The Journey : Taster Podcast
SIT BACK
I’m giving you a backie on my bike Tina from the Shetlands down to Great Yarmouth Following the Fish Workers..
1700 km over 1 month, This is a little taster of the quest to learn about the lives and struggles of fishworkers past and present.
ABOUT:
In early 2021 I was awarded Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice Grant to explore women workers rights and develop some theatre writing and seed some projects. This led to research shaping Following The Fish Workers, leading to multiple following projects, and forged connections across north east Scotland and England .
More context here:
http://www.followingthefishworkers.com/
MAP
you can have an explore the journey of people you hear here:
https://padlet.com/emermarymorris/followingthefishworkers
PODCAST CREDITS:
Featuring in order:
Polly Rowley Sams (Singing) Come on ye Fisher Lassies by Ewan McColl.
Jimmy Laurewson - Unst.
Gannets at Muckle Flugga, Unst.
John Morrison reading Poem For Da Gutters, Lerwick, Shetland.
Fisherman George Carter, Lybster (Wick)
Anne Coombes, Dornoch, Highlands
Anji Hancock and Paul, Lossiemouth
Gail, Buckie.
Margaret Ritchie, Edinburgh.
Angela, Fishmonger at Phil’s Plaice, Northshields.
Jerry, Hull Fishing Heritage Centre, Hull.
The Criterion Pub, Hull.
Nathan Premier Seafoods, Grimsby
Lowestoft Wind Turbine.
Contact details for contributors:
Margaret Ritchie:
[email protected]
margaret.ritchie.visualartist (instagram)
www.margaret-ritchie.com
Angela, Fishmonger at Phil’s Plaice, Northshields:.
https://philsplaice.com/
@philsplaice
Nathan Premier Seafoods, Grimsby
https://www.kingcrab.co.uk/acatalog/info.html
@nay.the.fish.man (instagram)
GUTS : LIVE RADIO PLAY (WIP) @ Camden People's Theatre 02/10/2021
GUTS @ Camden Peoples’ Theatre
Supported by Arts Council England ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ Grant
Credit to the fish workers, and thanks to all the people who have shared their experience, stories, knowledge and time with us on this journey. Picture courtesy of Ang from Tyne Brand Herring Factory
BACKGROUND ON FOLLOWING THE FISH WORKERS
"The sea, clock of ages, was full of time. In the tide ebb and flow, the sense of the moment was critical, but it was the coasts which were affected by tides, not the ocean depths, so while the sea, at its shoreline, represented the now of events, yet a paradox of the ocean was that in its depth, it was a symbol of eternity." - Jay Griffiths Pip Pip.
Research: Developing Your Creative Practice :
I was working on a theatre research project supported by Arts Council England, on the experiences women workers and what we could learn from them about time. I was interested both in how some forms of labor were valued economically and some people's time was valued in society, but other people's labor and time was not. I had been supported by the Developing Your Creative Practice fund from Arts Council England to do this research and develop my playwriting and theatre-making practice. I was taking an intersectional approach to look at gender, time, value, and labor. Using verbatim and playwriting strategies, I was in the process of story gathering/interviews over the next few months and developing some short theatre pieces/scenes from these as small experiments and to seed future participatory projects.
Through my fascination with the sea, I had been researching and thinking about what it was to work in the fish industry. I landed on the incredible history of the fish gutters. Often referred to as the fisherwomen, herring lasses, fesh quines, these incredible self-organized women, hardy as hell, were the fastest fish gutting teams in (our) history.
Many talented historians, researchers, documenters, and artists had recorded and documented the lives, work, and history of the fish gutters better than I could do here - (so please see the list of resources below!).
But If you didn't know, to give you a brief overview:
The Herring Workers
From the 18th century through the 19th century up to the first world war, and then again NH that to the second world war, many generations of women traveled from fishing communities on the East and North coasts of Scotland, all the way down to the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, on the Norfolk coast, following the herring shoals and the boats catching them. Known as the Scottish lasses’ invasion, the women fish workers who came from Scotland were so fast and so effective they were notorious. The women worked incredibly long days, usually with no stops for breaks. They worked in teams of 3: 2 gutters and 1 Packer commissioned on behalf of a particular fishing boat. It was brutally hard work. The fish workers could get up to 60 or 70 fish a minute and would read them in terms of size and then pack them into barrels which would be pickled and then shipped to Europe and Russia. Whenever the women went gutting and packing the fish, they were knitting. There are famous Scottish fisherman's knitwork and would be found to be singing.
Seemingly scarcely documented, ( and very excitingly for my interests), the women organized successful strike action a number of times. Largely unsupported and unrecognized by the male-run unions of the time, the fish gutters organized a number of actions through the 1930s, shutting down the pickling and curing yards in Norfolk, and winning better pay and better working conditions for themselves and their coworkers.
I was on a mission to find out more about the lives, work, and experiences of fish gutters from the past and present. I was excited to explore what they could teach us about time value and labor. What could we learn from them for workers’ struggles today?
Following the Fish Workers: The Journey
Over the course of a month, I cycled the route of the herring fish gutters. I was traveling from Shetland and stopping off in the fishing ports and harbors where herring was landed, through Scotland, down the East coast all the way to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.
I met with people on the way who had a relationship to this history: whether that was as present-day fish workers or involved in some way in fisheries or through their own personal relationship to this labor and the women who did it. I wanted to chat to anyone one - about fish gutting and the industry.
Traveling by bicycle and sleeping in a tent along the coast (following national cycle route 1), chatting to people, I documented my experiences. I uploaded regular voice notes and pictures to this website, so if you were interested, you could follow me following the fish workers then go here.
How I got here
Time, the sea and me
"Perhaps nowhere is there a more fascinating complex of time than in the seas. Cicero recorded that the flesh of oysters at sea waxed and waned with the full moon (and so, as women know, does the human oyster)." Jay Griffiths Pip Pip.
I am a dyspraxic and dyslexic, ADHD person. Recently, the definition of dyspraxia as 'a different experience of space and time' was brought to my attention by a fellow dyspraxic. I have also thought for some time that maybe I'm on the autistic spectrum, but that's neither here nor there. Any which way, I am neuro-divergent and, depending on the structures I am trying to fit myself into, I identify within the social model of disability as a disabled person: disabled by the ableist world around me. I do not think in a linear way and my experience of people and time and structures is not straightforward.
I have always been obsessed with the sea. Perhaps that is growing up near it, near Brighton, perhaps it’s that it has been known for eons to be a source of health benefit. Whatever, I need to jump into it, look at it, be near it.
WORKING TIME
I have come to this work through my own experience of different types of work. many exploitative, brutal and underpaid; others, incredibly well paid and sometimes easy.
My working life flits between manual, seasonal, artistic, corporate, care work, community phased, activism. I'm fascinated by how we experience time differently, depending on the activities we are doing, as well as at different points in our lives. That the work of mothers, of carers, is undervalued to say the least. You know that domestic and caring work are often invisible and the people who do it, often migrant women, are made invisible too.
An overall research question that frames my work is:
How can storytelling reshape how we value time and labour?
I believe we have a lot to learn from the experiences of workers that are invisiblised by a sexist white supremacist capitalism that doesn't value certain types of work or those that do it.
I am fascinated by why the different experiences of time change depending on what sort of labour you are doing, whether that's different job labour or unpaid labour such as raising families, caring for people or community / political organising. Beginning on this endeavour, on this research exploration I began to explore the different gendered labour roles from care work to sex work and alternative models and resistance.
STRIKE:
"The Scots Herring Lassies' Strike in East Anglia 1938 was a strike by female seasonal workers from Scotland who traveled to East Anglia in the United Kingdom to gut herring (which is a step in fish processing). "Lassie" is the word for "girl" in the Scots language.
Before the First World War, 80% of the herring catch at East Anglia had been exported to Russia, and the collapse of the Russian and German markets meant hardship for the herring industry during the 1920s and 1930s. It was still mostly Scottish, but the Scots were withdrawing. In 1925, they had 757 boats and 4,000 fisher women. By 1936 the numbers were about 460 and 2,000 respectively. In 1936, the fisher women went on strike, and succeeded in obtaining an increase in wages. By 1938, it was clear that many steam drifters were not earning enough to cover expenses.[1]
In the autumn of 1938, the Scots herring women who traveled each year to the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft in East Anglia to gut herring went on strike over their pay and conditions. This strike was over the same issues as the strike two years before, plus their protest was directed against the general decline of the industry. This strike in 1938 was also in support of the men who operated the herring drifters which caught the herring.[2] English boats were engaged in Sunday fishing, which the Scottish women said gave an unfair advantage to the English over the Scottish fishermen, as the Scottish fishermen did not fish on Sundays."
"The sea, clock of ages, was full of time. In the tide ebb and flow, the sense of the moment was critical, but it was the coasts which were affected by tides, not the ocean depths, so while the sea, at its shoreline, represented the now of events, yet a paradox of the ocean was that in its depth, it was a symbol of eternity." - Jay Griffiths Pip Pip.
Research: Developing Your Creative Practice :
I was working on a theatre research project supported by Arts Council England, on the experiences women workers and what we could learn from them about time. I was interested both in how some forms of labor were valued economically and some people's time was valued in society, but other people's labor and time was not. I had been supported by the Developing Your Creative Practice fund from Arts Council England to do this research and develop my playwriting and theatre-making practice. I was taking an intersectional approach to look at gender, time, value, and labor. Using verbatim and playwriting strategies, I was in the process of story gathering/interviews over the next few months and developing some short theatre pieces/scenes from these as small experiments and to seed future participatory projects.
Through my fascination with the sea, I had been researching and thinking about what it was to work in the fish industry. I landed on the incredible history of the fish gutters. Often referred to as the fisherwomen, herring lasses, fesh quines, these incredible self-organized women, hardy as hell, were the fastest fish gutting teams in (our) history.
Many talented historians, researchers, documenters, and artists had recorded and documented the lives, work, and history of the fish gutters better than I could do here - (so please see the list of resources below!).
But If you didn't know, to give you a brief overview:
The Herring Workers
From the 18th century through the 19th century up to the first world war, and then again NH that to the second world war, many generations of women traveled from fishing communities on the East and North coasts of Scotland, all the way down to the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, on the Norfolk coast, following the herring shoals and the boats catching them. Known as the Scottish lasses’ invasion, the women fish workers who came from Scotland were so fast and so effective they were notorious. The women worked incredibly long days, usually with no stops for breaks. They worked in teams of 3: 2 gutters and 1 Packer commissioned on behalf of a particular fishing boat. It was brutally hard work. The fish workers could get up to 60 or 70 fish a minute and would read them in terms of size and then pack them into barrels which would be pickled and then shipped to Europe and Russia. Whenever the women went gutting and packing the fish, they were knitting. There are famous Scottish fisherman's knitwork and would be found to be singing.
Seemingly scarcely documented, ( and very excitingly for my interests), the women organized successful strike action a number of times. Largely unsupported and unrecognized by the male-run unions of the time, the fish gutters organized a number of actions through the 1930s, shutting down the pickling and curing yards in Norfolk, and winning better pay and better working conditions for themselves and their coworkers.
I was on a mission to find out more about the lives, work, and experiences of fish gutters from the past and present. I was excited to explore what they could teach us about time value and labor. What could we learn from them for workers’ struggles today?
Following the Fish Workers: The Journey
Over the course of a month, I cycled the route of the herring fish gutters. I was traveling from Shetland and stopping off in the fishing ports and harbors where herring was landed, through Scotland, down the East coast all the way to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.
I met with people on the way who had a relationship to this history: whether that was as present-day fish workers or involved in some way in fisheries or through their own personal relationship to this labor and the women who did it. I wanted to chat to anyone one - about fish gutting and the industry.
Traveling by bicycle and sleeping in a tent along the coast (following national cycle route 1), chatting to people, I documented my experiences. I uploaded regular voice notes and pictures to this website, so if you were interested, you could follow me following the fish workers then go here.
How I got here
Time, the sea and me
"Perhaps nowhere is there a more fascinating complex of time than in the seas. Cicero recorded that the flesh of oysters at sea waxed and waned with the full moon (and so, as women know, does the human oyster)." Jay Griffiths Pip Pip.
I am a dyspraxic and dyslexic, ADHD person. Recently, the definition of dyspraxia as 'a different experience of space and time' was brought to my attention by a fellow dyspraxic. I have also thought for some time that maybe I'm on the autistic spectrum, but that's neither here nor there. Any which way, I am neuro-divergent and, depending on the structures I am trying to fit myself into, I identify within the social model of disability as a disabled person: disabled by the ableist world around me. I do not think in a linear way and my experience of people and time and structures is not straightforward.
I have always been obsessed with the sea. Perhaps that is growing up near it, near Brighton, perhaps it’s that it has been known for eons to be a source of health benefit. Whatever, I need to jump into it, look at it, be near it.
WORKING TIME
I have come to this work through my own experience of different types of work. many exploitative, brutal and underpaid; others, incredibly well paid and sometimes easy.
My working life flits between manual, seasonal, artistic, corporate, care work, community phased, activism. I'm fascinated by how we experience time differently, depending on the activities we are doing, as well as at different points in our lives. That the work of mothers, of carers, is undervalued to say the least. You know that domestic and caring work are often invisible and the people who do it, often migrant women, are made invisible too.
An overall research question that frames my work is:
How can storytelling reshape how we value time and labour?
I believe we have a lot to learn from the experiences of workers that are invisiblised by a sexist white supremacist capitalism that doesn't value certain types of work or those that do it.
I am fascinated by why the different experiences of time change depending on what sort of labour you are doing, whether that's different job labour or unpaid labour such as raising families, caring for people or community / political organising. Beginning on this endeavour, on this research exploration I began to explore the different gendered labour roles from care work to sex work and alternative models and resistance.
STRIKE:
"The Scots Herring Lassies' Strike in East Anglia 1938 was a strike by female seasonal workers from Scotland who traveled to East Anglia in the United Kingdom to gut herring (which is a step in fish processing). "Lassie" is the word for "girl" in the Scots language.
Before the First World War, 80% of the herring catch at East Anglia had been exported to Russia, and the collapse of the Russian and German markets meant hardship for the herring industry during the 1920s and 1930s. It was still mostly Scottish, but the Scots were withdrawing. In 1925, they had 757 boats and 4,000 fisher women. By 1936 the numbers were about 460 and 2,000 respectively. In 1936, the fisher women went on strike, and succeeded in obtaining an increase in wages. By 1938, it was clear that many steam drifters were not earning enough to cover expenses.[1]
In the autumn of 1938, the Scots herring women who traveled each year to the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft in East Anglia to gut herring went on strike over their pay and conditions. This strike was over the same issues as the strike two years before, plus their protest was directed against the general decline of the industry. This strike in 1938 was also in support of the men who operated the herring drifters which caught the herring.[2] English boats were engaged in Sunday fishing, which the Scottish women said gave an unfair advantage to the English over the Scottish fishermen, as the Scottish fishermen did not fish on Sundays."
More on the Herring Workers
Shetland to yarmouth
Herring Girls : https://engole.info/herring-girls/#:~:text=Herring%20girls%20or%20herring,south%20during%20the%20herring%20season
The sounds
https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/394/type/referance
Song of the fish gutters Chrstine Kydd https://soundcloud.com/christinekydd/fisherrow-the-song-of-the
Singing the Fishing https://ewanmaccoll.bandcamp.com/album/singing-the-fishing
Jess the herring lass : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0VZ9xMdQF8&ab_channel=Haycroft2
Seafood industry today : https://www.seafish.org/document/?id=16687d65-6e8c-488d-ac3f-f592f9fe9253
VIDEOS:
Scotch Fisher Girls at Yarmouth :http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/181
The HERRING girls, kippers and baskets http://wovencommunities.org/collection/the-herring-industry/
Articles:
C. Lewis. The Yarmouth Herring Industry (Norfolk Museums Service, 1988)
Davies, S., "'A whirling vortex of women': the strikes of Scots herring women in East Anglia in the 1930s and 1940s", Labour History Review, vol. 75, no. 2, 2010, pp. 181-207, Maney Publishing