Herring Tales by Donald S. Murray

Author:Donald S. Murray [Murray, Donald S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

*One moving story that centres on the branding of barrels by companies involved in the herring trade is about a man from Stornoway, who often played in a yard operated by a firm called Clydesdale when he was young – that mark imprinted upon the barrels he scrambled among. During the latter years of the Second World War, he was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. Allowed by his guards to forage for food outside the barbed wire, he discovered himself in a ruined warehouse. Among its contents he found an old barrel engraved with this trademark. Much to his disappointment, it was empty. He often spoke of this moment as being his lowest point in the war.

*An Applecross storyteller told me of a winter’s night when a high tide and a strong northerly combined to create its own brand of havoc for the locality. In the storm, the sea lashed over the pier with some of the herring drift nets being washed half over the edge. When the men went down the following morning to sort them out, there were so many herring swimming right up to the shore that some of these nets, just hanging by their edges, were heavy with a harvest of fish.

*Toilers of the Deep, MDSF, 1888, p. 83

*Derek painted this figure after receiving news of Cathel’s drowning – together with another man – near Handa Island in Scourie, Sutherland in August 1987. It was an event that occurred a short time after Cathel had saved Derek’s life in a similar incident. Derek sold the painting a short time after completing it. It was a sale he came to regret, trying to find its purchaser for years. Unbeknownst to him, Richard Barrett, the man who had bought the artwork, had also been trying to find Derek, the painting having inspired him to compose a song and write a novel. Around twenty-seven years after he had first completed it, Derek and Cathel were once again united.

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