Pease Bay, Dunbar and Coldingham – how the East Coast revealed its surfing potential

Welcome back to a comfortable corner of Shackleton’s Bar in Edinburgh, where Final Words is in the middle of interviewing three pioneers of Scottish surfing: Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and Bill Batten. Last week, you may remember, Andy and Ian were reminiscing about their groundbreaking 1968 trip from Edinburgh to Aberdeen with their friend Stuart Crichton – a budget, pre-university adventure with one surfboard between the three of them and (of course) no wetsuits. Thinking they might be the first people ever to surf in Scotland, the trio quickly realised they weren’t alone when they met up with Aberdonian surfer George Law, who had been surfing off Aberdeen Beach all by himself since 1967. It was still a momentous occasion for Scottish surfing, however, as it was almost certainly the first time that surfers from different parts of Scotland had met up and gone surfing together. Bennetts and Wishart have calculated that they first met Law on 2 September 1968, so Monday week could perhaps be said to be the 50th anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s surfing community – which is why this series of articles is appearing now.

Bennetts and Wishart had decided to try surfing in Aberdeen because Bennetts had lived there for a time, so he knew there would be waves. However, once they were back in Edinburgh it didn’t take them long to figure out that there were also plenty of places to surf closer to home, first in East Lothian and then further down the A1 – and before long, the surfing tribe of south-east Scotland started to attract new members.

“There were a few people [in Edinburgh] by this time with surfboards,” says Bennetts, “and one of them was a guy called Pete Rennie.

Pete didn’t have a driving licence but his father was very sympathetic so he would give Pete and his board and me and my board a lift down to the beach. We were looking at Dunbar, Belhaven, round about that area. One day we were going to the beach and this van was coming up the other way with a board on the top. So we screeched to a halt, and it turned out to be Bill [Batten]. This was quite near Belhaven Bay. We asked him ‘where did you get that?’ and he said, ‘Oh, New Zealand.’”

“I’d surfed down the East Coast for a wee while before I met Andy and Ian,” says Batten. “My first time surfing in Scotland was December 1967. I was more or less there by accident. I’d lived in New Zealand, then Australia, and then I’d shipped a surfboard back. When it arrived somebody said to me ‘Why don’t you go to Pease Bay? I believe there are waves there.’ I said ‘That can’t be possible,’ but I did go down, and the waves were reasonably big. The water was quite cold though, so I didn’t stay in too long. I didn’t have a wetsuit then, so it was shorts and in. Freeze, then get out quick.”

Unsurprisingly, Batten was inspired to get a wetsuit fairly soon after this first, bone-chilling experience.

“In 1968 I found a company [in Newquay] that sold neoprene rubber with drawings of how to cut out a wetsuit,” he says. “It was more or less a diving wetsuit though, with a big flap at the front with buttons, and they sent you this neoprene and a plan and a tin of glue. So my wife and I spent a week cutting all this out and sticking it all together and that was my first wetsuit. Extremely uncomfortable but it was warmer than not having a wetsuit.”

As they started exploring further afield, the crew soon found that there were surf spots dotted all along the coast south of Dunbar. Bennetts picks up the story: “We soon realised that Pease Bay had better waves than Belhaven – once you got your head around surfing over the rocks.”

“And Coldingham was almost a kind of a last resort,” adds Wishart. “If Pease was closing out [too big to surf ] then you could still get in at Coldingham, but Coldingham was a funny kind of break – it used to break right across the whole beach rather than giving you a decent ride.”

“You have to bear in mind that there weren’t any decent weather forecasts,” says Bennetts. “There certainly wasn’t a swell forecast, so you went down on the basis of ‘It’s Saturday, let’s go down the beach.’”

For all that Bennetts and Co pioneered many of the best-known spots in south-east Scotland, there were so few surfers in those days that once they’d found a few good ones there wasn’t much incentive to keep looking. “There were only ten or 12 people total, so there wasn’t the pressure to go and find somewhere else,” says Bennetts.

However, as we’ll discover next week, a significant surfing discovery was just around the corner.

“I didn’t have a wetsuit then, so it was shorts and in. Freeze, then get out quick”