A Doric A-Z: C revisited, again

Doric, the dialect spoken in the North-East of Scotland is rich in words and phrases associated with the land and the sea. I have so much enjoyed my recent journey through the Doric dictionary that I plan to revisit it on an irregular and random basis.

CLOOTIES: cloth strips used to protect the fingers when gutting herring.

Herring make annual migrations around the British Isles and in the past the Scottish herring fleet used to follow them. The gutting quines, the women who gutted and packed the herring into barrels, followed the fleet all around the UK. They travelled from port to port by train, on the fishing boats or sometimes on the back of a lorry. They carried their belongings with them in a kist, a large wooden trunk. Once they reached port they lived in wooden huts or, if they were lucky, in a guest house. The fishermen caught the herring at night and landed their catch in the morning. All the fish had to be gutted, salted and packed into wooden barrels that same day. They used sharp knives to gut the fish and inevitably suffered cuts which hurt badly in the salt water. To try and prevent this the women tied strips of old flour sacks on their fingers for protection, these were known as Clooties.
My photograph shows a group of Peterhead gutting quines, some with clooties, working in Great Yarmouth around 1930. Mrs Talpa's mother, then about 16 years old, is second from the left in the front row. The men would have been the coopers who made the herring barrels.