Get the nets. The whole sea’s boiling.
Peter Grimes (Montagu Slater)
The herring will set you free. After a fashion.
North Atlantic fishermen had always hunted the herring, in amongst the cod and the saithe and the ling and the whale; but it was the industrial fishing at the end of the nineteenth century which accelerated the end of the barter-truck, fishing tenure economy of Shetland, and elsewhere; which brought cash to the islands, which allowed the women who gutted the herring to follow them down the coast to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft; which, in effect, set the islands free. After a fashion, and for a short while.
...
For centuries, British and German and Dutch and Scandinavian fisheries had followed the shoals of herring around the North Atlantic, a seasonal bounty; but from the beginning of the nineteenth century the industry developed quickly in Orkney and especially Shetland as the railways and a government bounty induced rapid growth in the export of the fish to continental Europe, where, more than in Britain, herring was (and is) considered a delicacy.
When many years ago I lived in Venice I got to know a number of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian sailors—Kent, Gom, Big and Little Casper, and Carl the Norwegian boatbuilder whose mother was from Hull—who crewed a restored three-masted topgallant schooner (and ice-breaker), Activ, which that year was over-wintering off the Dogana. Homesick, they had their families send down jar after jar of pickled herring in time for Christmas, and my girlfriend at the time, Anna Keen, concluded, when she discovered that she couldn't stop eating it, that pickled herring must have some sort of direct chemical route to the pleasure centres of the brain, and that the herring, in effect, spoke direct to the brain's mushy, autonomic depths: pickle me, eat me, said the herring—and the brain deeply understood; bathe your neurons in my oil, it whispered as it slid down your gullet, feel the pulses of information skid frictionless across the dark glistening synapses. I will set your clogged and rusted thoughts free.
But we don't eat that much herring. The British brain is thus a tad more sluggish, perhaps, than the Scandinavian or Dutch or German or Portuguese or Spanish, which became at the end of the nineteenth century the great export destinations for the Shetland herring. The industry boomed, and from the 1870s to the Great War, young Gaelic-speaking women from the Western Isles and the Highlands arrived in numbers each year.
For the first time, after two centuries of indentured fishing tenure and attempting to survive in a cashless economy, the men could invest in cooperative boats and sell their catch for cash, and the women were paid for signing up and piecemeal for their processing work. Not so much, but not so little either, and in cash.
Suddenly, with a little cash in your pocket, you could walk away.
...
Not many did, of course. Life remained hard. The work on the herring boats allowed fishermen to stay a little closer to home, a little more often; but it was seasonal, as was the work of gutting and salting the fish, which took place on Hay's Dock in Lerwick, and predominantly (on Shetland) in Baltasound, on Unst.
The work was gruelling. It was done in 12-hour shifts, stooping over long troughs, called farlins. Each fish's throat was slit with a sharp knife, and its guts torn out and discarded. Its fat and oily remnant flesh was then thrown in the farlin and salted.
The knives inevitably nicked fingers, and into the nicks went the salt. The women would try to protect their hands and the previous days' cuts with rags, known as cloots, tied around them. In old age, a former herring girl, Agnes Halcrow described the effectiveness of these cloots as follows:
...it fairly saved your hands; But sometimes, du kens, da saat would geng in under, and den you'd git saaty holes. Only cure for dat wis ta put dem in a barrel o pickle in da morning. Dat kinda cleaned oot da holes...your hands wir just roasting at night...and den you du sees dat saat wis dat sharp it got up under da clouts...and hit made holes, saaty holes.
In addition to the saaty holes, there was rheumatism from the long cold wet days, and insanitary conditions to deal with (open latrines over the beaches where the fishermen were wandering about) and the back pain from stooping over the farlins.
However, as the historian Lynn Adams observes, the work was convivial. You worked in a gang. Most Shetland work was solitary, knitting or crofting; but the herring work was social. You could talk to your peers. Make a few jokes.
It was work which attracted mainly young, unmarried women (most, in Shetland, were not from Shetland but from the Hebrides, the Western Highlands, Caithness). Agnes Tulloch, another of the herring girls, remembered that "we enjoyed wirselves tae the core".
You could clean up at the end of the day, and link arms with your fellow herring girls and go for a walk down the high street, lay our a few coins. The pay was better than virtually any other wage-labour available. It might not have represented liberation; but it must have felt, a little, like liberation. For a life lived in poverty, a change in material circumstances usually does.
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The herring is a lucky fish
From all disease inured;
Should he be ill when caught at sea;
Immediately – he’s cured!
Spike Milligan
...
Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, outcast and margin-dweller of his little East Anglian world of fishermen and methodists and judgemental spinsters, living in an upturned boat on the cliff side, is brutal and negligent of the welfare of his apprentices. But he is also marked out as a visionary. ‘I have my visions,’ he claims, ‘fiery visions’; he ‘can see the shoals to which the rest are blind’. W.G. Sebald, in his mini-treatise on herring in The Rings of Saturn, talks about the shimmer the shoal sends up as it moves:
One dependable sign that herring are present is said to be myriads of scales floating on the surface of the water, shimmering like tiny silver tiles by day and sometimes at dusk resembling ashes or snow.
But what do Grimes's ‘fiery visions’ amount to? To setting up ‘household and shop’, to earning enough to buy and sell his un-visionary neighbours. His vision might as well be a gannet's, a gannet outsider calculating how he might work his way to the centre of the colony.
You can only be so free, it seems; free to move from one sort of bondage to another. Which doesn't make it a worthless exercise. Perhaps our freedom lies in the translations of our modes of being, one into another; not into some Nirvana of herring-like multi-dimensional drift. "This restless wanderer of the seas", Sebald calls the herring, as though they were footloose hippy souls; but the herring is as bound to its deep courses as any of us.
...
The herring arrive and the herring depart. They are an ephemeral phenomenon, and an unpredictable one: an embodiment of a certain elusive freedom. W.G. Sebald reports that:
the routes the herring take through the sea have not been ascertained to this day. It has been supposed that variations in the level of light and the prevailing winds influence the course of their wandering, or geomagnetic fields, or the shifting marine isotherms, but none of these speculations has proved verifiable.
...
In the British Isles, the herring boom lasted from around 1870 to 1914. In Iceland, which was transformed even more profoundly by the industry, it lasted from around 1900 to 1960. In Iceland, in fact, the herring is credited with the establishment of Icelandic independence from Denmark in 1944—independence flowing from economic autonomy.
Along the Westfjord in Iceland, where numerous herring procession factories sprang up along the coast of what had always been one of the most remote and unpopulated areas of Europe, the herring ceased to show themselves much after the mid-1940s. By the early 1950s, processing plants such as that at Eyri on the east coast of the Hornstrandir, and Hesteryi, on the south coast, had wound up, their settlements dispersed. Their job of transformation—of herring, of the economy—completed.
The Icelanders use the term síldarævintýrið, or herring adventure, to denote the economic explosion associated with the fish—in Icelandic, the sild.
The herring sets you free; but only so far.
The Icelandic archaeologist, Þóra Pétursdóttir, notes that, for example, the excavation of male and female middens at Eyri—the men and numerous women having their own accommodation blocks, hence their own middens—attests among other things to an economic disparity. And unlike their Shetland peers, they men and women had nowhere to go. Eyri and Hesteryi are as removed from the comity of nations as it is possible to get; there is nowhere to go. You are just there, gutting herring. The nation booms, away in the distance.
...
Pétursdóttir relates how, excavating the midden outside the women's dormitory, she found a comb.
..suddenly and utterly unexpected the comb appeared at the trowel's edge. It was blue, or rather turquoise, unlike anything I had ever excavated before—and took me by immediate surprise. The plastic on its rim was slightly worn, it was broken and a few of its teeth were missing... On the side facing us in the sun, by the edge of its handle, the comb was marked with its origin, "MADE IN U.S.A", the IN encircled and slightly tilted...as we kneeled there in the sun admiring that extraordinary blue thing in the soil the enthusiasm to explore its meaning or memory beyond its immediate presence gradually faded and turned into an appreciation of the comb itself. Its blue otherness, its incompleteness...
...
Venus
Does not rise from
These waters. Fish
Do.
Charles Olson The Maximus Poems
...
The Shetland Archive is housed in the same building as the Shetland Museum, a funky new structure testament to the sharp oil money flowing into Shetland these days, and distinct from the still peripheral, slightly dusty parochialism (and, if you like, charm) of Orkney.
The archive houses a remarkable oral record, recorded in the decades following the Second World War (it was from the archive that the reminiscences of Agnes Halcrow and Agnes Tulloch's were taken, by Lynn Adams).
I visited the Shetland Archive the day I arrived in Shetland (my second visit), on no sleep, Tourettes-Gaelic buzzing in my ear. I was pointed by the archivist towards a couple of articles that had to do with the herring fishery, and I sat at the long table and read them.
I had wanted to listen to some extracts from the sound archive, but on that day, it turned out, the sound archivist was not present. I took a note of his email with a promise of .wav files to come; but for now I wandered out on to Hay’s Dock, and stood and listened instead to the Shetland Receivers.
The Shetland Receivers, an installation by the artist Lulu Quinn (constructed by Alan Hart) comprises four stone receivers on posts (Shetland serpentine, granite and shell) which play random excerpts of recordings from the Shetland Archive, and also of some additional recordings made in 2006. The receivers are linked to an anemometer: the faster the windspeed, the briefer the snatches of voice, the more hectic the interplay of story, of song, of gently palatal, percussive dialect. On the day I visit, the wind speed is moderate to low. I hover in my super-somnolent state between languid recordings, all my research flapping in shreds at the mercy of the Shetland winds.
Memory, like archaeology (but not like history) is fragmentary, and these randomised excerpts were just that: fragments of themselves; and it all made sense to my sluggish, unoiled brain.
