The Scots Magazine

They enjoyed a degree of freedom which other young women of that time could only dream about. Leaving their families at an early age, young girls were hired by local fish merchants, to follow the local fleet round the coast of Scotland and down into England, chasing the shoals of herring. A traditional way of life, based on harsh reality. “There was nae other jobs at that time,” shrugs Janella Cowie. “That’s why we went to the fishing.” At 94 years, she is one of the few survivors of the “guttin’ quines”, who worked long hours on the open quaysides in sunshine, frost and rain, wrapped in oilskin pinnies, smothered in fish scales, gutting, curing and packing herring into barrels for export. The herring season started with the Stornoway “fishing” over March and April, then followed the shoals to Orkney and Shetland over May to July, drifting south to ports like Wick and Fraserburgh in August. From August to October, they worked from Eyemouth and North Shields then, over October to early December, the entire herring fishing industry crammed into the harbour basins of Great Yarmouth. Janella was eldest of a family of five and her mother died when she was only seven. A mere schoolgirl, she took over the responsibility of rearing her siblings as a stand-in mother until her father remarried many years later. When she reached 16, her father escorted her down to Buckie harbour to sign on with a local fish merchant for the herring season. “My dad took the man to one side and warned him: ‘now look after that quine, because she’s my daughter’,” Janella says. Her first fishing was at Papa Stronsay in Orkney, where she and two other young local girls shared a wooden hut, as a raw “crew” of two gutters and a packer. Their training? “You learned yourselves,” she says, quietly understanding the struggle of three young lasses to cope with the mountain of silver herrings dumped on their long wooden table, learning by watching the more experienced girls and women around them.