Following the herring

When ten Central and Eastern European countries joined the European Union in 2004, young men and women from those countries came to the UK to work. Such migration for work is nothing new. In the 19^th century young Scottish men sailed to Greenland to hunt whales, while young women travelled along the Northeast coast to Yarmouth to gut herring. Both Scottish traditions of migration for work live on in traditional songs and tale.

‘Come, a’ ye fisher lassies, aye, it’s come awa’ wi’ me,

Fae Cairnbulg and Gamrie and fae Inverallochie,

Fae Buckie and fae Aberdeen and a’ the country roon,

We’re awa’ tae gut the herrin’, we’re awa’ tae Yarmouth toon.’

(The Song of the Fish Gutters)

The Song of the Fish Gutters (you can listen at the melody at the bottom of this blog) tells the story of so-called herring girls, young women from highland and lowland Scotland who travelled from Stornoway, Wick, the fishing towns along the Northeast coast of Scotland to Yarmouth to cure herring. As the fish migrated from the Norwegian waters into the North Sea, these women started curing fish in the North of Scotland during the summer and arrived in England in the autumn. To gut and pack the large quantities of fish caught, up to several thousand fish gutters could work alongside each other on the quay of Yarmouth. Leaving home for work in the herring industry, the girls often stayed in wooden lodgings along the quay.

‘We’ve gutted fish in Lerwick and in Stornoway and Shields,

Warked along the Humber ‘mongst the barrels and the creels,

Whitby, Grimsby, we’ve traivelled up and doon,

But the place to gut the herrin’ is the quay at Yarmouth toon.’

(The Song of the Fish Gutters)

Herring girls worked in crews of three, one packer and two gutters. A barrel of 700 fish took around 10 minutes to gut and pack, and a crew could manage up to 30 barrels a day. As they were paid per barrel, speed was important. Working conditions were challenging as salt would aggravate any cuts from the sharp gutting knives. Girls therefore tied strips of rag round their fingers to save them from getting cuts.

‘It’s early in the morning and it’s late into the nicht,

Your hands a’ cut and chappit and they look an unco sicht;

And you greet like a wean when you put them in the bree,

And you wish you were a thousand mile awa’ frae Yarmouth quay.’

(The Song of the Fish Gutters)

There are striking similarities between the circumstances described in The Song of the Fish Gutters and the stories we hear about migrant workers nowadays. Many men and women from Central and Eastern Europe have found work in the Scottish fish processing industry as employers are said to find it hard to attract a local staff for the the kind of work, low pay, and seasonal work they have on offer.

To listen to a recording of The Song of the Fish Gutters, see Singing The Fishing.

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Community music - music for communities

Community music is gradually gaining ground in Britain. The most famous example may well be More Music Morecombe, but recently Sistema Scotland’s work in Raploch, Perth, has received a lot of media attention. 

My own background is in rural community development, urban regeneration and community processes. One of the themes I’m really interested in is community asset ownership, i.e. communities developing their assets such as heritage, woodlands and buildings for the benefit of the community. For communities to take such initiatives residents need to know each other and share a strong sense-of-community. Community music can contribute to this. Carefully thought-out community music initiatives can bring people together and help develop a story that can form the basis for a developing sense-of-community. 

In a way, this has been the approach in the Culter Mills project. Through the project former mill employees and other residents of Culter came together to sing about the former papermill in the village. They met each other face-to-face in a come-and-sing event, in turn creating a new memory for the participants. The Culter Mills project created a story on a range of levels: it formed the reason for bringing people together and the topic of the songs. As the story started to spread word-of-mouth  and through media attention, it started to contribute to people’s sense-of-community.

This interpretation of community music is different from that of More Music Morecombe and Sistema Scotland in that my aim is less to provide classes or otherwise enhance people’s musical ability (and thereby creating confidence), and more to use the music project as a trigger to bring people together to create a dialogue, and a story people can relate to and derive confidence from as a community. 

My approach to community music is inspired by socially engaged arts that stress that the dialogue created through the project can be seen as a form of art itself. Recently I had an inspiring conversation with Chu Yuan, a PhD student at RGU, who uses her Taste Buds project to open up a conversation about cultural similarities and differences. Yuan works one-to-one or with small groups. My emphasis is on bringing communities together and I therefore tend to work with slightly larger groups.   

Music can be a means for community development. The strength of music is that it communicates moods and atmosphere. Creating a story is important in community music and this means that the music has to be accompanied by words. This can be in the form of song lyrics, accompanying poetry or story telling, perhaps even combined with visual outputs. The impact of a project increases if the experience is shared rather than individual, and if people contribute actively rather than listen or observe only.

Copyright text Petra Vergunst

The home of the whale

The arrangements of whaling songs for the singing workshops are now finished. Each of them has its own atmosphere. My Donald is one of my favourites as it conjures up images of an intimate conversation between a sailor and his wife in which they express their feelings about the perils of whaling:

My Donald he works on the sea,

On the waves that blow wild and free,

He splices the ropes and sets the sails,

While southward he rolls to the home of the whale.

Ye ladies wha' smell of wild rose, 

Think ye for your perfume of whaur a man goes,

Think ye o' the wives and the bairnies wha' yearn,

For a man ne'er returning frae hunting the sperm.

He ne'er thinks of me far behind,

Or the torments that rage in my mind,

He's mine for only half part of the year, 

Then I'm left all alone wi' nocht but a tear.

Ye ladies wha' smell of wild rose, 

Think ye for your perfume of whaur a man goes,

Think ye o' the wives and the bairnies wha' yearn,

For a man ne'er returning frae hunting the sperm.

My Donald he works on the sea,

On the waves that blow wild and free,

He splices the ropes and sets the sails,

While southward he rolls to the home of the whale.

Copyright text and music Petra Vergunst