profiling an open-air folk museum in Arnhem, Netherlands, Arch-

itectural Digest magazine (1999: 92) notes that at the beginning of the
twentieth century, when

a wave of nostalgia swept over Europe . . . The founders of this museum

believed that what made them Dutch – the folk culture of farmers and fisher-
men and artisans of the countryside – would not survive industrialization and
had to be preserved in order to save some part of themselves as well . . .

Lofgren (1987: 59) in his analysis of how members of the Swedish

middle class used rural society to define their own boundaries, concurs
and elaborates:

As peasant culture was threatened by industrial development, the interest in the

natural, indigenous people increased. Scholars and folklore collectors saw
themselves as a rescue team picking their way through a landscape of cultural
ruins, where scraps and survivals of traditional life-styles could still be found.
Through their enthusiastic work they helped to construct the myth of a trad-
itional and national peasant culture . . . what was genuinely Swedish.

One of Sweden’s earliest folk museums, built in 1891 at Skansen,

included

reassembled farm buildings, a manor house, craft industries, a log church,

stocks, whipping posts [with] guides dressed in folk costume, with strolling
musicians and folk dancers re-enacting traditional customs. (Bennett 1988: 70)

As we shall see later in this chapter, fisher museums and displays have also
been appropriated as part of an attempt to construct a modern Scottish
identity.
All such identity discourses are contestable and contested. In Quebec,
Handler shows us that we cannot divorce the local uses of folkloristic
images and pursuits from larger agendas of nationalism and economic
development. Quebecois farmers have long been the focus of folklorists
interested in rural custom as well as those engaged in defining Quebec’s
character and true patrimony in terms of rural life. In response, rural
people have begun to collaborate in reproducing folk life for visitors.
Many, Handler (1988: 80) says, are now even “marketing themselves as
farmers”. However, doing so requires them to profess a lack of modern
attitudes as well as of modern material culture and thus confines them
even as it gives them a new source of revenue. Handler (1988: 56) calls
this process “cultural objectification”. Ironically, of course, this also

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

provides a means for rural Quebecois to participate in modernity – perhaps

the only means possible, given their precarious economic position.
Like Quebec, Scotland is what McCrone (1992) calls a “stateless
nation”. This continues to outlast the re-establishment of the Scottish
Parliament in 1999. It is also home to competing discourses of identity,
none of which has established a clear hegemony. Devolution has meant
that many decisions can now be made closer to home, but Scotland still
is part of the United Kingdom, still sends representatives to London and
still has a limited voice within Europe. Questions of heritage remain
central to an ongoing debate over the core elements of what it means to
be Scottish, as they do for the Quebecois, although the Scots have been
debating this issue far longer. The problem of defining Scotland or
Scottish identity is perhaps not quite so complex as determining “what is
a Jew?” (a question I heard asked frequently in my own very secular
upbringing) but it may come close, particularly as the Scots have their own
diaspora and many apparently long to return, if only for a visit (Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 1998). (I met a number of these during my fieldwork. Many were
searching for genealogical information and I came to think of them as
“kinship tourists.” I will return to these later on.)
Some writers argue that concerns with national identity grow as border
contexts shift. Walsh (1992: 177), for example, points to a new threat from

the increasingly important role played by multinational corporations and

capital, the development of supra-national organizations such as the EC, as
well as the strengthening of certain regional identities, or micro-national-
isms . . . In Britain especially, the loss of Empire and the erosion of the power
of the landed classes, certainly since World War II, should be seen as reasons
for the emergence of a national heritage industry.

Indeed, McCrone argues that Scotland’s “sense of difference and

identity has grown rather than diminished” (McCrone 1992: 3) since its
Parliamentary Union with England in 1707. This is hardly surprising,
because the political merger was never fully accepted, the institutional
merger was never complete, and the economic merger was very uneven
in its effects. Moreover, English attempts in the eighteenth century to
repress certain elements of Highland culture, notably in language and
dress, have never been forgotten. Many who do not support the Scottish
National Party’s independence agenda nonetheless assert a strong feeling
of Scottishness.
But on what is this “sense of difference” from things English based?
It is one thing to articulate a set of shared grievances but quite another to
make a positive statement about national identity.

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Like Alice’s dreamquest for the ever-receding egg on the shelf, such
definition seems to elude capture. Despite McCrone et al.’s (1998: 632)
assertion that Scottish identity is “largely uncontentious and unproble-
matic”, explaining what that identity consists of is anything but simple.
What kind of shared difference can transcend Scotland’s myriad internal
divisions? Tom Nairn (1997: 185), essayist and gadfly to all political
parties, says that Scottish storytelling reflects “a form of cultural nihilism”
that magnifies internal differences to the exclusion of national coherence,
creating “mountain ranges of peculiarity”.
It is thus difficult to know where to gain a foothold. Scotland’s popul-
ation is not homogeneous, popular representations of bonny Highlanders
to the contrary. Even language unites Scotland only up to a point. Most
Scots understand “BBC” English perfectly well, but few of them speak it
and those who do are likely to be regarded as anglicized in other ways, as
well as middle class. Fewer than one per cent of the population are native
Gaelic speakers, but Scots English has many versions, as any inhabitant
of Fife, or Aberdeenshire could – and would – tell you. This persists
despite the efforts of generations of schoolteachers to instill “proper
English” in the bairns (Kay 1993). The differences are so manifold that
even transcribers for the new Scottish Parliament are having to consult
dictionaries to make sure they get things right (Gilchrist 1999: 13).
Harvie (1977: 14) attempts to scale the ranges of peculiarity with a
more culturally inflected approach. He says that there are two Scotlands:
not, as one might expect, the Lowlands and the Highlands, but the
“achieving society and the defensive community”, bringing Scotland’s
bourgeois industrial advances together with its putative inferiority
complex, sometimes called “the Scottish cringe.” The latter can be seen
in any number of self-deprecating references to Scotland as “parochial”
(Craig 1996: 11).
Michael Russell (1998: xiv), Chief Executive of the Scottish National
Party, says that Scots tell many stories about themselves, just as modern
Scotland is a nation that is constantly rediscovering and reinventing itself.
Some of these stories become fixed in the stories others tell, while others
are less likely to be taken up. Take, for example, the despairing urban
realism of novels such as those in Ian Rankin’s detective stories. His
protagonist, John Rebus, sees only the seamy side of Edinburgh. Irvine
Welsh’s anomic Trainspotting (Welsh 1993), looks at the world through
the eyes of adolescent drug users, but only in literary circles do these
prevail against the romantic likes of M.C. Beaton’s portrayals of hapless
Highlanders, now immortalized in a series by the BBC. Turning to film,
Local Hero, with its setting in a quaint and quirky seaside village that

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

manages to avoid the impact of North Sea oil, is arguably the best known
portrayal of modern Scotland. Then, of course, there is Braveheart,
popular both in Scotland and abroad, a deification of William Wallace that
McArthur (1998) accuses of playing into a Celticized Scottish xeno-
phobia.
Most answers to the identity question come back in some way to the
idea of a shared history, but even here, interpretations clash. Some would
argue that Scotland is an internal Celtic colony of the British Empire
(Hechter 1975); or that it is the site of nationalist aspirations born out of
uneven development and political frustration (Nairn 1977). Few will agree
on a single answer. Certainly not the historians. As Brown, Finlay and
Lynch (1998: 1) say about such a project, “it is necessary to confront a
variety of Scotlands thrown up by the different ways in which images of
Scotland and Scottishness have been created and recreated in the past.”
In fact, it is not necessary to agree on the answer. The absence of
unanimity does not belie the importance of the idea that Scotland exists.
It is just that, like any heterogeneous society, “Scotland” includes too
many subjectivities ever to be accounted for in any single descriptive
scheme.
Nonetheless, the pursuit of Scottishness has occupied many people.
Edwin Muir’s travels through the country in the 1930s led him to describe
Scotland as “a confusing conglomeration” (Muir 1935: 2). David Daiches
(1975), Edinburgh University literature professor and the son of a rabbi,
describes himself as caught up in the interplay of two identities.And well
he might: J&B Scotch attempts to capitalize on Jewish Scottishness with
an advertisement showing a kilted, bearded, yarmulke-wearing and
bespectacled man blowing a shofar. It proclaims,

Zayde wore kilts! Although Jews have a tradition of maintaining their cultural
heritage, they also have the reputation of becoming an integral part of the
community they live in. And Scotland is no exception . . . No matter where
your friends or guests come from, serve them J&B to make them feel at home.”

Angus Calder (1994: 52), cultural critic, suggests that

A Scot is someone living in the area which comes under Scots law, so long as
that person also supports Scottish athletes against those of other countries or
identifies strongly with some other aspect of Scottish culture – our folk-music,
say.

This leaves Scottishness wide open. By that definition, I am a Scot

when in Scotland, after all.

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Given such debates, how do purveyors of Scottish heritage decide

which face of Scotland to project? The answer to this lies in what sells.
Nairn (1977) reviles “that vast monster of Tartan kitsch” that stands for
Scotland in all too many venues. Perhaps the best known example of this
is that dreadful musical, Brigadoon, which elevates Highland life to a
dream-like Utopia. By the time its American hero returns to that magical,
once-in-a-century Highland village to rejoin his true love, the audience is
greatly relieved, having wondered why it took him so long to recognize
the obvious advantages of life among the jolly, embracing, tartan-wearing
denizens of the glen. Not surprisingly, Brigadoon was not even filmed in
Scotland, Hollywood “having found nowhere in Scotland that looked like
Scotland” (Bruce 1996: 39). This is a problem that won’t go away: much
of Braveheart was filmed in Ireland.
Scottish tourism at all socioeconomic levels is best known for such
Highland-inspired imagery, accompanied by some highly inventive
heritage promotions aimed largely at North Americans (Ray 2001).
Tartanry sells well. Anyone who passes through a Scottish airport or who
ventures into one of Edinburgh’s Princes Street shops can hardly fail to
miss the plethora of plaids, as well as the ubiquity of clan references. For
the many North Americans who wish to claim actual Scottish descent, a
bevy of willing genealogists is ready to help them discover a Highland
connection. Some of this Highlands obsession can be laid at the door of
Sir Walter Scott and other early nineteenth century romantics (Bruce 1996:
9; Cannizzo 1999; MacDonald 1997; McCrone et al. 1995; Nadel-Klein
1997; Trevor-Roper 1983; Withers 1992). Even before Scott, however, the
Highlands, with its wild scenery and Gaelic-speaking people, had become
a destination for travelers in search of an exotic “other” within Britain
(Chapman 1992; MacDonald 1997; Urry 1990, 1995).
Such images both transcend and are refracted by class. Visions of the
country as a vast, untenanted “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’” estate dominate
the elite market, though, as Wightman tells us, such estates are a relatively
recent phenomenon (1997: 171). Upmarket hotels and resorts drape tartan
fabric everywhere and keep their male employees kilted. Vogue magazine
recently touted a stay at Cawdor Castle as an education for those still
unsure of what Scotland is really all about (August 2001: 142). Exclusive,
private resorts, such as Ackergill Tower in Caithness, or Skibo Castle in
Sutherland (once owned by Andrew Carnegie), offer – along with haggis,
bagpipes and deferential servants – such exquisite amenities as falconry
demonstrations or archery lessons – that is, for those able to afford the
facility’s astonishing membership fees. In the case of Skibo, one can also
hire the castle for a wedding, as Madonna recently showed the world.

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The heritage on offer here is little more than a set of tartan-draped props
arrayed upon a costly stage set. It is doubtful that most of its consumers
care all that much about it as long as the golf, the salmon fishing and the
food are first rate. The inequities and brutalities of Scotland’s history, of
course, receive no mention at all. Skibo sits almost under the shadow of
a statue of the Duke of Sutherland, infamous for his role in the Clearances.
“Cleared estates have come to represent landscape in Scotland just as
soldiers in kilts inform our image of what it is to be a Scot,” say McCrone
et al. (1995: 6), though few tourists have any clue about what the Clear-
ances were, or that the land was once more densely populated (McCarthy
1998).2
Alluring as these upscale venues may be, their consumers belong to a
select group and visit a small number of places. The money they spend is
concentrated. Marketers must construct attractive niches to draw the
widest possible variety of visitors to the widest possible variety of sites.
In effect, they must both exploit and combat the emphasis upon the
Highlands. One strategy has been to emphasize Scotland’s strong inter-
national connections. Edinburgh’s new Museum of Scotland proclaims
that its mission is to represent Scotland to the world. Its exhibits highlight
foreign – particularly transatlantic – connections established through trade
and technology. These explicitly appeal to members of the aforementioned
Scottish diaspora: those North American, Canadian, Australian, and South
African expatriates and their descendants. Many celebrate their Scottish
roots while at home through Highland festivals complete with bagpipes,
haggis, and caber-tossing (Ray 2001). At Spanish Bay golf resort, in
California, bagpipes wail every night at dusk, presumably to delude the
upscale patrons into thinking that, by playing golf, they are somehow “at
home” in Scotland. The Scottish Tourist Board (STB), created in 1969, is
not shy about exploiting this sense of community, however imagined it
might be.
The trick is not only to lure these people to Scotland for their holidays,
but to disperse them around the country. While tartanry brings visitors to
Edinburgh as well as to battlefields and castles in the Highlands, vast
sections of the country are left alone until they can transform their failing
industries into attractive tourist locations. The STB is one of the key
players here. Its official mission is to “promote Scotland at home and
abroad as a tourism destination . . . [and to] develop tourism outwith the
main tourism areas” (Scottish Tourist Board 1998).
Examining some STB literature, McCrone, Morris and Kiely (1995:
85) cite a consultant’s report that requires heritage sites to have “core
elements which are intrinsic to Scotland in some significant way”.

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Properties preserved by the National Trust for Scotland must also exem-
plify this. The Trust’s magazine, Heritage Scotland (1990), announces that
“the purpose of the Trust is to serve the nation as a cabinet into which it
can put some of its valuable things where they will be perfectly safe for
all time and where they can be seen and enjoyed by everybody”. Highland
battlefields, stately homes, archaeological sites – preferably Pictish – and
rural environments all come under the Trust’s domain. However, other
Lowland venues must be more creative. Small wonder that there has been
an ever-growing array of museums. In fact, museums and heritage centers
are one of the few growth industries left in recession-battered Scotland.
Since the early 1980s, the number of museums in Britain has more than
doubled, and “the Scottish Museums Council gives Scotland more museums
per head than any other part of the United Kingdom” (Rosie 1992: 159).
Now that I have established the broad context of Scotland’s interest in
promoting heritage, it is time to take a closer, ethnographically informed
look at the ways fisher heritage articulates with this endeavor. This also
returns us to the people I have come to know over the past two decades,
the people whose lives are now being woven into the heritage fabric.

Heritage Trails

Tourism is now one of Scotland’s largest industries in terms of employ-

ment. A 1997 pamphlet from the Scottish Tourist Board tells us that “Over
13 million tourists took overnight trips and spent nearly £2.7 billion,
supporting around 8% of all employment.” Visits to castles, monuments
and churches emerge as the favorite activity for overseas visitors (83 per
cent), while museums, galleries and heritage centres draw 58 per cent.
Heritage is clearly a lynch-pin for the tourist economy. Of course, the
vagaries of Scottish weather tend to encourage indoor events for all but
the most hardy souls.
Tourists can now seek heritage by following a designated trail, an
itinerary designed by the Scottish Tourist Board to “sell places” (Kearns
and Philo 1993). As targets of what Gold and Gold call “formal place
promotion” (1995: 22), tourists must be convinced of the value of a
cultural “experience” (Rojek and Urry 1997). Travelers’ imaginations are
lured down particular paths and pasts to the “stories” of whisky, weaving,
mining or fishing. These are presented as examples of Scottish industry
and culture. A Trail encodes as many meanings and purposes as the varied
agendas of those who travel or reside along it(Rojek and Urry 1997).
These include casual Scottish, English, or overseas tourists who just want

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something different from the mainstream tourist experience, as well as

returning members of the diaspora looking to discover and reclaim family
heritage.
The Fishing Heritage Trail extends from the Shetlands to the Borders.
Its 10 regional sub-sections encompass 43 communities designated as
“major attractions.” These range from the very large, like the port of
Aberdeen, to the very small, like the bird-watching mecca of the St Cyrus
cliffs. Despite this and other differences among them, however, Trail
advertisements impose a narrative uniformity on Trail sites. These rein-
force the perception that most Scottish fishing villages are fundamentally
the same. Thus the local becomes subsumed as a demonstration of the
general, as Urry has said. Crail village, in the East Neuk of Fife, for example,
becomes a sign of “the Scottish fishing industry” (Urry 1995: 133). On the
other hand, some distinctions must be played up to avoid the “if you’ve
seen one fishing village, you’ve seen them all” dilemma of marketing
locality.
Therefore, tourist literature also highlights a particular feature for each
site – marked sights, in MacCannell’s (1989) usage. These include a
seventh-century missionary’s cave in Pittenweem, for example, a notable
church, or even, as in the case of Eyemouth, the horrendous disaster of
the 1889 storm that I referred to in the previous chapter. To lure visitors
along the path, promotional brochures and advertisements emphasize the
authentic, the secret, the mysterious and the hidden, as well as the idea of
age-old continuity. Consider two examples from different brochures:

When you take Scotland’s Fishing Heritage Trail, you’re setting off on a
journey into the past. Men have fished from this rugged coastline since the end
of the Ice Age; today fishing remains man’s last great hunting activity. It still
offers the thrill of the chase, the fascination of the sea and sailing – and it has
brought about a particular way of life, with its own customs, speech, dress,
festivals and superstitions.
North East Scotland’s Coastal Trail offers a maritime adventure, a journey
of nearly 200 miles . . . By way of lonely sandy shores, cliffs and shingle
tidelines, past hidden fishing villages tucked in coves and bays . . .

Such language rightly arouses suspicions of manipulation and exotic-

ism. The second advertisement, in particular, has one wondering whether
some of these fishing villages, like Brigadoon, might even be enchanted.
This idea can be successfully purveyed in part because many coastal
locations appear to be isolated, like the villages of so-called primitives, in
a “land that time forgot” sort of way. Of course, as MacCannell (1992:

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285) points out, this is an impossible position to sustain, given the inter-
connectedness of all sites in the postmodern world, as well as the mundane
structures of the modern fishing industry. However, mythmaking under-
lies all tourist sites, which are distinguished as such by their “natural,
historical or cultural extraordinariness” (Rojek 1997: 52).
Promotional statements also refer to the enduring, essential values of
fishing people as well as to their colorful beliefs and customs:

Scotland’s fishing industry has undergone dramatic changes in the course of

its history: it has experienced heady booms and gloomy slumps. It has become
even more complex in its technology, ever more demanding in its calls on
capital and in its need to respond to market forces, to catching quotas, and to
changing types of fishery. But the basic skills of the industry – the resilience,
seamanship and judgement of the individual fisherman – remain the constant
factor . . . This is part of a broader truth about fishing communities . . . The
sense of continuity is strong and the past lessons learnt are handed down from
father to son, mother to daughter. This, as much as any of the features you may
visit on the trail, is the true wealth of Scotland’s Fishing Heritage.

The “broader truth” alluded to here says that fishing villagers can tran-
scend hardship and adapt to anything life can throw at them. Economically
and socially marginalized sites are sanitized for tourist consumption.
Ironically, these may be the ones that are most picturesque. Their very
failure to be competitive has protected their architecture, roads, quaint
houses and stone-built harbors from destruction in the name of progress.
This enables heritage displays to direct tourists’ eyes towards those
emblems of the past that fit the model of “industrial heritage.”

In focusing on industrial heritage, it was decided at the outset to concentrate

on industrial sites and buildings which are no longer in production . . . work-
places (i.e. industries in production which are open to the public) were excluded
. . . (“Industrial Heritage and Tourism in Scotland: a Review” 1996: 6)

Many active fishing communities thus find themselves in an awkward,

painful but sometimes even humorous position, when they are represented
both as obsolete and as enduring. Rosie sees this problem exemplified by
the case of the North Carr Lightship, once moored as a floating museum
in Anstruther Harbor, where “the past has banished the present” (Rosie
1992: 158):

The plight of the North Carr seems to encapsulate the conundrum presented
by Museumry and what has come to called the heritage industry. Important

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artefacts should be, perhaps must be, preserved for posterity. But the loss of
use and purpose can be painful to see. And the process can render them as
irrelevant as the North Carr’s blind and empty light tower. And the waxwork
“crew” will never replace the squads of ex-trawler hands and Caithness
fishermen who used to man the ship.

Overall, the Trail projects a halcyon vision of fisher life. For good or
ill, the history of stigma and poverty has been erased. Danger is admitted
because there is no getting around it. Besides, it adds to the romance. So
visitors can experience a vicarious nostalgia and even a sense of awe,
untroubled by politicized flashbacks to destitution, ostracism, or anger.
Ignorance, as they say, is bliss, or in this case, romance. The Trail reveals
no ruptures, no disturbances. And tourists seldom ask about what is not
there.
Wives of the Fishermen, Angela Huth’s novel about fishermen’s wives
in the East Neuk of Fife, depicts such visitors and their illusions rather
bitingly, in tones that echo film maker Dennis O’Rourke’s representation
in Cannibal Tours (1987). This documentary offers a scathing indictment
of how tourists construct their own version of reality in Papua New
Guinea, unaware of local people’s needs, problems, or, most especially,
of their views about the tourists themselves. Like O’Rourke, Huth sees
tourists as unthinking consumers:

Abroath Street, once only known for the poverty within its thick-stoned
houses, was by now a generally smarter place . . . roofs were patched, window
frames gloss-painted, the wood of old front doors turned yellow and red and
blue. Strangers with cameras, in clothes to match the front doors, were often
to be found wandering down the street these days – their eyes more dulled than
amazed by the sight of what one of them explained to Myrtle was surely “living
history”. (Huth 1998: 32)

Not all fishing communities suffer from such indignities, though this
absence may be a burden as well as a blessing. Like Ferryden, with its
offshore oil base, places now too far removed from the picturesque
because of modern developments have been excised from the Trail.
Because they are largely spared the tourist gaze, they lack the economic
advantages that visitors may bring, as well as the public recognition that
comes with being a heritage site. They are twice cut off – first from their
fishing past and now from their heritage future.
Of course, putting such displays together takes considerable planning
and coordination, not all of which can be laid at the door of the Scottish
Tourist Board. The list of parties involved includes public agencies,

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private firms and individual entrepreneurs. Politicians also become

involved in the act, from local councillors to Members of Parliament,
Members of the European Parliament, and, since 1999, Members of the
Scottish Parliament. In my more recent fieldwork visits, I worked closely
with members of fishing communities who participated in heritage
production, examining how their views articulated with those of museum
professionals. To begin exploring these articulations,, I will now go to the
East Neuk of Fife, where tourists, museum curators, heritage seekers and
fisherfolk interact on a daily basis.

A Stop Along the Trail: The East Neuk of Fife

People like to sit in Anstruther and believe they’re in a fishing village. (A fisher
informant)

The 15-mile stretch of coast along the Firth of Forth known as the East
Neuk of Fife is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s more picturesque
spots and “is Scotland’s only designated Maritime Heritage Area” (East
Neuk: Building a Maritime Adventure). Visitors are welcomed by a road
sign, courtesy of East Neuk Company Limited, bearing a picture of the
iconic fisher lass, whom we met in Chapter 3, with her striped petticoat,
knotted head scarf and creel. A stop into any newsagent’s shop in one of
the East Neuk’s villages and towns – Largo, Elie, St Monans, Pittenweem,
Anstruther, Cellardyke and Crail – reveals numerous flyers, also decorated
with the fisher lass logo, that similarly encourage visitors to view the area
in static, ahistorical terms, as a living “time-capsule”:

Each village retains its own individual characteristics virtually immune from
the passage of time. Small, white-washed buildings with red pantile roofs
crowd into small winding streets. The streets lead to secluded little harbors
containing a profusion of ropes, nets, creels, and boxes: testimony to the
existence of today’s small East Neuk “fleet”. It is little wonder that these towns
are among the most photographed areas of Scotland.

Alongside these flyers are the ubiquitous little pamphlets about local
history and folklore. “What to see in St Monans: a guided walk” is such a
one. With scant references to modern times, its effect is to convince the
reader that the twentieth century has been largely irrelevant to this part of
the East Neuk (Martin 1991).
The people of Fife are used to the visitors who have appeared along the
coast with greater regularity than the herring for well over a hundred years.

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After all, Thomas Cook, father of mass tourism, introduced his first
excursion tours to Scotland in 1846. Other entrepreneurs were quick to
follow suit. Durie and Ingram (1994) tell us that George Washington
Wilson, a professional photographer of the late nineteenth century, set out
to sell pictures to “the growing tourist market in Scotland”. While the
increasingly popular sport of links golf in nearby St Andrews was one of
Wilson’s chief subjects, he also did many studies of fishing, including
boats in the harbor and fishwives on the quay.
But, as a tourism worker from the Borders fishertown of Eyemouth
(site of yet another fisher museum) said to me, “the bucket-and-spade”
days of beach-lolling are gone. Visitors now want a more varied itinerary.
In 1989, the tourist industry launched the “East Neuk of Fife Maritime
Project,” described as

a partnership composed of seven national, local authority and voluntary sector

bodies . . . the Scottish Development Agency, North East Fife District Council,
Fife Regional Council, St Andrews and North east Fife Tourist Board, the
Scottish Tourist Board, the Scottish Fisheries Museums Trust and the East
Neuk Merchants and Traders Association.

The partnership, managed by East Neuk Ltd, was explicit about expl-
oiting heritage as a substitute for the once-thriving fishing industry:

As the area possesses a distinct identity deriving from its former dependence
upon fishing activities, the tourist marketing concept utilises this “maritime
heritage” in order to promote the area as a specific “product” within the
increasingly segmented Scottish and UK holiday markets.

The prospect of being turned into a holiday “product” does not sit well
with every resident of the East Neuk. Some, indeed, are greatly annoyed.
Take those in Pittenweem, for example. Pittenweem’s narrow roads and
wynds curve down from the top of a steep hill to meet the harbor. This is
protected from storms by a wall of concrete and stone and is bounded by
the fish market, various shops and offices, and a cluster of scrubbed white
cottages. Described as “The pretty village where fishing is still the main
way of life” (Fife 93), Pittenweem, like several other villages in Fife’s East
Neuk, has so much heritage value that the National Trust for Scotland has
restored a number of its historic houses. Strangers cluster on the quay to
photograph or sketch the brightly painted fishing boats. A summer colony
of people from other parts of Scotland and England occupies many of the
old houses.

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Even academics have been seduced by Pittenweem. An archeological

survey of Pittenweem, written in 1981 and sponsored by the University
of Glasgow, is prefaced in florid, even gushing prose:

There is something touching in the sight of such old towns as Pittenweem,

Anstruther or Crail left as they were two hundred years ago, as if the spirit of
progress had overlooked them – not unlike old maiden ladies shut up in their
garrets, unwilling to forget the days of their early beauty, although the bloom
has faded long ago – still able to boast of their royal degree, and ever thinking
to themselves what might have been were it not for their more fortunate rivals
Dundee and Glasgow, and even Kirkcaldy, luring the young men away.
(Simson and Stevenson 1981)

For all its prettiness, however, Pittenweem has another, more mundane
face. Its port sustains what is left of the Fife fishing fleet. Its new fish
market is built to European Community standards of hygiene; directly
across the road sits the office of the Fisherman’s Mutual Association. The
harbor wall where tourists wander is also the work site for fishermen
unloading boats and making repairs. In other words, the green and orange
tangles of net and rope that are scattered about are not stage effects.
However, tourist literature does not reveal that Pittenweem is struggling,
along with the rest of Scotland’s smaller fishing communities, to maintain
a foothold in the fishing industry.
Nor will the visitor hear about the conflicts that inhere in relying upon
the picturesque. A harbor-front shop-owner told me, with great scorn in
his voice, about a proposal to re-cobble the now smoothly-paved harbor
area in order to make the place look more old fashioned and quaint.
Slippery and uneven, cobblestones are not an ideal work surface. The
fishermen who mend their nets there and climb in and out of boats each
day were outraged. “Pittenweem is a working port; we don’t want it turned
into a marina,” one said. The cobble proposal reveals that power issues
surround heritage representations. As Urry (1995: 27) says, heritage
claims are “socially organised memories that are invoked as authoritative
sources of being able to speak a place”.
I heard fishers voice similar sentiments voiced at Anstruther:

Anster has changed for the worst. For example, if a Pittenweem boat has a torn
net, there’s very few places in Anster you could haul it in and mend it. This
promenade here [said with derision] . . . we used to mend our nets, had room
to spread them out. Not now. You try to do repairs here – it’s all for pleasure
boats. They’re trying to transform a beautiful working village into a tourist
trap.

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The Anstruther and the Pittenweem fishermen are finding that their
authority is slipping away as others attempt to “speak” their place. The
owner of a shoreside pub acknowledged that tourism boosted his business,
particularly when times were slow for the fishermen. He also owned that
tourists provide some entertainment value for local people: “Fishermen
like to have tourists come into the bar so they can tell them yarns.” Both
Brody (1975) and Puijk (1989), writing about rural Ireland and northern
Norway, respectively, have also noted that for some people in particularly
remote regions, a seasonal influx of strangers is, on balance, a welcome
diversion.
On the other hand, he said, “we don’t want to be like Anstruther”
(where tourists are truly thick on the ground, only a mile away). In other
words, in limited numbers tourists were acceptable, but no one wanted
them to dominate village life. Nor was the distinction between “kinship
tourists” or expatriates seeking their roots, and other, less focused strang-
ers, a factor in their local attitudes. As Pedregal (1996: 59) notes for a
southern Spanish community, “as the number of tourists progressively
increases, tourists cease to be individuals and become stereotypes”.
Anstruther in summer is indeed a busy place. Pedestrians overflow the
sidewalks. Mothers with babies in prams and elderly ladies in pastel
raincoats doing their shopping must compete for space with visitors who
peer into shop windows and snap photographs. Teenage girls with plucked
eyebrows and jet black hair totter along on gigantic platform heels. Brash-
voiced boys slouch along behind them, navigating the shoals of sticky-
faced children bearing ice cream cones and sweets. All are blown together
by the sharp winds off the Forth. It is a relief finally to push through the
Fisheries Museum’s polished wooden door and enter its shadowy, quiet
world.

Power and the Museum World in Anstruther

Every fisherman is a wee bit prood o’ the museum (A member of the Museum
Boat Club)

The Scottish Fisheries Museum is one of Anstruther’s chief attractions.

Established in 1967, it claims to represent the entire Scottish fishing
industry from all around the coast. It is a complex place that embodies all
the dilemmas of heritage. Part “cabinet of curiosity,” with archaeological
relics and miscellaneous objects relating to seafaring; part art exhibit with
portraits of fishermen and women wrought in oils and watercolors; part

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archive, with an enormous collection of photographs, tapes and documents;

part demonstration of industrial progress, with its linear succession of
exhibits routing the visitor from past to present; part instantiation of local
identity; and part heritage discourse: the museum is all this and more. (See
Walsh 1992.)
When I first visited it in the early 1970s, it was merely a couple of
rooms with a jumble of local artifacts, little funding, and less renown.
Today, the museum has joined the list of National Heritage Sites, competes
successfully for money from the EU and the Scottish Museums Council
and has expanded into several adjacent structures. It is almost fully
wheelchair accessible and has received public honors, including “a Civic
Trust Award, an Architectural Heritage Year Award and, in 1976, the
Museum of the Year Award for Scotland” (Hume and Storer 1997: 109).
The Scottish Tourist Board now places the Museum among the top 20
industrial heritage sites in terms of visitor numbers. In the early 1990s,
these averaged around 30,000 per year and come from all over the world,
including Japan.
After paying a small admission fee, the visitor is guided from the shop
to an inner courtyard where a few upturned boats amid piles of nets lie
about on the cobblestones. Then one makes a choice: in through the main
door or up a side stair to a special exhibit on domestic life known as the
Fisherman’s Cottage. If one chooses the former, the route is straight-
forward, leading from prehistory and marine biology through the various
technological eras: sail, steam and diesel power. Along the way are
displays on whaling, fish processing and navigation, among others.
Climbing the stair to the cottage, one finds a room filled with “good”
furniture and fancy ornaments, including a locally made grandfather
clock, a Japanese lacquered box, and a harmonium that was built in
Canada. Some rather scruffy-looking mannequins represent a small
nuclear family. A box bed sits against one wall. The whole exhibit is staid
and idealized, conveying fishers in their “Sunday best,” and affluent
fishers, at that. In this sense, it contrasts strikingly with a domestic exhibit
in the fisher museum at Arbroath, up the coast. There, a harried woman
is attempting to cook a meal while a baby cries and a cat, perpetually
suspended in the act of filching a fish, meows plaintively (sound effects
courtesy of a repeating tape).
I visited the cottage one day with David, whom we met in the previous
chapter. It was a fine summer day and he entered wearing a polo shirt and
sunglasses. These seemed out of place in the chilly half-light of the
cottage, but as he spoke, he made the place his own. The space had, in fact,
once belonged to him. He had used it to store gear and as a work area for

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the two women he employed to mend nets. Even a basket that stood
outside the door had once been his. As we surveyed the room’s contents,
he reminisced about domestic details. He told me, for example, that the
biscuits on the table were ships’ biscuits called “hardies” because they
would last for weeks. He also recalled the fisherwomen’s passion for
cleanliness and how each would scrub her section of the pavement all
along the village of Cellardyke, where “all the Anster fishermen lived.”
“The worst thing that could happen to you in Cellardyke was to be ‘spoken
aboot.’ If you didn’t keep clean you would be ‘spoken aboot.’” He recalled
his mother boiling clothes and then pounding them in an old, modified
herring barrel. Many objects provoked him to say, “that could have come
out of my granny’s hoose . . . I remember my mother’s mother before she
died – she lived in Cellardyke – we’re only 50 years removed from being
pretty primitive.”
David had done such an effective job of making me see the museum
though his eyes, that I found myself upset when others failed to appreciate
it. Thus it was that, while browsing in the Anstruther “fisherman’s cottage”
one day, I experienced one of those moments when the ethnographer
realizes how close she has come to her informant’s point of view. I was
showing some American visitors around the exhibit and I asked them if
they had seen any of the other fishery museums. They had not. When I told
them that this was the biggest one, a woman said with satisfaction, “Well,
that’s nice, we’ve hit the biggest then,” and hurried away down the stair.
It was not, perhaps, as egregious a remark as the famous, “if this is Tuesday,
it must be Belgium,” the kind of comment often associated with American
travelers. Nonetheless, I was glad none of my fisher friends, and partic-
ularly David, were around to hear this casual dismissal of their efforts.
Such “ugly Americans” stand in sharp contrast to those who consider
themselves part of the Scottish fisherfolk diaspora. These are the kinship
tourists to whom I referred earlier. Looking for heritage of a different sort,
they search for recognizable faces among the museum’s many photo-
graphs; some even comb patiently through the archives for details about
their ancestors and how they lived.3 These seekers tend to tour the coast.
I once overheard a visitor to the tiny fisher museum in Nairn say to his
child, “Look at that photo. There’s granny, baiting the lines.” A museum
volunteer commented on them as “exiles,” saying, “This gives them a
sense of stability in their lives to know their family history.” In Anstruther,
I encountered a number of similar visitors, including two from New
Hampshire who were looking for the man’s grandfather. “We think he
came from Pittenweem . . . he was a fisherman and probably left around
1850 . . .”

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But it must not be forgotten that tourists are not the only visitors to
the museum. It is also a collecting point for a more local, if dispersed,
imagined community and a place in which to imagine that community
reconstituted. Those claiming fisher identity or direct descent from those
who did, often visit the museum and make vehement, critical comments
about the selection and accuracy of exhibits. The criticisms stop, however,
when they reach the museum’s Memorial Room, where plaques to those
fishermen drowned at sea cover the walls. The room was built initially at
the suggestion of a fishermen’s association and anyone with ties to the
fishing community may put up a plaque to honor a lost kinsman. Casual
visitors are excluded, so mourners and rememberers can sit there in silence.
Many leave flowers, particularly on the anniversaries of boat losses.
“It’s when there’s no body recovered, no burial, this serves as a grave,”
said one museum worker. A look at the visitors’ book for 1992–3 showed
that relatives had come from as far away as Australia and Zimbabwe, but
by far the greatest number were from the Scottish coast. Many left little
messages: “God Bless Donald,” “In memory of a beloved father,” “Joe, I
remember you,” “Grandad lost at sea, skipper Caledonia.” This is, in many
ways, a sacred space and, as we shall see a bit further on, occasional
attempts by museum staff to manage it generate considerable hostility.
The museum also works with a boats club. This group of men takes
responsibility for collecting and maintaining old fishing boats and its
members often do not agree with Museum policies about preservation.
Their prize possession is the “Reaper,” a 74-foot-long wooden sailing boat
that dates from about 1900. She is used as a kind of floating emissary for
the Anstruther museum. A few club members regularly take her up and
down the coast for special events and on educational missions. “We have
to be careful what waters we take her into – she’s a sweet old lady,” said
one crew member, who also complained that the Museum would not let
the club fit her out with the appropriate artifacts:

There’s an Aladdin’s Cave up there, lassie. There’s half a gartlin’ [great line].
I dinna ken why they won’t let us have some o’ them things for the Reaper. A
boat like this would always have had a brass barometer and a weather cock on
the wall. They’ve got them up there and they won’t let us have them. Mebbe
it’s because the stuff’s on loan but we could sign a note and return them after
the trip.

These men wanted more accuracy from the museum, but others didn’t
want the museum at all. Not all fishermen were pleased to see their way
of life put under glass. Different attitudes tended to reflect different

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generations. As one man from Pittenweem said to me, “working fishermen

are not so happy to think of their industry as something that belongs in a
museum.” Another concurred: “fishermen don’t want to think of them-
selves as part of a dying industry.” A young boy standing near him said
simply,”it’s crap.”
However, a number of the East Neuk’s older fishermen have been
heavily involved with the museum, so much so that I once heard them
referred to (snidely) as “heritage aristocrats.” For them, the best definition
of heritage might be the sympathetic one (in contrast to the critical ones I
mentioned earlier) that Ray (2001: 7) offers in her discussion of North
American devotees of Scottish culture: “something of a rhapsody on
history [whose value] . . . lies in its perennial flexibility and the strength
of emotions it evokes”. These fishermen devote a great deal of time and
thought to the museum. While they are not always rhapsodic about the
results, they have powerful feelings about their efforts, as well as about
the kinds of truth they believe the museum should show the world.
In this, the oldest and largest of Scotland’s museums devoted exclus-
ively to fishing, we find a rich venue within which to examine the contested
meanings and uses of fisher heritage. These range from the national to the
local, the native to the “professional.” As one former curator said to me,
“a museum is a strange thing to have representing a living community.
You’re fragmenting someone’s life, splitting things up and putting them
in glass cases.” Yet local people wanted their pasts so preserved, at least
in the beginning.
One of the founders told me that a local builder had first broached the
idea for a museum in 1962. His family had all been fishing folk, and he
had watched unhappily as a lot of valuable material was thrown away
when the old men were dying off. He and his friends began a collection
and called for donations. These practically flew in, as people scoured attics
and storerooms. Every object came with a personal story about a local
family. All, moreover, were entailed, as donors expected their gifts to be
put on display (and would complain loudly if they sat in storage).
As I toured the museum with various fishermen or huddled with them
over tea in the chilly museum cafe, I learned a great deal about the many
ways in which objects reveal social relationships and about the politics of
exhibition. It immediately became apparent that the fishermen do not trust
professional curators. In particular, they do not and cannot subscribe to
what Gathercole (1991: 75) calls “curatorial knowledge:”

Curatorial knowledge, however, is much more than knowledge about artefacts;

it is . . . part of a museum culture, within which curators define, maintain, and

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extend their roles . . . The measure of curatorial productivity, therefore, is one

of ideas, expressed as texts of one form or another. Thus we find another
paradox. Artefacts are, in the contexts of their parent cultures, indigenous
instruments of production . . . Once they are transferred to museums, however,
they become some of the instruments of production which curators use
to demonstrate their professional roles and to delineate their productive
relations . . .

So any artifact on display is a potential site for disagreement (O’Hanlon

1993: 90). For example, several informants took great care to tell me that
the Fisherman’s Cottage should properly have been called “the Fisher-
man’s Hoose [House].” Farm workers had cottages, they said. Fishermen
had hooses. In another instance, one man pointed derisively to a replica
of a Scottish dugout boat, circa AD 500, saying, “What has that to do with
Scottish fisheries? It’s just a lump of wood and a waste of money.”
Such comments naturally aroused my curiosity about the social dyn-
amics of exhibit making and so I set out to interview not only fishermen,
but museum staff and curators. Over the years, the museum has had a
succession of curators whose goals for the museum typically derived not
from local experience and sentiment, but from a delocalized, professional
culture with a priori ideas about what to do with objects. It was the
Edinburgh-based Scottish Museums Council (based in Edinburgh) that
suggested the need for a professional curator and general manager. The
tenures of these curators have typically been short. The first one stayed for
12 years; the next lasted six months. Subsequent curators have had varied
tenures but all have been plagued by local politics, disputes and competing
agendas.
Baxandall (1991: 36) notes that museum exhibits are always complex
and dynamic productions involving a three-way conversation:

Rather than one static entity representing another, I would prefer, as more
productive, a notion of exhibition as a field in which at least three distinct terms
are independently in play – makers of objects, exhibitors of made objects, and
viewers of exhibited made objects.

This helps to explain much of the dynamics of exhibition politics in

Anstruther. There, the political engagements of exhibition are further
complicated by the fact that many people occupy more than one position
in this field. Disentangling the perspectives of makers, exhibitors and
viewers is enormously difficult. Hooper-Greenhill (1992: 7) says that
“power within museums and galleries is skewed towards the collecting

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subject who makes decisions in relation to space, time and visibility; in

other words as to what may be viewed, how it should be seen, and when
this is possible.” In the Anstruther museum, the role of “collecting subject”
has never resided in only one individual. Donors have continually warred
with curators over the right to make decisions. Their passion for their own
versions of appropriate use, accuracy and truth lead them inevitably into
conflict with those whose background is strictly in the academic or
museum setting.
The curator must answer to a Board of Trustees that includes local
fishermen, businessmen, solicitors, bankers and one university academic.
Fishermen still dominate the curatorial committee. One former curator
explained some of the challenges he had faced in the 1980s:

I found that just being local, even though not from the fishing industry, was
an advantage. But I was not local enough, because I came from another part
of Fife. For the people of the East Neuk, Pittenweem is the center of the
universe . . . The fishermen were very proud of their heritage and wary of
outsiders. We had a student from Queen’s University working with us who was
told a lot of lies. People didn’t want to reveal details about their families and
didn’t want their lives misrepresented. They even told one researcher in St.
Monans that a boat was to be covered in the best Fife butter prior to her launch,
for superstitious reasons! A lot of these people are frightened of academics.
They also want only the positive side of things to be represented.

My informant also found himself becoming caught up in the changing

climate of museum development, as heritage began to be perceived as a
profitable, as well as a national, enterprise:

In the Fife Region, the Scottish Museums Council are all getting into museum
politics. Working at the museum became a seven day a week job. For a couple
of years, I was going to meetings twice a week. The politics got intense as the
Scottish Development Agency and the Scottish Museums Council worried
about duplicating resources along the east coast . . . But more than this, there
was the frustration of not being able to get on with the job. Paper work and
meetings took the place of working on exhibits . . .

Early in this curator’s tenure, in the early 1980s, pressures to reconfigure

the museums’s identity to reflect that “intrinsically Scottish” quality that
McCrone et al. (1995) have remarked upon, began to plague him. The
museum then retained a distinctively East Neuk stamp, despite the pres-
ence of exhibits from elsewhere. Was it to remain a truly local enterprise,
or should it broaden its remit to include all of Scotland?

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From the beginning, the museum had been called the Scottish Fisheries
Museum, and it was felt that we needed to reach out. We went out with the
fishermen on boats, up to the Shetlands and all around the coast. In the 1970s
there had been a big change in technology and people were throwing things
away.

A subsequent curator, whom I will call William, came to Anstruther

from England and had a particularly difficult time. He deplored how his
instructions and demands were flouted. “This is an area of advanced
parochialism, where people delight in nit-picking and in seeing things go
wrong. This is true elsewhere, but it seems to be fairly marked here.” He
attributed the criticisms he received to his status as an Englishman and an
outsider. He also understood that local people and curators have very
different agendas. However, his understanding did not translate into
sympathy for the fisherfolk or an interest in compromise:

This town is still a close-knit community and it’s hard to penetrate socially. In
fact, I find it easier to collect things from the west coast than locally. The locals
got all upset when I changed the steam gallery [devoted to the days when steam
succeeded sail]. I rearranged the layout so that the models could be seen from
all sides, to make it more three-dimensional. The collection itself was sub-
stantially unchanged. Yet some locals think the gallery has been ruined because
the change came from an outsider . . .

With William, the ongoing war between fishermen and curators seemed
to intensify. Doubtless, his belief that the fishermen’s memories were often
faulty and rambling did not help. But then, his views were not unique. A
non-fisherman resident of the town explained fisher resistence to curators
in terms of ignorance and stubbornness:

There are tremendous local resources, but local people don’t understand some
aspects of the museum ethic, especially issues of restoration, research and
authenticity. If you’ve been a fisherman for fifty years, you believe you are an
expert. But we’ve found that their memories are not always reliable and stories
will get mixed up. They don’t believe that upstart academics could possibly
know better . . . Restoration is another issue. Locals want things smartened up,
fixed and painted, but sometimes that means a loss of material . . . We have a
lot of handymen who are invaluable – old retired fishermen who get paid a
pittance and turn around and spend the money on things for the museum like
paint. The problem, though, is that they make decisions for themselves. For
example, they’ll decide the curator is wrong about where to put an object and
they might move it. Once they took a very old object collected from up north
and decided to paint it.

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The question of restoration is always contentious. For example, in

O’Hanlon’s discussion of a Highland Papua New Guinean exhibit at
London’s Museum of Mankind he mentions the debate over whether to
clean a Wahgi shield:

The question raised the issue of what it is that an artefact is valued as embody-
ing. Is it the shield as a perfect example of its type, a kind of snapshot in time,
taken grime-free at the outset of its career? Or do we seek, rather, to preserve
the evidence of the shield’s biography through time, even when (as with the
grime) the evidence also begins to obscure something of the artefacts’ original
purpose? (O’Hanlon 1999: 80)

In the case of the Anstruther artifacts, the fishermen’s desire to clean

and paint was not necessarily to render them pristine. Rather it was to
show a different aspect of their biography: objects in use were frequently
cleaned and renewed; only discarded objects would have been left dirty.
As we have seen, in reference to the pride fisherwomen took in scrubbing
their doorsteps, it is part of the fisherfolk’s “presentation of self” (Goffman
1963) to display clean objects. In their minds, to display a dirty one would
embody the wrong value.
Various curators spoke of the need to preserve objects, maintaining the
physical integrity by locking things away, if necessary. However, what
museum professionals saw as a commitment to conserve rare objects and
delicate materials was widely interpreted by the fisherfolk as sacrificing
living history for sterile academic purposes. Some of the fisherfolk
believed that the museum was in danger of being taken over by “those
toffee-nosed buggers” and “lady do-gooders,” as some referred to a few
people from nearby St Andrews. They believed that such a take-over
would seriously distort and dilute the meaning of fishing for those who
visit the museum.
Fishermen employed various subversive tactics to undermine this
process. One day, as a fisherman member of the board was trying to
explain to me the difference between winter and summer herring nets, he
said, “Go and pick them up, so you can feel the difference. They say
you’re not supposed to, but you just go and pick them up.” I did, of course.
Not only did I want to feel the nets; it would have been a serious breach
of trust to indicate allegiance to what were, for him, a foreign set of
standards. Moreover, in telling me to pick up the nets, he was asserting his
role as de facto curator.
One of the few women active in the museum’s creation also voiced her
concerns over the influence of professional staff. An octogenarian in

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failing health, Mary had previously given museum tours, including one
for the Queen Mother. In recognition for her work, “I had to go to Buck-
ingham Palace and get an MBE. I’ll give that to the fisher museum.” She
was proud of the award, but even prouder of her fishing lineage:

My grandfather was drowned when my father was 12, in one of the first
steam drifters. He went to do a week of fishing in February, for white fishing.
There was a bad storm and she never came back. It was the fourteenth of
February in 1900. But their sons went to the fishing. My father left school after
his father drowned. But he was an intelligent man and he took his skipper’s
ticket when he was old enough. He could help me with my maths because he
knew navigation.

She was still deeply committed to writing and preserving fisher lore,
but deplored recent changes in the museum. “When it opened, the museum
was mainly about people. Now it’s about things. We looked for stories
about people. It was not so much a museum as a demonstration of history.
Now it’s not a place for homey talk. It has changed its ethos.” As for the
current curator, who was then on his way out, “I’ll be glad when he’s away.
He lost things. He didn’t think things were important that were very
important. He didn’t know anything or anyone among the fisherfolk.”
One local man was especially notorious for opposing the curators.
“Robert” was descended from a fisher family, but never went to sea
himself. Despite a career spent in teaching mathematics, he had amassed
an astonishing array of facts about fishermen and fishing boats. When I
went to see him, he sat me down in an armchair and first established his
fisher lineage. “My mother was from Boddam, near Peterhead; my mother’s
father went to the whaling. My father had three sailing yawls and two
motor yawls in my time.” Then he told me about all the things that were
wrong with the museum, blaming the growing influence of academics
from St Andrews for the many mistakes he saw there.
From his perspective, museum politics had seriously degraded the
quality of exhibits. He spoke of those who had “staged a coup and got
fisherfolk knocked off the committee.” Local fishermen had been alien-
ated from the museum by outsiders, “university and business people who
like to be important. I’ve noticed there’s an element in the town which
values incomers more than local folk.” According to him, local experts
have been ignored. “There are six kinds of fishing and I’ve never met
anyone who’s worked on more than four of them. So you have to listen
to people. These folks don’t listen.”
Peter was most aggrieved over an exhibit depicting a late nineteenth-
century fish-curer’s premises. In the antechamber of a large room sits a

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mannequin hunched over a typewriter. The mannequin represents a fish

merchant, an employer, as we have seen, of considerable local power. One
day, Peter identified the mannequin’s waistcoat as having once belonged
to a local man’s great grandfather, who had been a fisherman. When he
saw the man on the street, he roared, “why William, d’ye ken, yon mannie
in the museum is wearing your great grandfather’s waistcoat with a collar
and a tie!” Peter was outraged at the idea that a fisherman’s clothes now
adorned a fish merchant. No man who wore a fisherman’s waistcoat would
ever have been found working at a desk or with a typewriter. The mistake
was also critical because, as we have seen, during the period depicted,
fishermen and fish merchants stood in tense, antagonistic relations to each
other. To conjoin them symbolically, albeit unwittingly, in an exhibit
violated a significant structural opposition within the fishing community.
The resulting marriage of the unmarriageable was, in effect, a monster.
But the monstrosity was only evident or relevant to those in the know.
When I questioned the present curator about the decision to use the
waistcoat, he said that no one had thought that it mattered very much what
the mannequin wore. To him, the exhibit was accurate in all the ways that
counted. A non-fisher board member said that the intent had been to
display the fish-curer’s documents and that the clothes were “just things
that the museum had handy.” But to local fisherfolk, this was a breach of
major proportions. The story circulated widely throughout the town. For
us, it provides a telling example of Kishemblatt-Gimblett’s (1998: 149)
point that “a hallmark of heritage is the problematic relationship of its
objects to the instruments of their display”.
I listened to many conversations about the museum collection and its
personal meaning to the people who devoted so many hours to its making.
As might be predicted from what we learned in the previous chapter, many
of their stories were about boats: when and how they were built, and most
particularly, how accurately they have been depicted either in books or in
models. Even objects outside the Museum came in for such scrutiny. An
antiques dealer in Pittenweem told me that he had displayed a group of
model boats and found that “all the old fishermen came in to have a look.
One of them said, ‘You’ll have to tell the man that built this boat that he’s
gotten the stay in the wrong place.’”
One member of the museum staff said that the fishermen were so
concerned with accuracy because

You’re dealing with men mostly above the age of fifty. When they were young,
you were belted in school if you got things only 90 per cent right. They had to
be 100 per cent right. They feel you have to tell people the accurate story – a

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stranger can’t be satisfied with only half a story. This should accord with what
a museum does, but it doesn’t.

More importantly, however, was that almost all of the boats seemed to
have a personal connection to a kinsman. In other words, as when fisher-
men talked about actual boats, they were relaying family history. “My
grandfather/uncle, cousin/nephew/brother sailed aboard her/ken’t the man
who built her/lived across the road from her skipper/was her first skipper.”
Not all conflicts concerned displays: the museum itself could be a
contested space. Thus, Mary recounted how she had met a friend coming
out of the museum one day. Jessie, then about 70 years of age, had lost her
son some 20 years previously when his boat had foundered. Not only had
she had put up a plaque in the Memorial Room that read, “In memory of
David Meldrum Hughes Aged 19 of Pittenweem. Lost on 2nd February,
1966 from the boat ‘Honestas’ LH 370,” but she also visited the memorial
every two weeks, setting flowers in a vase near the wall. When Elizabeth
met her, however, she was in tears. Some woman in the museum had told
her she had no right to sit there and she had fled. Mary said, “your folk
have been fisherfolk in Anstruther for 300 years. You have every right to
be in there.” As she told me the story, her voice rose with indignation over
the affront. “That woman was an incomer.”
This incident reveals more than the persistence of the distinction
between incomers and fisherfolk. It speaks to the fact that heritage cannot
be contained within museum walls, confined to a designated space and
subject to hierarchical decision making about what does and does not
matter. We can follow this argument by moving out of the museum into
some more private spaces, where fisherfolk collect and produce texts and
displays of their own.

Heritage Domesticated: the Importance of Being Erudite

Not only the fishermen but also their houses speak volumes about herit-
age. Every living room, or lounge, is filled with memorabilia of the sea:
paintings (at least one of the fisherman’s boat), photographs (ditto) and
model boats. Every time I visited a fisher couple at home, I asked for a
guided tour of the art and artifacts. These were always happily granted and
accompanied by a long stream of reminiscences.
In addition to the artwork, many of the older fishermen have also
amassed a large store of books and notes relating to the fishery. Their
personal libraries often included weighty industrial texts as well as the

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bound volumes of reminiscences, verse, and local histories. These have

titles like Fishing in Old East Lothian (Gibson 1994); Broughty Ferry in
the Days of Sail (McMillan nd); The Berwickshire Coast (Wood 1998);
Aul Torry: O’ Fish and Fowk (Atherton 1992); Fishing the North East
(Taylor n.d.); Steam Fishermen in Old Photographs (Elliott 1979); or One
Foot in the Sea (Smith 1991). Over the years, I have benefitted from the
generous loan of many such publications. In fact, I have seldom had to ask
for them. My informants would unearth them from their shelves and press
them upon me, eager to display the prodigious chronicling capacities of
indigenous fisher writers. Thus, when David presented me with a copy of
Peter Buchan’s collected poems and stories, he told me “you’ll learn
everything you need to know about the fishing if you read that book. I take
it to sea with me.”
In laying claim to specific authors and texts, the fishers also ratified
their own status as fisher experts who could transmute and incorporate the
works of others into not only local knowledge, but reserved knowledge,
that is, kept only for themselves and for those with whom they chose to
share it. Such acts of sharing or withholding further enhance the value of
insiderness by reminding the outsider (whether curator or anthropologist)
that fishers still controlled access to their pasts. They, the fisherfolk, were
the patrons and dispensers of understanding. Outsiders were dependents,
knowledge-clients who may not receive all that they ask for or compre-
hend it when they do.
This also had the effect of inverting power relationships based upon
formal education, a significant class marker in British society. Such
inversions provoked reactions, however. An academic, non-fisher infor-
mant asserted a counter-claim to authority when he derided the “flurry of
pamphlets being produced all around the coast; many are very badly done
and privately published. This is just using heritage for status reasons. It’s
a waste of time and energy.”
Whether or not the volumes of local history were completely accurate,
fisher poetry was vivid and evocative. It was also voluminous. I refer here
not to the astonishing quantity of poetry that has been written about the
fisherfolk (by writers such as Alistair MacLean, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Robert Southey, Iain Crichton Smith, and Rudyard Kipling), but to the
poems written by the fisherfolk. Many fisherfolk are very fond of poetry,
writing it, reading it, and reciting it. Most of it is meant to be spoken aloud.
Often sentimental, it tends to be highly concrete, with compelling render-
ings of boat and home and harborside. However, it is rarely personal or
introspective. Most poems mark places and recognizable experiences.
Although the writers would no doubt appreciate a wider audience, they do

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not need it to justify their efforts. They write to each other, to celebrate a
way of life.
“‘Poetry Peter’ Smith: The Fisherman Poet of Cellardyke”, born in
1874, wrote poems “in the main for recital at church and other social
gatherings” (Watson 1992: 89). According to Watson, who edited a
volume of his work, Smith also wrote in order to preserve local dialect.

Yet tho’ we sing the same auld tunes,

Ilk [each] country’s words ha’e different soonds.
In Aberdeen we’ve quines [women] and loons [men],
And foo [how] and fat [what].
In Fife’s red tiled, auld farrant [old-fashioned] toons,
It’s hoo and what.
(Watson 1992: 112).

Nellie Watson, born in Cellardyke in 1895, wrote of old days but also
commented on the present. In 1949, she reminisced about the winter
herring, which were already in decline:

Thae days saw hunder-barrel shots

That a’ were brocht frae oot the Firth
And sune the herbour was astir
Wi boats a’ scamlin’ for a berth . . .
The Hame Toon was sae busy then
And HERRING often filled oor dish,
But noo there is this awfy change –
what’s happened tae that HUMBLE FISH! (n.d.: 1–2)

Peter Buchan (1917–91), the widely read Peterhead fisherman whose

work my friend David admires, also wrote for a fisher audience. The
jacket biography of his Collected Poems and Short Stories describes him
as “the voice of Scotland’s northeast fishing communities” noting that he
wished to present fishers in a kindlier light than the one often used to
illuminate them. “He started to write short stories to portray the ‘middle
ground’ in fisher life which had formerly been portrayed at the two
extremes of either drunkenness or religious fanaticism . . .” (Buchan
1992).
In a story that begins like a homily to fisher pride, he goes on lovingly
to mock the fishers’ competitive obsession with cleanliness,

Visitors to the Moray Firth coast are usually favourably impressed with the
spick-and-span appearance of the houses of the fisher folk.

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The immaculate paintwork on both wood and stone is positive proof that
a great deal of work and not a little money have been lavished on these
dwellings, which altho they are not of granite, are nevertheless soundly
constructed to endure the rigours of the north-east climate.
This is not the arrogant pride of bigsiness or conceit but a softer, milder pride
in such things as heritage and birthplace . . .
Seldom will you see a BCK [Buckie] boat in an orra [shabby] state. Nae
fears! The BCK lads, are, on the whole, ‘verra parteeclar’ with their craft . . .
(Buchan 1992: 205)

In Buckie, where we are about to go, Isobel Harrison reigns as local

poet. She is fully bilingual but she writes exclusively in the Doric, or
northern dialect of Broad Scots. Her poems, published in a volume called
En Kin Ee Mine Es? (And Can You Remember This?) with the support of
Moray District Council, concern the homely details of life in the Buckie
of the 1930s, when she was a girl. Poverty, sharing, humor and thrift
inform her verses and above all, the warm recollection of an enveloping
community:

Fin I wis a wee quinie, it aye seem’t tae me,

My Dad wis hardly iver hame, aye awa tae sea,
My Mam wis aye in the hoose, fin we come in fae play,
And nivir seemit tae chainge, bit wis wyvin ivery day! . . .

The Worrel wis a wee sma placie, safe an affey secure,

Bounded be a way oh care, an an innocence sae pure,
The days afore the war, we maybe wirna gran,
Bit Lord we hid athin that wis necessary tae man!! (Harrison 1992: 21).

Harrison, who traveled a great deal throughout her life, has now
returned to her birthplace in Buckpool, where the fisher community was
once concentrated. I met her there, at Bob and Nessie’s house across the
road from where I was staying, “the most traditional part of town,” she told
me. Our conversation was an intense lesson in heritage, although she
never referred to her memories in that way. Her talk, emphasizing the
independence and resourcefulness of the fishers she had known, was
replete with references to particular characters, jokes, and games. Much
of her lore, she said, came from her grandmother, a formidable character,
it seems:

I had the great benefit of sleeping next to her from the age of twelve until she
died. I got all her stories. When my grandfather was thirty-four, he was carted
home in a net-cart and the doctor came and diagnosed TB. Grannie set him up
in a loft near the window and fed him a tonic with eggs in it and he lived to be
seventy-four.

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Grannie became known as a healer, treating sore throats with iodine

and making beef tea and saving the fisherfolk from having to pay the
doctor’s fees. And when her labors failed, she also strauchtened (laid out)
the dead.
In the indigenous voices of Smith, Buchan and Harrison, we hear
strong notes of nostalgia. However, it would be a mistake to think that they
point monotonally backwards. Like my older informants in Anstruther and
Ferryden, they are also speaking about age, loss and modern times by
saying, in effect, “We’re still here. Let us tell you how we lived.” My
capacity for listening to them generated some comment. It even led one
of my informants to announce, “I ken what anthropology is: it’s the study
of auld men!” Like the elderly Jews of Myerhoff’s (1978) Aliyah Center,
they embraced this conversation to maintain vitality and to leave a legacy,
not just to inherit one. And thus they teach us what heritage is really about:
it is not just about what has been handed down from the past, but about
how to live in the present, as well as about what to leave for the future
(Huby 1992). As I said at the start of this chapter, the motto of the Buckie
Heritage Society, to which both Peter Buchan and Isobel Harrison have
belonged, reads, “our future lies in our past.”

Buckie

Travelling north from Fife to the Moray Firth coastline, we could visit
other fisher museums.4 But it is in Buckie that the competing orientations
of heritage – towards locals or towards tourists – emerge even more
starkly than in Anstruther. Here the locally established Heritage Society
faces a competitor in the large, expensive and purpose-built heritage
center called the Buckie Drifter Project, whose motto reads, “Catch the
Spirit of the North East.” The Heritage Society is a truly indigenous,
grassroots affair reliant upon donations and small entrance fees; the Drifter
is a sleek product of the tourist industry that cost about one million pounds
to construct.
Unlike Pittenweem and Anstruther, Buckie (population 8,800) has not
been a major tourist destination. In fact, so parlous has its status been in
the tourist industry that in 1995, despite the opening of the Drifter Project,
Buckie’s local tourist office was threatened with closure. This aroused
much ire:

The decision can only mean astonishment in the Buckie and Cullen areas as
to its absurdity. Within the last year . . . the new Buckie Drifter, has been
opened to act as a tourist flagship and provide a platform for developing a

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

tourism base in the Buckie coastal area . . . (Banffshire Advertiser, 14 March

1995: 1)

However, the town is neither beautiful nor picturesque. Its commercial

center contains a number of rather seedy shops, chain stores, and desultory
cafes. Its sidewalks are often empty. It is hardly a tourist’s idea of the
perfect vacation spot.
But Buckie proper is not all there is. When people speak of the town,
they refer to a thickly settled coastal strip that extends eastward from
Buckpool to Portessie, once separate fishing settlements. The shoreline is
rocky, with no sand beach to draw the summertime crowds. At the heart
of these settlements today is Buckie harbor, which hosts an active, though
troubled, fishing fleet. Many of the boats are small and well worn. Lately,
shellfish, primarily prawns and nephrops, or Norway lobster, have been
the mainstay for the large, enclosed fish market. There one finds a bustle
of activity, with workers, mostly retired fishermen, helping to weigh and
grade fish. Picking up large, iron hooks, they drag fish boxes to the waiting
vans, then drive the vans, or fish lorries, to other ports. When the auction
is over, they repair to the fisherman’s cafe across the road to light cigar-
ettes, drink tea and coffee and to talk about how bad times are getting.
They appreciate the Heritage Society but have many qualms about the
Drifter, which they see as having been imposed upon the town.
These fishermen like the Buckie Heritage Society’s “Heritage Cottage”
much better. It sits just behind the town library in a graceful little square.
Founded in 1986 by a group of local fisherpeople who, like the folks in
Anstruther, were worried about preserving the artifacts of days gone by,
the Society claims to be “more than a museum, much more! . . . where
people fae a’ the airts [places] can meet.” The Society is an all-volunteer
organization whose main collection consists of an astonishing number of
old photographs, as well as a set of video and audio tapes of people’s
reminiscences. The artifacts are crowded and jumbled. Much remains in
storage. Unlike the Drifter Project, which focuses exclusively on the days
of steam drifting (roughly from the 1880s to the First World War), the
Heritage Society welcomes all material relating to Buckie’s fishing
history. As a result, there is far more material than can be displayed. The
Banffshire Advertiser (7 March 1995: 1), in an article headlined “Cramped!”
quoted Society Chairman Peter Bruce as saying that “There’s enough
material in our possession to fill a building twice this size.” That was
probably an understatement.
True to its claim, the cottage is a convivial place. It is open about 20
hours a week, staffed by volunteers (most of them in their seventies or

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 Fishing for Heritage

beyond) who drink tea, sort through the massive collection of photographs
and happily chat about the old days of fishing with any visitor who
happens by. In the summer of 1994, they received some 900 people. Some
of these visitors are the kinship tourists whom we first met in Anstruther.
However, the Heritage Society, while locally respected, was not doing
much for Buckie’s lagging tourist industry.
For some years, efforts to increase Buckie’s share of the tourist market
had languished. With the growing popularity of heritage, Banff District
Council decided in the early 1990s to launch a second heritage site, this
one lavishly funded and architecturally avant garde. By 1993, a profes-
sional manager had been hired. Work went quickly and the Buckie Drifter
Project opened in 1994. The power struggle over domain began immed-
iately. On a visit to the Heritage Society in ‘93, shortly before the Drifter
Project was built, I sat chatting with a few members when the new manager
of the Drifter Project came by to collect information. Her manner was
brisk and the presence of an anthropologist hardly put her off her stride.
When I asked her about plans for the new museum, the old men quickly
said, “oh, that’ll be for the tourists.” She immediately responded, “no, no,
it’s for local folks too.” The old men remained unconvinced. “That’s
right,” they said, “it’ll be for the tourists.” After she had gone, they pointed
out that she was an incomer.
Like the people of the East Neuk, the old men of Buckie were not
opposed to tourism per se. Yet, they would have agreed with the woman
from the small fisher museum in Nairn, further west, who said, “We’re not
particularly interested in tourism, we’re interested in preserving the
community.” These men thought, in fact, that tourism would probably do
some good for the local economy, but they also saw it as essentially
irrelevant for their purpose, which was to keep and make available the
memories of Buckie’s fishing past for those who really cared about it.
Moreover, further conversations also revealed some concern that the
Drifter would attempt to acquire the Society’s collection of photographs,
tapes and artifacts. The old men adamantly insisted that these would stay
where they were. Others were not so sure. Still, everyone was clearly
anxious that ultimately, the Drifter would efface the Heritage Society and
eclipse its efforts.
Rivalry with the Drifter began to mount. The Society’s newsletter,
Heritage News (1993: 3) reported concern that an artifact promised to the
Society “would end up in the Drifter.” On the following page, it tried to
reassure its readers:

Our work and display will be totally different to the Drifter, yet complementary
to it. We will continue in Heritage Cottage, to do what we do best, to do what

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our members expect; namely to provide a down-to-earth, no frills, home for

the photos and exhibits which have been entrusted to our care and a ‘hamely’
welcome to all our visitors from home and abroad.. (1993: 4)

Some claimed that the Drifter’s designers had ignored local expertise
and created a superficial display. In 1993, Bob’s words strikingly echoed
those of Mary, my Anstruther informant, who lamented the growing
impersonality of her museum’s ambience:

The new heritage opening up may help or it may not. I would have put the
Buckie Drifter Project nearer the town, so you could see the sea and have easy
access to the town. I don’t approve of the site, but they got it cheap from
Grampian [Regional Council]. They’ll take over the Heritage Society. The new
curator is an outsider and can’t tell the story the way the local folk can. The
fishing communities along the coast, from Peterhead to Lossiemouth, they
work together. If I ran the museum, I’d have them tell people stories.

However, the worst insult was the first manager’s failure to invite
members of the Buckie Heritage Society to the gala opening ceremony.
This was a faux pas of epic proportions. Word of it sped down the coast
so that I heard of it not only in Buckie but in Anstruther as well. A number
of fishermen now refused to set foot inside the Drifter and only one or two
agreed to work with the Drifter as local experts.
The next Drifter manager, who started work in 1995, had local ties
and a better understanding of how to engage with the community. The
Banffshire Advertiser reported that she

would like to see the quayside alongside the Drifter come alive, with real
people taking part in the recreation of history. Anyone who could spare some
time to demonstrate net-making, gutting or any of the other quayside jobs
which were part and parcel of harbour life during the time of the steam drifters,
is asked to get in touch with her.

She went on to call for people to feel a sense of ownership. She also
attempted to separate the roles of the two institutions:

I want the people of Buckie and the surrounding area to see it as their heritage
centre . . . It’s not a museum, it’s a visitor attraction [italics mine] . . . and to
increase its appeal we need the help of local people who are in the know about
the periods we are recalling . . . Anyone who could spare some time to demon-
strate net-making, gutting or any of the other quayside jobs which were part
and parcel of harbour life during the time of the steam drifters, is asked to get
in touch with her. (Banffshire Advertiser, 14 March 1995: 1)

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 Fishing for Heritage

Under her aegis, the Drifter was promoted as part of “the Buckie
Experience,” which includes the working harbor itself, the fish market,
and the Royal National Lifeboat station. “Experience” is an increasingly
popular concept in heritage productions and it figures strongly in the
Drifter’s approach. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 138) notes that “the term
indexes an engagement of the senses, emotions, and imagination” that
signals a “self-conscious shift in orientation away from the museum’s
artifacts and toward its visitors”. And indeed, with an early twentieth-
century polling station where one can cast a ballot for or against becoming
teetotal, and the Drifter deck where one can walk on board and even stand
in the wheelhouse, experience is on offer. In contrast to the Anstruther
Museum, visitors are even encouraged to touch things, such as the cloth-
made “herring” inside an old cooper’s barrel, or the bedclothes of an old
box bed. Preservation is not the watchword here. The Drifter is intended
to make a profit.
In one pamphlet, the visitor is explicitly invited to “experience the past”
through “a journey back in time.” This journey is marked by performances
available through modern technology in the form of an audiocassette.

Go on board a Buckie Steam Drifter, find out how many fish it took to fill a
barrel and listen to the Buckie loons [men] and quines [women] as they talk
in their distinctive dialect. Join in the activities by mending nets and packing
fish and become part of the Buckie Drifter Experience.

In some ways, the Heritage Society and the Drifter have much in
common. As I said earlier, a heritage center, as opposed to a museum, is
more specifically intended to provide a didactic, but enjoyable experience.
In a heritage center, a greater part of the display is constructed using
replicas or simulacra and brings visitors into close contact with the
exhibits. By contrast, in a museum, curators anguish over accuracy,
authenticity and preservation, within the terms of the museum profession.
Neither the Buckie Drifter nor the Heritage Society is a museum and this
accounts for part of the competition between them. The simulacra of the
Drifter are pitted against the artifacts and conversation of the Society. And
it remains unclear which side will win out.
In some places, it seems, the line between museums and heritage centers
is being blurred. In an address to a museums conference in Glasgow,
Patrick Boylan commented on the irony of changes besetting the museum
community as heritage centers arise to challenge their domain:

. . . real museums seem desperate to deny their own status and market them-
selves instead as ‘heritage centres’ or ‘experiences’. Well, I have news for you,

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

the Disney Corporation has now put the grand-daddy of all ‘centres’, the Epcot
Center, on to an independent non-profit basis, declared it to be a museum after
all, and applied to the American Association of Museums for Accredited
Museum status. (Museums Journal 1990: 29)

He further remarks that proponents of the “new museology” in Europe

argue that the true limits of the museum should not be the boundary walls of
the museum building and its grounds: they should be the whole of a defined
geographical territory, which might be a small village at one extreme, or a
whole country in the case of a true national museum. They further argue that
the subject matter of the ‘new” museum’s operations should not just be the
collections within the museum building, but the total patrimony, natural and
human (including the individual and collective memory) of that defined
territory . . . (Boylan 1990: 32)

To my ear, the idea of a “total patrimony” sounds a lot like “heritage.”

Conclusion

Both Buckie and Anstruther celebrate fisher heritage, but they do so in

very different ways. Anstruther’s museum concentrates on the past but
also brings things up to date. It celebrates inventiveness and progress.
In that way, it models the heritage industry’s desired spirit of intrinsic
Scottishness, to which I referred earlier. Despite a lingering East Neuk
emphasis, it is a national museum in more than one sense. Its exhibits
evoke different parts of the coast; but more importantly, its focus on
changing technology recapitulates Scottish pride in industry and invent-
ion, the “achieving society” of which Harvie (1977) spoke, whose products
are featured prominently in Edinburgh’s Museum of Scotland. It links
Anstruther to a wider world in which Scots have traveled and made their
mark.
In Buckie, which still has a working port, both the Society and the
Drifter focus exclusively upon the past. Their displays call up local history
and local memories without saying much about external linkages. Buckie’s
heritage productions closely resemble those of other small, local fisher
museums, but the heritage stakes in Buckie still matter a great deal to those
whose lives have been given over to the sea. Everywhere that people
deplore the present (and that would seem to be pretty much anywhere),
they invoke some other time as an idealized contrast (Lowenthal 1985;
Wright 1985). Indeed, as the previous chapter showed, modern fishing
communities find themselves at a juncture where the latter has largely

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failed them. Hence, to recapitulate, the motto of the Buckie Fishing

Heritage Society: “Our future lies in our past.”
Will Scotland’s fishing communities have any choice about how to
manage themselves as sites of industrial heritage? Some signs suggest that
they will. The idea – however facetiously expressed – that Scotland and
its localities could be transformed into a series of museums and thereby
lose all cultural integrity rests, I believe, on two mistaken ideas. The first
is that such a transformation could truly fast-freeze communities: that time
and social dynamics would essentially stop in the interests of preservation.
To the contrary, it seems to me that the debates over heritage in Scotland’s
fishing villages affirm that fishing people still have something to say.
The second idea is that museums themselves are truly “about objects,
and not about people,” as my informant lamented. But her very lament,
and the controversy that surrounds every move museum people make,
assert that the objects in the fishing museums may sometimes be seen as
hostages in a battle for control over the definition of heritage. In that sense,
they are entirely about people and their ongoing social relations.

As we saw in Chapter 5, a fisheries crisis extends across the North Atlantic.

Not surprisingly, heritage centers are following in its wake. Canadian
government subsidies have encouraged the development of outport
tourism in Newfoundland, for example, but these have not successfully
replaced either the economic or the social benefits of an active fishery.
Davis notes that some residents say bitterly that they now live on “a
reservation” (Davis, personal communication).
Filmmaker Richard Wheeler’s (1994) documentary about the town of
Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, visits a fisheries museum, commenting that
“fisheries museums are beginning to replace the fisheries”. In the US, we
find that Gloucester, Massachusetts, has for many years marketed itself as
a tourist attraction. There, visitors can follow a red-lined sidewalk trail
down to the historic parts of the harbor. Soon, many say, the red trail will
be all that is left of the fishery.
This does not mean, however, that all heritage sites can be read in the
same way. Analyses of tourism in Europe to date have often followed a
paradigm of pessimism, exemplified by Davydd Greenwood (1989), who
argues that cultural tourism almost invariably purges local practice of
authenticity and cultural initiative except as dictated by the profit motive.
Hewison (1987) and Harvie (1992) both apparently presume that
heritage centers and community museums are institutions imposed by
a hungry and expansive tourist industry and thus have little organic
connection to their host sites. But as we have seen, many museums are

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 Fisherfolk under Glass

indigenously sponsored by local people seeking to ensure their mark on

Scotland’s future. Caring for history is not a pastime reserved solely for
Scotland’s elites.
That people pay admission to fisher heritage museums may validate the
fishers’ belief in their own self-worth. So the answer to the question of
“who benefits?” may not entirely exclude the locals after all. In that sense,
Greenwood’s assumption that tourism renders authenticity impossible
may be shown to rest on a static and exclusivist view of meaning. To the
contrary, heritage sites encode multiple, contested, and mutually constit-
uted meanings, linking local people to national and diasporic communities
as well as locally instantiated, transnationally based economic processes.
Scottish heritage is not a coherent identity or ideology, but rather an
ongoing discourse that is rife with ambivalence and disagreement, or as
Rapport (1993) would put it, with “conversations” that take place in a
variety of significant contexts.
Fisherfolk deploy heritage as a way of surviving in a manner they deem
authentic. If, as McCrone et al. (1995: 25) suggest, Scottish heritage is
“doubly peripheral” to core English heritage by being defined as outside
the center both geographically and culturally, then the heritage of Scottish
fisherfolk must be seen as peripherality squared, because fisherfolk
themselves occupy a doubly marginalized space: socially and geograph-
ically separated from middle-class Scottish society. If they possess heritage,
it may be both blessing and a peril. Blessing, because they actively enjoy
it; peril, because they cannot control or contain it.
“Who owns the past?” then, is a question that too often translates
reductively into issues of economic and political power, into contests over
the meaning of places and debates over the value of preservation. As
Herzfeld (1991) argues in his analysis of time, place, and power in Crete,
such contests and debates draw upon larger issues of identity, issues
that raise questions about national and cultural boundaries. Unlike the
Rethemniots, however, Scots fisherpeople are ambivalent about their
heritage being pressed into national service. They do not (yet) feel forced
to edit themselves for external consumption, but they are aware that they
must be vigilant if they are to participate in the conversation.

Notes

1. Indeed, heritage productions that depict national and local culture

histories abound. We find analyses of them, for example, in Crete

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 Fishing for Heritage

(Herzfeld 1991), England (Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1998; Taylor

1994; West 1988), France (Hoyau 1988), Guyana (Price and Price
1995), Hawaii (Boniface and Fowler 1993), India (Appadurai and
Breckenridge 1992) Quebec (Handler 1988), and the United States
(Dorst 1987; Gable and Handler 1996; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998;
Ruffins 1992), to name but a few.
2. Lorne Rubenstein’s (2001) new book is notable for its exceptional
attention to the bloodier side of bonnie Scotland.
3. Some of these are, no doubt, avid participants in the Scottish heritage
phenomenon that Ray (2001) details for the United States. See also
Lowenthal (1998) on “Being Innate.”
4. Fisher museums proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s. Sites include
Aberdeen, Anstruther, Arbroath, Buckie, Eyemouth, Lossiemouth,
Nairn, Peterhead, Oban (on the west coast) and Wick.

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 Afterword: Scotland in the General and
the Particular

And so we come to the end of our voyage along the Scottish coast. We
have stopped at more than one destination, for my ethnographic quest
could not be located in a single place. To understand the play of forces
affecting Scottish fisherfolk, I had to leave my first site, Ferryden, and
look elsewhere. Once, “the field” was an idea that ethnographers could
take for granted; today, it has become far less easy to define (Gupta and
Ferguson 1997). For the anthropologist, as for the fisherfolk, a place can
no longer be taken for granted as a fixed social or “ethnographic locale”
(Rodman 1992: 640).
Old certainties about the integrity of field sites and their value as
microcosmic representations of a larger reality have given way to a
revived concern about social fluidity and the commensurability of our
comparisons (see Kapferer 1990). As we have seen, the tourist industry’s
happy depictions of ancient fixities notwithstanding, modern Scottish
society is typified not by sites fixed in tradition but by mobility and
change. The days of many communities based upon single occupations,
such as weaving and mining, as well as fishing, are past, along with the
activities that gave rise to them. Workers in such places have been made
redundant and have joined the larger Scottish labor force, shifting to a
variety of jobs as demanded by fluctuations in a capitalist labor market,
or subsisting on the dole.
So many grandchildren of fishers are now indistinguishable from
anyone else in the population. Former miners now drive taxis. Many of
the places where they live are no longer filled with others who have shared
the same industrial experience. They have fallen victim to what John
Foster (1992: 215) calls a “culture of migration”. Now virtually everyone
has relatives abroad, from Ohio to Sydney. Indeed, one of the first questions
a Ferrydener asked me upon hearing that I lived in New York City was
“My cousin Joe lives in Brooklyn. Perhaps you’ve met him?”
But some fishing communities remain and still express the very essence
of places where locality, in Appadurai’s (1995: 205) terms, is a “general
property of social life”. They are face-to face – even, one might say, “in

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 Afterword

your face”. They contrast starkly with Auge’s (1995: 78) notion of the
“non-place,” where people live in the electronically coded, increasingly
evanescent interactions of a “world thus surrendered to solitary individ-
uality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral”. As astute readers of
global trends, fishers worry that this fate might also befall them. They have
no wish to inhabit any version of what Kunstler (1993) calls The Geo-
graphy of Nowhere, referring to that vast, dis-cathected and anonymous
wasteland called suburbia.
Hence they cling tightly to fisher identity and try to preserve what is
left of the fishing industry, despite the stigma, marginality and stereotype
that have marked their lives. As we have seen, community identity is
precious to them, in part because it has been the one thing they could count
upon, apart from the insecurity of life and livelihood.
Writer Christopher Rush grew up in St Monans among fishers who
cherished their way of life. In The Scotsman, he writes about his uncle’s
decision to retire from fishing because of too many regulations and too
much bureaucracy. It sums up quite neatly how identity is now on the line
and how bitter its loss can taste:

My uncle, who once stepped out of his front door and was fishing in the Firth
minutes later, has lived to see most of the fishing culture that was his livelihood
fossilised overnight in the Anstruther Fisheries Museum . . . Each time a
fisherman goes out he risks his life. But to do so for a way of life that was
virtually a religion, which was saturated in and strengthened by formal piety,
and in a spirit that was a cocktail of faith and fortune – that seemed somehow
acceptable. The gladiator was on his own with God. Who’d be a fisherman
nowadays?” (The Scotsman, 1997)

The question of the future remains a difficult one. Today’s globalizing

economy has made such sites as fishing villages appear to be curious
relics: ironically enough, that also makes them ideal sites for heritage
centers and museums that reassert the importance of locality. One result
is that their economic problems are not taken seriously. They are simply
expected to market themselves as simulacra of their own ancestors.
In the context of current discussions in anthropology of place as a
cultural construct, the localism of fishing villages might be considered
almost “overdetermined,” in that such communities form virtual Rubik’s
cubes of significance. Every path, route, intersection and work space
interlocks with every other, housing memories of birth, death, love, hope
and insult. Within their boundaries, intimacy is inescapable, though it may
generate discord as much as harmony. Perhaps, then, fisherfolk should be
candidates for inclusion in the next issue of Cultural Survival’s volume

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 Afterword

on The State of the Peoples, a survey of groups whose physical or cultural

persistence is in doubt. After all, the Highland Celts are already included
there.
However, the term, “cultural survival” carries a double entendre. As I
pointed out in the first chapter, its older, currently less reputable usage
takes us back to Tylor’s notion of survivals and the idea of folk holdovers
atavistically lurking within the body of the West. As we have seen, modern
tourism plays upon this meaning, conflating the folk with the primitive
and exoticizing the marginal. From this perspective, as we have seen,
fisher localism is a sign of quaintness (read parochialism). This, of course,
rules out the idea that fishing communities live in the present.
Such a de-politicized view provokes us to think about the other mean-
ing of cultural survival, the explicitly advocative one adopted by the
above-mentioned compendium. This view asserts the rights of indigenous
or otherwise disempowered and encapsulated groups to have a place
where they can live upon their own terms. Such rhetoric is not foreign to
the fisherfolk. Indeed, it circulates quite widely. As Jedrej and Nuttall
explain in their book, White Settlers (1997), the growing presence of
English incomers in the depopulated areas of Scotland has provoked many
people to liken the Scots themselves to internally colonized, indigenous
populations in North America. When the True Ferrydeners lament their
loss of community, they blame incomers for taking space that fisherfolk
should occupy. For them, as for the rest of the fisherfolk, locality is “a
structure of feeling” (Williams 1976) and they feel it very deeply.
Nothing is simple about the experience of people who gaze at a past
they see devalued and who imagine a future in which they have no role.
It is hardly surprising that many glance back often to recall a time and
place full of warmth and sharing. They do this despite their equally vivid
memories of hardship and insecurity. This complicates their vision of the
present. Few fishing communities enjoy consensus on how to manage
current uncertainties.
In this, of course, fishers are hardly alone. One has only to look at
Scottish writer William McIlvanney’s 1985 novel, The Big Man, to realize
that fishers are not alone in such feelings. His protagonist, a village man,
not a crofter, is lured by city slickers to a life of risk and danger. Ultim-
ately, his longing for community and local identity draws him back home,
even though home (in Ayrshire) is not quite what it used to be. Still, it owns
him, claims him and will not let him go:

His former sense of his past seemed to him now about as incredible, as
untrustworthy as it had to Betty. He found himself questioning the shared

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 Afterword

identity he had found there. But even as he questioned it, he was confronted
daily with the stubbornness of place, the hauntingness of its familiar assoc-
iations. (McIlvanney 1985: 83)

This ‘stubbornness of place’ is what this book is all about.

Elsewhere I have called for anthropologists to represent Scotland as “a
set of articulating arguments” (Nadel-Klein 1997: 89). By arguments I
mean the terms people use to explain who they are and to lay claim to
distinct identities within Scotland. These claims, whether of locality,
ethnicity, occupation, religion or class, all say something about the range
of possible ways to be Scottish. They exist in dialogue with each other.
When David says, “I’m from Fife,” he is saying that his family came from
there, that he learned his trade there and that the Fife coast is home to him.
When he says, “I’m a fisherman,” he is also saying that he is not a farmer
or an accountant. He is claiming an inheritance, a legacy of pride and skill
as well as of stigma and marginality. His legacy binds him to others who
make the same assertion.
Thus I do not deny Cohen’s argument that social identity, national or
otherwise, is mediated through the person and thus retains properties of
uniqueness (Cohen 1996; 1999). However, I emphasize the bonds that
make identity a collective as well as an individual experience. Only by
searching for the mutual entailments of claims or arguments can we gain
a deeper understanding of how the particular and the general are related.
How Scotland’s fishing communities survive depends in part upon what
their inhabitants want but also upon others’ visions for them. To learn
about fishers tells us much about power, hierarchy and boundary-making
in Scottish society.
Moreover, the concerns that I have raised in this book go beyond
Scottish borders. Anthropological debates about Europe today acknow-
ledge the centrality of history while they address all kinds of fractures,
disputes, assertions and claims. In the age of European “union,” we find
that questions of “identities in Europe” and European “identity” are
conjoined twins, and not just at the national level (Bellier and Wilson
2000; Boissevain 1994; Goddard et al. 1994; MacDonald 1993).
Locality remains significant throughout Europe, contradicting occid-
entalist assumptions that Europeans and other “Westerners” are freely
moving individuals who inhabit only a wider, cosmopolitan culture
(Carrier 1992; Nadel-Klein 1995). However, it is certainly the case that
localized or at least located certainties face new challenges. Place, space
and territory no longer lock us in – if, indeed, they ever did. Nor do they
enable us to make clear, unambiguous claims of status and identity.

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Without them, however, we are disembodied, unmade, and impotent.

People are still widely inclined to identify themselves or others with
specific areas, whether cities, towns or villages. As creatures and creators
of a spatially ordered world, we continually construct our lives in terms
of origin and destination, home and away, places where we belong and
places where we are not welcome, zones of comfort, and zones of danger.
Some might say that setting Scottish fishing communities in a context
of cultural survival lacks credibility. After all, they are not Filipino hill
tribesmen or Amazonian head hunters. Their physical survival is not on
the line, nor are they objects of state-sponsored genocide. Nor, perhaps,
is their way of life so obviously a distinct “culture.” In other words, they
have been exoticized, but not enough! Furthermore, their dependence
upon endangered marine resources loses them allies, such as those in the
environmentalist movement, who might otherwise be sympathetic to the
plight of the under dog.
It is much less contentious to submerge the issue within the process of
heritage making. From this perspective, one can see how the heritage
industry manages to link local people’s desires to maintain their way of
life with the more widely-encompassing impulses of nationalism. Local
identity is “reimagined” (Macdonald 1997a) as part of the larger project
of presenting a Scottish identity to the world. Thus, when fishers assert
ownership of their cultural legacy, the heritage industry enfolds it into
Scotland’s patrimony. Stereotypes become sanitized and celebrated;
marginality becomes a resource, and stigma is generally overlooked.
Some see in this process a traducing of authenticity that renders cultural
survival moot. Others see it as a practical way of solving economic
problems. In either case, we are well beyond the purely theoretical here.
As academics, we can suspend our textual battles; we can quite literally
put them aside with the papers on our desks as we go out into our gardens.
I do not share these bleak, condemnatory, and ultimately homogenizing
views of heritage. As I have shown here, fishers are not merely passive
figures in static tableaux. They are creative, assertive actors in a swiftly
moving play, attempting to write their own scripts for the future. As
Macdonald (1997b) has revealed about the intensely tourist-visited Isle of
Skye, local people may be very sophisticated in their engagements
with modernity. For the fishers whom I have come to know over the
past quarter-century, the act of telling their heritage cannot be put aside.
It is part and parcel of the fabric of everyday existence. The act of telling
– whether through song, poem, autobiography, ethnography, museum
or heritage display – is an argument for their worth and their right to
place.

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 Afterword

So having told the story of Scotland’s fisherfolk, I hope I have answered

the question of why should anyone should care about these few thousand
people in their small communities. My own journey toward the answer
began in the 1970s, in Ferryden, where a local drama pitting small against
large and poor against wealthy had unfolded shortly before my arrival. I
pursued the story back in time and outward beyond the village: beyond
the east coast and beyond Scotland. To discover the sources of Ferryden’s
predicament meant linking the village to the nation, to Europe and to the
North Atlantic.
I have learned much along the way. I have learned that every bit of food
we eat has a story behind it. I have learned that connecting the local to the
global, a trendy phrase today, is a political commitment, not just an
exercise in theory building. For as soon as we turn that phrase around, and
connect the global to the local, we realize that all of our actions, as citizens,
have consequences far beyond what we can see. And I have learned, most
of all, about enduring marginality and facing loss. Marginality is the
perpetual frame that surrounds the fisherfolk. Even the wealthiest and
most successful fisherman (and there are a few) knows that his livelihood
is precarious and that public policies rarely reflect his interests or even
take him very seriously.
Many readers of this book may ask what they have in common with
Scottish fisherfolk. I would answer that most of us experience some
degree of marginality in our lives and all of us experience loss. Even if we
live relatively secure, middle-class lives, we are marginalized by the sheer
scale of our globalized existence. Daily news accounts of war, famine and
oppression leave us feeling intensely powerless, in part because we have
been taught to care about the problems of so many people we will never
meet.
Ironically, perhaps, we care more about them than about those closer
to home. It is a common feeling, I think, that those “like us” somehow
have greater control over their lives. However, the processes forcing
fishermen from their livelihoods at sea are not separate from, or in their
origins all that different from, those forces that drive millions of peasants
and tribespeople off the land in remoter settings. But remoteness and
numbers should not matter. If we can only care about the big tragedies
then we truly lose sight of what humanism means. We should care about
the fisherfolk because their story is fundamentally one that entails us all.
What I hope I have done in this book is to use anthropology and history
to bring the fisherfolk into our view and within the reach of our empathy.
For too long, Scotland’s fisherfolk have been ignored as part of Scot-
land’s modern story. They are even virtually absent from Edinburgh’s

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 Afterword

Museum of Scotland. As I write these last pages, I find myself wondering

what my fisherfolk readers will make of my project. I hope that they can
take some pride in it, knowing how crucial they have been to its fulfilment.
I hope also that they will see it as an attempt, which it is, to send their
voices more widely around the world, to those in land-locked professions
as well as to fishers on other coasts.

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679 afterword.p65 219 11/18/02, 03:55

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 Index

Adams, D., 55, 79, 96, 99, 100, 124 Berreman, G., 22, 46
agriculture, changes in practice, 32–3 Berrill, M., 159, 160, 169
Aitken, H., 53 Bertram, J.G., 27, 47, 58, 60, 81, 88
Alexander I, 27 Blades, K., 160
Alex and Peggy (informants), 166–7 Blair, A., 60, 61
Allison, C., 91 Blockade (1975), 151
Anderson, R., 161 Bob (informant), 163–4
Anderson, B., 2, 14 Bochel, M., 59, 73, 74
Andrew (informant), 128–9 Bodley, J., 130
Anson, P., 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 44, 48, 55, Boniface, P. and Fowler, P., 212
59, 60, 61, 63, 79, 81, 87, 96, 140, 162 The Bonnie Fisher Lass (trad.), 64
Anson, Peter, 48, 49n1, 79, 104 Boserup, E., 53, 92
Anstruther, 164–6, 167–8, 188–9 Bourdieu, 164
Scottish Fisheries Museum, 189–200, Boyarin, J., 161, 171
209 Boyes, G., 8
The Antiquary (Scott), 79, 82 Boylan, P., 209
Appadurai, A., 174, 212 Brandt, V., 41
Ardener, S., 54 Braveheart (movie), 179
Arensberg, C., 12 Breitenbach, E., 53
Armour, M., 150 Brewster, Reverend Dr., 113
Armstrong, K., 53, 78 Brigadoon, 180
art and photography, fisherfolk in, 47–8, Britain
84–7 pastoralism in, 10–11
Asad, T, 6 rural life in, and Western imagination,
Association of Scottish District Fishery 8–9
Boards, 25 Britan, G., 38
Atherton, D., 75, 80, 201 British Fisheries Society, 31
Auchmithie, 60, 148 Brody, H., 189
author, and study, 3–7, 15–20 Broun, D., 179
Brown, M., 173
Bachofen, J., 80 Brown, A., 53
Back Sands mussel beds, 109–10 Brown, G. M, 23
Baks, C., 22, 40, 143 Bruce, D., 5, 180
Bamberger, J, 90 Bryson, B., 19
Barclay, W., 45 Bryson, Bill, 19
Barth, F., 10, 41 Buchan, D., 7, 53
Baxandall, M., 194 Buchan, J., 43
Bechhofer, F., 178 Buchan, M., 52, 57, 66, 72, 73
Bell, C., 91 Buchan, N., 64, 68
Bennett, T., 174, 176 Buchan, Peter, 201, 202–3

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 Index

Buchanan-Smith, Alick, 123 Clearances, 36, 181

Buckie, 147, 149, 163–4, 166–7 Clifford, J., 5, 6, 130
Drifter Project and Heritage Society, Close Brethren, 163
204–9 Cohen, A., 7, 10, 14, 22, 94, 102, 134
Buckle, H., 31, 36 Cole, J., 9, 90
“but and ben” houses, 98 Cole, S., 44
Butchart, L., 111, 112 Collected Poems and Short Stories
Butcher, D., 71, 143 (Buchan), 202
“Buyers and onlookers at Cockenzie Collins, N., 84
market,” 85 Colls, R., 7
Byron, R., 22, 26, 37, 40, 77 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), 153–5
community and class, in villages, 13–15
Cage, R, 107 community identity, persistence of, 18
Calder, A., 179 Connerton, P., 161, 171
Callander, R., 5 Conservative Party, 123
Cannibal Tours (O’Rourke), 185 Cook, J., 140
Cannizzo, J., 180 Cook, Thomas, 187
capitalism, impact of, 1 Cooper, D., 85, 86
Cargill, G., 151 Cooper, S., 47
Carrier, A., 5 Cordell, J., 134
Carrier, J., 5, 6 Coull, J., 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 37,
Carter, I., 32, 53, 78, 131 40, 41, 43, 56, 61, 69
Carwardine, R., 114 Craig, C., 178
Cellardyke, 48n1, 56, 148, 202 Crail village, 183
Celts Cullen, 148
as “barbarians,” 42–3 cultural “identikits,” 7
in legend and lore, 4, 20n1 cultural objectification, 176–7
as possessing ancient lore and wisdom, curers, fish
46–7 early development of, 38–9
Center for the Study of Sparsely and Ferryden, 109–12
Populated Areas, 17 herring curing industry, and women,
Chantraine, P., 160 69–79
Chapman, M., 10, 42, 46, 180 Curtain of Mist (Pardo), 4, 20n1
The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Czerkawska, L., 34
Black Oil (McGrath), 6
children, labor and, 106 Daiches, D., 179
Christensen, J., 140 Danforth, L., 115
Christie Johnstone (Reade), 81, 86, 87 David and Jim (informants), 164–5
Church of Scotland, Great Disruption in, David and Mary (informants), 162
113–14 David I, 27
Clark, D., 49 David (informant), 167–8, 190–1
Clark, M., 90 Davies, M., 86
class Davis, D., 52, 89, 160, 210
Ferryden’s self-image of, 117–20 death, in fisherfolks’ lives, 63–5,
generally, in England, 15 135–41
historical development of in Scotland, dependency theory, 120–1
32–3 Devine, T., 51, 53
iniquities of, in Victorian England, 70 Diamond Lil’s, 98
and parish relief, 107 doctors, 59, 92n2

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Dodgshon, R., 25 women in curing operations, 71

Donaldson, 113 feudalism, 5–6, 25, 38
Dorian, N., 22, 41, 43, 45, 53 The Final Trawl (Fisher), 150
Dorst, J., 212 Findochty, 148
Douglas, A., 43, 81, 113 Finlay, I., 140, 150, 179
Douglas, Andrew, 81 Finlay, R., 179
The Drifters (movie), 162 The Fisherman’s Song (Stewart), 64
Dugmore, R., 14 Fisherman’s Wife (MacColl), 64
Duncan, D., 62 Fishermen’s Association Ltd. (FAL), 154
Durie, A. and Ingram, J., 47, 187 Fishermen’s Society, 113
fishers/fisherfolk
East Neuk of Fife, 164–5, 186–9 in art and photography, 47–8, 84–7
Elliott, C., 37, 72, 73, 201 class divisions among, 143–4, 169
Ennew, J., 53, 67 as experts, 200–4
Errington, F., 174 intermarriage, 44
ethnography, British, 3–7 landed dominance of, historically, 24
Europe marginalization of, by non-fishers,
EU and fishing industry, 146, 153–5, 155–6
158, 168 marriage, 65–8
“folk” category in, 9 poetry of, 201–4
social exclusion of fisherfolk in, 41 portrayed in Victorian novels, 43
Eyemouth, 148, 149, 183 separation from land people, 37, 41
Eyre-Todd, G., 46 stigma attached to, 40–8, 80–1
tales of alien origins of, 44, 48n5
Ferryden Old Age Pensioners’ Lunch vignettes of memories and identity,
Club, 102–3, 129–30 161–8
Ferryden village fishing
choice of, for study, 15–18 baiting lines, 55–7
expatriates of, 112 basic techniques used, 37–8, 55
genealogies of, 100–2 boat ownership, 39, 136
hostility and suspicion towards bureaucratization of, 150–9
Montrosians, 101, 107 conglomeration of, 143–5, 171–2
identity and, 94–6, 129–31 dangers and uncertainties of, 135–41
Inch Burn, 124–5 Dutch success forces changes in, 28,
incomers and true Ferrydeners, 100–2, 48n2
117, 129, 130 economics of, 38, 54, 136, 141–50, 157
informants’ recollections of, 102–6 EU policies and, 146, 153–5, 158, 168
Johnston’s control over, 109–12 gendered spheres within, 54–5, 92n1
lighthouse, 98–9 herring fishing, 30, 39, 68–79
origins and general history, 96, 100 illegal catches (blackfish), 157–8
parish relief in, 106–9 interest-based asssociations, 154
physical environs, 96–9, 102 male-dominated stereotype, 52–3
political voices in, 118–20 in museums, as past, 193
powerlessness of, 112, 118, 120–1, protest and activism regarding, 76–7,
128, 130 90, 151, 156
religion, as divisive, in, 113–17 resource depletion, 133–5, 159–61
religion and identity in, 131 salmon fishing, 25
Sea Oil Services Base in, 122–9 small ports’ conditions, 147–8
social divisions within, 128 white fishing, 67–8, 69

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women’s roles (see women (fishwives)) roles, and respectability, 51–2

Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the east in studies of work and community,
Coast of Scotland (Anson), 48n1 52–3
fishing communities. see also history, of General Strike of 1926, 76
fishing communities; specific George I, 30
communities or villages Gewertz, D., 174
decline in number in 20th cent., 22–4, Gibbon, L. G., 43
48n1 Gibson, W.M, 75, 85, 201
migration among villages, 35 Gilchrist, J., 178
originated in Improving Era., 31–4 Gill, A., 140
population drawn from displaced Gmelch, G., 10
Highlanders, 35–6 Goffman, E., 16, 45, 197
power relations to sites of industrial Gold, J. and Gold, M., 5, 182
heritage, 188–9, 194, 199, 201, Gomme, G., 13
210–11 Gordon, E., 53, 82
Fishing Heritage Trail, 97, 182–9 Gould, S.J., 45
fishwives. see women (fishwives) Gourdon, 57
Fitchen, J., 142 Grant, I.F., 53, 135
Flinn, M., 26, 36 Gray, M., 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41,
“folk” life, 7–10 53, 60, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 78, 110
folklorists, documentation of women’s Greece, conceptual marginalization of, 9
roles, 53 Green. F., 36, 44
folk/urban continuum, 7 Greenlaw, L., 91
Forsythe, D., 53 Greenpeace, 156
Fotheringham, P., 119 Greenwood, D., 175, 210
Frank, A.G., 121 The Grey Flannel Line (Armour), 150
Frankenberg, R., 7, 12 Grimes, M., 20
Fraser, D., 31, 56, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 115, Gunn, N., 37
121, 125 Gypsies, 48
Fraserburgh, 145
The Free Fishers (Buchan), 43 Habermas, J., 134
Free Kirk, 113–17, 131 Hall, P., 64, 68
Fried, M., 12 Handler, R., 174, 176, 212
Frykman, J., 43 Hardin, 133
Hardy, F., 5
Gable, E., 212 haringbuis, 48n2
Gaelic language, 44–5 Harrison, 80
Gaffin, D., 95 Harrison, Isobel, 203–4
Gamrie, 147 Harvie, C., 175, 178, 209, 210
Garry, F., 64 Hay, E., 29, 57, 61
Gathercole, P., 193 Hechter, M., 179
Geertz, C., 2 Heijmarin, J., 40
gender Henderson, 97
equality and solidarity of men and Hendry, J., 53
women, 88 heritage. see also museums
gendered spheres within work, 54–5, competing orientations, 204
92n1 and national identity, 173–82
matriarchal culture, 79–88 productions, and power relations,
men’s current status, 88–91 188–9, 194, 199, 201, 210–11

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 Index

herring fishing, 30, 39, 68–79 Joe and Elizabeth (informants), 118–19
Herzfeld, M., 8, 9, 94, 211, 212 Johnston’s (Joseph Johnston & Sons), 39,
Hewison, R., 3, 171, 175, 210, 212 71, 109–12
Highlands, tourism in, 180 Junger, S., 136
Hill, David, 86–7
history, of fishing communities Kalland, A., 41, 140
feudalism of medieval era, 24–30 Kay, B., 178
general trends, 22–4 Kearns, G, 182
herring fishing industry and, 68–79 Kellas, J., 107, 119, 120
planned, laird-owned settlements, Kemble, Fanny, 82–3
31–5 Kiely, R., 175, 178, 181, 195, 211
west coast different from east, 34, 41 Kiely, R. and Morris, 175, 195, 211
Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., 130 Kimball, S., 12
Holland, fishing success of, 28, 48n2 kin and kinship, in Ferryden, 101–2
Holy, L. and Stuchlik, M., 8 kin-based labor, 54, 66–7
Homer, Winslow, 47, 85–6 King, M., 27, 29, 53, 59, 79, 90
Hooper-Greenhill, E., 194 Kingdom by the Sea (Theroux), 19
House, J., 20 kinship tourists, 191
Houston, J.M., 32, 51 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B., 177, 199,
Hoyau, P., 212 208, 212
Huby, G., 204 Knipe, E., 22, 40, 90, 100, 147
Hume, J., 190 Knox, W., 61, 120
Hunt, D., 20 Knoydart, 5
Hunter, J., 36 Korea, 41
Hutcheson, G., 37 Kwangtung (Hong Kong), 41
Huth, A., 185
Labour Party, 119
Iceland, 169n1 language differences, and identity, 44–5,
identity 178
language differences and, 44–5, 178 Lantenari, 114
national, and heritage, 173–82 Laslett, P., 14
as self-reference and ascription, 93 Lebow, N., 42
Improving Movement or Era, 31–4, 96 Lenman, B., 28
incomers, 100–2, 117, 129, 130, 200 Lerwick, 71–2
indentity-in-dialogue, 2 Levi. L., 44, 45
Independent Labour Party (ILP), 119–20 Levitt, I., 108
industrial heritage, 184 Lewis, 115
inheritence, 67 Liberal Party, 119
intermarriage, 44 Linares, 92
International Law of the Sea Conference, literature, pastoralism in, 11
152 Littlejohn, J., 12, 16
Irish Celts, as racially inferior, 42–3 Local Hero (movie), 147–8, 178
Lockhart, W., 21, 25, 35, 38, 52, 74
Jackson, G., 91 Lofgren, O., 26, 29, 38, 176
Jacobs, S., 91 Lohr, S., 12
James, 46, 160 Lossiemouth, 147
James IV, 28–9, 36 Lossie museum, 212n4
Japan, 41 Lowenthal, D., 2, 173, 175, 209, 212
Jeannie (informant), 165–6 Lowland Scots dialect, 45

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Lummis, T., 22, 39, 54, 55, 73, 75, 76, 77, Miller, D., 8
140 Millman, R., 28, 33
Lummis. T., 141 Mitchell, H., 114
Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, 210 Mitchell, W., 113, 114, 115
Lutz, C., 84 Mitchison, R., 31, 32, 33, 82, 107
Lynch, M., 28, 119, 179 modernity, evidence of, in eastern fishing
Lythe, S., 121 villages, 6, 188–9
monks/abbeys, 26–7
McArthur, C., 179 Montrose
MacCannell, 183 attitudes towards Ferrydeners, 101
McCarthy, J., 181 history of, 121–2
McCrone, D., 54, 118, 131, 175, 177, and power over Ferryden, 120–1
178, 181, 195, 211 Sea Oil Services Base and (see Sea Oil
McCrone et al., 180 Services Base in Ferryden)
MacDonald, 180 Montrose Basin, 97
Macdonald, S., 3, 7, 53, 93 Montrose Harbour Board of Trustees,
McEwen, J., 5 122, 124–5
McGhie, John, 86 Moore, R., 20
McGoodwin, J., 25, 142, 160 Moray Firth region, 34–5, 36–7, 163–4
McGrath, J., 6 Morgan, L. H., 80
McGrath, John, 6 Morris, 175, 195, 211
McIvor, A., 54, 76, 80 Morris, A., 181
McKay, 25, 134 Morrison, Hamish, 155, 156
Mackay, G., 20 Morton, H.V., 62
McKinney, R., 7 Muir, E., 179
MacLaren, 118 Mullen, P., 140
McLennan, J., 80 Mundurucu, 92n6
McMillan, R., 56, 201 Murphy, R., 92
Malinowski, B., 141 Murphy, Y., 92
marginalization, via stereotype, 2, 8, Murray, M., 38, 58
155–6 museums
Martin, A., 24, 56 Buckie Drifter Project and Heritage
Martin, P., 26, 186 Society, 204–9
Mary (informant), 198 as concretization of memory, 173
Mather J., 44, 45 curatorial knowledge, 193, 196–8
Matless, D., 13 growth of, 182, 212n5
matriarchy, in fisherfolks’ lives, 79–88 politics of exhibition, 193–6
Mayers, F., 53 Scottish Fisheries Museum, 189–200
Mead, M., 10 mussel beds, 55–6, 109–10
medieval era, 24–30 Musselburgh, 87
Meikle, 87 Myerhoff, B., 204
Meldrum, Jeannie, 86
Mellor, A., 175 Nadel, J., 20, 43, 140
memory and identity, 2, 172–3. see also Nadel-Klein, J., 1, 8, 11, 52, 53, 54, 84,
heritage 88, 95, 180
Mencher, J., 53 Nader, L., 122
Miely, D., 169 Nairn, T., 178, 179, 180
Miles, R., 43 names and naming, 100–1
Millar, J., 22, 35, 72, 75, 76, 145, 153 National Trust for Scotland, 182

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nation-building, 43 Prebble, J., 36

nature, fisherwomen as primitives of, press gangs, 38
86–8 Price, R., 212
Nemec, T., 38 Price, S., 212
Netherlands, 176 Puijk, R., 189
Neville, G.K., 53 Puttenham, 14–15
Newby, H., 91
Newby, H., 10, 11, 14, 15 Quebec, 176–7
Newhaven, 87–8
Norbeck, E, 41 race
North Atlantic fisheries persistence of characterization by, 46
crisis today, 159–61 in Victorian anthropological reasoning,
in late 15th cent., 28–9 41–3, 45–6
North East Fishermen’s Joint Group Rapport, N., 211
Training Association, 149 Ray, C., 180, 181, 193, 212
Notes from a Small Island (Bryson), 19 Reade, 81, 86, 87
Nova Scotia, 92n7 Redfield, R., 7, 14
religion, 113–17
occupational specialism, 31–4 Renwanz, M., 53
O’Hanlon, M., 194, 197 resource depletion, 133–5, 159–61
Okely, J., 10, 44, 48 restoration, 197
oral tradition, 7–8 Rich, G., 140
Robben, A., 140
parish relief, 106–9 Rodgers, S., 54
Parman, S., 16, 49, 53, 67 Rodman, M., 93
past, and sense of value, 2 Rojek, C., 182, 184
pastoralism, in Britain, 10–11 Rosaldo, R., 5
Paterson, N., 59 Rosie, G., 175, 182, 184
Payne, 53 Ross, J., 5
Pedregal M., 189 Royal Burghs, 27–8, 121
Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Rubenstein, L, 212
(P&O), 124, 125 Ruffins, F., 212
Pennan, 147–8 rurality, and “folk” label, 8–9
Peterhead, 71 Russell, M., 4, 178
Peter (informant), 198–9
Phillipson, N., 31, 33 Sahlins, M., 130
Philo, C., 182 Said, E., 6
photography, stereotypes in, 47, 84 salmon fishing, 25
Pittenweem, 148, 183, 187–8 “Save Britain’s Fish” (SBF), 154–5
poetry, 201–4 Schneider, D., 67
“Poetry Peter” Smith, 202 Scotland
political activism, 76–7, 90, 151, 156 economic history a martime one, 40
political parties, in Ferryden, 118–20 feudalism in, 5–6, 25–30
Porter, 66 heritage and identity in, 173–82
Porter, M., 91 history of fishing in (see history, of
Portsoy, 148 fishing communities)
Postel-Coster, E., 22, 40, 143 Improving Movement or Era, 31–2
Potter, Mrs., 56, 78, 101 male-dominated culture, 53–4
Pratt, M., 6 in medieval era, 24–30

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myth of Scottish democracy, 118, 131n3 strikes, women fishworkers’, 76–7

poor laws in, 106–9 Summers, 30, 35
romantic imagery of, 4–6 Sunset Song (Gourdon), 43
as stateless nation, 177 superstitions, 54–5, 140–1
Scott, J., 114 Sutherland, G., 56, 57, 75, 154
Scott, Robert, 96 Sutherland, I., 27, 29, 36, 142
Scott, Sir Walter, influence of, 6, 20n2 Sweden, 176
Scottish Fisheries Museum (Anstruther),
189–200 Taylor, J., 26, 27, 42, 72, 201, 212
Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, 154–5 Telford, S., 67, 72, 73, 74, 77
Scottish Fish Merchants Federation Temperance movement, 116
(SFMF), 158 Theroux, Paul, 19
Scottish Tourist Board, 181–2 Thompson, E. P., 15, 119, 142
Scott-Moncrieff, G., 48 Thompson, P., 22, 39, 54, 55, 73, 75, 76,
seals, protection of, 156 77, 140
Sea Oil Services Base in Ferryden, 122–9 Thomson, D., 75
serfdom, 29–30 Tilly, C., 175
Seton, 34 Tobermory, 48n3
Sher, R., 32 Tolkein, J.R.R., 95
Short, B., 5 Tonnies, F., 12
Shostak, M., 63 To Suffie, Last of the Buchan Fishwives
Sider, G., 34 (Garry), 64
The Silver Darlings (Gunn), 36–7 tourists/tourism. see also museums
Simpson, A., 188 in Buckie, 206–7
Slaven, 122 cultural tourists, 174
sma’ line fishing, 37–8, 55–7 fisherfolk as objects of, 8
Smith, 179 Fishing Heritage Trail, 97, 182–9
Smith, M.E., 41, 62 kinship tourists, 191
Smith, R., 57, 201 and pastoralism in Britain, 11–12
Smith, William, 56 Scotland as magnet for, 4
Smith P., 38, 69, 77 women’s roles displayed to, 92
Smout, T.C., 29, 30, 32, 33, 65, 82, 84, Trainspotting (Welsh), 178
87, 120 Travellers (Tinks), 48
SNP (Scottish National Party), 119, 178 travel writers, 19
Solomos, J., 42 Trevor-Roper, H., 180
songs, of fisherfolks’ lives, 63–5 Tylor, E.B., 80
Spanish fishing, 152–3
Staithes (Yorkshire), 48n5 Union of 1707, 30
stereotype United Free Kirk, 116–17
and marginalization, 2, 8 Urry, J., 8, 42, 46, 180, 182, 183, 188
of matriarchal fishwives, 80 Usan, 148
of romantic imagery, 6–7
Stevenson, S., 44, 47, 82, 83, 86, 87, 188 vignettes, of informants’ memories and
Stewart, Andy, 92n3 identity, 161–8
Stewart, R., 175, 178, 195, 211 villages, generally, 10–15
Stewart, W, 69
Stocking, G. Jr., 42, 80, 174 Wadel, C., 161
Storer, J., 190 Wailey, T., 22, 39, 54, 55, 73, 75, 76, 77,
storms, at sea, 137–8 140

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Walker, B., 29, 57, 61, 110 Wilson, W., 67

Wallerstein, I., 15, 49 Windy Friday (Watt), 137–8
Walsh, 177, 190 Withers, C., 180
Warner, W., 160, 169 Wives of the Fishermen (Huth), 185
Watson, H., 202 Wolf, E., 1, 54
Watson, Nellie, 202 women (fishwives)
Watson, W, 14 heavy labor and, 81–2
Watt, Christian in herring curing industry, 68–79, 83–4
on curers’ and fishers’ profits, 70 laboring outside of home, 51–2
on sanctity of fishers, 115 matriarchy of, explored, 79–88
on women and marriage, 56, 61, 62–3 notion of, as idealized type, 90
Webster, B., 26 responsible for selling catch, 60–2
Weld, C., 84 status today, 88–91
Welsh, I., 178 stereotypes of, 61, 88
West, B., 212 strikes and labor consciousness of,
Whalsay, 134 76–7
Whatley, C., 29, 51 taboos concerning boats, 54–5
Whaur Will We Gang? (Fisher), 162 vulnerabilities and fears of, 62–5
white fishing, 67–8, 69 work of, in early fishing communities,
Whitehead, 91 55–62, 65
Wightman, A., 5, 180 Wood, L., 73, 150, 201
Wilk, R., 174 Wood, S., 84
Williams, R., 10, 11 World War I, 76, 111–12
Wilson, George Washington, 47, 187 Wright, 174

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