Extract
Chapter 14: Women in Fishing Communities by James R Coull
Introduction
Fishing has for long been very much a male occupation, and even now in the twenty-first century women as members of fishing crews are very rare; and until very recently women in such a role were unknown. At first sight therefore it might seem that women in fishing communities had little to do with fishing, and that their roles would be in the background, in keeping house and raising the family. However, in addition to these important roles that they shared with women in many other types of community, they have also played essential fishing-related roles; but these roles are poorly recorded in documents – especially in official documents. A distinction may be made between the situation of women in communities along the coast of Lowland Scotland, where in the modern period fishing had become virtually the only means of support, and crofting communities of the seaboard of the Highlands and Islands. Although men from these communities were often engaged in fishing, there was also the round of the agricultural year which had to be attended to, and women usually had their roles on the croft in such work as milking cattle and helping to get in the harvest. If the men in crofting households were as a rule less fully committed than other fishermen to fishing, the work of their womenfolk was certainly fully as onerous as that of the women in communities of full-time fishermen. In addition to the various fishing-related tasks in which the crofting women took part, there was a heavy responsibility in the work on the croft, as well as seeing to the needs of the family.
On the seaboard of Lowland Scotland (including prominently the north-east) fishing communities by the nineteenth century were largely specialised and separate from the landward farming population. Marriage was largely within these communities, although as mobility developed, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, intermarriage between different fishing communities became more common. The fact that fishing communities were distinctive and separate helped nurture the skills in line baiting, fish gutting and net mending that became essential contributions of women to the maintenance and functioning of the communities. While women in crofting communities contributed to such tasks they were naturally less fully committed to them than in the specialised fishing communities, in which it was said that a fisherman needed to a marry a lass from a fishing community to have a help-meet who knew how to bait his lines or mend his nets. Line baiting, fish gutting and selling, and net mending were vital tasks that employed many woman hours. Not a few of them were done within the family, and might well have no direct statistical or economic measure. While for long there was some work paid for by men who for various reasons had to get lines baited or nets mended by women outside the family, such women nearly always came from fishing communities in which they were familiar with the work from their childhood days; and although there appear to have been something approaching norms in payment rates little of these were committed to paper. The best recorded data in official documents are the numbers of women gutters and packers in the herring fishery, where they were employed for wages or piecework by curers. Any money transactions related to line baiting or net mending, however, were very generally carried out on more informal arrangements. Thus, although the annual reports of the Fishery Board for Scotland from 1882 until World War I are some of the most detailed records ever made in any fishery anywhere, and regularly extend each year to several hundred pages, they are virtually silent on the work of the women folk of the fishing communities in line baiting and net mending. The official statistics do contain information on the amount of gear in use, and it is from such indirect sources that something of the scale and importance of women’s work may be deduced.
What is better known in the wider society is the role of women in disposing of fish: one of the most kenspeckle figures in traditional Scottish life is the fish-wife. This in turn is a reflection of the fact that few of the more densely populated parts of Scotland are far from the coast, and are not beyond the sort of return distance that at one time might be covered on foot from coastal fishing villages and towns.
Line Baiting
In traditional fishing in Scotland, before the advent of trawling in the later nineteenth century, the main fishing activity was line fishing for white fish, and this commonly provided an important diet component which extended considerably beyond fishing communities themselves, especially in the coastal zone. Most of this fishing was by what is rather misleadingly termed ‘small lines’: these were characteristically long lines with hooks on snoods at relatively frequent intervals of two or three feet. They were distinguished from the ‘great lines’ which were employed mainly in the spring, and which had bigger hooks attached to the main line at longer intervals of about six feet. However, the total length of the ‘small lines’ that a boat employed usually stretched for miles; and it was very important that they be baited before the boat put to sea. This entailed that a man had two or three sets of lines, so that while he was fishing his wife could bait the line to be used next day. While some variety of line baits were used, by far the most common was mussels, and it was the regular task of the women to collect daily hundreds of the mussels from the shore, ‘sheel’ them (i.e. extract them from their shells with a knife) and put them on the hooks which were done up on line sculls to facilitate the clean running of the line when it was ‘shot’ at sea. It was a regular routine for the women to rise early in the morning to collect the mussels and to proceed to bait the lines before the men put out to sea.
There are various stories and traditions of women wading into the sea and carrying their husbands or sons out to the boat so that they could start a fishing trip without getting their feet wet. It has been suggested that this reflected the subordinate position of women. It is difficult to know how frequently this took place, but it could refer to a situation before there were dependable watertight sea boots. While it was common at one time for seagoing clothes including oilskins to be made locally or indeed by fishermen’s families, in the nineteenth century sea-boots became factory products. Once it became usual for men to wear thigh-length sea-boots there would have been little point in them not wading into the sea themselves to board a boat. There are also traditions of boys going to sea barefoot, and indeed it was not uncommon for children generally to go barefoot on land into the twentieth century during the summer. Although it was usual for men (and boys) to have several layers of clothing on under their oilskins, to go to sea barefoot can only have been a hardship.
The demand for sea fish in Scotland, and also in Britain as a whole, was rising from at least the late eighteenth century, and rose more rapidly as the expanding railway network in the nineteenth century facilitated contact with growing markets. By about 1880 very few of the more densely populated parts of Britain were not served by railways, and an important trade for the burgeoning industrial cities was that in fish which supplied the population with a cheap form of animal protein food. While this demand was increasingly supplied by trawling in England, trawling was slower to come to Scotland, and did not expand decisively until after 1880. The result of the expanding market was that the line fishery boomed as never before, and this meant much more work for the women of fishing communities in the baiting of lines.
The activity in small line fishing can be gauged partly from the amount of gear that was recorded as being employed in it, although when the most detailed data become available from 1893 line fishing was already set on a downward path. Before this there was data for the values of lines in use but great and small lines were undifferentiated. Since many or most sailboats had great line gear for use in the spring, in addition to any great lines used by the smaller craft, the situation was less than clear although the data available from 1893 make it certain that the aggregate length and value of small lines exceeded that of great lines. In 1893 the total length of small lines was 40,465,115 yards, and their value £70,955; and that value was 33 per cent above that of the aggregate value of great lines. While all the small lines can hardly have been perpetually in use, the total number of hooks potentially to be baited must have been comfortably over 40 million.
One study done at Eyemouth in the 1880s showed that the weight of mussels needed for bait was between 85 per cent and 90 per cent of the weight of fish caught. It was also recognised in 1889 that most of the Scottish fishermen, now numbering some 50,000, used mussel bait for at least part of the year. From the parts of the coast where small line fishing survived longest it is possible to use later information to assess the dimensions of the work involved in baiting these lines. Even so, practice varied on different parts of the coast, and the total length of lines a boat employed was from 300 to 1,500 fathoms with hooks at frequent intervals, the total number of hooks being 500 to 3,000. Small line fishing was still active in Arbroath in the years after World War I, and at that time it took a total of around 10 hours to shell the bait and put it on the hooks of one line with 1,300 to 1,400 hooks, which was c. 2,700 feet (or 450 fathoms) long. The arithmetic of this indicates that the lines used in 1893 would have taken fully 300,000 woman hours to bait; and if the assumption is made that a line was used every second day, at the not unlikely figure of 10 hours per day per woman, there could have been 15,000 women involved. While such a figure can only be very approximate, it does show the scale of the task that must have faced the women of fishing communities most days.
A prominent result was a developing shortage of mussel bait, as sources of it in locations like the Montrose Basin, the Findhorn Estuary and the Firth of Clyde were put under increased pressure. Bait was increasingly systematically gathered and carried around to fishing settlements by rail and not only did such bait have increased money value, but the national shortfall was in part made good by importing mussels from England and even from Holland. The conservation of bait beds also became a matter of national concern, and increased attention was given to the possibility of rearing mussels on a systematic basis: this was, however, overtaken by events and came to little.
The very difficult situation of the herring fishery between the wars helped sustain the small line fishery although there was also the contemporary development of the seine net fishery which occupied men who had previously devoted most of their time to herring fishing. The total length of small lines recorded in 1920 was over 16 million yards and there were still nearly 7 million yards in 1937.
Small lining for haddocks also continued through the inter-war period in Shetland, especially in the islands of Burra and Whalsay which held best to the fishing tradition; and women played a big part in baiting the lines. Lining continued to dwindle over much of the remainder of the Scottish coast. This was partly due to the difficulty in preventing the illegal inshore fishing of trawlers, and partly to the increased use of set cod nets, which of course did not require the trouble of baiting. There is also folk memory of the paid rates for line baiting for men who had to depend for this on hired help. To have a line with 1,300 to 1,400 hooks baited cost 4s 6d (22.5p), and as the bait had to be transported and bought the cost of the bait needed was an additional 3s 6d (17.5p). So, for the 10 hours needed of a woman’s work to shell the bait and put it on the line she got 4s 6d or 22.5p, an hourly rate of under 6d (2.25p). It was noted that all costs in fishing had gone up considerably after World War I: the earlier rates can only have been lower, and this does illustrate the time-consuming – not to mention dirty and smelly – tasks performed by the women of the fishing communities.
There was less need to account for small lines after World War II: statistics for them were collected until 1952, but on a different basis than before. The number of small lines in use decreased from 8,900 in 1938 to 2,250 in 1952, and the cessation of counting them is itself a comment on their decline towards insignificance. The baiting of lines has been discontinued for so long on most of the coast that it is a folk memory that is now in danger of being lost. It did, however, continue for longer in one or two places, and exceptionally survived until the 1960s. These were principally the coasts of Kincardine and Angus where ‘hard ground’ (rocky reefs) offshore was largely avoided by trawlers as they were afraid of snagging their gear. The other main instance was in Broad Bay in the Isle of Lewis, where crofterfishermen from some of the many townships on the bay continued it as a low-cost method of fishing.
Women also played a big part in disposing of the fish, both fresh and cured, to the landward population. However, although the fishwife is a colourful figure in traditional Scottish life, organised – as opposed to anecdotal – information on her is elusive, and the expansion of the fish trade from the nineteenth century eventually largely displaced her. Originally the disposal of fish entailed a woman taking a heavy creel of fish on her back and going on foot among the landward population. In the poorly recorded earlier days this could involve barter whereby fish were exchanged for farm products like cheese, meal and eggs. The great importance of herring in the diet of areas around the Firths of Forth and Clyde must have been due in considerable measure to fishwives from places on the coast supplying the surrounding area. It is also evident that there was a better opportunity for fishwives to sell their wares in the more densely populated part of the country, and the distinctive appearance and physical strength of the fishwives of places like Newhaven and Fisherrow were known in Edinburgh. Aberdeen was supplied by the surrounding villages as well as by the nearby communities of Fittie and Torry, and the fishwives of the village of Newburgh, 15 miles to the north, regularly walked along the sand beach between their village and the city to the town market. In such locations fishwives appear to have operated in small groups, which must have been a considerable insurance for safety when away from home. With the general expansion of fishing settlements and of the market for fish that occurred from at least the eighteenth century, fishwives must have increased in number and probably in range around more or less the whole area of Lowland Scotland. Most of the disposal of fish by this stage must have taken place for money, and the haggling of the fishwife became proverbial. As transport improved fishwives did make more use of made roads and of service transport; although on railways there were at least some cases where they were assigned with their loads to separate compartments. In the north-east the Great North of Scotland Railway (GNSR) went as far as granting the fishwives with their creels concession fares not only from coastal stations but from certain inland stations for the return journey. As the scale of the fish trade expanded and commercial organisation became more stream-lined, other modes of disposal for fish were increasingly used. Already in the eighteenth century fishermen from the north-east were known to sail with cured fish to Leith: presumably the main disposal was to merchants, but the poet Fergusson in his ‘Leith Races’ speaks of men selling fish in the streets. Curing usually involved salting, and the amount of salt applied could vary with the length of time that it was desired to keep the fish before consumption, but smoking was also practised, sometimes in association with salting, and gave a variety of taste. It was mainly a short-term preservative. Although more sophisticated media of trade – especially fish shops – progressively replaced the fishwife as trade expanded, there were exceptionally fish wives plying their trade for more than two decades after World War II.
In view of the escalating problem of obtaining bait, what ‘saved’ the situation in the supply of white fish to the general public was the drastic change to trawling as its main source. Trawling was a mass-production method of operating which was actually more crude and tended to deliver lower quality fish which had been compressed in the trawl bag in the catching. However, from around 1880 steam trawling increasingly took over in supplying the expanding market. It was a capital-intensive method that very few traditional fishermen could contemplate seriously, and trawlers were almost all company owned. In the period between 1880 and World War I trawlers were an attractive line for investment, especially in Aberdeen. However, the friction and conflict between the trawlers and traditional line men who were small operators was to continue for decades. In addition to dominating the market, trawlers often paid scant regard to long lines in the seas and were often accused of destroying the gear of the line men. None the less the long-term result was never in any real doubt; there was a progressive reduction in line fishing from Scottish coastal villages and towns, and a concomitant reduction in the need for line baiting and for the fishwife to hawk her wares. At the same time distribution by rail from the ports and disposal through fish shops and fish friers became the norm.
Mending Herring Nets
The work of line baiting must have been evident to at least some observers because of the collecting of mussels by the women. However, the Scottish herring fishery, which depended very much on the nets being mended and maintained, and which in the years before World War I was the world’s greatest fishery, would not have been possible without the contribution of the womenfolk of the fishing communities. The great part of this, however, was not visible to the public as it was done indoors, in mending lofts and in houses. A prominent characteristic of houses built for fishermen (especially those who had shares in boats) when the herring trade was at its peak in the early twentieth century was a large net loft. This was notably the case in the towns where fishermen owned houses, i.e. places like Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Buckie and Anstruther. It was also the case in several of the towns in the East Neuk of Fife. Where town councils allowed it, net lofts were built in council houses when these were built on a big scale in the inter-war period. Although these houses were of course important to the fishermen themselves, they were away from home or at sea so much of the time that they were the domain of their wives and families more than of themselves.
The most important single theme in Scottish fishing history is the development and growth of the herring fishery, which expanded from the latter eighteenth century until World War I. Basic to this is the increase of the herring fleet in both numbers and size of boats in the nineteenth century, but for much of that century the value of the gear (mainly in the form of the nets) equalled or exceeded that of the boats. The possession and maintenance of adequate gear was a sine qua non of the fishery, and the history of herring gear is an important subject in its own right. While herring on occasion have been caught with hooks, emphatically the main gear for catching such a shoaling fish in quantity was nets. There are records from at least the eighteenth century of part of the fishing effort being conducted with fixed net gear at the coast when the herring came inshore in the season, and this may well illustrate a practice that was much older. However, the main technique was to use the drift net, the use of which in the open sea was the basis for the Dutch domination of the North Sea herring fisheries from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It is striking that when this method was copied by the Scots the main rope to which the nets were attached while in the seas was termed the ‘bush rope’, ‘bush’ being derived from the ‘buss’, the usual Dutch herring boat.
While there is very little detailed early information on herring nets, it can be said with confidence that they were relatively small and were made from linen or hemp. Factory-made nets did not appear until the 1820s. Early nets were made by hand, and hand-made nets were in use on some scale until late in the nineteenth century. Net making appears to often have been women’s work, but fishermen themselves might make them in the less busy times of year. In the 1840s in Latheron parish in Caithness, for example, nets were reported as being made by the fishermen in winter and spring. At any event even the smaller nets of earlier times must have involved much work in the making. While there were inshore herring fisheries in Scotland from at least medieval times, little can be said of the gear with which they were prosecuted; but in the important herring fisheries of Fife in the seventeenth century, ownership of nets was important in the division of the proceeds of the fishery. Even so, as was often the case, a big share of the proceeds went to the upper classes in feudal society.
More information is available for the eighteenth century. Records are particularly rich for the herring buss fishery, which was supported with government money in the form of tonnage bounties for fitting out the fleet. While these records do give a good account of the numbers of barrels of herring produced and the amounts of subsidy paid, detailed information on gear is lacking; and it is not clear what role the families of the crew members played in its maintenance. There was, however, a substantial though less well recorded inshore fishery on the Clyde for which open boats were used and for which the gear would fairly certainly have been largely maintained by the womenfolk or families of the fishermen.
The organisation and practice of the fishery becomes clearer from the end of the eighteenth century when there were government incentives for the inshore fishery in the form of barrel bounties, and when there was the spectacular rise of the Caithness fishery focused on the port of Wick. This fishery in its early stages was operated by open boats using only ten or a dozen nets. Being home-made these can hardly have been standardised, but the size of 12 yards long by 6 or 8 yards deep quoted by Martin may well have been reasonably representative. When a boat had shot her nets at night (when the herring swam up) the net train might stretch 200 yards from the boat. Although the first factory-made nets in Scotland were in 1820, it was two decades before machines could make secure knots for the nets to retain their shape. It was years before factory-made nets became standard, although when the bigger cotton nets came in the 1860s the factory-made article took over (see below). However, if the delayed transition to the bigger factory made nets was to an extent labour saving for the women, this was largely counterpoised by the extra mending that cotton nets required.
As the fishery developed, the trend was for the boats to increase in size and for the net trains also to increase. In a main district like that of Fraserburgh, boats were regularly employing 30 nets by the latter 1850s; and when cotton nets came in there was a further increase to 60 nets or more by 1880. The increased work-load in net maintenance is also shown by the estimates made by the Fishery Board of the total area of netting deployed in the fishery. The Fishery Board was concerned about the amount and type of net used and until the 1860s attempted to enforce a minimum mesh size by insisting that approved nets be at least one inch knot to knot. The object of this was to prevent small herring being caught which were more difficult to salt and which were not welcome on the market. The most decisive change in the development of gear was that already referred to when from the end of the 1850s factories started to make nets from cotton instead of the older fibres of linen and hemp. These cotton nets were made of finer fibres, were much lighter and fished better; and it was estimated that a boat was able to carry five times the area of cotton net than of hemp without increasing the weight. This was to lead to a great expansion in the area of netting employed, and net trains could extend over two miles from a boat when it was lying ‘shot’. Not only was there a big increase in the area of netting but the finer cotton nets suffered more wear and tear in use and needed more mending. By 1878 the total area of netting owned by Scottish herring fishermen was 230 million square yards. The actual area of netting actually tended to decrease thereafter as fishing effort was concentrated in fewer larger boats. In the peak years of the early twentieth century the total amount of netting was around 200 million square yards. However, the amount of work involved in maintenance of herring gear continued to rise as the output of the fishery rose, and gear was more intensively used. This was especially so after the steam drifter came in from 1900; the fact that steam drifters cost around three times that of the biggest sail-boats made it imperative to fish longer and more often, and resulted in a pattern of seasonal migration in which herring fishing was engaged for the whole year (other than the spring, when herring were difficult to catch in quantity anywhere in British waters). In the peak years of the fishery it was fairly frequent for a man with a share in a boat to have fifty to a hundred nets, each of which was 50 x 50 yards, so that the number of meshes in the individual net ran into hundreds of thousands. It is clear that with the unavoidable tearing of gear that occurred in the work of fishing there was a substantial task to mend nets once a fishing was over. This was particularly the case at the East Anglian fishing where much of the fishing was in relatively shallow water and where there was a greater danger of the nets ‘taking the bottom’. It was usual that older and well-worn gear was used at East Anglia. All this can only have led to a big increase in the work of maintenance for the womenfolk: the early months of the year were especially busy in this regard, and many long hours were worked in the net lofts. The increased work-load in net maintenance was not due solely to the increasing net trains used by the boats, but also to the progressive lengthening of the active herring fishing season (or more accurately seasons). Leading fishermen characteristically had fully double the number of nets they required for fishing at any one time and mending could be attended to while another fishing season was proceeding at places like the Hebrides in the early summer or East Anglia in the autumn.
Gutters and Packers
As well as the poorly recorded work of net mending, the other main employment for women was in the herring curing yards. (Chapter 15, on the experience of the women from Nairn, is a good illustration of what life was like for them). It was very general that they worked in teams of three – two to gut the fish and one to pack the gutted herring in layers in barrels between layers of salt. The main system of payment was by the barrel, but there was also regular hourly payment for ‘filling up work’ by which the barrels were topped up with herring once the original herring filling the barrels had ‘pined’ (shrunk) for 10 days; and after pickle was poured into the barrels the lids were put on. Hours of work were essentially irregular and were frequently long, and up to World War I were unregulated; they depended very much on the landings of the individual day. Heavy landings meant long days stretching well into the evening or beyond, but poor landings meant much inevitable idle time and it was usual then for the girls to spend time knitting. Some curers, in trying to hold their workforce, did guarantee them some sort of minimum payments. Rates of payment did improve as the fishery developed and the best review of payment arrangements was made by the Fishery Board itself in 1911: at that point the usual practice was for 8d (3p) per barrel to be paid to each team of three women while ‘filling up’ work was individually at the rate of 3d (1p) per hour. The main differences were in other payments: in their home districts ‘arles’ (signing on) payments were paid to women individually at the rate of 10s (50p) to the £1, while when they were engaged in other districts arles were paid at £1 to £2 and there was also a guaranteed weekly wage of 6s (30p) to 10s (50p). For those who travelled to English herring ports arles were a nominal 1s (5p), but there was a fixed weekly wage of 8s (40p) with rates per barrel and for filling up the same as in other ports. The main exception to these arrangements was in the Western Isles, where a certain amount of casual labour was hired. Under this arrangement women were paid no arles or weekly wages but a team of three got 1s (5p) per barrel and 3d to 4d (1 to 1.5p) per hour for filling up work. Curers also paid for all travelling and lodging away from home. It was also stated that even at these modest rates the gutting women of Scotland could earn a total of £90,000 to £100,000 in a year.
As it was part of the function of fishery officers to gather data on curers and their staffs, a clearer picture is available of the numbers of women employed. From the peak years there are data for the numbers of gutters and packers in each district, although some of these might not have been employed in herring; and there is also data specifically for the herring fishery of the numbers of women gutters and packers stated as working in the peak week of the year in each district. While this does give a clear and substantially accurate picture of the numbers active in different districts, it is not possible to make a straightforward addition of the numbers to get Scottish totals, as there was some migration according to seasonal demands for labour, and individual women might work in two or even more districts during the year. W S Miln in 1883 estimated that the total number of women employed during the main season was over 20,000. By this time migrant fishermen were largely accommodated on decked boats with cabins, but women gutters and migrant male shore workers still had a variety of rudimentary and notably inadequate living accommodation, although the permanent housing accommodation of Scottish fishermen had significantly improved. Even harder for the gutting women frequently was the passage by steamer to reach Shetland as not only was accommodation on the steamers rudimentary but bad weather could make the passage traumatic.
Seasonal work migration involved for the most part unmarried women, as married women inevitably found it more difficult to leave home. Characteristically the main single concentration of gutting labour was in Aberdeenshire, in the districts of Fraserburgh, Peterhead and Aberdeen: in 1900 for example these three districts employed a total of 7,760 gutters and packers. However, the single most important district was Shetland, which in the early years of the twentieth century might have between 5,000 and 6,000 itself, while the early summer fishery in the Stornoway district was capable of employing over 3,000. Other major districts were Wick and Eyemouth which both employed between 1,000 and 2,000 women, although before 1860, when Wick was the leading district, it employed as many as 3,000 gutters and packers itself.
Main patterns of seasonal movement can be discerned. Compared with the main summer fishing on the east coast, a bigger proportion of the herring caught in the early summer in the Hebrides went to the fresh market in Britain but there was a good deal of curing also and much of this curing was by curers whose main bases were on the east coast. A main aim of this curing was to get herring to the early season market on the continent. For the gutting associated with this fishery curers very generally recruited Hebridean women; and many of these women would also move to the east coast centres or (after 1880) to Shetland during the main summer season; and in the peak years before World War I the total number of women moving from the Hebrides for gutting work was estimated at 2,500. There was much recruitment of local women to gut at Shetland, but the scale of operation grew to such a scale that (especially in the early summer) they were joined by considerable numbers from the east coast, while women from the Hebrides would go to Shetland for the main season after the Hebridean early summer season was over. Scottish curers also dominated the autumn fishery at East Anglia which became a main event in the British herring year from the late nineteenth century; and these curers recruited the great part of their gutting labour from Scottish women familiar with the work. Most of them came from the main districts of the east coast, but girls from Shetland and (more especially) the Hebrides also took part: it was estimated that between one half and two thirds of the 2,500 women who migrated from the Hebrides for work in Scotland also got employment at East Anglia. Such was the scale of the seasonal migration that as many as 20 or more special trains were run to convey personnel from Scottish fishing ports to East Anglia, in addition to the numbers who went by regular scheduled trains. The Fishery Board for Scotland had no direct involvement with this big seasonal migration, but estimates from the peak years before World War I put the total of women workers at fully 6,000 between the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. While other English east-coast ports like Grimsby and Shields had some involvement in the herring fishing, they were of minor importance compared with the East Anglian ports, and were not known for the presence of Scottish curers and gutting women.
Conclusion
In more recent times the distinctive fishing-related roles of the women of fishing communities have largely disappeared. Like women from other communities, the wives and daughters of fishermen have often acquired training and skills in formal education and gone into a wide range of occupations. Line baiting is almost a thing of the past, the drift net for catching herring has been abandoned in favour of the purse-net and the trawl, and any mending of gear is attended to by the fishermen themselves. The fishwife has completely disappeared: when fish are not retailed to the public through fish shops it is generally because freezer cabinets in supermarkets have taken over. The old method of salt curing of herring in barrels has disappeared, apart from the floating processing capacity of ships from Eastern Europe, and although this became the main outlet for the herring catch in the 1970s and 1980s, it did not involve any British personnel, and in any case it has since been substantially scaled down. While there is some onshore processing in a modern form, any gutting is now by machine. Where a role for women has been to some extent maintained it is in fish plants for such tasks as filleting and packing: it is still necessary to prepare fish for the consumer after they are landed at the ports. It is also the case that in the management of the financial affairs of fishing boats women may also play a role, and even in recent times it has not been unknown for skippers’ wives to be the financial brains in the management of a boat, the value of which now characteristically runs into millions of pounds. Despite the modern problems of the fishing industry, living standards are much higher, and the variety of opportunities outside fishing for both men and women from fishing families is much greater; yet not a little that is distinctive, colourful and indeed character-building has been lost.
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