A Perilous Catch
Page 6
Adrian Sellick, known as the last mud-horse fisherman, working his nets set out across the mud in Bridgwater Bay, Somerset.
In Brendan’s own words:
Well, I started when I was fourteen, when I was a kid. My dad was here all his life and I carried on from him. I’ve done it for sixty odd years, my dad did it the same, his father did it the same and the grandfather before him started it in 1820 or something. He was a stonemason, he picked up with a local fisher girl and she persuaded him there was no money in fishing and that’s how we came here. Of course there were a lot of families doing it in those days. Any amount. When I started there were three or four families, a dozen blokes, nine brothers and that. Fifteen years ago there were two families. All had their own patch and a licence. That’s only a few quid today but it gives us reassurance.1
He paused for a few seconds before continuing:
Yes, non-stop for sixty odd years, I can’t believe it. Adrian went out when he was six or so. Some blokes from Burnham did it using a boat to get out to their nets. I remember one father and son one Sunday whilst we were out. They disappeared whilst out trammelling in their punt. Went in they did and weren’t found for three weeks. Probably one got caught in the net when it went over and the other went in to save him. Lost their knife they must have. Yes, many have lost their lives out here where all sorts of things can happen.
It’s a danger well voiced in fishing circles and it isn’t just the boats working in the extremes of the North Atlantic who are vulnerable from the perils of the sea. Respect for the sea doesn’t protect anyone, life jackets don’t prevent crew members getting caught in nets as they are shot over the side and dragged down to the seabed and lifeboats cannot always reach casualties. The sea is a dangerous platform to work upon and just as fishers drown in the sea, even mud-horse fishing has its dangers if the unwary fisher stays out too long and gets caught by the incoming rush of tide.
The nets Brendan and Adrian have staked are a mile out into the bay and to get there involves a drive in the 4x4 jeep, out as far as the beach allows, along a well-worn track among jagged rocks, to the edge of these. Ahead is a sea of glistening mud and the several hundred yards of this have to be traversed, pushing the mud-horse out to the distant line of nets. There are twenty-eight shrimp nets there, nets with a square mouth several feet across and which are funnel-shaped to decrease the cod-end some 6ft downstream. Each is untied, the contents emptied into a sieve before the net is carefully tied up again. The catch is sorted – the small fish, weed and bits of rubbish are extracted – after which it is added to the slowly filling basket. This catch consists of shrimps, dabs, Dover sole, whiting, the odd mullet, dogfish and skate, the latter being expertly sliced to separate the edible wings. You can certainly tell an experienced fisherman by the way he cuts a skate. Then Adrian clears the few stake nets which held the odd fish before trudging another few hundred yards through mud and water out to a further line of stake nets set out by the low water mark. Here maybe are two more skate, mullet, dogfish and a Dover sole. All the time he’s watching the tide.
Adrian goes out most days but sometimes hangs the nets up if there’s nothing in them to save the tide ripping them. A good wind also brings a lot of weed down off the beaches, and hanging them up saves time as he has a limited amount of time out before the tide catches him out. Only then can he load his baskets and push his contraption straight across the mud back to the jeep. By leaning upon the framework, he can push it forward without his feet sinking too far into the mud. It does look hard work, though, he says, not as half as hard as carrying the fish in a basket. Being a longshoreman is hard work and dangerous, he adds.
Longshoremen work all around the coast of England and Wales – and Scotland too but we’ve discussed the fishing there in the last chapter. However, several regions of the country jump out as being more resilient than others in that the practice has survived up to today even if that very survival is now under threat. In these following pages we shall consider various parts of the English coast in sections.
The Northeast Coast
There’s little evidence of fishermen operating a dual economy in Yorkshire and that fishermen were farmers during the quiet season. It’s true to say that a few did work in the iron mines in winter during the nineteenth century but these were more the exception than the rule.2 Generally fishermen worked from one of the many coastal settlements that existed from Berwick upon Tweed down to the River Humber, working their locality although some did join the autumnal herring fishery off East Anglia in the nineteenth century. Lines, trawling, potting and drifting for herring were the main fisheries.
From an inshore fishery point of view, both Northumberland and Yorkshire were well served by square-sterned cobles, those quintessentially British boats that are a mixture of Scandinavian and English techniques with a catalyst emanating from what is still today an unknown influence. They are unique among British fishing boats which, in a way, must make the fishermen themselves different from the rest. It’s ‘ceubles’ in the north and ‘cobbles’ in the south and the point of merging is said to be around Redcar. The etymology of the word is unclear: some say it has Celtic connotations as Celts used ceubal for ‘boat’ while couple is said to have originated from the Lindisfarne Gospels of the year AD 950. The boat itself has obvious Scandinavian influence and has been developed over the years for working directly off a beach. It is a complex shape with a pronounced forward sheer, slightly curved stem, deep forefoot and lean entry into the water giving an almost Viking appearance. The after end of the body was shallow with flat floors, hard bilges and a high sheer. The keel only extended over the forward part of the boat and a ram plank, a flat plank onto which the floors were fitted, continued to the sloping transom. The hull had a degree of tumblehome which was unusual for British working craft and was built in true clinker fashion with wide planks called strakes. A deep rudder descended a long way beneath the boat. The design suited the coastal conditions where heavy breaking surf was often encountered both on launch and recovery. Boats were normally beached stern first and horses were often used to haul the boats up the beach on trolleys with huge wheels, such as at Filey, though a steam-powered winch was used at the North Landing at Flamborough.3
There are 170 miles between the Tweed and the Humber and until the rivers were dredged out for shipping in the nineteenth century, harbours were few and far between though rivers may have afforded some protection. South Shields was an early settlement for fishers – ‘Shields’ coming from the Norse word scheles taken to mean ‘simple fishermen’s summer huts along the shore’ – though is today nothing by comparison. One example of a small coastal settlement that has survived as such is Low Newton-by-the-Sea, a cluster of fishermen’s cottages built on three sides of a square, the open side facing the sea. Today though the fishermen have gone, to be replaced by holiday homeowners, who play on the grass where the net poles, once vital to the upkeep of the nets, once stood.
Cobles also came in various sizes, depending on the time of the year and the fishery it was working. Winter and spring were the times for trunking, potting and line-fishing in 30ft cobles, crewed by three men, said to be older men by some. Trunking was an old method of catching lobsters and crabs which survived longer in Yorkshire and Norfolk than anywhere else in Britain.4 A trunk was a net attached to an iron hoop with two bands across in which the bait was held. The trunk was set on the seabed, marked with a buoy, and while other trunks were being set, it was hoped a lobster or crab would find the bait and begin eating. Then, when a short time had elapsed, the trunk would be carefully hauled, hoping the crustacean had fallen into the net. The next trunk would then be hauled and so on. In a night’s fishing (which was preferred) the whole fleet of trunks could be shot and hauled up to fifteen times. A similar method were used on the east coast of America, in New England, where the net was dropped and the fisherman stayed above, watching for the lobster or crab to climb onto the net before hauling it in.
In June
they got their larger cobles out when the weather was more reliable. These were the herring cobles that they called ploshers and they followed the herring into the autumn. These cobles could be as much as 42ft in length and powered by a dipping lug sail, the same as the smaller boats. As motorisation affected all the fleets in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, the hull shape was altered to incorporate a tunnel in the after part of the boat so that boats could still work off beaches. A few ploshers were double-ended though most retained the transom, and some were half-decked.
In about 1875 a double-ended ‘mule’ was introduced into Yorkshire, a keel boat which has been described as a cross between a coble and a whaling boat. These were half-decked and tended to work out of the small rivers, such as at Staithes or Whitby.5 The small river out-flowing at Staithes gives a sheltered refuge for boats and it can be difficult to envisage that this was the largest harbour along this coast in 1817 when there were seventy cobles based there, a figure that increased to a hundred later that century.6 Today it is home to a mere handful of cobles and keelboats.
Fishing for salmon with a seine-net from a salmon coble on the River Tweed. This type of fishing mirrors that depicted on the Naxos vase. These cobles were different to those to the south, being smaller and less pronounced in shape.
The fishers were independent folk as elsewhere but it is said that in Filey they kept completely to themselves. They lived in the old town, apart from both the other inhabitants who opened lodging houses and other fishermen from along the coast.7 Sunday fishing was frowned upon. Filey fishermen, other than having their cobles worked off the beach there, owned Yorkshire yawls, larger two-masted boats of about 50ft in length that were kept at nearby Scarborough harbour.
Today’s cobles are numerous and remain the chosen working platform of the modern fisher though most are motorised and are based in the rivers and harbours that today dot the coast. At Filey, sheltered mostly by Filey Brig, however, things haven’t changed at all and the boats still sit on the Landing on metal trolleys with big wheels, the only sop to modernisation being tractors instead of horses. Another spot along this coast that hasn’t changed much and is worthy of mention is Robin Hood’s Bay, an almost cliff-hanging village, the haunt of smugglers and fishers (often the same thing), where boats are hauled over the scaur (rocky platforms) onto the track leading down the hill. It’s hard to believe today that some thirty-five cobles operated out of here during the fishing heydays of the mid-eighteenth century.8 Here too the village had its own Robin Hood’s Bay Mutual Shipping Insurance Company, formed in 1806, which insured vessels worth £94,300 in 1867. It is said that the fishers went with the Whitby whaling fleet and came back with money enough to put into trading vessels. At that time there were 174 ships owned by Bay men and registered at Whitby. ‘The trade in fish had given way to the trade in coal’ lamented one visitor in 1858.
A comparison of prices is useful. In the Whitby district, in 1730, the annual rent of a small fisherman’s cottage was forty shillings to five pounds whereas herrings were ten to twenty a penny and haddock ten to twenty pence a score (twenty). Beef and mutton were two pence a pound, small chickens two pence, butter at twice that a pound. Local farm workers earned eight pence a day in winter and one shilling and sixpence in summer, both including board.9
Nearby quaint Runswick Bay has a similar atmosphere of intrigue and secrecy and was once centre of a large fishery, while in between Whitby retains the charm of a fishing station and a bustling river and is said to be one of the most atmospheric towns in the whole of Britain. Further north, the Northumberland coast is regarded as the unspoilt coast of Britain and has gems of villages along it such as Beadnell and Craster and here the cobles are notorious for the canvas cover they set over the forward part of the boat. Many survive and are in use daily in an area where longshore fishing is alive and well. Boatbuilder Fred Crowell of South Shields is kept busy today in his small yard off the River Tyne, repairing and rebuilding cobles, among the other fishing boats he works upon.
East Anglia
There are two types of longshore boat of interest in this part of the east coast of England – the north Norfolk crab boat and the Suffolk beach boat. A third, the Yarmouth shrimper, was based in the river and there is no evidence that it ever worked directly off the beach.
Along the thirty-mile stretch of coast between Wells and Sea Palling, fishing has been characteristically small scale, mainly done from beach-launched boats.10 This was centred on the neighbouring towns of Sheringham and Cromer, both of which had attempts at building some form of shelter for boats at the end of the medieval period. None seemed successful except for a harbour at Shipden Ness, just east of Sheringham, though this was engulfed by the sea in 1430. The coastline here has been for centuries one of erosion and changing and shifting sands, made worse by the fact that this part of England is slowly sinking. Fishermen have had to work directly off the beach and they continue to do so today.
By 1724 Daniel Defoe noted that the market town of Cromer was famous for its lobsters which were sold in Norwich or taken to London. He described it as a dangerous coast.11 In 1771 an agreement was made between 123 fishermen of Cromer and the London markets for the supply. As the century concluded, Edmund Bartell in his Guide about Cromer (1798) wrote that ‘Lobsters, crabs, whiting, cod-fish and herring are all caught here in the finest perfection.’ He continues that:
the lower class of people are chiefly supported by fishing. The herrings which are caught are cured in the town, a house, within a few years, having been erected for that purpose, which, I believe, answers well, both to the proprietor and the fishermen, who now find an immediate market for any quantity they may bring in.12
When William Daniell passed through in the early nineteenth century, a new jetty had been built, the older one having been swept away in March of that year, 1813. Sea bathing and fishing appear to attract a similar interest to Daniell though not for the first time do we see the growth of a resort simultaneous to the development of the fishery, where the fishermen are partly responsible for both through the colourfulness of their way of life and the use of their craft to take day-trippers out during the summer season. This always allowed a small extra earning for them. In 1875 Frank Buckland, in preparation of a Parliament report, found fifty crab boats in Cromer, a hundred in Sheringham and perhaps another fifty from other north Norfolk beaches. Each boat carried some twenty pots and that they had only come into use some twelve or fourteen years before. Before this they used hoop nets – the same as trunk nets. The lobster and crab fishery preoccupied the majority, if not all, the fishermen.13
The boats of the crab fishermen are unique in British craft and have been described as a cross between a coble and a keel boat. Again they work directly off the beach into the surf and are recognisable from the oar holes they have in the top strake, known locally as ‘orrack’ holes, used to slide oars through so that the boat can be carried up the beach. Boats were built locally and were some 16ft in length while a slightly larger boat at 19ft, known as a ‘hoveller’ or ‘hubbler’, was used for whelk fishing, drifting for herring and mackerel, and long-lining for cod when the lobster fishing was slack.
When the creel-type pots were introduced in about 1860, possibly from Yorkshire, they were made by the fishermen and called ‘flotums’ at Cromer and ‘swummers’ at Sheringham. They were made from hazel bent into hoops and fitted into an oak floor, the whole thing covered in hemp netting, with the entrance spout (‘crinny’) at the side.14
With the development of motorisation, use of the traditional wooden double-ender continued though tractors and trailers became the normal mode of hauling the boats from the water. The shape, although similar, fattened up to take the extra weight involved, and the dipping lugsail was done away with. Their usage continued throughout the twentieth century and, in 1996, the last vestiges of the wooden boats were still working though the newer lighter one-man boat called the skiff was being introduced. These still work the b
each and most fishermen have, since the 1970s, had their own tractor and trailer. Beaching still attracts holidaymakers in the season as, although boats tend to set off in the very early morning, they return any time after nine o’clock. Unknown to most of the onlookers, this is the most dangerous time for the fishermen, especially when there’s a heavy swell running, for there is the ever present danger of a boat overturning and trapping a crew member underneath. To add to their woes, each beach was different.
The transgression from wooden double-ender to fibreglass skiff might save the payment of wages to a second hand but doubtless has led to an increase of the risk of accident. However, with the decline in fishing fortunes leading to many choosing to turn away from the sea, the increase in the cost of living and wages, it has been necessary for many fishermen to survive to work alone. Not only on this coast, but all around where longshoremen continue to serve the inshore fishing sector, it’s the same story. With shrinking quotas, fierce competition from the large-scale fishers taking the catch before it reaches the coast, and general legislation, longshore fishing is increasingly under threat and at the same time we see many of the traditions stretching back generations, being discarded. That the Cromer and Sheringham lobster fishermen continue in the same vein as their ancestors, albeit as a part-time occupation in many cases, is surely something to celebrate when so many other walks of life are changing, and not always for the best. Like the survival of the coble in modern-day fishing, the beach boats of north Norfolk have perhaps faced their toughest challenge and are now secure in their survival for the next century, especially after the very recent construction of a wooden crab boat.