Fishing in Fife

Oh hey, I wrote this and then never posted it! I've just found it in my drafts. It's from December 2016. Whoops. Better late than never.

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Well, as usual, it's been a while since last I posted! Sorry about that. I've been working away, but haven't attended any events to show you photos from. That changed this past weekend, though!

A friend and fellow St Andrews student, Adam HL, pulled me into the project he was putting together on eighteenth-century maritime fashion, and, in particular, the material culture of early modern fishing communities in coastal Fife, Scotland, for his undergraduate honours course. Some of you may know Adam from his work on the French reproduction frigate Hermione, which stopped to call in various spots up the North American coast in the summer of 2015. His deep interest in maritime fashion resulted in his choice of honours project, and also in the project's, er, *expanding* past the usual bounds of university coursework! I was very glad to get involved, and it's been very fun - we put on two public talks at the University of St Andrews, co-led a walk down to the ocean estuary near St Andrews to learn about historical ecology, foraging, and fishing work, and did a photoshoot down on the St Andrews pier and harbour-side. For next term we're planning some further demos at the Anstruther Fisheries Museum, and hopefully a trial-run on the Firth with a recreated sma'line (ocean fishing line). You can read lots more about Adam's project here, on his excellent blog 'Fishy Fashion and Maritime Modes.'

First of all, here is a watercolour by David Allan from the end of the eighteenth century (#D404, National Gallery, Edinburgh), showing one of the very few depictions of Fife fishwives from this period, and a photo of me next to Jigger's Inn, an eighteenth-century cottage on the Mussel Road that fishwives would have walked down to get to the estuary.

The basket is a back creel, which would have been loaded up with mussels to bait the lines or herring to go to market. Fishwives walked many miles on foot down to Edinburgh or up to Dundee to sell their wares, and came back with the goods their families needed in their fish baskets. They were also responsible for using the mussels they gathered to bait the fishing lines their husbands would take out to sea. Fishwives were the backbone of these communities, and their hard work resulted in quite a bit of power - they had control of the money, the households, and much of the daily running of the town. We re-created three baskets for this project - the back creel and two smaller baskets - with the help of Liz Balfour.

The photoshoot we did on the St Andrews pier, with photographer Noël Heaney, re-created a series of photos taken by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill in the 1840s. Their work, now held in the National Portrait Gallery in London, gives us some of the best and earliest documentation of coastal Fife's fishing communities. Although our impressions are based on 18th-century sources, we chose to re-create this photoshoot because we wanted to show the continuity over time that made these looks iconic. Indeed, the fishwives' back creels and striped petticoats survived with little change until fishing declined here between the World Wars, and became so iconic that locals were able to immediately recognise my impression as I walked around St Andrews.

Here's my impression, alongside an Adamson and Hill portrait of Elizabeth Hall.

And Adam's impression, alongside an Adamson and Hill portrait of David Young.

Adam had reproduction seaboots made, and they are top-quality but very difficult to get off:

Behind us is one of the original fishing cottages in town, which you can see in another of Adamson and Hill's images:

So there you have it! It was quite a different impression for me, as my non-medieval kit tends to be more suited for ball attendees and suffragettes, but I really enjoyed putting this together and I learned a lot.

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Note, 2019: Adam is still working on expanding his maritime impressions and is conducting further research into eighteenth-century dress and maritime work, particularly with regards to the material cultures of sailors of all sorts (except pirates). He's now based in the U.S., so definitely have a look at his work and public lectures if this is a topic that interests you!