Herring fish lived in vast quantities in the waters around Scotland and was a relatively easy catch. It is known from 1550 that James V of Scotland encouraged fishermen from Fife to fish for herring around the Hebrides. These fish were caught in nets out at sea. Dutch fishermen also came to the Scottish waters for the herring and taught local people methods of fishing and curing. Herring, because it is so rich in fat with the oils spread throughout the body of the fish, needs to be used or cured and packed quickly otherwise it will go rotten in just a day. It was really the Dutch who fished the majority of herring until the eighteenth century.

Herring was first transported to Ireland and the West Indian plantations but later it was in great demand from Germany, Eastern Europe and  Russia as a delicacy. Bounties by the British government helped the fishing industry expand with bigger boats and to increase production with barrel bounties. In the early nineteenth century the British government gave bounties on herring sold abroad. Once the railroad network was extended, the herring catch could be sold around Britain easily too. The Scottish fishing industry became the biggest in the world. 10,000 boats were in the industry in 1913.

The herring boats followed the shoals of herring round from the north west coasts from May round the north of Scotland, down the east coast and then on to the coast of east England in the autumn. Because of the necessity of packing the fish quickly the boats went out and came back every day.

Baskets were a very important part of this industry. From the nineteenth century the catch was measured in crans which was approximately 1000 herring. The quarter cran basket was used both to land the catch and measure the haul. These baskets continued to be used until 1940 when boxes were brought in.

The Herring Girls

Baskets were also used at the port to process the catch. The fish were emptied into long wooden troughs called farlans. Teams of women would gut and sort the herring into baskets or small barrels. The fish were sorted for size and condition. The guts sold for fertiliser. It appears from the photographs that the baskets used were mainly oak swills/swales but some could have been made of willow. It is likely that the oak swills would have lasted longer than willow under such conditions.

Each team would consist of three women, two gutters and one packer. The packer was in charge and a curer would engage a team for each boat. Packing the fish in salt was the only way to preserve it for its long journey east. Gutters would gut the fish in one stroke of the knife, often able to gut one per second. They would often wind cotton material around their fingers to protect themselves from cuts and the corrosive brine. The packer would take the basket of gutted fish and tip them into a tub with salt. Then they were packed into the barrels in a spiral with all the tails to the middle then the next layer had the heads in the middle, and with a generous cover of salt to each layer. Each barrel would hold a cran.

Women were also the processers for the herring that became kippers. Baskets were used for the different stages. Again they would gut the fish this time putting them into an oval ‘cobbing’ basket or cob ‘mound’. This basket would be beside the worker as she stood gutting. Then she would wash them in running water in specific washing baskets or washing’mounds’ and transfer them into oval kipper baskets. These would then go into the pickle vats which were a mix of brine and orange dye for an hour. The fish would then be opened out and smoked.

Working on these gutting crews gave women untold new freedom to travel and work.  In 1913, 2,400 women left Stornoway in May and June to go to the herring ports of Shetland and the East Coast. 1,613 of these women continued down to Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Some of these women stayed on in the towns to become domestic servants and some married and stayed in these new areas. Then sisters or cousins might find work through them, continuing the emigration of women from the far off isles and coastal ports of Scotland.  Their independence and confidence shows in a strike they organised for a week in Yarmouth for more pay. 6,000 women were on strike. Even in 1938 there were 1000 women working gutting, packing and kippering in Stornoway. The crews travelled and lived together in huts with quite a lot of women sharing accommodation or in lodgings, at each port for the whole season. They had to take their own bedclothes, pans and dishes. The money earned by each crew depended mostly on their speed and skill. They were paid a small sum as a pledge of engaging them at the start of the season and then they were paid per barrel packed.

The baskets used by these women represented time and money to them. Each filled basket was one less to do in their day, and one more to fill each barrel that brought their wage. They must have been so relieved at the end of the day to see the last basket of fish disappear into the barrel.

Mary MacDonald from Point, Lewis was a herring girl in the 1930s. She said “I saw a lot of the world. I went to Lerwick, Stonsay, Lochmaddy, Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Peterhead and Fraserburgh.

Herring girls or fisher lassies started this work at sixteen years old, often following in the footsteps of relatives and being taught by them. These women worked a six day week and often for 12-15 hours a day. They would start when the first catch came in which could be at 5am. Because of the nature of the fish the processing had to be quick so often the women did not stop, only having a snack or mug of tea where they were.

As late as the 1960s women from Shetland were still working the herring in East Anglia.

Basket invoice, Unst Heritage Centre

So where did all these baskets come from? It would seem that they were brought to the processing ports from basketworks. The quarter crans would not have been made in Stornoway or Lerwick for instance. These were made in vast quantities in East Anglia but also there were basketworks around Scotland including Wick, Dundee, Montrose, Aberdeen, Leith and Skye. These had to be inspected by the Fisheries Board and stamped to insure that the correct measure was maintained. See the article on quarter crans here. The oak swills/swales may have been made at these basketworks but so far we have no direct evidence of that. It could be that they were imported. Some swales were made by travellers but many would have come from Furness in the Lakes. See the article on woven split wood basketry here. The Wick basketworks invoice here shows him offering on the left hand side at the top all the baskets for the kippering process ‘Cobbing’, ‘Oval kippers’ and ‘Washing’ and presumably these were made there to order.

By Dawn Susan

See Linda Fitzpatrick’s article on Scottish fishing baskets here

Resources

‘The Herring Girls in Stornoway’  Stornoway Amentiy Trust 2006

Dorothy Wright ‘The Complete book of Baskets and Basketry’

/histories/from-creels-to-quarter-crans-the-form-and-function-of-baskets-used-by-the-scottish-fishing-community-in-the-late-19th-and-early-20th-centuries/ Accessed 14/12/13

http://www.scotfishmuseum.org/the-herring-boom Accessed 14/12/2013

http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_photograph.jsp?item_id=22070 Accessed 14/12/2013

The very word crann in Gaelic can mean a ‘measure for fresh herring’ (Dwelly). The cran measure is considered to have originated in Scotland and was later adopted by the English and Americans. The decision on its exact capacity was modified over time, and was redefined several times. Thus the 1815 Act permitted the Commissioners of the Fisheries Board to determine its volume, which they did in 1816 as 42 Wine Gallons (Dundee City Archives, SCRAN ID 000-000-495-377-C). The Commissioners for the Herring Industry then re-defined in a report published on 10^th January1832, when it had to be no “greater or lesser contents or capacity than Forty-five Gallons of English Wine Measure” (RCHF 1832). A further re-definition of 1852 regulated the 45 Wine Gallons into imperial gallons, which made it 37.5. It was only in 1908 that the cran was also made a legal measure in England and Wales (Cran Measures Act 1908). The half cran was similarly regulated to hold “Twenty-two and one-half Gallons English Wine Measure”, and had dimensions of 21 inches height, 18.4 inches at its widest point and 16.3 inches at its extremity (RCHF 1832, 40). The general inspectors and officers of the Fishery examined, approved and branded crans where the measure was found to be correct. The branding iron had the figure of a Crown, the initials of the inspector, and the year of inspection on it, and the brand was put on every second joint of the cran. It held about 1000 fish.

Descriptions of the cran are quite tantalising and, while describing its dimensions, rarely say what the cran actually was.  Thus the 1832 Act set the cran at 30 inches high, the diameter at its widest 21.9 inches and at the base 18.9 inches –“without any fractional part under or over” (RCHF 1832, 3). But while some accounts describe these large measures as baskets, other reports suggest they were barrels with brands upon 4 staves and bound with ‘good iron hoops’ (Mill 1821, 465-9). Debate in the 1908 Cran Measures Act describes them as ‘a measure which is really a basket’, while other sources linking them to English Wine Measure describe them as barrels (Chamber and Chambers 1834, 364). According to John Mitchell’s The Herring: Its Natural History and National Importance, the cran could be either a wooden tub or a wicker basket. If anyone has any further information on this, we would like to hear it!! (sjb20@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Quarter crans, however, most certainly were baskets, both used as means of transporting the herring and measuring it. They were much more convenient for moving the fish about and became the common measure. Thus, in 1889, the Herring Fishery (Scotland) Act, section 4, authorized only crans and quarter crans (when properly branded) as legal measures of capacity in the herring industry. Since the passing of this act, further regulations have prescribed exactly the quarter cran’s construction, the materials each part must be made of and its internal measurements. –a “ branded piece of hardwood beneath each cane handle, 1.5 inches broad; pieces of ‘hoopwood’ (6 in number), 1 inch broad, bark outermost and equi-distant with willows in between; and binding, waling and cane fitching had top be done according to precise instructions as issued by the Fisheries Board in Scotland.…” (Martin 1904, 62-3). To be so precisely made, they had to be made by trained basket-makers.

A contemporary common misconception has been that all quarter crans were made in Great Yarmouth, and imported to Scotland from there. This is perhaps because of the last known workshop making quarter crans was in Great Yarmouth, as described by the great English basket-maker, Colin Manthorpe (2009). But a little research reveals that at the height of the herring industry, these baskets were made in several basket works across Scotland, including in the Royal Institute for the Blind Workshop in Dundee in the 1920s (Dundee City Archives, SCRAN ID 000-000-495-280-C), at Aberdeen, Leith, Wick and at cooperages in Montrose (ARFBS 1900:17, xxxvi), and also in the Kilmuir basket factory, Skye from 1908 (HIHI 1914, 111). Indeed, making quarter crans may have begun in Scotland.

Very similar baskets to quarter crans ere also used to load and unload fish, hooked on to slings to be hauled up from the boat.

Bibliography

ARFBS 1900 Annual Report of the Fishery Board for Scotland for 1900, Part 17. Fishery Board for Scotland

Chambers, R & Chambers, W. 1834 Fishing Villages – Buckhaven. In Chambers Edinburgh Journal, V2 p364

Cran Measures Act (Bill) 1908. Hansard, 22 July, 1908. V 193, 51-3.

Dundee City Archives (see SCRAN IDs for exact archival source)

Dwelly, E. 1988 The Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary. Edinburgh: Birlinn

HIHI Report to the Board of Agriculture for Scotland on Home Industries in the Highlands and Islands 1914. Edinburgh: HMSO

Manthorpe, C 2009 Fifty Years on the Plank. Basketmakers Association

Martin, AJ 1904 Up to date tables of Imperial, Metric, Indian and Coloniak Weights and measures. London: T. Fisher Unwin

Mill, MA 1821 The Ancient Ordinances and Statute Laws of the Isle of Man, Carefully copied from and compared with the Authentic Records. Douglas: Phoenix Press

John Mitchell’s The Herring: Its Natural History and National Importance

RCHF  – Report by the Commissioners for the Herring Fishery, year ended 5 April 1832, part 3

Quarter cran, Leith Customs House Collection, NMS

A quarter cran was used in the herring industry. Originally they were made in willow and hazel but later came to be made in rattan.