The £600 jumper that knits together the threads of history
Each one takes 160 hours to knit, is as individual as a fingerprint and will keep you dry in the wildest weather. A celebration of the gansey ....
KeNNaG, from Scadabay on the Isle of Harris, died many years ago, but I often think of her. She was typical of a generation of Hebridean women, born in the decades before the Second World War, who could have accomplished much granted educational opportunity.
erect, handsome, she had the bearing of the Queen Mother and, of shrewd mind and force of expression, would have adorned the Cabinet.
You never wanted to get on the wrong side of Kennag, and I seldom did.
She raised six handsome children – the last delivered when she was 47 – kept an immaculate house, demonstrated traditional Harris Tweed weaving to tourists, and could have knitted for Britain.
I used to drop by to entertain her daughter Nellie, who had severe learning difficulties but a passion for Calum Kennedy, and on one 1999 afternoon Kennag presented me with a traditional fisherman’s gansey, a magnificent grey garment in robust Harris wool.
It fitted me perfectly, was all but waterproof, and only in the wildest weather did I need to throw a jacket over it. I cherished it for years until the sad day my cleaner put it through a boil wash.
Its knitting was an extraordinary labour of love – the typical gansey takes 160 hours to make.
The garment is not of course unique to the Outer Hebrides, though some of our islands – most notably eriskay – are famous for them.
The gansey was the practical workwear of the herring fisherman and, as they pursued the great shoals right round the coastline, we can see ganseys sported, in untold old photographs, everywhere from Castlebay to Stornoway, Lybster and Wick, Crail and Berwick, as well as Grimsby, Yarmouth and Lowestoft.
The gansey is not just stylish, but practical. It is knitted all in one piece, it is seamless, it is free of buttons (which, of course, would catch on nets) and the underarm gussets were calculated to allow maximal freedom of movement.
They were always a little short at the waist and the sleeve, and usually reversible, so you could wear it the other way round when, say, an elbow began to wear.
CrafTed in fine and unexpectedly tough five-ply wool, they also tended to be elaborately patterned – stars, cables, horseshoes, zig-zags, or whatever took the knitter’s fancy.
It’s often claimed that a given pattern was unique to a particular port or island, but it is more likely the wife or mother with the clacking needles came up with something unique for her lad.
and, of course, there was a bleak reason for that. even today, fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in Britain.
In Victorian times, especially in the Outer Hebrides and where so few coastal communities boasted even a basic jetty, disasters were all too frequent.
In just one incident, in december 1862, 31 fishermen from Ness, at the far north of Lewis, were lost in a single storm.
That catastrophe widowed 24 women and orphaned 71 children. for days and even weeks after such disasters, they would comb the beaches for their dead men – and, too often, he could only be identified by his gansey.
Oddly, the gansey has not been with us long. We find little evidence for them before the 1850s and, from the 1950s, it faded from favour in the face of PVC and, later, Gore-Tex from labels such as Berghaus and North face.
In the 1970s, though, there was an upsurge of interest in traditional rural crafts – exemplified in the great-granddaddy of slow television, Jack Hargreaves’s Out of Town – as car ferries began to bring tourists in number to the Outer Hebrides, where woman such as Kennag fast identified a market for their knitting.
It is difficult to forget how much women used to knit. You could converse with a granny for hours as the needles clicked skilfully away. You used to see crones walking home with a creel of peats on their back, knitting as they went.
They knitted socks and slippers and, of course, ganseys. Often, on a fine day, they would perch atop the wall of the traditional thatched blackhouse – the last, on Lewis, were only abandoned in the 1980s – or on a chair by the front door.
There is even a deliciously camp book by one Lewis expert, alice Starmore’s 1990 Sweaters for Men: 22 designs from the Scottish Isles, full of pouting hunks with angular cheekbones and moussed hair – and the dude on the cover is in a fetching cream gansey.
Typically, a fisherman owned six ganseys, one for best – churchgoing and so on – and they were never washed; the grubbier they became, the warmer they felt.
They were re-knitted and remended as far as they could be and, when hope was finally lost, were donned only for the filthiest jobs, like tarring ropes, or torn up for cleaning rags.
We forget that there was once a strong culture that equated female virtue with female industry. from an early age all girls were set to spinning, knitting or weaving. Not for nothing do we call an unmarried woman a spinster.
and the herring industry employed women as well as men – the females likewise moving around the coast, sleeping in great communal lofts, gutting herring with such speed you could not see their fingers and, of course, keeping a coy eye out for potentially interested young men.
Go through a typical Hebridean family tree and it is surprising how often folk got married in a place such as fraserburgh.
and, of course, as well as a promising husband, the young women noted and remembered striking gansey patterns, the length of the kingdom – which is why the widespread belief that one is uniquely associated with a particular port or island is no more than myth.
Knitting has another advantage: it is done more by feel than by sight, so could be done in the dimmest light, through the long nights of winter, in a humble cottage.
and, much as well-fitted black tie can make a youthful builder’s mate look like a matinee idol, so a well-made gansey can flatter any man.
NOW the Scottish fisheries Museum – worth a visit when, in normal times, you are next in anstruther – has launched a website, Knitting the Herring, devoted to the gansey. It’s replete with facts, tales and photographs and has instructions for making one.
Today, anyone who knitted me a gansey of Kennag’s quality would have every right to charge £500 for the labour and another £70 for the wool. But the garment has another resonance for me.
My late great-grandfather, who died at 90 in 1971, was the only one of my great-grandparents still alive at my birth and I have only one clear memory of him.
He had had a long and arduous life, including service in both the army and the Navy and many years as a fisherman. But I see him there in his gansey, still as erect as the day he sailed to fight the Boers, and almost as strong.