Susan Florence, nèe Manson, was born in Cromarty 53 years ago. Much of her childhood was spent fishing on or by the sea. Most unusually, she was one of 20 female welders among the workforce of 5,000 at Highlands Fabricators Yard at Nigg, helping to build oil rigs.

It was December 1973 when I started at Nigg as a welder’s helper. They were recruiting at the time, the money was good, everybody was working there. It was better than going to Inverness to work. I was then trained as a Lloyds-trained welder at the Hi-Fab training school.

After nine months as a welder’s helper I thought ‘I can do that’. You were with a welder all the time and it was ‘submerged arc welding’ I started off on. It’s a big machine with a big coil of wire on the top and you’d a bucket at the back and a flux came down and actually covered the wire as it was melting and the pipe just went round automatically. And all you were doing was guiding the weld. So I hounded the GF (general foreman) at the time – Tudor Lewis – and after about three months of me stopping him every time I saw him, “Can I not do my welding tests?” eventually he just said “Right, we’ll give you a go, we’ll put you on to it” and I passed the test and I went on to stick welding – that’s ordinary welding – and then on the ‘MIG’ welding (metal inert gas).

There’s different types of welding, you see. With sub-arc welding you’re just sitting watching a pipe all day – very boring after 8 or 10 hours. The MIG welding is a routine weld: it’s a base before your ‘stick’ or your ‘sub arc’ goes on. Because when your two cans are coming together there’s always a gap – you have to have a gap. And the MIG just bridged the gap, you know, it’s just a base weld for the other weld to go on top. But most of the time it’s back-gouged out anyway (taken out by what they called ‘gouging’. It’s a long carbon rod which ripped out the weld). It was supposed to be back-gouged but quite a lot of the time we burnt it out. We weren’t supposed to, but we did.

Sue's welding procedure from the 80's Conoco rig. ©Susan Florence

I’ve still got the old ‘procedures’ here – for the Conoco Rig in 1982. Before you start to weld, the pipes have to be pre-heated and the minimum pre-heat temperature was 100° C. That was before you started welding, I mean…welding is a very, very hot job, it really is. That’s why I don’t like the cold now, I think!

We females wore exactly the same things as the men: a T-shirt and a boiler suit. It depended on where you were and what you were doing. If you were gouging, you wore moleskins because that’s actually ripping out hot metal, melted metal. You always had a moleskin jacket on, and that was really hot. Some of the procedures here, minimum heat 100° C, max 250°C. You had temp sticks which actually melted at the temperature. There were different colours, different gradings – I think orange was the hot one that melted at about 250°C. And once that melted, you stopped welding then. And you’d wait until the pipe cooled down. But some of them were a minimum of 130°C before you started. Aaahh, you’ve no idea, it’s very hot work!

I remember one time – Oh, God it was embarrassing! I was in a can and our squad was down in the hole, you know, where the rig was actually built. Our squad was normally in the Fab shops 1, 2, or 3. But some of the time we were sent down the hole, once the rigs were getting nearer to finishing. I was inside one of the cans, in one of the big flotation legs, and I had to back-gouge a manhole cover overhead. Oh my Lord, I was 40ft in the air on this scaffolding, up there on my own, back-gouging, and my jacket couldn’t have been tied at my neck properly and the red hot metal went down my neck. Aahhh, I just stripped off and there was men working down below. I didn’t give a damn, you know, I was burning and stripping everything off and it just melted my T-shirt. I was lucky, I caught it before it went properly into the skin. But I just stripped off, but not everything went, you know! Anyway, it was a couple of Croms that was working down below, so it wasn’t too bad. I knew who they were. They knew themselves they’d to keep well clear anyway, because the hot metal’s flying everywhere, you know.

I remember another time when I stepped into mid air! We were in Shop 2 at the time, doing sub arc welding with what they called a plough. It would actually run on rails, it wasn’t the big, big machines. You could walk about the shop with them; they were manual. There was a big hole in the centre. For some unknown reason I went and walked from one end of this plate to the other and walked into this hole and I fell 15 ft and just caught the H-beams on the way down. If I hadn’t, I’d have been splattered! I hurt my shoulder and in fact I’ve still got a lump in my leg yet. What a clatter I got. I don’t know what I was thinking about! I just climbed down after that. It was all up on frames so I climbed down the frame.

I got electrocuted a lot of the time. Oh it was dreadful. Some of the pipes weren’t earthed properly or anything, you know, and you touched a machine and you touched the pipe they were on if you were actually welding inside the cans themselves, and you could be 10ft, 15 ft down inside a can, you know, and the heat was at least 100°C before you even started. It’s like working inside an oven.

What was it like, being a woman there? You did get a bit of harassment, a couple of times, maybe, but the squad I was in was nearly all Croms anyway: Cromarty men, so they sort of looked after me anyway. But it made no difference if you were a woman or not. You still had to do your job. With being a welder, you couldn’t get away with it. You had to do your Lloyds testing and your work was tested for you – nobody else could do it for you, so I mean the welders got tested, every new rig. You had to put 105% into it instead of 100%. Some of the boys came up from Glasgow or Newcastle, with all the ones all their lives in shipbuilding and that, and to have a woman welder – it just wasn’t the done thing. So you basically had to prove yourself – that you could do it and you were as good as them, if not better. But 99% of the time, once they saw that you could do your job, you could do what they did, you were accepted, or at least I was. But this is going back into the 70s so we were breaking new territory. Nowadays you’ve got women welders just two a penny, women engineers and that, it’s an acceptable part of the way the world is now. We all looked out for each other, it was good.

But the conditions were horrendous. They wouldn’t get away with it now. The heat was absolutely atrocious. We were lying on scaffolding boards that were actually smouldering, they were that hot. The boxes that we were working in, in Shop 3, were maybe 4ft x 8ft – it was just coffins we were in and they were all pre-heated up to 100ºC, 160ºC, 180ºC, before you even started welding and you were in this, it was just layers of boxes, and if you were working in the bottom box there’d be a man working in the top box, so you’ve got his heat on top of you and you’ve got air breathing equipment which was just taken off a manifold and you’re breathing this in. We were 20 minutes in and 10 minutes out, I think that’s what we were allowed.

And the orange juice! It started off all right. I mean we were on gallons of this orange juice but then they started diluting it that much, it was just practically water we were getting. And we were on salt tablets as well – we had to go to the nurse to get salt tablets. The conditions were absolutely horrendous, they really were. And we weren’t getting any more money for it – we were getting the same money as the fabricators and the riggers and it was totally wrong. So we went on strike. The general foremen were having nervous breakdowns – too much pressure, you see, to get the job done. They were taking it out on the foremen and the foremen were taking it out on us and six weeks I think we were out on strike before we got a decent wage for that job sorted out, and decent orange juice.

Thirteen years I was there. It was all right, it was an experience, but we never felt we were making history – it was just a job. And even when the rigs were floated out, I just thought ‘Thank God I’m no working on that any more’. The welds we did will last, though they’ll probably have to touch them up. Before the rigs went out we went down and scrawled our names everywhere in the cans. If a rig came in now that I actually worked on, I could tell what weld I did because I find it impossible to keep a straight line. I cannot even draw a straight line freehand. The start of my welds is like a dog’s hind leg. The thing is, if your first weld isn’t straight, then your second one’s obviously not going to be straight to follow the first one, you know. My welds were always squint. You build the welds up. There are about 30 runs with a cap on top.

I wasn’t sad to go. When I left, the camaraderie was already going down the hill. When we first started off we were part of a team, you know. And you weren’t just a number, you were a name. But by the time the 80s came you were a number and as far as I know it’s still the same to this day – you’re expendable, they don’t really care. I was there at the best time because it was new for everybody: the foremen, the GFs, were all from the farms, the forestry, or whatever; we were all in the same boat. I was quite glad to go, actually.

When I was at Nigg, I didn’t like travelling on the bus if the boat wasn’t running. I get travel sick. There were quite a lot of us that didn’t like travelling on the bus. Well, at the end of backshift one October, November, time – it was quite dark, it was a really stormy night and the bus was on – the boat wasn’t going to run. But somebody must have phoned the skipper of the Coral Star, John Patience, and he chanced it, taking back whoever was on the harbour at the time. We were all at the harbour and we thought ‘Oh, he’s never going to make it’ but then he came and he didn’t even get right into the harbour, we just jumped on to the boat and back he went…Oh…it was horrendous! I never really liked the Coral Star you know, there wasn’t much keel on her and it didn’t feel safe. I really thought I was going to meet my maker that night. And John was calling out “I canna hold her, she’s going”. How we didn’t hit Davy Jones’ locker, I’ll never know. But he made it to the Cromarty side! And I’ll always remember the first three people I saw on the pier: Jan Davie, Rob Davie, Alison. They thought the boat was going to go down.

And ‘Buller’ was on that night as well. He was holding on at the back to one of the guardrails that ran round the back of the boat. We couldn’t believe it next day. The whole bar was bent. I mean, what strength to bend it, it was scaffolding tube, you know. You can’t bend scaffolding tube! He must have been hanging on for dear life.

That crossing must have taken about 25 minutes. We normally did it in 8-10 minutes. That was about the only time I can say I was really, really scared in crossing. I think we all were. But it didn’t put me off, the sea’s in my blood. If we had gone over, one of the old fishers told me as a bairn: “If the boat ever goes down, take a deep breath and run for the shore”!

Childhood and pre-Nigg

In the summer time when we were bairns we used to go down and set lines: 50 houcks, 100 houcks, 200 houcks along at the Old Beddie, I mean you’d get a flukie (a flounder) and all along there. You don’t take the ‘Bigger Man’(a dab), they’re horrible. We used to get mackerel and pollack in the Firth and we’d throw them away – they were just bait for the creels – we’d never eat them. And they cost a fortune now!

We’d go over to Nigg for bait. If not, we might get the bait down at the Old Beddie or we’d cycle out to Jemimaville and get bait there: lugworms. You just needed a grape there (a garden fork); you get lug all over the place. At the Beddies we’d use a lug spade. If not, we’d just go over to Nigg and get cockles and mushrooms. What we used to do was go and get Jimmy Mallaig’s wee boat and row over to Nigg. I’d be about ten, eleven. I would never let my grandson cross the firth now! But then, it was nothing – we never thought anything of it. As long as you were home at night for your tea… I’m talking about Cromarty in the 60s you know. We were really the last of them – the ones with such freedom. That freedom just wasn’t there in the 70s.

We made our own entertainment. We did a lot of fishing. I spent most of my time at sea. I used to go out with the salmon fishers. The first memory I have – I must have been about three or something like that and I was down at the salmon fishers. I was never away from the bothy, I was always in there. I was just fascinated by boats and the sea and everything.

They used to take me out and throw me up the bow; if not, I was sitting in the starn, you know. I can’t swim to this day. No life jacket – never thought anything of it and yet you were stuck there and sitting on top of tarry rope. I love the smell of tarry rope to this day. And you just sat there and they were checking the leaders (the nets that guide the fish to the bag net.) The fish hit the leader and they just follow up the leader and they go into the bag net and they canna get out. The bag net was massive. They would check the leaders first for anything. You’d get cod or whatever stuck in them if they were big enough because the mesh was quite big. Then they’d take the ropes off the poles and check the bags. This was off the Blue Head, the Red Nose, MacFarquhar’s Bed, Charlie’s Seat, right out to the point of the Sutor there, but they went right up to Eathie.

And they used to take in some big fish, 30-40 lb salmon, you know. They’d take

The Ice House on the Links ©Fran Tilbrook

it in to the salmon bothy, then up to the Ice House. They were all thrown in the Ice House, cleaned and washed and everything. They were all packed in ice, packed in boxes and then off to the railway station in Inverness. I was involved in that all my childhood. I just loved going out in boats, you know. We used to go for our own kais (crabs) and lobsters when we were bairns. We’d go along the shore and always got a lobster at the Clach Malloch but only if you blocked up the holes – there’s two or three holes for escape. You’d a cleek (a long bit of wire with a bend at the end) and you’d use that for kais and lobsters.

I mind one time when I was about eleven, twelve years old. It was a beautiful hot summer’s afternoon and I was out fishing with Ali Maclean. The tide was just on the turn and we were over at the ‘White Patch’ (the bird cliffs on the North Sutor). I was facing the White Patch and Ali was facing Cromarty. He never said a word and when you’re line fishing, you’re just leaning over the side of the boat and your arm’s just going back and fore and you’re in a world of your own until you get a bite. And then this head just popped out of the water and said, “Hello!” Oh, I tell you, I nearly shed my skin, I was screaming. What a fright I got. And the skull cap! He had a skull cap on – it was John Robertson of Castlecraig. He was swimming quite a lot at the time, used to swim over to Nairn! He was just like a dolphin.  

My husband built a boat and bought inkwell pots. Everybody knows the channel in the middle of the firth is quite deep, so we thought we’d drop the creels just on the edge of the channel there. Anyway we got 12 inkwell pots, it was quite a lot of money too to buy, you know. We put down 180ft of rope and I can’t remember how many fathom on top of that again and we dropped the creels to the bottom and never seen them again! They were gone. 12 brand new pots and they were all strung together too, a quarter of a mile. It was so, so deep out there. And we had the sonar on board as well. We knew exactly where we were going. We could see we were on the edge of the shelf. But the current took them. I was quite peeved about that. Even if I got one dip out of them I’d have been quite happy.

I’ve never learnt to swim. I don’t like going in the water. I like being on it, I’ve been on rafts, in canoes, in boats all my life. I was in the raft races before they made life jackets and all that compulsory. I don’t think any of us on our raft could swim, and we were in the middle of the firth!

Years ago I tried to swim. My husband Mac does a lot of scuba diving – he’s a seal – and I was determined I was going to conquer my fear of the water and he bought me a wetsuit. I was going to be really brave. I walked to the harbour in my wetsuit and flippers, down the slip and into where the pontoons are now and Mac was with me – he was in, swimming. “Right”, he says, “in you go. Lie back on the water”. “Oh my Lord,” I says, my arms and legs sticking straight out to the side. That was fine, I was just starting to relax, when Mac took off! He went away and left me. Well, just as he went under the bridge and started swimming away, this wee tug came into the harbour and of course the wash came over me and as soon as it started going on my face and that, I just screamed blue murder. And the Legion was going at the time and I always mind, they all came out and they were all standing at the Legion door, looking and laughing. I mean, nobody attempted to rescue me or anything! Anyway, Mac eventually appeared and by this time I was hysterical. He stood me up in the water and do you know where the water was? Up to my knees. I was so embarrassed!

I love the sea, I love boats and everything, but I have never gone in the water since. If the Lord had meant me to be in the water, the Lord would’ve given me gills!

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