“Widows and Bairns”: The North Sea’s 260 Faces of Grief

By Isabelle Holloway

Jill Watson, *Widows and Bairns*, 2007, bronze, 120 x 500 cm, Eyemouth, Scotland.

On October 14, 1881 in Eyemouth, Scotland, 93 women and 267 children watched as a seething, swelling storm drifted slyly over the North Sea and toward their harbor. Despite warnings that the rising dawn would bring about a cyclone with hurricane-force winds, their men - fathers, brothers, and sons alike - had untethered the fishing boats moored to port, eager for catches. Unknowingly, 189 appointments would be imminently arranged with the age-old face of Death upon the soundless seabed below. By Eyemouth’s harbor, and before a besetting reality, the faces of 93 women and 267 children would inflame into expressions of rawest terror: ahead, their mens’ fishing skippers would smash between billow and gale, even supplemented with a number of screams which would be heard ringing out into the swirling depths of the blackened sky above.

The day became appropriately titled “Black Friday”. Often, it has been regarded as Britain’s most tragic fishing disaster.

126 years later, Scottish-born sculptor Jill Watson sought to meticulously recapture the terror from the face of each of Eyemouth’s 78 widows and 182 fatherless kids. After extensive research and community collaboration, and in taking reference from the physical features of those who had genuinely paid witness to the dread of “Black Friday”, Watson molded sincere grief into sunken eyes, gasping passion through outstretched arms, and full-bodied despair into frenzied swoonings - all contained in the widows’ misery-stricken forms. The children, though less emotively coloured than their older, maternal figures, still adopt the depressive air. Appearing lost from the glossy chambers of their innocence, they seek refuge - either in the sheltering bodies of their mothers, or in pondering the vague, cold stretches of the North Sea before them.

In 2007, “Widows and Bairns” was erected with deliberate attention to this sea-adjacent location. Lined along a long, narrow “harbor”, the “Widows and Bairns” parallel that same body of Nature which swallowed their men whole. A curtain between hazy sky and opaque sea is drawn upon it, forever screening those bodies which have been dragged down into the obscure depths of a darker, slow-moving, subterranean world. The widows and children give an initial impression bereft of steady defiance, and rather with a sense of unfulfilled longing. The powerlessness of the widows and children to interfere, their coerced stare into that view which is ultimately hopeless and long escaped from any run of Fate, is further cemented in pathos by their static poses. As sculptural pieces, they intrinsically reject dynamism, emphasizing instead a quality which both chains and freezes them into the grips of Time. Perhaps one may imagine, in the flair of Scottish superstitions, that there does lay, in fact, some quivering soul beneath the bronzed armor of these lined mourners - that, upon closer inspection, there is evidence in their eyes of an uncanny retrieval of the original, mourning spirits, which now haunt Eyemouth by their mere melancholic presence and constant reminder of Life’s fragility and Nature’s omnipotence.

Completing this duality between Life’s fragility and Nature’s omnipotence is the harbor itself. A grand, imposing structure when scaled to those individuals which stand atop it, with a rugged, oxidizing facade, the harbor mirrors the collective immensity and architectural perfection of Nature. Implicitly, the prowess of Nature muffles the lingering, seemingly disjointed particles that would comprise the appearance of those widows and children when scaled from afar. The uneasily thin width of the harbor lends itself as a metaphor for the precarious balances of Life - how easy it could be, say, to dip oneself sideways into Nature’s throes - through any fatal sense. One can even feel a vicariously dizzying rush of anxiety when imagining the adrenergic risk associated with standing along such thin proportions. This feeling is heightened when adding into account the panoramic vacancy, as there is no near place for footing, with only the suspense into air and the blurring horizon of sky to sea to prop one’s awareness of any spatial positioning or perspective.

Yet, ambiguously, the “particles” which seem disjointed are also closely knit; by the gaps between bodies and limbs, there also exists a transcendent tenacity to protect and to hold those in vicinity into a stronger line of endurance. The figures, though partaking in the same oxidation process as their stoic, clifflike harbor, even appearing wholly consumed by it at times, are nevertheless preserved in stances of undying commitment to their deceased and courage against the life-stealing tendencies of Nature. Rather than resist the seafoam-green corrosions, a color which perhaps bleeds from the sea, they become embraced in it, earning themselves a more martyrdizing glow. In this sense, Life can still tease love as a stronger binding force than any superficial front, as presented by Nature. Through the haunt and the pain, it is revealed that it is a persistent diligence to the other which, beyond all and any shades of grief which may be contained within the blue undulations of the North Sea, still proves itself as holding the “Widows and Bairns” together.

Bibliography
Jill Watson, http://www.jillwatsonstudio.co.uk/index.htm.

King, Caroline. “Curiosity of the Week - Widows and Bairns Look out to Sea.” Contrary Life, 30 Sept. 2020, https://www.contrarylife.com/2020/09/curiosity-widows-and-bairns-scotland-60187/.

Rovers, Border. “Widows and Bairns.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 25 Sept. 2012, https://www.flickr.com/photos/87645035@N07/8023462076.

Ugc. “A Memorial to Scotland's Worst Fishing Disaster.” Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 27 Apr. 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/widows-and-bairns.

“Widows & Bairns.” SCT My Place, https://myplacescotland.org.uk/awards_entry/widows-bairns/.

“Widows and Bairns.” Widows and Bairns | Art UK, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/widows-and-bairns-260372.