Following the Fish: uncovering stories of the herring girls through cross-archives partnership

In 2024, High Life Highland’s Archive Service was delighted to secure funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation for ‘Following the Fish’, a joint project to be run with Suffolk Archives, the Norfolk Record Office, and Tasglann nan Eilean (the Hebridean Archives). 

Across the 19th and 20th centuries thousands of women, known as ‘herring girls’, travelled from the Western Isles to Caithness and the Northern Isles, before following the fishing fleets on down the Scottish and English coast to East Anglia. Their work,gutting and packing the herring as it came into ports, was both exhausting and dangerous, but created a great sense of camaraderie and pride. 

The money made by the herring girls during the season provided a significant boost both to their families’ incomes and to the islands’ economy. A central, but sometimes overlooked, part of our maritime history, these women played a substantial role in both the economies and the communities of fishing towns around Scotland and England. 

Funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s small grants programme enabled the project partners to research and share stories of some of these remarkable women. 

Research was undertaken within the partner archives’ collections, with staff and project-specific volunteers unpacking information and stories from existing business records, personal correspondence and oral history recordings. We also collaborated with organisations such as Lowestoft Maritime Museum and Brora Heritage Centre, to expand on our research.

In addition to identifying existing archival material, a public appeal was issued via local press and social media with the aim of gathering new and unheard stories. As a result, the project team was delighted to receive memories, recordings, and photographs from herring girls’ family members, which both shaped the ‘Following the Fish’ project and enriched the wealth of material held across our archival collections.

Through this research, we discovered more about the life of a herring girl. The hard physical labour of their work, the pressures of being working women as well as wives and mothers, the importance of singing and knitting to the ‘girls’, their immense sense of community, as well as the pride taken in their work. It is these recurring themes that helped to shape our project outputs - a digital exhibition and two identical touring exhibitions (one for Scotland and one for England).

The herring girls were notable for spending much of their lives between Scotland and England and, as a nod to that, the project team hosted events to launch the exhibitions in both Wick, Caithness and Ipswich, Suffolk.  Both launch events, held in May 2025, were very well attended by project partners, contributors, volunteers, descendants of herring girls, and other guests.

The touring exhibitions, comprising banners, audio material, and activity boxes are now making their way round venues across the Highlands and Islands and the east coast of England. With the support of museums and visitor centres, we are ensuring that ‘Following the Fish’ will tour for at least the next two years and that these women’s lives and works will continue to live on.  An online version is also available at https://suffolkarchives.shorthandstories.com/following-the-fish/.

The project team are incredibly grateful to Lloyd’s Register Foundation for their support of, and interest in, this project which sheds light on a lesser-told story from coastal communities around the British Isles.