The first mention of Bobby Hogg’s forebears in the public annals of Cromarty is in the 16th century. They were boatmen and fishermen. Today in the early 21st century Bobby aged 87 is still in Cromarty and still has a boat, continuing half a millennium’s association with the sea. His wife Helen (85) is a direct descendent of the polymath Hugh Miller, Cromarty’s most celebrated son, underlining the importance of the family’s DNA to Cromarty’s story. Their house is the first port of call for many seeking to know more about Cromarty, its history and traditions which they both hold dearly. It is also a long established social thoroughfare.

Their son Robert, a former marine engineer, has inherited his father’s maritime interests and spends much of his time restoring boats. He and his family live in a house in Cromarty’s Fishertown which dates back to 1780 and used to house four fisher families. Robert’s sister Rhona lives in what was the Cromarty Cottage Hospital, which looks up the Cromarty Firth to Ben Wyvis.

Bobby:

My father was a fisherman.  My folk have always been fishermen, all the way back to Galilee. On my mother’s side too. She was a Finlayson. But my great grandfather is buried up in the graveyard and his name was William Fiddler. His son is buried beside him and he is William Finlayson. At one time all the people called Fiddler in Cromarty changed their name to Finlayson. We do not know why and there is nothing in the church records to explain it. I think myself there must have been some infamous guy with the name Fiddler and the people didn’t want to be associated with him. So they changed their name.

You see the fisherfolk were kind of God-fearing folk. You would never, ever hear them swear. When there had been a bad day there would be 20 or 30 men standing at the bottom of the Big Vennel, walking back and forward as fishermen do, but you wouldn’t hear them swear. 

Of course they would be talking in their own speech. You see when I was young we talked quite differently in the fishertown. We had this sort of patois, which had a good smattering of both Doric and Gaelic in it. But we would say ‘thee’ and ‘thine’. The older ones were very biblical in their speech. I can remember my aunt saying things like “O Blessed Jesus”. That would be followed by “O Holy one of Israel”, then “O Great Redeemer” then “O Jacob”. It wasn’t blasphemy. It was just the way they spoke. But up the other end of Cromarty the people didn’t have the patois. I remember going to school and coming home and telling my mother that the teacher couldn’t speak properly. There were also people who had received no education. For example my mother’s sister couldn’t read or write. She would count by the score and measure with her thumb. She had some very strange phrases and expressions.

But there is hardly anyone else left who can speak the patois. There is my brother Gordon of course and there is the odd one or two who have a little bit of it. But that’s all. It’s quite sad in some ways. It still comes to me:

“At wid be scekan tiln ken?” That was just “What do you want to know?”

The names are still here. One of the oldest names in Cromarty is Hossack. They were fisherfolk as well. But you know, when I was young you could start along at the east end of the fishertown and every house along Church Street and Shore Street and every house up and down the lanes had somebody connected to the sea: fishermen, seamen, navy men. Now there is not one person there who goes to sea.

You could also start at the east end and work your way through the fishertown and every house would have a byname associated with it. There was nothing condescending about it. It was just practical. It was just the same way as on the islands where there are a lot of MacDonalds or Macleods, they will have different names to distinguish each other. Well, when I was young there were five or six people with the name James Watson on Shore Street alone. In some families it would be the father’s side that would give the byname; in others it would be the mother’s. Our Robert is still known as ‘Koka’ and that came from his great, great granny. There wasn’t a day at school he wasn’t called that. But I wasn’t. I was called ‘Bolt’. It’s a Shetland name. Don’t ask me why.

The sea and fishing was everything then. My grandfather James Hogg, who was in his 60s, and his brother were drowned when they were out fishing. I was only two at the time so I don’t remember it, but I remember people talking about it. It seems it was a fairly normal day in March, but the winds sprung up a southerly gale. They were in sailing boats of course at that time they were caught, just outside the Sutors. The bodies were never found.

The boats would go quite far out. That was why the women carried the men out to their boats. They couldn’t go off for 24 hours soaking wet.  They were good fishermen, but because the Cromarty men had good fishing on their doorstep they didn’t go much into the nets or go after the herring the way the men from Avoch did. So they were better off for a long time. But as time went on the Avochies would be going through the Caledonian Canal and heading to the west after the fish and perhaps invested more than Cromarty.

But my dad when he came home after the war invested in a motor boat. He also got a seine net boat. But he got into buying and selling fish. He got himself a motor car and got somebody to teach him to drive. He would take fish to Beauly where a lot of the people were Roman Catholics and would eat fish on a Friday. He would go out in the car and sell fish all over. He would also send it down to the market in the likes of Manchester and had a shop. He did well. We were in the Paye House and Links House before that, and as a youth I never wanted for anything. But at the same time there was a great deal of poverty around Cromarty. There was hunger. There was no money about for fish. I was lucky in never experiencing it.

All my life was round fishing. I always thought I would go to sea or fishing, although my mother was always dead against it. She didn’t live to know that I didn’t go, although my oldest brother did.

After the First World War the trawlers started moving into the Moray Firth. They had been barred for a long time, but the likes of Belgians weren’t barred and they used to come along in the cod season and they used to sweep the lot up. The Belgians used to get tremendous catches of cod in the Moray Firth. Furthermore, the development of the seine-netters and motors in the boats meant that the fish stocks in the Moray Firth were under pressure and so were the Cromarty boats. So much so that it is now more than 40 years since a haddock was caught here. We had been brought up on haddock. You used to say to your mother, “don’t worry about the tea, I will go and catch it”.  I was talking to an angler recently who said he had barely caught one in 20 years of trying. The whiting and codlings disappeared as well. So did the graylings. You don’t get them now and nobody now knows what a laithe looks like. The place used to be full of them.

I used to help my father in the boat but I was never a full-time fisherman. I went to work in a garage in Dingwall. But we all knew that the war was coming and I joined the RAF as a fitter, training pilots. We were used to seeing the planes around here and I talked to one or two who had gone to the air force. They influenced me, otherwise I would have gone to the navy. In fact I was seconded to the navy because the motor torpedo boats were getting new Packer engines in them. We were sent away to train on the Packers. I thought I was going to get to America, but instead I landed in England, in 'Pompey'   (Portsmouth). I was at that for two years.

After the war I had been working in Yorkshire trying to learn about diesel engines, but I was courting Helen by then and the draw of that was much stronger than diesel!

Helen:

My father, James Cooper, was a grocer. He had a shop in the house that Wilf Taylor now has in Church Street. His father before him had come to Cromarty buying fish when the herring was at its height. He had stayed at Portmahomack but when he became ill he thought he should get something for his wife so they got the Shore Inn in Cromarty and once he died she carried on running it.

My mother meanwhile was a Johnstone, and her father was the chemist. Her great grandfather built this house we are in (in Denny Road). They lived here. My grandfather’s wife’s people were Rosses from Miller Lane. It was through them that I was descended from Hugh Miller. I was born in Denoon Villa.

My earliest memories of the sea was when we went swimming. We were very young when we were in the sea - great swimmers here. We weren’t of the fisherfolk but we knew them, or knew of them.

I lived in Cromarty till 1943 when I went off to do nursing in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. But I had to come home after I finished when the war was over to look after my mother and the rest of the family.  That was when I met Bobby. We were coming out of the East Church. We had been in the same class at school but I hadn’t seen him since he had left school more than 10 years earlier. Bobby had only got home to Cromarty twice during the war.

After we were married we went to Buckie and Bobby was working in a boat builder’s. The whole community there would follow the fishing down to places like Yarmouth and Lowestoft at different times of the year. The men, women and even the minister would go. Later we went to Thurso on the Pentland Firth. Bobby was working first of all on fishing boats in the boatyard, then at Dounreay. But all the time I had to be going back to Cromarty because my mother wasn’t well.

The furthest we ever lived from the sea was when we were in Leicester. We were about as far as you get from the sea and we were very conscious of that. We missed it awfully. You should ask Robert. We were in Leicester for 12 years 1959 to 1971 when Bobby was working for English Electric. We came back when he got a job at AI Welders who were looking for people. Then he went to Nigg so it was back to Cromarty. It was really good to be back. Nigg gave a lot of work.

When we were in Leicester Robert would come up here on holiday. When he left school he got himself an apprenticeship at AI Welders in Inverness, but the minute he had served his time he was off to sea with the Blue Funnel line as a marine engineer. He was in the Far East, Africa and up and down America. The sea was in his blood, but he got fed up and came home and ended up working at Nigg as well.

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