Glasgow magistrate
March 8th 2025
A Glasgow magistrate is defined as, “a salt herring of fine quality, sometimes a red herring”. That is, a herring that has turned reddish-brown during the curing process. Interestingly, DSL gives us another term for salt herring – a Gourock ham – that also shares a connection to the Clyde.
The term has a long pedigree, with DSL taking its earliest citation from George MacGregor’s The History of Glasgow (1771): “It is customary also to take what is call a meridian, or a pint of ale and a salt herring, about one. A salt herring they call a ‘Glasgow Magistrate’”.
However, where the name came from is unclear. J.C. Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary (1874) offers the following theory: “When George IV visited Scotland, a wag placed some salt herrings on the iron guard of the carriage belonging to a well-known Glasgow magistrate, who made one of a deputation to receive his Majesty”.
The Scots Magazine of December 1950 suggests otherwise: “Herring were cured there by Walter Gibson, a merchant of Glasgow and Provost of that city in 1688, and it is perhaps because of Provost Gibson that salt herring acquired their nickname of ‘Glasgow Magistrate’”.
Sadly, both the term and its obscure origin seem to have now passed into history. The last example in DSL is taken from an Edwin Morgan poem, written in 1969 and published in the 1983 anthology Noise and Smoky Breath: “…ran with a bawbee ballad five feet long, felt fishwives, gutted a brace of Glasgow magistrates”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
