Douglas Matheson (86), a retired maths and physics teacher, belongs to Cromarty. He met his wife Jess (86), a native of Fochabers, while they were both teaching in Insch in Aberdeenshire. They lived 10 years in Invergordon, then went to the North Island of New Zealand near the port of Gisborne for three years. They returned to Scotland in 1963 with their two sons and two daughters to allow them to go to university here.
They came back to Cromarty, then Grantown on Spey and Forres. This was before returning to Cromarty to live opposite the town’s lighthouse which Douglas tended through his retirement until 2006. For most of his life he lived within sight of the sea, but he still clearly recalls his first real experience of it, or rather in it.

I must have been about three or four at the time. My father had a shop in Bank Street and there were a lot of old tyres about. I selected one and that was my gird. Tyres weren’t as heavy as they are now. Using my hand to guide it rather than a stick, I got it going well down Bank Street towards the harbour. But the slope increased, as did the speed of the gird and away we went right over the grassy bank beside the pier, over a pile of seaweed, across a stretch of stones and into a strip of sand where a wave came and knocked me flying back into the seaweed.

The tyre carried on into the sea. I remember being shocked at the sheer power of the wave, the way it knocked me back. There were some people watching but they didn’t give me a hand. I retrieved the tyre and went home. Meet the sea!

The shed that Bobby Hogg has now, was the slaughter-house. We used to play nearby. There were two or three naval cannons lying to the east of it along the Links. They probably dated from the sailing ships of the early 19th century or late 18th. They had stepped supports for the cannons. They fired our young imaginations.

Just over the bank from the guns were enormous piles of seaweed so we used to have fights there after constructing forts from the seaweed. It was a great place for us to play. During the Second World War the cannons were taken away for scrap metal.

This is going back to the 1920s. We played a lot down on the shore then. A lot of the local fisherboys were marvellous with a sling. I never really mastered it, but they could throw stones tremendous distances and used to be accurate.  They would have competitions to see how far they could get. The sling was the tongue of an old boot with two strings and a hole in it to hold the stone.

There were lots of children in the fishertown then and to me, as a young boy, it was dangerous country. There used to be fights, the east end versus the west end. It had nothing to do with parental status, just geography. There was a fountain in front of Forsyth House on the High Street; that marked the dividing line. When the curfew bell sounded at 8pm everybody would disappear whether there was fighting or whether we were all playing football, often the same teams. The police spurred us on our way home.

Cromarty Harbour was a very busy place in the early 1920s. All the cargo for the Cromarty end of the Black Isle came by boat. There was a company called Coastline Seaways. It was based in Leith and used to come with stores every week. Commercial travellers would precede her and take orders from all round the area. The boat would tie up at the pier and unload all the supplies. The local carrier, Jock Shepherd, would go from the pier delivering to all the shops and taking cases for anyone who had travelled north by train and bus.

At the end of the First World War a lot of timber was still being exported from Cromarty. In front of the Royal Hotel there used to be huge timber-carrying bogies with four or six horses. They would be taking wood to the pier to be loaded on to ships. The timber came from the Sutor and other estates on the Black Isle. It was a great shame because there were some lovely trees. The men driving the timber bogies would invariably visit the Royal Hotel for refreshment.

At that time there were still about 60 fishing boats in Cromarty, and each boat would have had a crew of four or five. Now there are three.

The fishwives were a marvellous set of ladies. I remember seeing them carry their men to the boats on their backs so they wouldn’t get wet before they went out fishing. The boats would lie in the harbour, while others would be pulled up on the Links at night.

But the women wouldn’t carry them back ashore when they returned three or four hours later. The boats would leave at dawn and would be back in Cromarty before 10 in the morning. The fishwives would fill their creels and race round the town to catch their customers. I remember them coming to my door. We lived above the present day Londis shop then, and it frequently happened that two fishwives would arrive with their creels of fish at the front door at the same time. My mother would be scared to go down to avoid the squabble. She would wait until the victor came up the stairs. The fishwives would come into the scullery and clean the fish and then on to their next port of call. Some would go out to the country to the farms. They would almost run out to Jemimaville. I had an aunty who lived in Culbo, 10 miles away. Sometimes the fishwives would arrive there on foot with their fish for sale. They would barter with the farmers and their wives: fish for eggs, tatties, turnips and oatmeal.

I remember one, a woman who was known as Annaig Sponge. She went out to Culbo once, sold her fish and was coming back when she stopped at Newhall bridge, about five miles from Cromarty. My grandfather was the Blacksmith at Newhall. For a rest she backed up to the wall of the bridge and let her creel rest on the parapet. A local man played a trick on her by creeping up behind and putting a big stone in her creel. To the amazement of everybody she just pulled it up on to her back and away she trotted.

Some of the Cromarty fisherfolk would take the bus to Dingwall with their creels. All the salmon from here would go by ferry boat to Invergordon and then by train down to London.

In the afternoons the women used to bait the lines then go to the woods to gather a ‘burden’: twigs and branches for the night’s fire.

The men would go out at low tide and dig for lugworm. The fisher folk were great characters. They were all known by their bynames. I think at one time 45% of the town were Watsons. Then there were the Hossacks. All the Hossacks in Scotland could be traced back to Cromarty.

All the fishing was line fishing. After the First World War seine-netters began to appear and the local fishermen used to get mad, swearing and shouting at them. Some of the Avoch fishermen bought seine-netters but the Cromarty men never did. I remember hearing the Avoch men criticising their Cromarty counterparts for not investing in the new fishing boats, saying ‘Whatever money they get, it goes against the wall of the Royal Hotel.’ The Avoch men would save and invest in new boats. It was not that Avoch harbour was better than Cromarty. It wasn’t. It dried out. But there was a railway at Avoch to get the fish to Inverness. If there had been a railway to Cromarty, perhaps the fishing industry could have continued longer.

The seine-netters got the blame for the decline of the Cromarty fishery. I remember some fishermen in the Buckie area bragging about how they had killed the fishing in Cromarty.

Cromarty depended on the sea. Cromarty was the sea, but my people were of the land. Although they never went to sea, the Cromarty Firth was the ever-present backcloth to our lives. Never more so than when the fleet used to come in. It would fill up the firth. Invergordon couldn’t cope with the big battleships and they would lie off Cromarty in the deep water. You would get aircraft carriers as well. Cromarty used to look forward to them coming. From when the first ship put her anchor down, men would start coming ashore to Cromarty for cross-country running, hundreds of them. They would go as far as Newhall and then come back. Other boats would take officers to Nigg to play golf. Then you would get football teams coming ashore to play here, rugby teams too. There would be three pitches on the Links and one on Victoria Park. Football was also played along at the Reeds and on ground up at the top of the Denny, on what used to be called Jock’s Field.

There used to be a naval outfitters where the Cromarty Arms is now and he used to open up for the fleet in the spring and the autumn, and he must have done well enough then to last the rest of the year.

I went away to Glasgow University in 1938 to do Maths and Physics but the war came and I joined the army. At one point I was stationed in England at Retford, which was far from the sea, as far as I had ever been. I didn’t like it at all. Later, I trained in Combined Operations which involved sea-work. After retiring to Cromarty I served over 20 years as Lighthouse Keeper and 5 years as Auxiliary Coastguard in charge of the local search and rescue team. So I ended my productive career back at the sea which had knocked me for six so many years ago.

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