WATCH: Hooked - The Early Days of Surfing in Scotland

Scenes from Hooked - The Early Days of Surfing in Scotland | Andy Bennetts / MBP Productions

In September 1968, three young Scottish surfers decided to hit the waves in Aberdeen. Ironically, Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and Stuart Crichton were based in Edinburgh, and - had they known where to look - could easily have found countless high-quality surf spots much closer to home.

Having lived in Aberdeen for a time, however, Bennetts knew for certain that there were waves there, and so in September 1968 the three students took the train north together. They had just the one surfboard between them - a factory made board or “pop out” Bennetts had acquired on a holiday to Cornwall - and, of course, no wetsuits.

When they arrived in the Granite City, the trio thought they might be the only surfers in town - perhaps even the only surfers in Scotland. However, they were surprised to run into Aberdeen surfer George Law, who had been riding waves there since 1967, taking advantage of the antisocial shift patterns at the abattoir where he worked in order to maximise his time in the water.

In 2018, half a century on from their Aberdeen trip, I met up with Bennetts and Wishart in Shackleton’s Pub in Edinburgh to hear more about this key moment in Scottish surfing history. Also present was Bill Batten, another pioneering Scottish surfer who had been surfing in south-east Scotland since 1967 and who, along with Bennetts and Wishart, soon became part of a small but dedicated group of surfers hunting for waves along the coast of East Lothian and down into the Scottish Borders. In Hooked, and in the feature below, they share their memories of the early days of Scottish surfing. - RC

Stuart Crichton, Ian Wishart and George Law, Aberdeen Beach, 1968 | Andy Bennetts

This is an edited version of a series of features first published in The Scotsman in the summer of 2018

On 2 September this year, it will be the 50th anniversary of Scottish surfing’s big "Doctor Livingstone, I presume" moment – the day when surfers from Edinburgh first met up with surfers from Aberdeen, thereby forming the first known link between two of the nation’s early, geographically isolated wave-riding tribes and laying the groundwork for what would eventually become a distinctive national surfing culture, with its own legends, its own contests and its own "we-know-it’s-freezing-but-we-don’t-care" attitude. To mark the occasion, I caught up with three veterans of those pioneering days – Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and Bill Batten. Bennetts and Wishart were both on the much-discussed trip to Aberdeen in 1968, while Batten subsequently had a Doctor Livingstone moment of his own.

When they caught the train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen in early September 1968, teenagers Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and their friend Stuart Crichton were obsessed with Americana - as many people their age would have been one year on from the Summer of Love - and, armed with a surfboard owned by Bennetts, they also suspected that they might be the only surfers anywhere in Scotland.

"The surfing thing came about because Ian and I were both interested in cars and things American generally, " says Bennetts, "drag racing, the Beach Boys - all that kind of stuff. We were going to university and we had a short holiday between the end of school and the start of university and we thought, because I had bought a surfboard at that point, let’s go to Aberdeen, because I used to live there and I knew there were waves up there.

"The other chap was Stuart Crichton, who was also at school with us. We took my board which was a 9’6" pop-out [a factory-made surfboard] onto the train, got to Aberdeen, and then walked from the station carrying said board all the way to the beach, which was two miles maybe, something like that."

"We got some funny looks, " remembers Wishart, "people wondering what it was. We walked right down Union Street, right down Beach Boulevard all the way to the Beach Pavilion, which is no longer there - it was knocked down many years ago."

"We got to the beach fully expecting our surfboard to be the only one around, " says Bennetts, "and we thought well, we’re not walking back and forth with this all the time so let’s try and find a place to store it.’ We asked the guy in charge of the pavilion if we could leave the board somewhere and he said ‘put it in beside this other one’ - at which point we were somewhat deflated, because George Law had been surfing there for a year before, and his board was kept permanently at the beach."

George Law and Andy Bennetts, Aberdeen Beach 1968 | Andy Bennetts

Law, it turned out, had been surfing the waves off Aberdeen since 1967, his early shifts at a nearby slaughterhouse freeing him up to surf all afternoon. Bennetts and Co soon met up with him, and the four spent the next few days surfing together.

"Being poor prospective students, " says Bennetts, "we didn’t have the money to buy wetsuits, so it was on with the trunks and into the September Aberdeen sea."

"It was very cold, " remembers Wishart, "but the caretaker of the pavilion was a nice chap who took pity on us because we were coming out frozen - he had a wee wood-burning stove and we sat around that."

Bennetts picks up the story: "George Law just had a vest made of neoprene - he didn’t have a proper wetsuit - and he’d been surfing there right through the winter, which in Aberdeen is quite some feat."

Law only stayed on in Aberdeen for a couple more years before emigrating to Canada. He passed away in 2014, but he certainly left an indelible mark on the sport, and not only because of his historic meeting with Bennetts, Wishart and Crichton. In 1968, California’s Surfer magazine, the "bible of the sport, " ran an article about Scottish surfing - perhaps the first ever - based on an interview with Law, which began with the immortal words: "Scotland??? Whoever heard of any surf in Scotland? Well, Scotsman George Law reports there’s fine surfing off Aberdeen beach in the chilly North Sea."

Once Bennetts, Crichton and Wishart were back in Edinburgh it didn’t take them long to figure out that there were also plenty of places to surf closer to home, first in East Lothian and then further down the A1 – and before long, the surfing tribe of south-east Scotland started to attract new members.

"There were a few people [in Edinburgh] by this time with surfboards, " says Bennetts, "and one of them was a guy called Pete Rennie. Pete didn’t have a driving licence but his father was very sympathetic so he would give Pete and his board and me and my board a lift down to the beach. We were looking at Dunbar, Belhaven, round about that area. One day we were going to the beach and this van was coming up the other way with a board on the top. So we screeched to a halt, and it turned out to be Bill [Batten]. This was quite near Belhaven Bay. We asked him where did you get that?’ and he said, Oh, New Zealand.’"

"I’d surfed down the East Coast for a wee while before I met Andy and Ian, " says Batten. "My first time surfing in Scotland was December 1967. I was more or less there by accident. I’d lived in New Zealand, then Australia, and then I’d shipped a surfboard back. When it arrived somebody said to me Why don’t you go to Pease Bay? I believe there are waves there.’ I said ‘That can’t be possible,’ but I did go down, and the waves were reasonably big. The water was quite cold though, so I didn’t stay in too long. I didn’t have a wetsuit then, so it was shorts and in. Freeze, then get out quick."

Unsurprisingly, Batten was inspired to get a wetsuit fairly soon after this first, bone-chilling experience.

"In 1968 I found a company [in Newquay] that sold neoprene rubber with drawings of how to cut out a wetsuit, " he says. "It was more or less a diving wetsuit though, with a big flap at the front with buttons, and they sent you this neoprene and a plan and a tin of glue. So my wife and I spent a week cutting all this out and sticking it all together and that was my first wetsuit. Extremely uncomfortable but it was warmer than not having a wetsuit."

As they started exploring further afield, the crew soon found that there were surf spots dotted all along the coast south of Dunbar. Bennetts picks up the story: "We soon realised that Pease Bay had better waves than Belhaven - once you got your head around surfing over the rocks."

"And Coldingham was almost a kind of a last resort, " adds Wishart. "If Pease was closing out [too big to surf] then you could still get in at Coldingham, but Coldingham was a funny kind of break - it used to break right across the whole beach rather than giving you a decent ride."

"You have to bear in mind that there weren’t any decent weather forecasts, " says Bennetts. "There certainly wasn’t a swell forecast, so you went down on the basis of It’s Saturday, let’s go down the beach.’"

For all that Bennetts and Co pioneered many of the best-known spots in south-east Scotland, there were so few surfers in those days that once they’d found a few good ones there wasn’t much incentive to keep looking. "There were only ten or 12 people total, so there wasn’t the pressure to go and find somewhere else, " says Bennetts.

That said, they did occasionally try surfing in different places just for the hell of it. Batten remembers one session at Dunbar that got him into trouble with the law.

"I surfed off the rocks at Dunbar once," he remembers, "where the harbour is – in the town itself. That wasn’t a great idea because the police pulled me in and said ‘What are you doing? We were about to send the lifeboat out for you!’

"I thought The lifeboat would probably have been wrecked, but I’d have been alright.’"

No matter how good the waves on the east coast were, however, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Scotland’s surfers started looking west, to the powerful waves of the Atlantic. Travel times and costs being what they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the islands were a tricky proposition, but Machrihanish, on the swell-exposed southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre, was a little more accessible (although only a little), so it seemed like an obvious place to try.

Although it can have great waves in certain conditions, Machrihanish and the spots nearby have a fairly narrow swell window so they can be maddeningly inconsistent, and in the days before accurate surf forecasts this made a trip there even more of a gamble than it is today. "Machrihanish is relatively sheltered, " says Bennetts, "so you didn’t really know when you set off whether there were going to be waves until you got there."

The next major discovery wasn’t too long coming, however, and it was Batten who made it, stumbling upon the untapped surfing potential of Scotland’s north coast completely by accident.

"I went to a wedding up there in about 1970, " he says, "to a place called Bettyhill. I looked out of the window in the morning and these waves were rolling in and I thought ‘Oh wow, this is the place to be!’ I didn’t have a board with me of course, but I did have a trip up there very quickly after that and that got the north shore going."

The now-famous barrels peeling along the reef at Thurso East weren’t surfed until the mid-1970s, and they didn’t really appear on the surfing world’s radar until 1978, when Liverpudlian transplant Pat Kieran finally got lonely surfing them all by himself and wrote an article for an English surfing magazine appealing for people to come and join him.

In the early 70s, however, before Thurso became synonymous with surf, Batten, Bennetts, Wishart and Co found plenty of other great spots to keep them entertained around Bettyhill.

"Bettyhill was good because there was a choice of waves up there, " says Bennetts. "You had Torrisdale, Farr Bay, Strathy... and nobody else had ever been up there [to surf] as far as we knew.

"The thing I remember about going up to Bettyhill was the drive, " he continues. "You used to leave work [in Edinburgh] at four o’clock on Friday night and you drove for hours and hours and you got to Bettyhill at half-past 11, because there was no Kessock Bridge, it was the Kessock Ferry, and there was no Cromarty Bridge either. We took the single track road for the last bit from Helmsdale, by which time it was usually getting dark. So there would be three or four cars charging up this single track road, being aware of sheep..."

And that seems like as good a place as any to leave our three surfing pioneers, driving north through the lonely countryside of Sutherland as night falls, a little string of tail-lights following the winding course of the River Halladale towards the sea, and the promise of waves in the morning.

Surfing, it is often said, is a sport that leaves no trace, but everyone who has surfed in Scottish waters since Bennetts, Batten and Wishart has been following in their footsteps, whether they realised it or not.

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