Maddeningly elusive, yet herring are still the silver darlings of the dinner plate
THE Dutch adore them raw. King Edward VII loved two, fresh, rolled in oatmeal and fried as just one course in his vast breakfast. Through the ages, in assorted communities of old Eastern Europe and in the tenement canyons of New York, the Jews have devised ever more ingenious ways of eating them.
Mind you, most of us might be underwhelmed by, for instance, the thought of chopped herring topped with crushed chocolate biscuits. Traditionally, Hebrideans like them salted; the matrons of Morningside (and the Queen) preferred them kippered.
Swedes eat canned ones, so fermented – for a certain sinus-clearing va-va-voom – that it is whispered the tins visibly bulge with gas.
Norwegian sailors, not to be outdone, knock back mugs of ‘bree’, the acrid salt-thick liquor in which the fish have been cured… and Iceland has a great museum devoted to nothing else but the ‘silver darling’.
And so much of Scotland herself has been defined – even shaped – by Clupea harengus, the humble herring.
It’s the fish that built Tarbert on Loch Fyne, Mallaig, Ullapool, Lochinver… and inspired The Silver Darlings, by Neil Gunn, about a Highland boy growing to manhood as he goes forth to sea in search of them. It is one of Scotland’s greatest post-war novels.
So vital was the herring through two centuries to the economy of Stornoway in Lewis that the old burgh coat of arms devotes an entire quadrant to three smug specimens – and, not so long ago, it was a fish associated with unfailing and, it was fatally thought, inexhaustible abundance.
The herring is, besides, a fish that, even more than the salmon, seems almost maniacally to possess those who pursue it.
It is a sociable, shoaling fish, moving in vast and exuberant companies up and around this or that coastline. It is beautiful to look on – a radiant, scaly silver – and it was an exceptionally good, healthy, affordable source of protein (readily salted or smoked too) when meat, to most, was a rare treat.
And no fish in these islands has inspired more traditional song. Most of us had at some point to lisp Wha’ll Buy My Caller Herrin’ at some point in primary school.
Other ballads, from Ewan MacColl through The Corries to Kathy and Wallace Dempster, have extolled the fish, the brave men who went out to catch them and the young women (many from the Outer Hebrides) who toiled at the gutting, following the fleet round all Britain – from Stornoway to Lowestoft – wielding a square blade with such speed their hands blur in the old cine footage.
With our nets and gear we’re faring On the wild and wasteful ocean. It’s there on the deep, that we harvest and reap our bread
As we hunt the bonny shoals of herring.
Oh it was a fine and a pleasant day,
Out of Yarmouth harbour I was faring,
As a cabin boy on a sailing lugger,
For to go and hunt the shoals of herring…
But the herring is fickle. Time and again, through the history of the north Atlantic and the economies fatted from it, the shoals have suddenly vanished, not perhaps to return for decades – if at all – as the curers reeled, men lost their livelihoods and communities dissolved.
In the Western Isles, in the late 1960s, it seemed that the good times would never end. Teenage boys could find themselves part of a four-man crew landing 40 cran of herring a week at £5 a cran, and go home at the weekend with stupid money – this at a time when a mere minister might earn £1,000 a year.
Lads married young, built beautiful houses, drove sleek cars and raised big families. Those of us old enough can still remember the tall ‘suckers’ on Stornoway quayside; machines hoovering up herring by the barrel from the holds of groaning smacks, lorry after lorry filled with herring, herring in such abundance any passer-by could leave with a wee ‘fry’ for free...
Some may remember their grandmothers talking about the really fat times, the old days before the Great War when Scots fishermen landed up to three million barrels of herring a year – much of it destined for export to Tsarist Russia.
They recounted how in their day they had been herring girls, moving around Britain after the boats and staying in jolly, communal lofts, and in such number (and with so many island men at the herring too) that the Highland churches sent ministers after them to keep Gaelic services in the most improbable corners of the English coast. One does not have to delve too far into the family tree to see how many Lewis couples ended up tying the knot in Peterhead, or Eyemouth, or Newcastle, or think long to remember the sight, decades after, of the gifts a lassie would typically bring home in her kist – tea-sets, a table-cloth, shawls, a teapot proclaiming itself A PRESENT FROM GREAT YARMOUTH.
But a certain darkness seems so often to follow this oil-rich, gorgeous, maddening little fish. Until the 1500s, as Donald S Murray records in his brilliant new book about the herring, they splashed in the Baltic by the million and the might and clout of the Germandominated Hanseatic League was built on trade in them.
Then they simply vanished, to the bafflement and desolation of a hundred ports. By then, it emerged that something far more terrible had been brought home to the isles by the singing herring girls than pretty crockery: tuberculosis.
It was hitherto unknown in the Hebrides and there was no herd immunity. Until the 1950s and the advent of the BCG vaccine, everyone in Stornoway had friends in the ‘Sanny’ and school contemporaries of my own parents wasted and died of the disease. Still, for the best part of two centuries herring sported in great numbers around our shores, only, in the late 1970s, to collapse suddenly and on such a scale that, in 1977 the Government banned the fishing of them.
Many, too late, muttered darkly about methods. Traditionally, herring were caught in the Minches by drift-netting – a sustainable method snaring only large, adult fish, letting the juveniles go free.
HOWEVER, the last drift-netters in the islands – men like Murdo MacLennan of Marvig and John Mackinnon of Scadabay, Harris – could get no one on high to listen, even as ring-netters and pursenetters and factory ships from beyond the Iron Curtain hoovered up herring on a fantastic scale.
Scottish Office experts insisted there was nothing to worry about – until they imposed the ban. That they’d been wrong was scant consolation for the end, not just of an industry, but a way of life.
In the early summer of 1998, with Mackinnon’s son Alasdair Dan and one of his uncles, I was part of a brief, joyous expedition into Loch Scadabay when a modest shoal of herring imprudently stopped by.
We were in one open boat; the craggy uncle in another. The little craft tossed in the swell; the fish boiled like mercury as we drew the drift in… enough herring for everyone in the village and a basket left over to be sold. Not what once it was and never again what it had been. But I fried some for my tea the next night: rich, delicious, with the crunch of oatmeal and floury potatoes and a glass of milk, and praised the silver darlings.
Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History. By Donald S Murray. Bloomsbury Publishing, London. Hardback. £16.99.