In yesterday's post we looked at how garments changed when women started practicing sports and activewear became therefore more popular. Yet, you may argue, there are cases in which work and activewear coincided. Take the herring girls.
Herring girls were part of a travelling workforce, a tradition that started in the 19th century in Scotland, at Wick. Young women from the Hebrides walked across Scotland, following the fleet along the coast to work at the summer herring season. As herrings migrated to new breeding grounds, the women would work in Scotland and northern England in Spring going as far as Aberdeen, and then they would travel south to the coast of East Anglia, reaching Great Yarmouth, in Autumn.
They would live in huts and sheds, often in dire and unhealthy conditions (so that they had to fight illnesses such as cholera) and their days were extremely long (there were often strikes because of the conditions they lived in). Men worked on the ships catching the herring, and on land, the women would gut, salt and smoke the herrings.
In the mid-1800s there were over 40,000 fishermen and boys working in the herring fishery in Scotland and the army of girls who followed them had to be extremely fast as they were paid depending on the amount of barrels they finished: some of them could gut a fish at the rate of one a second and, in a day, two girls could gut around 60,000 herrings.
The work took place outside, in the cold and mud, and the women's wardrobe mainly comprised warm clothes such as knitted knickers, vests, skirts, woollen stockings, shawls, gumboots, oilskin aprons and gansey (or guernsey), a tough hand-knitted, woollen jumper worn by fishermen and characterised by patterns that varied from village to village and from family to family and that allowed to identify the fisherman in case of shipwreck and death (some patterns spread through the UK also thanks to the herring girls). In a way the gansey represented a piece of activewear incorporated into the traditional workwear outfit of these girls.
While the girls also had Sunday clothes that mainly consisted of skirts, blouses and a cardigan, their key working accessories were a gutting knife and a sharpening stone. Herring girls also had to wrap bandages around their hands to protect them from cuts and salt.
Knitting needles, wool and a knitting pouch were also essential as the girls would use them when they weren't working to knit ganseys. They would often knit their way along the coast following the fishermen or use their needles while waiting for the arrival of the fishing fleet.
The herring fishing industry struggled in the first decades of the 1900s and eventually died out in the '50s. But if you have time on your hands in case you're still in a hard or partial Coronavirus lockdown and you want to pay homage to these girls, you can try and make these Gansey Herrings with a pattern by Nita Bruce (originally created for the Crafting History project at the Time and Tide Museum of Great Yarmouth Life, the pattern is free, but you can make a donation to the Marine Conservation Society on Bruce's Just Giving page).
This pattern celebrates the herring industry in Great Yarmouth (check out also the video from British Pathé included in this post about "The herring harvest" featuring the "bonnie Scotch fisher lassies hard at work") and the herring girls who, throughout the decades, impressed historians and writers alike.
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