Obituary: James Strachan Buchan, head of the Fishermen’s Association who spent his life helping the industry

JAMES Strachan Buchan, managing director of JSB Supplies Ltd, died suddenly of a heart attack on Thursday 25 August at Port Seton harbour, doing what he loved, helping fishermen.

The son of a successful Peterhead herring drifter skipper, Danny Buchan of the “Ugievale”, James would have followed his father into the wheelhouse, but poor eyesight ruled against a fishing career.

With no other son to take over the family boat Danny retired from sea, bought a small shipchandlery, the Energy Supply Stores at Peterhead harbour, and a grocery nearby, to give him a living ashore, and James worked for his father for a couple of years after leaving school. Then the opportunity arose for him to become a salesman with the firm of Cosalt.

Established in Victorian times as the Great Grimsby Coal, Salt and Tanning Company, Cosalt served the fishing industry as shipchandlers in Grimsby and other fishing ports nationally. The move suited James perfectly; he was a natural salesman and dealing with fishermen was for him the next best career to a life at sea; soon he was a “weel kent” figure in every Scottish fishing port and promotion to chief Scottish salesman followed.

No matter what time of day or night his phone rang with a call from a skipper needing an item of fishing gear on some isolated pier, no matter what the weather, James did his best to supply that article. So it was that he built up a great deal of goodwill for himself and the company.

James, always an entrepreneur at heart, had long considered setting up his own shipchandlery. Leaving Cosalt after 20 years, he set up JSB Supplies based in Leith. Depots in Tarbert, Buckie, Arbroath, Fraserburgh and Port Seton soon followed.

Some years ago the chance to run the fish selling side of the Cockenzie and Port Seton Fishermen’s Mutual Association arose. Despite ill health, James grasped the opportunity and added yet another string to his bow, or as a drifter skipper might say, another net to his fleet.

His long involvement in the politics of the fishing industry was understandable, given his intelligence, his business and his family background.

In his well considered opinion, the position taken by the Fishermen’s Association Ltd, (FAL) in advocating complete withdrawal from the common fisheries policy, was the only way forward for British fishermen.

Reform of that policy from within he saw as impossible. James became a director of FAL. In that capacity, and despite indifferent health, he took time and trouble, and also travelled extensively, to promote its ideals, and the restoration of national control of fisheries.

If the fishing industry played a large part in James’s life, so too did his Christian faith.

He and his wife were for many years in fellowship at the Viewforth Gospel Hall in Port Seton, although his funeral service was held in Chalmers Memorial Church of Scotland in the village, simply to accommodate the numbers.

A crowded church justified that expectation. In that service too, there was an echo of “days lang syne” in the herring fishing industry, as friends and relatives from all over Scotland came to pay their respects.

Present among the congregation were residents of Port Seton whose mothers and grandmothers were “guttin’ quines” from the north-east of Scotland, who had settled in the village.

They had met their fishermen husbands at the summer fishing off Shetland and the Buchan coast or at the Yarmouth fishing, off East Anglia in the autumn, forging family ties between the fisher communities that exist to this day and were renewed at the service.

The greater part of the congregation followed the cortege to Prestonpans cemetery. There in the fitful sunshine of a mild autumn morning we laid James to rest; fittingly and movingly we sang the 23rd Psalm, unaccompanied, and to that most Scottish of psalm tunes, Crimond. Yet another echo of an older Scotland.

James had a great love of, and pride in, his family and he is survived by his wife Agnes, herself the daughter of another Peterhead drifter skipper, the late Jim Hay of the “Fertility”.

He is also survived by two daughters who both studied medicine (Suzanne, the elder, is now a consultant in obstetrics and gynecology in Cambridgeshire; Gwendolynn is an associate specialist in paediatrics in Angus) and their husbands; his eight grandchildren and his three sisters.