Tag Archives: The Christian Watt Papers

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The Christian Watt Papers

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This book has left me filled with admiration for the fishwives of Fraserburgh.

Christian Watt is, for I hear her still, so proud and so strong, despite all kinds of hardship and loss. Four of her seven brothers die at sea leaving her parents in despair. It is not long until her mother dies, physically exhausted from years as a fishwife.

“… with their skirts kilted above the knees they waded into the sea summer and winter with their men on their backs to ensure the men would go to sea dry …”.

Yet despite the hardships Christian marries a fisherman herself, and it is as a fishwife, and mother of ten children, that life begins to overwhelm her. She faces more deaths by drowning, including that of a favourite son and then her husband, the impact leaving her struggling with poverty, the law, and her mental health. Eventually, strained beyond coping, she is certified and admitted to the asylum in Aberdeen on a permanent basis. There she begins to write. Calmer and cared for, she details the wars and events, lives and challenges that surround her, her children and their community as they move into the new century.

Christian dies in 1933, trusting implicitly in God.

This version of her papers – first published in 1988, and edited by General Sir David Fraser, a descendant of the Fraser family that knew her so well, and to which she was related – keeps her voice alive. Brave and kind, it speaks out consistently against subservience, poverty, prejudice, racism, snobbery and war. I loved it.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The Christian Watt Papers

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“There was so much talk of war it made me feel ill.”

A hectic fortnight has meant that it’s taken me longer than it should have to read this book, but I’m now into the final third and just as fascinated as I was at the start.

From the beginning the voice of Christian Watt is as strong as the cover suggests. She has such a sense of who she is that her personality still reaches out loud and clear two centuries after she was born.

Like others in the fishing community where she was born her life is hard, but it becomes increasingly difficult when she starts to lose those she loves or depends on. When her husband is drowned she becomes utterly impoverished and exhausted, the effort of providing for their many children eventually destroying her mental health to such an extent that she is finally admitted to the asylum in Aberdeen on a permanent basis. It is there that she starts to write.

She writes about the different dialects still being spoken around Scotland, and of the pittance being paid by a “grateful nation” to a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo. She has no time for the pompous or pretentious, and is “furious at a society which forced bairns to work.” She wishes that better pay and working conditions could have been enshrined at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and she is scathing about the concentration camps of the Boer War.

Here is what she has to say about the arrival of the Great War.

“Never did I think I would live to see the day when the enemy would be coming out of the sky. They were flying in the air like birds and going down in the sea like fishes, and the world was running with blood.”

She loses family and friends at Gallipoli, Ypres and the Somme.

“No person wants to kill another. It is politicians who start wars and expect others to fight them.”

I am looking forward to reading what she has to say in the final hundred or so pages I have left.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The Christian Watt Papers edited by David Fraser

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Another treat of a book to travel with, and it feels right to be taking it to Inverness and the Moray Firth.

Eland included a short press release with this copy, and it emphasises that the ‘voice’ in the book is that of Christian Watt. She was born in 1833, and it is her words used, as found in the papers and notes she left when she died in 1923. Apparently she was encouraged to write as a type of therapy to help her through the loss at sea of a son, her husband, and four of her seven brothers. The family kept all her work together and after her death passed them on to David Fraser, who organised and edited the collection ready for publication. The first copy was published in 1988, with this edition coming out this year.

I have only just started the book but already the voice and its context are drawing me in. The hardships endured sound terrible. Christian Watt was not even nine when she began work as a domestic servant. She then returned to work back by the sea where her family where from, and eventually married a fisherman.

The introduction to the book ends with these words: “The times through which she lived were hard, and the folk they produced were not only hard but brave and tender. It is fortunate indeed that they come to meet us through the words of so worthy, witty and fluent a chronicler.”

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023