Scotland oysters - pollution

Pollution with heavy metals killed the Firth beds beds. Ultimately the shipbuilding that was set up to support the oystermen, outgrew the trade and killed it.

Loch Ryan, near Stranrear survives. Ryan is now the largest fishery in Scotland. It was bequeathed to the Wallace family in 1702 by William 111. At its height, in 1910, more than 30 boats worked the waters taking 130 tonnes a year, but stocks declined and in 1957 it was handed over to the Scottish Marine Biological Association to see if sustainable oyster growing could be revived. It has slowly been brought back into production by the Colchester Oyster Fishery and then Loch Ryan Shellfish. Further north oysters have been cultivated at Kilbrandon off the West Coast and at Loch Fyne and sold out through their restaurant chain

Saki - sympathetic unselfishness

Another memorable inspiration on oysters came from Saki, the Scottish writer Hector Hugh Munro who lived from 1870 to 1916 when they would have been easily available:

"Oysters are more beautiful than any religion...There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster."

Munro also made this wry quip:

“You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.”

Music hall balads - of tubs and fubseys

This bawdy music hall shanty Oyster Nan is obviously also Scottish. A fubsey is a “small chubby person”

An oyster nan stood by her tub
To show her vicious inclination
She gave her noblest parts a scrub
And sighed for want of copulation
A vintner of no little fame
Whop excelled red and white can sell ye
Beheld the dirty little dame
As she stood scratching her belly

Come in says he you silly slut
Tis now a rare convenient minute
I’ll lay the itching of your scut
Except some greedy devil be in it
With that the flat capped fubsey smiled
And would have blushed but that she could not
Alas says she, we are soon beguiled
By men to do these things, we should not

From door they went behind the bar
As tis by common fame reported
And there upon as turkey chair
Unseen the loving couple sported
But being called by company
As he was taking pains to please her
I’m coming, coming Sir, says he
My dear and so am I, says she

Her molehill belly swelled about
Into a mountain quickly after
And when the pretty mouse crept out
The creature caused a mighty laughter
And now she has learned the pleasing game
Although much pain and shame it cost her
She daily ventures at the same
And shuts and opens like an oyster

Scotland - the Dredging Song

This fishing song – singing was much associated with both gathering oysters as well as their selling in Glasgow – is from Newhaven and certainly before 1850 and called The Dredging Song.

Getting wind and kind to rhyme is almost as verbally dextrous as reducing oyster to o’u, unless the latter is read as o meaning oysters and for you.

The herring loves the merry moonlicht
The mackerel loves the wind
But the oyster loves the dredging song
For it comes o the gentle kind

Scottish oysters - the creel lassie's cry

Scotland too had an oyster history in the Firth of Forth which it defended fiercely. When Essex boatmen came apoaching, they were bombarded with stones. Where today a sign reads not to eat the fish caught in the waters, in the late 1800s, as many as 30 million oysters were taken a year.

The oyster girl with her creel was a familiar sight doing her rounds of the tenements. Some of this culture was caught in song, the oyster humbled to just two letters in the dialect as o’u:


At night round the ingle sae canty are we,
The oyster lass brings her treat frae the sea;
Wi music and sang, as time passes by,
We hear in the distance the creel-lassie's cry.

Caller o'u! Caller o'u! Caller o'u!
Frae the Forth. Caller o'u! Caller o'u!