Scotland’s Herring Lassies Built a Boom That Ate Itself

Scotland’s herring lassies gutted 40 to 50 fish a minute so barrels could take a quality stamp before the catch rotted. In the early 1900s the Scottish Fisheries Museum counts 14,000 women among more than 35,000 people in the herring trade. In 1907 alone, curers sent 2.5 million barrels east.

The wages and the train tickets looked like freedom in fishing towns with few other paid jobs for women. Both depended on a cure that had to finish the day the nets came in, and on buyers in Germany, Russia and eastern Europe. When those buyers and then the shoals went, the independence went too.

Two Gutters and a Packer at Every Farlin

Ian Leith of The Wick Society still uses the old nickname with a wince. “They were called Herring Girls, even though many were adult women,” he said. “Gutting fish was a tough job. It was a mucky job.” He puts the knife work at 40 to 50 fish a minute.

Herring spoils within a day unless it is gutted, salted and packed. From May the shoals were followed from Shetland and the west coast down the east coast of Scotland and on to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft by December. The boats came back each day. The women came with them, kists on the train, hymns and Gaelic songs in the carriages, tea boiled on small stoves.

They stood at long troughs called farlins, two gutters and one packer, often sisters or neighbours from the same village. Salt on the fish helped the hands get a grip. A short knife, the futtle, took out the gills and the long gut in one movement. The packer, usually the tallest, bent into the barrel and laid the first row belly up, because inspectors often checked only the top and bottom layers.

HOW A CREW OF THREE WORKED

• The gutters: Two women sorted herring by size and quality at the farlin and flicked each fish into the right tub.
• The packer: She layered fish and salt in a barrel that held 900 to 1,200 herring, depending on size.
• The clock: A crew could fill about 30 barrels in a 10-hour shift, and the barrel was paid only if it passed the inspectors.

A standard day ran from 6am to 6pm. When the fleet hit a heavy shot they stayed until 9pm, and sometimes into the small hours, because the Fishery Board’s crown brand required the cure on the day of the catch. Fingers were bound at dawn with cloots cut from flour bags. Left-handers were often put on packing so the knives all moved the same way. Blood poisoning ended a season. Rubber gloves did not arrive until just before the Second World War.

Wick, built out at Lower Pultneytown to Thomas Telford’s plan, was a hub. Leith said the town’s population was said to treble in the season, and that 43 pubs once stood in the Lower Pulteney area alone. Saturday night was the only real pause, because Scottish crews would not fish on Sunday.

A Shilling a Barrel Halted Yarmouth

Pay was a pledge fee called arles, a living allowance, and piecework on barrels that passed. Before the First World War, Annie Watt of Peterhead, speaking later to David Butcher, remembered 8 shillings a week for food and lodgings and 8 pence a barrel. In one heavy week at Gorleston her crew packed 288 barrels between Tuesday and Friday.

Angus Macleod’s archive puts average take-home for a whole season at about £10 to £12 at the start of the 20th century. That was still money a crofting household could feel. It was also a wage that vanished if the fish were late, because waiting at the yard was unpaid.

Photographs from 1929 show Scottish crews on the Yarmouth quay with knitting on their laps. The wool was not a hobby first. Piecework meant hours on the stones with no barrel to fill, and the landladies stripped rooms and covered the walls against scales and the smell once the summer visitors had gone.

In November 1936 that leverage flipped. About 3,000 Scottish women stopped work in Great Yarmouth and demanded 1 shilling a barrel, up from 10 old pence. Herring kept landing while they marched the harbour. The Transport and General Workers Union came in. Mounted police were brought from London. Historian Sam Davies later wrote that these walkouts stayed “hidden from history” because they did not fit the usual union story of the period. They still won the shilling, and then a backdate to the start of the season.

Wan year we gied on strike. We got fifteen an six shillings a week, an aabody gied on strike to get anidder half-a-crown onta wir wages. In Yarmouth dey wir dis tree women, an dey gied round aa da yards, aa da fishing yards, an took oot aa da women. God help dem at didna come oot. Da strike only lasted tree days. We just walked up an doon da river at Yarmouth. Dan, ida end da curers hed ta gie in because dey wir so much herring. We got half-a-crown, so dat brought wiz up ta seevinteen shillings. But we needna bothered because da landlady pat up wir rent a shilling, so whit we got wis only wan an six pense ida end.

Christina Jackman, Shetland herring girl, in Susan Telford’s oral history

The raise was real. So was the lodging bill. Curers gave in because fish on the quay was a wasting asset, not because the trade was generous.

Why They Left Sunday Herring to Rot

Scottish curers and Scottish drifters kept the Sabbath. English boats often did not. On 24 October 1938 about 2,400 women in Lowestoft refused to gut or pack fish caught on Sunday, and the action ran through Yarmouth as well.

The protest mixed faith with fleet politics. Sunday shooting put Scottish crews, already tied up, at a disadvantage, and the women said so. They had struck over pay two years earlier. This time they left fish to spoil in support of their own boats and their own Sunday.

They had been losing numbers before either walkout. Herripedia, drawing on the migrant counts, puts 9,000 travelling herring lasses on the coast in 1920 and 4,500 in 1938. The shilling and the Sunday stand were won inside a trade that was already shrinking, which is why the wins still feel sharp in family talk and so small on a ledger.

Export Markets Paid the Piece Rate

Onshore curing was Scotland’s edge. Dutch fleets had long salted at sea. Scots could pack on land at a scale the busses could not match, once the British government set a Fishery Board in 1809 to inspect barrels and brand them. Exported barrels rose from 100,000 in 1820 to more than a million by 1840. By the 1900s the industry was turning out more than two million barrels a year.

The Scottish Fisheries Museum’s herring-boom record is the figure every later tally still uses: 2.5 million barrels of cured herring in 1907, about 250,000 tons, shipped mainly to Germany, eastern Europe and Russia. In 1913 more than 10,000 boats were in the Scottish herring fleet. Girls started at the farlins at 15 and followed the season from Stornoway and Lerwick through Peterhead as far as Yarmouth.

THE HERRING BOOM IN COUNTS

Margaret H. King, writing on east-coast fishing families, called the split of sea work and shore work a partnership of equals. That was true in the yards. It was also a partnership with buyers in Danzig and St Petersburg. When the First World War cut those routes, and when later German and Russian demand failed to return on the old terms, the piece rate had less and less to bite on.

Purse Seines Emptied the Farlins

Ray Richard was 17 when Wick crowned her Herring Queen in 1949, the first festival after a ten-year gap. As a girl she had played in Stewart’s curing yard. “I would watch the gutters and packers and think ‘I hope I don’t have to do that,’” she said. She went into the NHS instead. Wick crowned its last Herring Queen in 1953.

Leith puts the end of the Scottish boom in the 1960s, after the wars had already knocked the trade about. By 1962 only 10 Scottish women still worked the Yarmouth season. Demand for salted herring was fading as other preservation methods spread, and tastes shifted toward white fish.

Then the North Sea stock itself went. An ICES review of the collapse found that the spawning stock fell by 97 percent, from more than 2 million tonnes in the 1960s to under 50,000 tonnes by the mid-1970s. Directed herring fishing in the North Sea was banned in 1977 and did not reopen until 1983. A Minch ban followed in 1978. Purse seines and pelagic trawls, sonar and bigger boats had raised the kill long after the old drift-net shore cure had lost its markets.

THE LONG DROP FROM THE CROWN BRAND

1. 1809: The Fishery Board begins inspecting cured herring and stamping a crown brand.
2. 1907: 2.5 million barrels leave for Germany, eastern Europe and Russia.
3. 1914 to 1918: War cuts the export routes the piece rate lived on.
4. November 1936: About 3,000 women halt Yarmouth for 1 shilling a barrel.
5. 24 October 1938: About 2,400 women in Lowestoft refuse Sunday-caught fish.
6. 1962: Ten Scottish women still work the Yarmouth season.
7. 1977: Directed North Sea herring fishing is banned; it reopens in 1983.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• ICES scientists: Reviews of the 1960s and 1970s treat fishing itself as the main cause of the crash, with a closure required to stop a worse wipeout.
• Scottish Herring researchers: They add a sharp drop in northern sea-surface temperature in the 1970s, which would have hurt juvenile survival even before the last heavy catches.

Both accounts end in the same place for the yards. No daily landings, no farlins, no barrels to pass. The women’s bargaining power had always been the rotting heap on the quay. Once the heap was gone, there was nothing to strike over.

Bronze Girls on Stornoway’s South Beach

Stornoway keeps the labour in metal. A bronze herring girl on South Beach, about 1.70m high, was unveiled in 2003 by sculptors Virginia Hutchison and Charles S. Engebretsen, with a plaque for the women who worked there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A second harbour figure stands on the north beach. The town once put up to 1,000 boats in the harbour in summer and saw its population treble, on the same pattern Wick knew.

The Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther holds the Reaper, a 1902 Fifie herring drifter, and the gutting kit the crews used. Wick Heritage Centre shows a travelling kist. Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway opened Clann-Nighean an Sgadain / Following the Fish on 23 September 2026, with Highland Archive, Norfolk Record Office and Suffolk Archives, and the show runs until 21 November 2026.

Family accounts still surface without photographs. Women packed boots, oilskins and blankets into the kist and came home with sticks of English rock. Some married in Yarmouth and stayed. Most sent money north and went back to villages that had few other cash wages for them.

The job gave travel, a crew, and a rate you could fight for. It also asked for 12-hour days in salt and wind, and it ended when the cure and the shoals were no longer worth a barrel stamp.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Was the Scotch Cure?

It was the onshore pack that replaced the older Dutch at-sea salt. Gutters in Scotland sorted fish into seven sizes, from Large Full (not less than 11¼ inches, full of milt or roe) down to Mattie (9 inches, young). Packed barrels were left to pine, shrinking in brine; the pickle was drained, kept for flavour, then poured back after a top-up before the lid went on. East Anglia used fewer size grades, which sped the work, though the fish were often smaller so a barrel took more guts.

Who Were Coilers in the Herring Yards?

First-year gutters on Lewis were called cùibhlearan, or coilers. They were paid less than the older women because they were slower, and they were expected to be fully up to speed by the next season. Each packer also carried a number that was branded on every barrel she filled, so a bad pack could be traced.

When Did Herring Girls Start Using Rubber Gloves?

Rubber gloves came in only just before the Second World War. Until then the defence against the futtle and the salt was cotton cloots tied on each morning, plus Red Cross and church first-aid posts on the quay. Farlins themselves were not raised off shin height until 1918, so a generation of crews packed bent double.

What Did Great Yarmouth Change After 1914?

After packer Anne Reid spoke at the House of Commons in April 1914, firms had to put in better standing surfaces and nearby toilets. Great Yarmouth council spent £5,000 that year on those yard conditions. The vote did not shorten the day. It did mean the crews were no longer standing in the wet with nowhere to go.

Where Are the Herring Girls Commemorated?

Two statues stand at Stornoway harbour, including the 2003 South Beach bronze. Wick keeps kists and Herring Queen memory; Anstruther keeps the Reaper and the museum galleries. Helmsdale’s Timespan has also staged artist Joanne Coates’s Red Herring, which treats the crews as a class of migrant labour rather than a costume display.

Wick’s harbour now looks to offshore renewables more than to drifters. The bronze on South Beach still faces the water the barrels left from, with no farlin behind it.