Betty Hourston was born 85 years ago in the same house in Cromarty’s Gordon’s Lane that she still lives in today.

I was born Betty Hogg on 17th September 1921. I have lived in this house all my days. I taught myself to swim, oh aye, in the sea of course. I got the corks to put round my middle from my Auntie Maggie. She was Bobby Hogg’s auntie. I learnt to swim when I was about 12 – my mother was not long dead. We didn’t have swimsuits in those days. There was sewing in the schools and I’d make myself just a gingham frock and swim in that. You were maybe not all that decent. You never thought about it in those days.

I’d go in at half tide. My granny always told me not to swim out, but to swim along, because of the danger of the beddies below Hugh Miller’s Monument – that stretch of sand there, when the tide was coming in that quick. It’s all changed now. I’d swim all the way along from below the house to where the sewer outfall is now. I was on my own. My grandfather and father were both good swimmers. They were always in the water. They were hot summers in them days. My grandfather, Willie Hogg, would never allow me to swim on the Sabbath. I was also banned from swimming in the harbour, but I’d go there, swim, climb out at the steps below Stella Watson’s office, where the Vee used to be. She was the daughter of Captain John Watson who ran the steamers then. My granda caught me in the harbour one day. I was holding on to the barnacles sticking out of the pier wall and I got a row.

Later on there were bathing huts, below the monument. This is still long before the last World War. They were where the old YMCA was. All the children would go there after school. Helen Hogg, she was one of them; Cathy Walker, she was my chum. Betty Fraser, who became a professor, she was a marvellous swimmer; Alison Malcolm, Eric’s sister: these were the older ones.

When I left school at about 14, I was always in the harbour and so were a lot of the other children. I used to hide the towel under my arm from my grandfather when I wanted to swim on the Sabbath. Then I would swim in the regatta. We swam blindfold, straight across the harbour. I won some races, beating them from the baths in Inverness. They were marvellous swimmers, with all the beautiful strokes. I wasn’t a good swimmer – just the breaststroke – but I was strong. I won naturally, straight from the step, on the bell, to the step on the other side. The regattas were a lot of fun, with the greasy pole and the coble racing, and that. The cobles fished right up into the 1970s.

Learning the children to swim, I used to hold them until I could get them to float. Some had more confidence than others. If I was in the water, everything was okay. “Betty, Betty”, they used to shout. No life jackets or armbands or nothing. Maybe just a rope round their middle. Jock McBean was one of them. So was Bill Campbell’s brother, Colin. Helen Hogg’s nephew Rossie, that became a professor. Confidence was the key thing. They would know themselves when they were ready to swim.

Later on, youngsters from the school would learn at the baths in Inverness. I went with the teacher. One of the girls, a Maclean lassie, jumped in. She thought it was the shallow end but it was the deep end. She was lying to the bottom. I got her out. She has remembered it to this day, reminds me every time I see her. We’d take the Boys Brigade in the bus to the Alness baths when Mr Galloway was the minister in charge of them.

Janet Davie and I were in swimming with dolphins. We were at the old beddie and they were so close we could hear them breathing. Another time, we were swimming near the steps, on the shore below my house, and salmon rose right up in front of us. We were shouting to each other, “catch one, catch one.” In these later years, 1970s, 1980s, I was teaching another generation to swim. I wouldn’t say teaching, it was just giving them the confidence. They would shout, “Betty, Betty”, same as when I started learning the previous generations. They’re all grown up now with families of their own, they grow up that quick. I was well known for swimming to the lifeboat every day. It was moored a bit beyond where all the yachts are now.

In 1973 Betty Hogg and Nurse Jenny Ruthven were awarded the bronze medal of The Royal Humane Society and received a parchment certificate from the Queen, for saving three men employed at the Hi-Fab offshore fabrication yard at Nigg from drowning off the Cromarty foreshore. This is Betty’s account of that night.

I’ll never forget it. It was midnight on 13th May. I was up watching a film on TV, a Western. Then I heard shouting for help. I ran out of the house, in my nightdress, and I realised there were men in the water, three of them as it turned out, because their boat had capsized, just in front of Weatherglass House. I heard later that it had struck a piece of timber. They were returning home after a night out at Rosemarkie and their boat overturned and they panicked.

I went straight into the sea. I didn’t have a second thought about it. It was just natural. You don’t think of yourself. You don’t think of things like you might be risking your own life. I knew what I was doing. I took the first man ashore who was in the shallows. He was sick. He said another man further out there couldn’t swim, so in I went again. This second chap was in quite a state. He’d swallowed quite a lot of water and hurt his leg, so I got him out as well.

What a fright I got when I returned to the shore again and found the first man I’d rescued had gone – disappeared. I found out that he’d walked up the Little Vennel towards the light he’d seen in Paye House, which was Dr Forth’s surgery then. Dr Forth called the ambulance which took the three of them away to be treated for hypothermia.

The third man had apparently got trapped in the bunghole of the boat. Nurse Ruthven found him, and Albert Watson and John Gillies, the ferrymen, got the boat out to him. There was a lot of commotion. The police were there. Anne Short contacted the Coastguard.

I got the Humane Society medal from the Lord Lieutenant of the County, Matheson of the Brahan Estate. Colonel Ross was there, and the police, and most of the village at a ceremony in the Victoria Hall. Later on, Nurse Ruthven and I got the VIP treatment at Hi-Fab: flowers, a tour of the works and all that. I’m glad to say all three men involved are still alive.

What’s it like, living by the sea here? Our lives change a lot round it but the sea goes on, in all its moods.

It used to come right up into Fishertown, before the bulwark got built up. I can remember a storm when the waves and spray went right over Weatherglass House. It was during the War – some of the road got washed away. You couldn’t get into the house by the front. I went up Gordon’s Lane and down Miller Lane and over the garden wall to see if Granny Brown, the old lady who had a broken arm, and her daughter, Nurse Hossack, were okay. Eric Malcolm’s house was always in danger, and up Miller Lane. My husband used to barricade Ron Tomlinson’s and Russell House with sandbags when a flood was in the offing.

The Atlantic Fleet in the summers, they were a sight – it was the battle cruiser Hood always lay off Cromarty. I mind the Hood crew marching to the East Church and playing rugby in the cornfields. All the ships sailing out when the War was declared, the whole lot going out. The tank landing craft coming in when they were practising for the Normandy landings.

I saw the Queen when she came by sea to Cromarty in 1963. I was sitting on the wall of Lydia Cottage watching when she came to visit Hugh Miller’s Cottage. Oh, she was beautiful, she was lovely, she was. Oh what a complexion she had.

I married Willy Hourston, an Orkney man, on 7th September 1974. His son Alistair met his future wife, Ginny Stokes, on our wedding day. They have had four lovely children. My grandsons Allan and Scott were both in the navy. Allan was in the Falklands. Scott served on the aircraft carrier Illustrious. He was at the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Another boy, Joey, is a pilot officer in the RAF. Willie and I stayed on in this house, same as always. I went down to the Isle of Wight and Glasgow for short holidays, but Cromarty’s the place for me.

I like salmon, the fresh salmon, nothing like it in the world. My father, James Hogg, worked for the Moray Firth Salmon Fishing Company – coble fishing. He would carry the fish all the way up from the Eathie station to Navity and then down to the ice house in Cromarty. You would get a fish at home if it had already been damaged by a seal bite, or maybe damaged some other way! If it was done by someone deliberately and he got caught, you could get the prison for that.

I like the rigs at night with the lights on like Christmas trees. Otherwise I don’t care about them one way or the other. It’s Cromarty by the sea. Before I go to bed, I listen to the waves and I hear the swells in my bed at night. I went down in the dark the other night to watch a big tanker coming in with all its lights on. I have seen the sea in all its moods, and they are many. My favourite swimming chum was Janet Davie. People would say, “oh it’s cold”, and I’d say “oh no, it’s lovely and warm.” I have gone on swimming to this day – I was swimming this year. I have the sea in my blood. Yes, I have always loved the water. I will till the day I die.

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