About

The information on this website was originally the subject of a Dissertation for an MA degree at Birkbeck, University of London. I have set it up to share the knowledge I have gained with a wider audience, and in order to make it possible for interested parties to continue the process of discovery by interrogating the results which I have gathered. I also hope that the website may stimulate further research into the trade - both in the UK and on the Continent.

Both my parents were natives of Wick, Caithness, and although I grew up in Fife, we returned to Wick on a fairly regular basis during my formative years. After studying Physics to postgraduate level at the University of Dundee, I went abroad to work in Germany and Switzerland for a total of 23 years, becoming fluent in German. After returning to the UK in 2002 I studied for a bachelor's degree in German at Birkbeck, and recently followed this up with my MA in History. I have always believed in building up my knowledge gradually, by extending what I know, and the present work represents my interest in my past, and in the relationships between Germany and Britain in the years prior to the First World War. I am particularly interested in any evidence there may be of the herring trade on the Continent, and still hope to find more information about the treatment of the German herring traders in Scotland after the outbreak of the War.

I assert my right to be identified as the author of the contents of this website.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Jan Rüger of Birkbeck for his help, guidance and encouragement while I was preparing the dissertation on which this website is based. I would also like to thank Harry Gray, Chairman of the Wick Society, for his interest in my project, and for giving me permission to use the photographs obtained from the Johnston Collection. I would also like to thank the University of Aberdeen for providing the two photographs from the George Washington Wilson Collection. I am keen to ensure that the contents of this website are accurate. If there are any shortcomings, or errors, or if there is scope for improvement, please contact me.

In the statistics section, the Annual Overview chart is derived from an example developed by delimited.io , and the other diagrams were originally implemented using Google chart tools and Google Maps Javascript API. When Google changed their licensing for the latter product and the map application stopped working, I re-implemented it using Bing Maps.