My First Trousers

   
Written by Alexander Gunn, A Native of Badbea, and published in the Northern Ensign, November 18, 1880
 

Rambling Recollections of my Schools and School Days

“I said we ran barefoot till we were in our teens. Some will be ready to say, but how did we manage in frost and snow! Well, necessity has no law, and we just did the best we could, and ran about in the frost and snow as freely as if we had on the best boots or shoes in the parish, and it did us no harm. Many a broken “shin” and knee did we get as we tumbled and fell among the rugged boulders that were scattered so plentifully about Badbea, and it must have been picturesque to see us sitting around the blazing peat-fire during the stormy winter evenings, with our limbs bare half-way up the thigh, displaying all the shades and hues of the rainbow from the effects of the frost without and the heat within”.

Fisher Boy 1845 Hill and Adamson

“Well do I remember the first pair of trousers in which my limbs were encased. They were, of course, home-spun, home-dyed, and made by a local tailor, who seems to have made them in the same way as a contemporary of his, who had gone to the country to make a suit of blacks, but forgot his patterns or shapes, and who, on being asked, how he managed without them, answered, “I cut them out of my own judgement.” This appears to have been the way in which mine were made. I was, however, very proud of them, but felt rather from home in them for a time”.

 

Fisher children 1848 Hill and Adamson

 

Spinning wool on St Kilda, c1920 am baile

“We were not pampered with luxuries in my young days. We had potatoes and fish for breakfast, ditto for dinner, and fish and potatoes for supper. Tea or loaf-bread was never used except at a birth or a death, and none of us youngsters ever tasted it. There was a herb which grew plentifully in the rocks called “mallery,” which on being dried was extensively used as a substitute for tea. It had no unpleasant taste, and when sweetened with sugar and a quantity of good milk added, it made no bad substitute for the Chinese plant. Sugar was very high in price in those days. What can be purchased to-day at 2½d was sold then at 9d and 10d, and tea of the commonest sort was six or seven shillings per pound, so that considering the scarcity of money among common people, and having an abundance of milk, potatoes, and fish, as well as a fat pig, we need not wonder at the frugal habits which prevailed”.

 

Potatoes growing at Newtonmore

 

Dried fish

My Comments:

In the 1840s when photography was just invented, Hill and Adamson produced a series of photographs which included photographs of Newhaven, a small harbour port near Edinburgh. These photographs show many details of the clothes worn by fisher families. Alexander Gunn’s descriptions of his boyhood clothes hint they were remarkably similar to those in the Hill and Adamson photos. Hand spun, pure wool trousers would have been itchy and apparently poor fitting, but hard wearing, water repellent and, under the circumstances, most suitable for the rugged conditions on both land and sea.

I can’t find out what mallery was. It may have been something like dandelion. As it apparently grew plentifully in the area it is probably still there but with a different name.