A Doric A-Z: C revisited

Doric, the dialect spoken in the North-East of Scotland is rich in words and phrases associated with the land and the sea. I so much enjoyed my recent journey through the Doric dictionary that I plan to revisit it on an irregular and random basis.

CLOOTIES: cloth strips used to protect the fingers when gutting herring.

Herring make annual migrations around the British Isles and in the past the Scottish herring fleet used to follow them. The gutting quines, the women who gutted and packed the herring into barrels, followed the fleet all around the UK. They travelled from port to port by train, on the fishing boats or sometimes on the back of a lorry. They carried their belongings with them in a kist, a large wooden trunk. Once they reached port they lived in wooden huts or, if they were lucky, in a guest house. The fishermen caught the herring at night and landed their catch in the morning. All the fish had to be gutted, salted and packed into wooden barrels that same day. They used sharp knives to gut the fish and inevitably suffered cuts which hurt badly in the salt water. To try and prevent this the women tied strips of old flour sacks on their fingers for protection, these were known as Clooties.

This account comes from the website of the Banffshire Maritime and Heritage Association where you can see an excellent selection of photographs of the gutting quines at work.

My photograph shows a group of Peterhead gutting quines working in Great Yarmouth around 1930. Mrs Talpa's mother, then about 16 years old, is third from the right in the back row. The men would have been the coopers who made the herring barrels.