Women working in the Scarborough fishing industry
Quotes from Scarborough women or about the fisher wives.
THEY DON'T KNOW THEY ARE BORN TODAY "Women don't know they are born nowadays to what me mother and them used to go through. It's an awkward job and it's a mucky job!" [Mary Bradley]
SCOTTISH FISHER LASSES "The Scottish fisher girls, I felt sorry for them,.. they were so hard worked... they used to start the first thing in a morning and they'd work until it was dark and in those days, of course it was summer months...it was light until ten o'clock, so they used to come home shattered and their poor hands were all cut, because they were cutting and gutting hundreds of crans of herring. They used to weigh their herring in crans. They used to have a big basket and they would call it a cran of herring and they had to gut them and, of course, they cut themselves numerous times. Cut them so much that they had to tie string round their fingers and all their fingers and thumbs was tied with string and instead of the knife hitting the flesh it would hit the string, which was a good thing. But then they took the string off, their poor fingers looked red raw anyway". [Raymond Foster]
HARD TIMES "well things were so hard, I don't want to dwell on that, but it was hard. Each time a boat went to sea, there was an old lady who would run round the houses, collect the suits, take 'em to Ward's pawn shop, put 'em in and immediately that boat came back, she was running back to get them out again The women were very much involved. [Old Tommy Rowley]
KNITTING GANSEYS "I have heard my mother say many a time... she had little ones in wooden cradles a' fireside and she used to be knitting when she cae home she used to knit these, knit these jerseys a long while after midnight with one foot rocking this cradle. She always knit all their jerseys, marvellous knitter she was. Oh, they were lovely ganseys". [Rhoda Jenkinson]
SKEINING "Me mother used to go into shed about three at the latest in a morning and me sister used to go and skein with her and then they had another two women with them as well. There was four or five women in the shed skeining and then four or five men baiting lines, you see, for when me father came ashore. And many a time they used to go back in again... when we used to come in from School and they used to have a bit of dinner and then they used to go back into the shed, you see. And by time we'd got home at teatime they'd finished then and packed up for the day - but they were long days for such as me mother" [Mary Bradley]
OTHER ARTICLES
• The Womens work in the Filey fishing industry
• The history of the Scarborough fishing industry
• Children of the fishing families in Scarborough
• The history of the herring fishing in the North Sea
• The new way of catching caller herrin
• The national RNLI and the Scarborough lifeboat of 1861.
• Tunny fishing in Scarborough in the 1930's
• A sea shanty about a storm on the Scarborough coast
• The port of Scarborough in the late 15th Century
• Watching for ships by the harbour walls in Scarborough
• Tommy Rowley - stories about loss of life at sea
• Harwood Brierleys description of Scarborough harbour at the opening of the 20th century
• The 200 year history of scarboroughs RNLI
• Wreck of the Mary Stoddart - Dundalk
• The loss of the Scarborough trawler Heritage in 1993
• Life in the Old Town of Scarborough and harbour - the fishing families
• The early years of the Scarborough Lifeboat
• Funny stories from the age of sailing ships in Scarborough
• Coastal erosion in the 19th Century around the North Bay and Scarborough Castle area
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