Scottish Notes & Queries, February, 1910
The following article first appeared in the "Penny
Magazine" for 26th September 1840, under the heading "The
Fish-People of Aberdeen".
This handsome and flourishing town [Aberdeen] consists of about sixty
thousand inhabitants, who are distinguished even in Scotland for their
shrewdness. At the mouth of the river Dee, and in two squares, called
Fishers' Squares, separated from the rest of the town by only a few
dockyards, are a race of people who differ more in dialect, customs,
superstitions, and other peculiarities, from the Aberdonians, than the
latter do from any of the other inhabitants of the lowlands of Scotland.
They are a completely separate community; and their dialect is so
different from that of the working classes of Aberdeen that, though the
two races have a sufficient number of words in common for transacting
business with each other, most of the words used by the
"Foot-Dee" or "Fittie folk," among themselves are
unintelligible to the "Aberdeen folk." If a native of Aberdeen
were to wander into the square inhabited by the "Fittie folk,"
who are almost all fishers and pilots, he would run no little risk of
being pelted out again with stones and haddock-heads. The "Fittie
folk" scarcely ever intermarry with the other citizens.
Their marriages are generally "penny weddings." They seldom
send their children to school, and almost never to a promiscuous one.
Their sons are almost invariably brought up to follow the occupations of
their forefathers, and never learn any regular trades, except that,
perhaps, now and then , a youth, more adventurous than usual, becomes a
ship-carpenter. They live together patriarchally, sometimes three or
four generations in a single room. The oars are laid above them on the
couples (or rafters) of their cottages; the children may be seen
sleeping on nets in corners; and on the walls are creels, baskets, and
other fishing tackle. Their boats descend by primogeniture.
Their women have not merely a costume different at all times from
that of women in a similar rank of life in Aberdeen (distinguished by an
all but exclusive preference for the colours white and blue, and
consisting of a blue-striped wrapper, blue baize petticoat and close
cap, called a "toy mutch." with "moggins," or
stockings without feet, and they wear no shoes); but they also adopt
very generally the masculine blue jackets of their husbands and
brothers.
The men do little more than go out with the boats. The women search
for bait, assist in carrying the nets, bait the hooks, and do all
drudgery, while their lords are looking on with folded arms. The women
both of Foot-Dee and those of the same race in several other villages on
the east coast of Scotland, carry great loads of fish to market on
market days in creels (large wicker baskets which are fastened to their
shoulders, and rest on their hips), sometimes as many as eleven miles
before breakfast; and so necessary does the load become to them, to
enable them to walk steady, that when they are retuning home, they
prefer carrying stones to carrying an empty creel. They never walk but
in single file, and they have a superstitious dread of being counted, a
fear of which the boys of Aberdeen avail themselves to annoy them by
crying as they pass - "One, two, three, What a lot of fisher
nannies I see." A salutation equally dreaded by them is the cry,
"A baud's fit in yer creel" - that is, the point of a hare's
foot is in your creel. This saying derived its meaning from the
circumstance that a hare was seen to run through their "fish
town" on the evening preceding a day on which a great number of
their people were lost at sea. To point at their boats with the
for-finger is the surest way of offending them. Among these people all
superstitions which useful knowledge is banishing from the homes of the
poor still flourish. The belief in lucky days and omens of stars and
clouds is to the present hour a practical faith under the low, thatched
roofs of those squares of white cottages among the sandhills of the
sandy beach at the mouth of the Dee, occupied by this curious race who
still tremble with the fear that a neglect of these things would bring
great evils down upon their heads. They observe Old Christmas, and all
their transactions and calculations are made by the old style, to which
they tenaciously hold, saying, "New style is man's makin', but auld
style is Guid's."
Aberdeen is full of stories of the fisherfolk. A "Fittie
lassie" once visited London, and, on seeing St Paul's exclaimed -
"This dings the kirk o' Fittie." A woman of this class went to
the Post Office and asked for a letter "from oor Jock." She
was asked what was her name or her husband's but she exclaimed - "I'se
behaud you!" The chief article of trade is "Finnan
Haddocks." Finnan (Findon) is a small village famous only for its
fishery, situated about six miles south of Aberdeen. Of the excellence
of this fish, perhaps the most decisive proof that can be given is that
the burghs on the Firth of Forth and other places have regular
manufactories of a spurious article, which they vend under its name, and
doubtless to the detriment of its reputation among the deceived but
unsuspicious purchasers.
