Remembering Scotland's fishing disaster

The fishing port of Eyemouth in 1880

By Peter Aitchison For BBC News Online Scotland

As Europe's politicians ponder massive cuts to fish quotas which some say will sound the death knell for many coastal communities, BBC Scotland is to look at the forgotten story of a real fishing catastrophe.

BBC Scotland's Peter Aitchison, who wrote Children of the Sea: The Story of the Eyemouth Disaster, considers the legacy of that day.

For most people the Scottish fishing industry means that knuckle of coast around the north east promontory. Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Aberdeen and Buckie.

Few think of Berwickshire and the still substantial fleet that is based at Eyemouth, a town of 4,000 folk just a few miles north of the English border.

Fishing was the town's main industry

Yet had it not been for a remarkable series of events and coincidences, culminating in the worst tragedy to strike the sea going communities of Scotland, the whole nature of the fishing economy might have been radically different.

For many decades in the nineteenth century Eyemouth was a boom town.

Fortunes were made from huge catches of haddock and herring and the population swelled with migrants who arrived on virtually every tide and from every part of Britain.

But while tens of thousands of pounds was expended by the state creating safe new piers at a rash of other havens, Eyemouth got nothing.

It was, for all its success, a pariah port; the people as renowned for being rebels as expert seamen.

Legal intervention

In the 1840s a simmering row with the Church of Scotland, which claimed a right to a tenth of the local catch, erupted into violent confrontation.

This "teind" was an historic anomaly which had long since been abolished elsewhere and the men of Eyemouth, led by their leader William Spears, came together to rid themselves of the hated tax once and for all. It led to almost 40 years of trouble.

Eyemouth became a by word for riots and lawlessness. Eventually the Lord Advocate intervened and brokered a compromise, with the Kirk agreeing to surrender its right on payment of substantial compensation from the fishermen.

Women were employed curing herring

Only in the late 1870's, with the row settled, could application be made to the government for money to improve Eyemouth's crumbling piers and unsafe harbour entrance.

By then the place that had once been pre-eminent in the fishing industry had fallen far behind Peterhead, Fraserburgh and Aberdeen.

In the interim the Eyemouth men became used to taking risks. They sailed in the fiercest weather, they put to sea when others would not, and they prospered in spite of the poor state of their piers. But they also knew that they were testing fate.

A plan to create a deep water port, accessible at all states of the tide, was finally published in August 1881. Six weeks later a massive hurricane swept down over Berwickshire.

'Unparalleled magnitude'

By dusk on 14 October, 1881, 19 local boats had been sunk and nearly 200 men killed - many were drowned in the approaches to the bay, in full view of their wives, mothers and children.

The storm, which might have been a tragedy with some lives lost, had become a disaster of unparalleled magnitude because of the inadequate state of Eyemouth harbour.

Seventy widows and close on 300 children were left in penury.

In spite of countless memorials and petitions, the works that would have prevented the carnage were never started.

Whitehall decided that a town which had lost half its fleet and a third of its men was no longer viable. The harbour of refuge was instead to be built at Peterhead.

A memorial was built to honour the town's dead

It was a decision that dismayed the Scotsman newspaper, which said: "A harbour there would be of no use to boats running for shelter south of the Tay. It is to be hoped that the government will see their way to construct a harbour accessible to the Berwickshire fishing fleet."

But it did not - at least not until the 1960s, and those works are a pale shadow of plans that were pasted outside the fishery office on the very eve of the storm.

It took a century for the population of Eyemouth to reach the level of 1881, but the legacy of the disaster has neither dimmed nor diminished.

The families who live in the town today are the descendants of the lost and of the sorrowful who watched the men drown when the heavens opened in a most hellish way on 14 October, a day still recalled by all as Black Friday.

Black Friday will be shown on BBC Two Scotland on Tuesday, 17 December at 1930 GMT.