Herrings & Smoke How Swallow Fish are keeping a national tradition alive in Seahouses

Interview with Patrick Wilkin

Patrick Wilkin and his wife Karen run Swallow Fish in Seahouses.

Their smokehouse, kitchen and shop, housed in a building dating back to the 1800s where the herring lassies used to work and stay, is home to a thriving business supplying a variety of smoked and fresh seafood and shellfish to locals, tourists and beyond.

After many years of concentrating on the local crab and lobster catch, John Swallow realised that the smokehouse represented a unique opportunity and re-opened the 150 year old facility in the 1980s. Today the Wilkins produce a truly authentic and celebrated product that has created jobs and helped sustain the local fishing community.

Patrick Wilkin talks us through how he makes the kippers, and provides some context to the decline of the fishing community in Seahouses.

When we first started we was just splitting a few herring by hand, now we’ve got machines to split and that’s why we can do more volume. This is the only real machine that they’ve ever made for splitting the herring – it’s a complicated machine - we split about a tonne of herrings about a week in the summertime. The herring is Icelandic or Norwegian, ‘cause there’s still a ban on the North East coast for herring so I have to get it shipped over from there, frozen at sea, and that’s the only way we can do the kippers.

We take out the guts and the gills and clean them all...

...and they get put in brine for a certain about of time.

Then they get hung on the tenterhooks, drip dried a little bit to get the excess water off, then straight into the smokehouse.

They’re in the smokehouse for about 15-18 hours and they’re usually out the following day. We take 3 sets of fires, which is the shavings on the bottom and the oak sawdust on the top, and each set usually lasts about 3.5/4 hours. We come in and check the fish, make sure they’re going alright and light more fires.

There’s not many people that carry on the traditional way of the kipper, with no dye or additives in the fish, it’s all just brined and oak smoked.

1842 they started smoking here and its all still done the traditional way. We clean the floor out and we’ve replaced a few of the beams, but apart from that everything’s just as it is, for over a hundred years.

When they’re ready you can tell as they lose the fishy sensation on the skin and they go a nice golden colour from the smoke.

Then they’re brought out, packed into big boxes and put straight into the chiller to chill down, they’ve got to be chilled down before they go into the vacuum packer, and then we send them away to different places. All over the UK, including wholesale distributors, supermarkets and our own postal service. We’ve started sending some to Europe as well.

We don’t do many crabs now compared to what John Swallow used to do. John used to do a lot of crabs, and it’s very labour intensive as we hand-pick every one.

Anybody can boil and sell a crab, but there’s not many people who can do the smoking anymore.

John Swallow preparing herrings for the smokehouse and boiling crabs. C. 1970s.

My dad was a fisherman, so from an early age I was always out on the boats in the school holidays, I’d go down every night and help him land the fish putting ice aboard and all of that.

When I left school it was straight on a boat, we used to do a 4 day trip at a time, usually, sometimes longer when we were away on the Sunday night, then probably land mid week then back into seahouses on the Thursday night, just trawling for whatever was in season.

Summer time it was more the white fish, in the winter it was further off for prawns and things.

Patrick Wilkin on the bow of ‘Andrew’, 1988

There was about 12 bigger boats running out of Seahouses at the time, and there was 5 people working on each of the boats.

There’s no white fish boats left now in seahouses now they’re all away. Families retiring, quotas and people not making any money. A lot of it was to do with big family businesses which have come to the end of the road and they’ve just sold their boats because there was a lot of money tied up in the boats and it wasn’t worth them carrying on with the younger generation.

They weren’t going to make the money so they just cut loose when they could.

When there was big white fish fishing, it was good for the community, people could go down to the harbor and see the boats land their catch, which is stuff that people’s never ever seen, mending their nets on the pier. They always used to mend nets at the weekends and prepare the nets for the week. There’s none of that now.

The boats need crew as well which gives local people jobs, but when the fishing was good people spent the money in the village, and there was all them boats that needed groceries for the week and things like that. And there was a fishing store in Seahouses that stored nets and twine and boots and oilskins and gloves. That doesn’t exist anymore.

We were catching a lot of white fish, cod and haddock and things just in shore.

When we were fishing off seahouses, every fisherman heard about it from far north and far south and they used to come and fish these grounds as well. At weekends, and nights when the local boats weren’t fishing, they kind of cleaned all the local fishing grounds up and it hasn’t really come back for the past 20 year.

If we didn’t catch it somebody else would have come and caught it. There was some big boats from Peterhead and Eyemouth who would come in at weekends and clean the ground up just because they knew there was fish there and they had big boats and they needed lots of catch.

There was even clam fishing and king scallop fishing, and there were boats coming over from the west coast and coming right the way round to fish out of Seahouses. And they weren’t bothered about anything they were just scraping the whole ground up, and they took lobster pots away because they didn’t know where the pots were. The local boats knew where the lads had their pots – they didn’t.

They just trawled everything out, and then none of that came into Seahouses, only paying a landing fee and all the catch got sent away. But we suffered because they just wrecked the grounds and there weren’t any fish left.

There was nothing you could do about it at all. You could stop them coming into the harbour but they would have just gone somewhere else and at least they brought revenue into the harbour.

We’ve always been in the fishing industry to do with either the boats or here. Its just a tradition that we hope we can keep going for a while, it’s a thing we like doing, and there’s not many young people who want to get into this sort of smelly trade like before.

We’ll just keep on as we are and see how it goes. If people still buy them we’ll still produce them.

Weighing scale with labels indicating names of the boats supplying lobster and crab.

All images taken February 2011, copyright Tom Gildon. With thanks to Patrick and Karen Wilkin www.swallowfish.co.uk