Pull up a surfboard and I’ll tell you a story about the early pioneers of the sport

Who was the first person to surf in Scotland? It’s a question that’s featured more than once in this column over the years, and one to which there is no easy answer. In 2006, when the British Surfing Museum brought an exhibition on the wave-riding history of these islands to Aberdeen, the official line was that the first person to catch a wave in Scottish waters and clamber to his feet was a Cornishman called Tris Cokes, who visited in 1968. (“Hey!” he said, when I asked him what his first Scottish surf was like, “I’m 56 years old! I’m supposed to remember what the day was like 40 years ago? It was bloody cold in the water, I remember that.”)

Subsequent digging, however, revealed a hardy bunch of Aberdonian surfers headed up by Sandy Mathers, who had built and ridden hollow surfboards out of marine ply off the east coast well before Cokes. They in turn had been preceded by another Aberdeen local called George Law, whose early morning shifts at a nearby abattoir left him free to surf all afternoon from 1967 onwards.

Then, in 2014, not long after Law passed away, I was contacted by 91-year-old Neva Macdonald-haig, who, along with her brothers Peter and David, rode waves off the Mull of Kintyre in the mid-1930s using rudimentary surfboards made for them by the local undertaker. (“It makes a good story to say they were coffin lids that we rode on,” she chuckled, “but they weren’t really. They were rounded at the end – probably about five or six-feet long.”) In one grainy image, Peter seems to be half-way to his feet – could he have been Scotland’s first ever surfer?

Clearly we’re still very much at the “first draft of history” stage with all

this, but that just makes the stories of Scotland’s surfing pioneers all the more intriguing.

It’s hard to imagine from the vantage point of 2018, when every surfable wave in Scotland seems to be mobbed whenever there’s a decent swell running, but for a short time in the late 1960s there were little groups of surfers dotted around the country, happily surfing away by themselves and assuming that they were the only people riding waves anywhere north of Carlisle. In these very early days, whenever one of these tribes encountered another, it was a real “Dr Livingstone I presume” moment for all concerned – a rare comingtogether of like-minded souls; a meeting of followers of the same religion, if you will, in an otherwise heathen society.

Andy Bennetts and his friends Ian Wishart and Stuart Chrichton may not have been the first people to surf in Scotland when they took a surfboard from Edinburgh to Aberdeen in September 1968 – although at the time they thought they might be. However, their pioneering journey was a significant moment in Scottish surfing history all the same – perhaps one of its defining moments – as it was probably the first time that two different groups of surfers from different parts of the country became aware of each other.

Bennetts and co, having lugged Bennetts’s heavy longboard all the way from the railway station to the beach, decided they needed somewhere to store it, so they asked an attendant at one of the pavilions where deckchairs were stored if they could leave it with him. “Of course,” came the reply, “put it in beside this other one.”

That “other” board turned out to belong to George Law. Bennetts and his friends soon met up with Law and, for a week in early September they all went surfing together in the waves off Aberdeen beach. None of them had wetsuits (although Law had a neoprene vest to keep out the cold) so nobody was able to stay in the water for very long at a time. When they got too cold to surf, they would retreat to the pavilion where the caretaker who had agreed to look after their surfboards would let them huddle around his wood-burning stove to warm up.

Bennetts, Wishart and Chrichton had their first Aberdeen surf on Monday 2 September 1968, so to mark the 50th anniversary of that red letter day Final Words thought it would be a good idea to sit down with Bennetts, Wishart and their friend Bill Batten, who was a key member of the Edinburgh surf scene of the late 60s, and talk about the early days. We ended up covering so much ground in our interview that it would have been impossible to do it all justice in a single column, so Andy, Ian and Bill’s stories will be appearing in instalments in this slot over the next couple of weeks – tune in next Saturday for Part One.

None of them had wetsuits so nobody was able to stay in the water for very long at a time