Herring Days in Stronsay.

A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.
Islands, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our in
RAIN ON MY WINDOW.
Morris Pottinger (in Chicago!!) Nov. 15th 2007

The Silver Darlings of Stronsay.

( with acknowledgement to Neil Gunn )

I have been circling round a very special part of our father’s life, and ours too, the Herring Fishing of Stronsay, as I wished to do it the justice it deserved. I will never do enough, but for this series the time has come, though it is mostly my own memories I put down, not a definitive history of the Herring Fishing of Stronsay. Still, a bit of background by way of introduction will not go amiss, and reference to:- “The Herring Fishing - Stronsay: by W. M. Gibson. Published by B.P.P., Edinburgh. 1984.
The name Stronsay has been given many meanings but for me it is the Island of the Strojns, or Strands, Old Norse for sandy beaches. Hence Strojn ey , i.e beach island. Shaped like the emblem of the Isle of Man, a tripod of legs, within which lie so many sandy bays. The only hard part of Stronsay lies in the cliffs on the east side from Odness to Brough Head and to the south Rothiesholm Head, both graveyards to many ships. To the old Vikings a sandy shelving beach saved many a life as they ran right up onto the beach even in a storm. Apart from that, these beaches were all round the island so whatever the direction of a gale a sheltered beach was always available. No harbours then as now we know them, the only trace of one being the ancient stone-built Dane’s Pier at Housebay on the south-east. None know it’s provenance. Above all the sheltered harbour of Whitehall was supreme, having Papa Stronsay to the North enclosing and sheltering Whitehall Harbour, with a deeper entrance on the west side between Papa and Huip Ness, a shallower one to the east, navigable for shallow draft fishing boats and at high tide for larger.
History only tells us so much, but we know that Hollanders fished herring off Orkney and Shetland at the time of Robert the Bruce, and no doubt long before then. With no harbours as now we know them they used these sheltered beaches, ran on-shore onto sand or gravel, carried their catches up to the dry land and there processed them in whatever manner they wanted. Salting them down is the best known, either dry salting or cured in barrels of brine, but splitting and drying in the wind was common. My forebears in Stroma did the same with cod and ling, even today a practice still widely used in Norway with huge wooden A-frames on exposed spits of land holding split cod and even cod heads to cure naturally in the salt sea air. In our days in Whitehall farm staff often had an evening at the sea with hand lines, catching coal fish we called caithes, in Caithness cuddins, or ling, haddock or cod or mackerel if they were biting, using wands of bamboo with three hooks on the line with white goose feather lures, and often three fish to each cast when they were taking. They also got sillocks off the pier with a pock net or even off a suitable sea rock, drying them against the wall of their house strung on long lines, and when dry hung from the kitchen ceiling in bundles.
The main pride of Stronsay in fishing will always be the herring fishing, begun by Malcolm Laing about 1800, finally finishing when the War of 1939 broke out, having been in severe decline for the few years previous. It had been vastly important for our father who returned to Stronsay to Whitehall Farm in Nov. 1919. The family had been in Rothiesholm in Stronsay from 1893 to 1913, moved to Hobbister in Orphir for the six year gap.
Father was in partnership with his father David in the farm of Whitehall, but during the herring fishing season he was deeply involved in carting all the requirements of that trade. He did this on his own account, diversification I believe is the modern word. For this seasonal work he employed locals and imported men and horses and carts from wherever he could find them, sometimes as a team, sometimes individuals whom he provided with a cart and horse. Once I was watching a rugby match in the Bignold Park in Wick, spoke to a Wicker standing beside me, and found he had carted herring for my father in Stronsay when he was young. We forgot about the Rugby match I am afraid, as he told me one story after another, which I regrettably did not write down Tempis fugit I fear.
Going to the Village with our father was high on our list, if he was not too busy. There he oversaw his carts moving all the necessaries for the season, salt first from ships from the Baltic to be stored dry in sheds for later use, empty barrels again from the Baltic coming in to Stronsay piled mast high on the ships, to be stored in huge pyramidal piles on the curing yards, filled with salt herring and then reloaded for the Baltic and Germany, Danzig and Hamburg. Wick provided two curers I remember, Donaldson and More. The yards were open air work benches into which was wooden-shoveled cartloads of herring from one side, on the opposite side the hundreds of gutter girls at a speed that defied the eye gutted and size-sorted the herring, large one way, small another, herring guts a third. I doubt if any mere man would have had the dexterity to do so, but they were not asked anyway. Others packed the barrels just so, layers of herring and layers of salt. Everywhere enormous activity to deal with a perishable harvest. When I see these marvelous old photographs in Wick Heritage Centre it brings much of it back to me. They are a richly harvested heritage in their own right.
Then the drifters themselves. Early mornings saw us from our bedroom window scanning the Eastern horizon to catch the first smudge of smoke, the first of many as the steam drifters headed for harbour after a night at sea. There were still a few sailing drifters around, the Isabella Fortuna in Wick provides an example. Their big brown sails against the rising sun, they must have been of shallower draft as most came in by the shallower eastern entrance.
Drift netting was done at night when the herring came near the surface to feed, the boats setting off at the end of the afternoon each for their chosen grounds. The nets hung in a curtain suspended between cork floats and sinkers, the mesh large enough to catch mature full-sized herring and let the smaller fish through to grow and mature for another year. It was very sustainable compared to today with all fish being swept up in purse nets and often turned into fish meal, a shocking waste.


CRAN.
In Great Britain, a unit of capacity for fish, specifically herring, since 1852 the quantity needed to fill 37½ imperial gallons (about 6.03 cubic feet, or 170.5 liters). Since 1832 it had been defined legally as 45 wine gallons, almost exactly the same value.1 Under the Herring Industry Board's rules, and Weights and Measures Regulations, any herring not sold by the cran must be sold by weight. A cran but can vary from 700 to 2500.2
The cran originated in Scotland as a heaped measure. A standard but bottomless 30-gallon herring barrel was filled to overflowing with fish, and then the barrel was lifted off. Because the fish were heaped, the resulting pile contained more than 30 gallons of herring – observers estimated around 34 wine gallons. 4
In the United States, the size of the cran was fixed “from and after the first day of June, 1816, the cran to be used for the purchase and sale of fresh herrings...shall be of the content or capacity of forty-two gallons English wine measure.”

My memories are of seeing the drifters coming to harbour in droves, shoals might be better, mostly by the western entrance which lay below Whitehall and in our full view. Father had an old brass telescope which we were allowed to use to get a better view. We looked for boats low in the water denoting a heavy catch, at it’s greatest a boat would have so many herring in their nets they would ask another boat to help garner the harvest. Gulls clouded behind a boat even if they were not gutted on board. A big catch could not all be stored in the herring hold and we saw boats with fish everywhere on deck, easy pickings for marauding gulls.
When tied up the first task for two fisherman was to carry a wicker basket with a sample of their shot, as they called the catch, up to the fish market at the head of the pier for sale by auction. The speed of the auctioneer’s tongue always beat us, quite incomprehensible, but the fish were sold anyway. Father was on hand to send carts immediately down the pier, of which there were two, the old and the new, to cart the herring quickly to the curer who had bought that catch. Measured in crans of four baskets, a Scottish measure typically containing about 1200 fish, but there was no time for fussy weighing though the baskets had to be full and an oversman for the curer counted the tally. The baskets were filled with a light wooden scoop with a beveled edge which did not harm the slippery fish. . They were swung ashore by a ship-mounted derrick boom and most had a small steam winch to help, though not all. Swing it high and across to the waiting carts standing in line. Do not get in the way, we were told, and the work was rapid indeed. Each full cart then off to the curing yards, back it over the outer face of the working troughs, lower the back door, shovel the herring across for the numerous waiting gutter girls.
When we had later moved to Caithness, in 1944, there was many a time that we would go to Wick with our father and down to the harbour. It did not take long before he would meet someone who had been to Stronsay, some who had worked there for him, or others, and it gave us the nice feeling that Wick and Stronsay were herring sisters in the old days, now long faded into the mists of time.