Coast and CountryFREE CHRISTMAS EDITION!

SORROW AND SPLENDOURLife in Scotland’s fish ports

THE BUCHAN RIVIERAPuddings, pilots, and publishers throughout the ages

FIGHT FOR THE PHILIPPINESAberdeen responds to Typhoon Haiyan

Editor’s ForewordWhat started out as a current affairs magazine has, ow-ing to unforeseen events, since evolved into a kind of sec-ond-hand travel guide for the northeast of Scotland. Com-piled over a short period of time, the series of features and historicals, some with a topical angle, aims to give the lay-person a window into what life in the northeast is like. It’s written for no particular reason other than to pleasantly engage and we hope you enjoy it.

CONTENTS

Page 2 - 6: Fraserburgh

Page 6 - 8: Philippines Fundraiser

Page 9 - 10: Cruden Bay

BATTLE FORTHE BROCH:A FEATURE

OFSCOTLAND’S

BIGGESTWHITE FISH

PORTBy John Mailer

Fraserburgh is unusual among towns, in that it leaps out at you. There’s no surge of traffic or streetlights to announce its arrival, no road signs, no duelled carriageway. Out of nowhere, it just appears, a collection of church spires and roofs on the horizon, rising out of fields and trickling down toward the sea. The ghost town atmosphere, then, is familiar any visitor even before they’ve reached the town’s doorstep.

“That’s one of the places little ironies,” says tourist guide NormanMcKerracher. “It’s never chaotic or rowdy, just silent.”

Even on a sunny day, the town lies empty. James Ramsay Park, with its playground and its martial arts centre, is theexception, hosting a

mother and her child, and their pet dog. After that, as the bus rolls into the town centre, life ceases.

Norman points out the solid old gran-ite mansion and town-houses on the Strichen Road. “They would have been

“The ghost townatmosphere”

owned by the skippers and merchants back in the town’s heydey.”

The heydey is not far-gone. The sea hasalways givenFraserburgh its living and even today, the fishery industry stillaccounts for 65% of the town’semployment. It hasn’t left Fraserburgh short of money either; a 16-to-18-year-old, fresh out of the local

Academy, can walk into a job worth £35,000 a year on the boats moored in the harbour. “The town’s problems all come back to money,” the old man says. “Too much too young. It goes to their heads and all bets are offafter that.”

All the spare money wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t for what much of it was

going toward.

“Heroin,” McKerracher spits. “The stuff’spoisoned the place since it first got here in the Nineties.”

The drugs boom,

“Too much too young... all bets are off after that.”

apparently imported by local cannabis farmers and dealers fromLiverpool and the North, culminated in the town earning the horrible distinction as Heroin Capital of Scotland in 2007.

“There were around 140 deaths fromheroin abuse, from the early 90s going into 1997,” McKerracher relates.

The combination of a prosperous industrial hub and a persistent drug problem makes Fraserburgh anunusual, even unique case in criminology. The usual conditions arising from addiction, most obviously crime and theft needed to pay for the habit, are absent here. Thefishermen’s generous wages mean nobody has to steal or mug for their troubles, they just work for it. Hence why you can walk around the town in complete safety, day in and out.

Reaching the end of the Strichen Road brings us to the turn-off with Victoria Road. To the east liesBellslea Football Park and, beyond that, the South Church. This wonderful old building served as the finalresting place for one of the heroes in the fight against the epidemic.

“Sandy Wisley,”McKerracher says fondly. “He was the first person who was really prepared to tell it like it was about the heroin boom here.”

Wisley operated out of the Saltoun Surgery in Finlayson Street for almost 30 years. His work brought him face-to-face with thesudden drugsexplosion and hebecame a contentious figure in the localcommunity, with many lauding him as a hero while others dismissed him as a hysteria-monger and a crank. He was laid to rest in a packed-out funeral service in July 2009, after dying fromcancer. “There aren’t enough like him,”

is the mournful riposte of most people these days.

There is, however, a sense in Fraserburgh that things are finally beginning to pick up after the carnage of the previous twodecades. Broad Street, one of the two high streets that runsparallel to the docks, was once notable for little more than its boarded up windows and closures. This has changed somewhat, though not in the most encouraging ways. Payday loan firms and gambling dens prosper here, and more of the town’s famous sweetie and haberdasher

shops have goneunder in recent years, though the recession has hardly helpedmatters. A recent casualty is the Saltoun Hotel, once the cen-tre piece of the town square, nowabandoned by itsowners.

“It’s not all doom and gloom these days,” says Olivia Keir, one of the waitresses in the Snax cafe on Broad Street. “A lot of thereally old and run-down places have been overhauled and renovated. Marconi Road’s the bestexample of that.”

Marconi Road, named

after a local shipping engineer, generated notoriety as one of the worst streets inScotland for itsslumping propertyvalues and its ominous bleakness. Here, the gradual resurrection is most evident. Half the street, east to mid, consists of the barren granite houses with moss in the tiles and grass in the gutter. From midway to the west end, the houses are impossibly garish, multicoloured andmodern. Talk ofrenaming the street Westshore Gardens has come to nothing, and Marconi Road (AKA “The Bronx”) stays put on maps and

in the town’sconsciousness.

A visit to the town’s li-brary, a wonderful feat of nineteenth-century architecture, turns up some little nuggetsfrom the town’s past. The Christian Wattdiaries (the memoirs of a mental patient who died in Cornhill in the 1920s aged 91) offer a fascinating glimpse into the fishing industrybefore the Great Wars, while a copy of Killing for Company - abiography of serialkiller Dennis Nilsen, who grew up inAcademy Road here - occupies one of thedustier and morediscreet shelves in the building’s corner.

Fraserburgh, for all its faults and problems, rubs off on its visitor. The people are warm, its resilience is anexample to all, and its history a grim lesson for many. A passing visit is recommended for a local visitor.

Cruden Bay:The StoryBehind the

BuchanRivieraA Feature

One of the country’sunsung destinationssits next to the sea,between Aberdeenand Peterhead. Thegolf course, the smallharbour, the ruins of the old castle, and the long near-perfectstretch of golden sand(continued on page 8)

Charity andthe Church:Fundraising

for thePhilippines

A Feature

With the Philippinesstill recovering from theeffects of TyphoonHaiyan, the Britishpublic have given some £70 million to variousappeals organised tohelp the millions of people left bereaved,homeless, or without(continued on page 7)

(Church and Charity continued) power and basic material needs. One of the many small organisations that have sprung up to help is the Mid StocketTyphoon Fund, a band of volunteers who had taken out their own weekends to raise cash for the badly-hit Philippines. Coast and Country attached itself to Aileen Mowat (73) and Edith Duthie (76) as they pounded the pavements andhoovered up the city’s

spare change.

“Secret weapon,” Edith says earnestly, pulling a Celebrations tin from the small cupboard at the back of the creche room in the breezychilly old church. “This is going to bring home the bacon.”

“Let’s get going, shall we.” Shrugging into her coat and slinging her scarf round her neck, she grabs her own money tin and makes for the door.

The Number 3 drops us on Union Street, and immediately the pair of them install themselves against the wall of HMV and the money drive begins. “Hurricane Relief”, “Help the Philippines”, and “Money for shoes and food” are among the slogans offered to passersby doing their Christmas shopping and getting on with their Saturdaymornings.

“Pub!” Aileen cries

after about half an hour, and we march along the street to the Grill, where they count the coppers over a soda water and lime. “That’s £32.55, most of it in small change,” she concludes. “Off to Union Square next.”

Piling down Market Street and into the glass-and-concrete shopping complex, the same ritual occurs, as the pair stand rooted outside Zizzi’s and implore shoppers to

part with their money. Union Square turns over more revenue: £56.28, again mostly in coppers and silver.

Lunch, pizza inside, offers the afternoon’s first opportunity for a proper conversaton. Asked why they wantto give up their spare time to help people they’ve never met,Edith offers: “We’re in touch with churches up in Peterhead and Fraserburgh, and both those towns have big

Filipino congregations, because of the fishing industry. So they’ve all taken an interest in the typhoon. We thought we ought to do the same.”

“We’ll keep this upuntil Christmas,” Aileen pledges. “Our target, for the time being, is £5,000.” This, roughly, is the same number of people killed during the typhoon.

“We’re off to the beach front later and then we’ll have a whip round the pubs in Mid Stocket,” she relates. Handing over a spare tin, she says, “A wee contribution from an outside source would be appreciated.”

You can still see the pair of them, buzzing about the city, andharanguing people for money, in the citygardens and parks. All money collected goes to the Oxfam Shoebox Appeal, run out of their shop on King Street.

Cruden Bay:Past, Present,

Pilots, and Publishers

Sitting on the cliffs above the North Sea, Cruden Bay looks like the postcardvillage setting for an Agatha Christie novel. The beach, a great golden horseshoe,sweeps past one of theoldest golf courses in the world. Sandstone cottages line the street leading to the harbour, where pleasureyachts and fishing boats sit moored for the weekend. Along the coast lie the ruins of Slains Castle. At the other end of the village, on top of the Church Hill, sits St. James Episcopal Abbey.

“It is quite a place, just to look at,” says local historian Paul McClannan. “More than the other towns and villages in this part of Scotland, it is quite tourist-friendly.” This is easy enough to confirm; a quick stroll along the beach introduces us to a German couple walking their dog, and a Norwegian student on his gap yeap.

The Norwegian connection is appropriate. Next year, in July 2014, one month away from the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, another history-making event unfolded here on the same beach, lost to history now but celebrated at thetime.

“There he is.” Paul points out the picture of a dark-haired tanned stranger on the wall of the Kilmarnock ArmsHotel. “The kind of person you wouldn’t find anymore, someone who just risks everything for the hell of it.”

The black-and-white stranger is Tryggve Gran, the Norwegian explorer and pilot who cut his teeth in Captain Scot’s Arctic expedition in 1912 before training himself as a pilot over the following two years. On 30 July 1914, he made history by becoming the first person to fly solo across the North Sea from

Cruden Bay to Norway.Picking through the tatty old ringbinder devoted to Gran’s life makes for unbelievable reading. Following on from this feat of flying, he would violate Norwegian law by enlisting in the Canadian air force during the Second World War and fightingImperial Germany during the First World War, only to turn Nazi collaborator in the Second conflict. He is little remembered now in the town that made his name.

The same can’t be said for another part of local folk-lore, which has since passed into the modern lexicon and culture. Catching the 63 bus from the Kilmarnock Arms, we’re dropped off at amuddy car park outside the town and end up trudging along a muddy track that takes us to the edge of the cliffs. To the north liesCruden Bay’s beach, and Tryggve Gran’s runway. To the north lies the ruins of Slains Castle.

Technically a manor house rather than a castle, the old building is now falling to pieces, but still occasionally enters the news: a localstudent ended up in hospital after falling over one of the ledges and into the water. A memorial stone erected for another young boy has since been removed, probably as part of the Aberdeenshire Council’s drive to getplanning permission forluxury flats in the castle’s place; these have since been temporarily shelved, courtesy of the recession.

Unusually, there aren’t any photographs in existence of Slains Castle before it fell into ruin shortly after the First World War.Nonetheless, we do have the memories and diaries of some of the guests whoenjoyed the privilege of a brief stay.

One of them was Bram Stoker, the Irish novelist who foundfame and made his fortuneas the author of the diaries of Count Dracula, a vampire in Transylvania. “Stoker loved the town itself” (you can still view his written opinion of the Kilarmnock Arms in an old guest log) “but thought there was something really sinister about this castle. Nobody has ever proved that he did take inspiration for Dracula from Cruden Bay, but he did love it enough that he eventually retired to Whinnyfold, just a mile up the cliffs from here.”

Other guests at Slains Cas-tle included H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister who tookBritain into the First World Wa that Tryggve Gran would be swept into as a celebrated RAF pilot. Winston Churchill apparently convalesced here following his adventures in the Boer War and in the House of Commons, as a guest and friend of the owner of the Castle itself.

The house’s gradual demise

Cruden Bay:Past, Present,

Pilots, and Publishers

started after its purchase by a shipping company in 1923. “The Earl was fed up with the house, which he thought was a a white elephant,” Paul explains, “and he just want-ed to get rid of the bloody thing. So he flogs it to this merchant, who takes the roof away in 1925, some kind of tax avoidance scheme. It’s never recovered from that.”

Turning away from the old house, he offers, “Want to come and see the Murdoch’s church?”

The Wee Free Church sits across Aulton Road from the Kilmarnock Arms and along the Main Street leading to the harbour. “Pat Murdoch called this home before he went to Australia,” Paul says. “We don’t know much about him, other than that he came here, set up the church, and married a local girl before upping sticks.”

Rupert Murdoch’s family can trace its roots back to this town. His grandfather, a

preacher and minister for the Free Church of Scotland, set up one of a dozen local parishes before taking his savings and his wife toAdelaide, on the other side of the world. His grandson has since established himself as one of the leading media executives of the 20th century.

While Cruden Bay makes for a beautiful postcard, you’re only sratching the surface with a brief stay in this jew-el of the coastline’s crown. The little mythologies and histories that have since been lost to the public’s memory and consciousness make it one of the richest and most intriguing villages in theBuchan area. A visit is well recommended to anybody with an interest in local, international, and esoteric history.

If you wish to stay in Cruden Bay, the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel is the most highly recommended for comfort and good food.