HERE COME THE TATTIE HOWKERS
Tattie howkers, believe it or not, howk tatties. We’re speaking Scottish here, not Scottish Gaelic. Scots speak English but we have a whole dictionary of words that belong only to us. A tattie is a potato. Howking means digging up or searching for something. “Here come the tattie howkers” is an old Scottish song and a Bagpipe tune in march time. The song celebrates the influx of Irish workers who came over in October/November every year to howk the tatties. That was at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The potato famine had hit Ireland worse than Scotland so there were thousands of people willing to cross over and get their hands dirty and their backs aching.
When I was a kid at school there was a “tattie week”, when the schools closed so that mothers and children could go to the tatties. It’s all done mechanically these days and the school break is now called “the Autumn holiday” or “the October week”. When I was young, I lived in Fife in the Forth Valley and it was normal to join the tattie howking, although we called it tattie picking.
We were each allocated about 20 metres called a “stint” and each time the tractor passed with it’s rotating “howking” machine, we had to gather all the potatoes into a wire mesh basket. It was heavy and got heavier as it filled up. Another tractor with a trailer passed behind us and we had to tip the baskets into the trailer. Younger people were often allocated half a stint but then the pay was half as well.
At lunchtime we stopped for half an hour and somebody from the farm appeared with sandwiches, scones and fresh milk. At the end of the day, we all piled into the trailer and the farmer took us home with our cash earnings and a small bag of tatties.
One year, another farmer planted potatoes in the field behind our house. He employed “tattie howkers” during the week so there was no work for us at the weekend. It poured of rain that weekend anyway. When the rain went off, I went for a look and noticed the tips of some potatoes, cleaned by the rain. The “howkers had not been super efficient. My brother and I got a trowel each and went re-howking. WE GOT ENOUGH POTATOES TO LAST THE FAMILY FOR WINTER. Nowadays it’s very fashionable to go potato gleaning, as it is called. It’s a very environmentally-friendly activity. For us it was a money saving activity. We had chips with everything.
My wife and her mum and dad went tattie picking too when she was young. Her favourite story is when the tractor started to boil up and lose water. The farmer took off his welly boot, filled it from the nearby stream and topped up the radiator of the tractor so they could keep on howking. Maybe that’s the origin of the expression, “give it more welly”!
All the potato harvesting is done now with special machines but they miss a lot of very usable tatties. So the “tattie howkers” of today are “tattie gleaners.” I watched a TV programme about it a few weeks ago. The programme ended with a chorus of:
“Wha saw the tattie howkers?
Wha saw them gang awa’
Wha saw the tattie howkers,
Sailin’ doon the Broomilaw?”
Around the USA and Canada there are many Pipe Bands and Scottish associations. They will be familiar with the pipe tune.
