This blog post is about my paternal great-grandfather who was from Banffshire in the north-east of Scotland.

My great-grandfather James Murray was born in Seaview Road, Buckpool in 1890, married Williamina Geddes in 1917 in the Church of Christ, West Church Street, Buckie, married Margaret Thomson Cowie (my great-grandmother) in 1920 in the United Free Church, West Church Street, Buckie, died in 1985 in Seafield Hospital, Buckpool and is buried beside the hospital in the New Cemetery. All of the censuses from 1891 to 1911 have my great-grandfather living at Seaview Road, Buckpool.

My great-grandfather was a fisherman all his life (he came from a fishing family in a fishing community) and this blog post is about the sinking of one of his fishing boats, the Craigmin.

On Saturday 6th November 1926 there were severe gales with many casualties and one of those was the Craigmin.

The Craigmin was around 28 miles from Great Yarmouth with a load of nine crans ( a single cran is around 370 gallons) which was 2 days’ worth of catches, when it suddenly sprung a leak at 3am owing to the strain caused by the rough seas during a severe gale. The leak happened after they had finished hauling their nets. An hour and a half after the leak sprang, the boat sank.

Water rushed in at a rate which overwhelmed the boat’s pumps and the water simply kept rising under it reached the boiler furnace. The crew did try pumping out the water for an hour but to no avail.

When there was no hope of saving the boat, the crew of ten abandoned the drifter and after the crew including the skipper, my great-grandfather, boarded the Great Yarmouth drifter the Chestnut, the crew watched as the Craigmin sank.

The crew of ten consisted of seven Buckie men, one Porsoy man and two Stornoway men.

The crew lost all of their belongings and the weather was so rough none of the boat’s gear or nets could be salvaged. There were eight or ninety nets onboard at the time.

On landing at Great Yarmouth the crew of the Craigmin were cared for at the Yarmouth Sailors’ Home and the crew arrived home to Buckie on Monday 8th November.

The Craigmin was a wooden steam drifter weighing 33 tons, used primarily to catch herring and was owned by my great-grandfather and others.

The sinking of my great-grandfather’s boat was reported in the Aberdeen Press & Journal, the Dundee Evening Telegraph, the Northern Whig, the Southern Reporter, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, the Shepton Mallet Journal, the Yarmouth Independent and the Western Daily Press with most details in the Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Dundee Evening Telegraph. The other papers just carried minimal detail.

As an indication of how bad the weather was that day, the Belfast News-Letter and the Western Daily Press published information on several disasters that happened that day: an elderly woman in County Derry who died when her house was blown down, ten families in Dublin made homeless when a tenement building collapsed, flying slates and debris and uprooted trees in Belfast, the west wing of Linlithgow parish Church demolished, a teacher and two boys went missing in the storm in Ballymena, flooding on the west coast of Scotland, flooding in the Galashiels district, flooding in the Lake District, a railway viaduct on the Lancashire-Cumberland border sank by two or three feet, St Michael’s Church in Bristol was damaged and trees came down in Wotton-under-Edge.

The Aberdeen Press & Journal, the Gloucester Citizen and the Daily Herald all reported in December that Ernest Lilly, the skipper of the Chestnut, was rewarded for his bravery in rescuing my great-grandfather and his crew. The Board of Trade gave Mr Lilly a piece of plate.

There will be another blog post on the Craigmin in the coming months – in 1928 my great-grandfather and his father along with one other man, the registered owners of the Craigmin, were sued in Banff Court by George Smith, a Buckie ship bullder in respect of repars to the Craigmin between 1919 and 1925 which George Smith indicated had not been paid for.

Sources: personal family knowledge, Scotland’s People website (birth, marriage and death certificates and censuses), Aberdeen Press & Journal 6 November 1926, Dundee Evening Telegraph 8 November 1926, Belfast News-Letter 6 November 1926, Western Daily Press 6 November 1926, Aberdeen Press & Journal 16 December 1926, Gloucester Citizen 17 December 1926 and Daily Herald 16 December 1926.

(For the benefit of anyone else researching families in the fishing communities of the north-east of Scotland, the tee-names or by-names, ie the local nicknames, of my great-grandparents were Murray Farmer and Cowie Pum).