Christian Watt Papers

At the age of forty-seven Christian Watt began to write down recollections of her life; she continued until her death at the age of ninety in 1923. Hers is a remarkable story, vividly told with a natural narrative gift. Christian was born into a Fraserburgh fishing family, and spent much of her life gutting and selling fish, and, for a time, working in domestic service, first to the Duchess of Leeds and subsequently travelling to New York to serve as tablemaid to Winston Churchill's grandmother. Hers was a life of constant toil and hardship. The sea brought her family a precarious living and often a violent death - four of her seven brothers, her husband and her favourite son all died at sea. Anxiety and grief eventually led to mental breakdown, and Christian spent the last forty years of her life as a patient in the Cornhill Infirmary. Her treatment there was enlightened and humane; she continued to work and travel and it was there that she wrote, drawing on her vivid memory. Her writings offer a vivid insight not only into the life of the North-east of Scotland during the middle and later part of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, but also on events of national and i