Gansey Nation

This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.

George contributed to the Moray Firth Gansey Project, and his story is recounted in their book, along with a picture of his father in his gansey, on page 37. But it’s so interesting I think it’s worth repeating here. We were talking about ganseys, and the way the Scottish ones had buttons on the neck to keep them tight; and he said that the buttons would always be on the other shoulder to your main hand—in other words, if you were right-handed, the buttons would be on the left side, and vice-versa.

Harry Gray and Gordon

The reason was that when loading the boats the men would heave the nets up onto their shoulder, like men pulling a cart. And if the buttons were on the same shoulder as the nets, they’d run the risk of snagging on them—as indeed George says happened once to one poor fisherman in Dunbeath: when the nets were being loaded, they caught in his buttons and he was pulled violently down and broke his neck against the harbour quay.

Harry is the Chairman of the Wick Society, which runs the Aladdin’s cave-cum-museum in town, and he came in to collect the Caithness-patterned gansey I knitted recently, and which I was donating to the museum.

He said that in the old days the fishermen used to wear their ganseys next to the skin—except for old newspapers, which they’d wrap round their chests as a sort of under-layer to keep the wind out. “It made you crackle when you moved,” Harry said, “but it didn’t half keep you warm.”

Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.

In parish notices, many congratulations to Sue Rees for a splendid Staithes gansey, which can be seen here being stylishly modelled by husband Paul. As I’ve always said, this is in many ways still one of the most effective patterns.

So remember: next time you’re thinking of throwing away that old newspaper, spare a thought for those fishermen who used them for keeping more than just their fish and chips warm; and the stories that lie behind even simple things like buttons on the neck…

Another short blog this week, as it’s back from our Easter jaunt down south with a cold and a chest infection. (It wasn’t exactly the birthday present I was looking for, but to be fair it’s so hard to find a suitable gift these days.) So now gravity seems to have increased, it feels like there’s an invisible baby orang-utan clinging to my chest, and my breathing sounds like Darth Vader finishing a milkshake.

I think that’s the real secret of growing older—after about 40, each birthday counts double or treble—so I now appear to have the mind of a sprightly 54 year-old trapped inside the body of an octogenarian, and a crotchety one at that.

I read once that the U.S. Civil War Commodore David (“Damn the torpedoes!”) Farragut used to turn a handspring on his birthday each year, even into his sixties, saying that when he found it difficult he’d know he was getting old. Well, I perform a similar sort of test, except in my case it involves removing the silver paper from a chocolate Easter egg. (Yup, still got it.)

Being laid up this last week has at least meant that I’ve got rather a lot of knitting done. In fact, I’m about 14 inches up the body, and in another inch will start the gussets. (The gansey is going to be some 27 inches long, viz.: body, 15 inches; gussets, 3 inches; yoke, 8 inches; shoulder, 1 inch.)

I’m also trying to teach myself to knit more loosely, and am getting my stitch gauge down from about 9.25 stitches an inch to something in the region of 8.5. It helps my fingers relax more as I knit, and the finished garment seems softer, and drapes more easily. It also seems to use less yarn.

Finally, when you’re ill you need things to cheer you up, and I found just the thing in an article in The Guardian newspaper online, about the dangers of formatting books for e-readers, such as the Kindle.

Everyone who’s downloaded an ebook knows that they can be bedevilled by typos, in part because often the printed text has been scanned in using optical character recognition software, and then not proofread. Now it appears that two words that the software can’t actually distinguish between are “arms” and, (ahem), “anus”.

This has apparently come to light in the course of scanning vast quantities of romantic fiction for e-readers. As the article points out, it now appears that a genre in which the hero has a tendency to “take the heroine in his arms” may never be the same again…

We’re getting a new water heater and boiler installed just now, and from the state of the kitchen I imagine the builder decided to take out the old one with hand grenades. It looks like a set from Saving Private Ryan, in fact I had to dislodge three German soldiers from the utility room this morning just to do a load of laundry.

There used ta be a cupboard here . . .

Ours is an old stone house, and although built near the turn of the twentieth century seems to have been designed to repel a medieval army (well, you can never tell when the trebuchet is going to come back into fashion). The walls are surprisingly thick, and the builder kept having to fetch a longer drill to get through, until finally settling on something which was last used to find oil on the North Sea seabed.

Every surface in the house is now coated with a layer of fine dust, and so, I find, is my morning toast. Sometimes the dust gets up my nose, and the resulting sneeze resembles nothing so much as an explosion in a talcum powder factory.

And the boiler was here

At least we’ll hopefully get an efficient hot water system out of it; that, and a shower which is more effective than a plant misting spray. (If you want to know what our current shower is like, take a baked bean tin, make some holes in the bottom, fill it with lukewarm water and hold it over your head. It’s a bit like being baptised on the instalment plan.)

Still, if the kitchen is a no-go area, the lounge is so far unscathed, and I’ve retreated there and got quite a lot of knitting done this last week.

As you’ll see from the pictures the welt is but a distant memory, and the body is fairly begun. I’m not sure whether to call the pattern “Flambraser” or “Fraserflamb”, as it’s a cross between elements of Flamborough (the seed stitch and cables) and a Fraserburgh pattern recorded in Michael Pearson’s “Fisher Gansey Patterns of Scotland and the Scottish Fleet” (the diamonds and ladder).

I’m cabling every 7th round. I won’t really know till it’s finished, but as the pattern is going to run the full length of the body, welt to shoulder, it should be quite distinctive. I like the colour, too—it’s Frangipani’s Denim yarn, and like so many gansey yarns seems to change hue depending on the light, from warm sky blue to a sort of steely grey (this being the far north of Scotland, mind you, I’m expecting rather more grey than blue).

Meanwhile, spring continues to edge its way into Caithness. How can I tell it’s spring? Because the rain actually stops every now and then…