Sandy's Blog
'Cromarty for Poverty'
by Casagrandeblog - 10:29 on 13 May 2013
Cromarty for Poverty
Fortrose for Pride
Rosemarkie for Romance
And Avoch for a Bride
Anyone else know that one? I heard it a few years ago at a bowling match from an elderly Invergordon bowler. He said it was a rhyme he used to chant as a bairn. It does tell you something about how Cromarty was perceived in the surrounding district seventy-odd years ago.
When Paul Monk was giving us his excellent tour of the Courthouse Museum last week, one of the artefacts he produced was a box file containing all the records of the Cromarty Dorcas Society. This was a 19th century ladies charitable organisation that sewed and knitted items of clothing to be distributed to the poor of the town. I haven’t had a chance to go through Paul’s box file, but I have seen a report in the Ross-shire Journal of their AGM in May 1879. In that year, they distributed gifts of warm clothing to 22 men and 136 women. That’s about 12% of the town’s population at the time. 
Up to 1870, the herring fishing industry in Cromarty was in a very healthy state. Cromarty fishermen owned about fifteen herring boats and there were four curing sheds on the Links. Then the herring shoals disappeared from the Firth, and by 1913 not a single herring boat was left in Cromarty. Local men still went away to the herring fishing, but it was now as hired men. Add to that the closure of the hemp factory around 1850 and the eviction of small tenant farmers as their holdings were consolidated into big farms at Newton, Rosefarm, Navity and Davidston, and you can understand why the Dorcas Society might have been needed.
But my bowler from Invergordon wasn’t harking back to the 1870s. The ‘Cromarty for Poverty’ that he was speaking of was 20th century poverty, probably the period between the wars. Wars were good for the Cromarty economy - all these soldiers and sailors with money to spend - but they couldn’t disguise the slow, long-term decline in the town’s fortunes. One snippet from the Town Council minutes in the 1960s has always stayed with me. At the meeting of 10th March 1965, the Town Clerk was instructed to write to certain householders in the Fishertown asking them to desist from dumping their excreta on the foreshore. These were houses with no sanitary facilities whatsoever - as the standpipe at the top of Little Vennel suggests. Not so much the Swinging Sixties as the Mingin’ Sixties.
Still in existence today are three old trust funds set up ‘for the benefit of the poor in Cromarty’. These are the Klein Bequest (generating £26.75 annually), Alex MacLean’s Trust (£6.58 per annum) and the F.W. Grant Bequest (£35 annually). They are supposed to be administered by The Highland Council, so you could try turning up at David Alston or Craig Fraser’s door with your begging bowl and see how you get on.
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