A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  The main boat would shoot the seine by understanding and anticipating the instructions from the cliff top or Master Seiner who was in charge. These were in the form of semaphore signals which would direct the boat this way or that, so that the net would be eventually shot around the shoal. The folyer would help and if the catch was huge, the second net, the stop-net, would be employed to close off the mouth of the net. The seine-net could be up to a quarter of a mile long and 60ft deep. Once surrounded and sealed, the seine would be towed by both boats to shallow water where the fish would be extracted. Sometimes the process of taking the fish ashore had to be delayed, for example if the curing process could not keep up, so that the fish would be held in the net for days, with a guard left twenty-four hours to make sure no one else helped themselves. The largest catch was said to have taken place in St Ives in the autumn of 1851 when it was estimated that 17,908,800 pilchards were caught. This catch took a week to land and the overall profit was £7,500 which is over half a million pounds in today’s sums.

  The net itself needs a mention. It has been described as a:

  … cumbersome affair … about 160 fathoms in length (320 yards) and could be as deep as 8 fathoms (48 feet). A net of this size would weigh three tons. This included the lead ‘sinkers’ which were placed on the foot rope causing the net to drop like a curtain into the sea and prevent the fish from escaping underneath the net close to the sea bed.11

  Hauling it from the sea would take several men; hauling it ashore would take far more manpower.

  Daniel Defoe, when being rowed to view the river’s entrance and castle at Dartmouth, experienced the excitement of the sighting of a pilchard shoal. In his words:

  … I observ’d some small Fish to skip, and play upon the Surface of the Water, upon which I ask’d my Friend what Fish they were; immediately one of the Rowers or Seamen starts up in the Boat, and throwing his Arms abroad, as if he had been betwitch’d, cryes out as loud as he could Baul, a Scool, a Scool. The Word was taken to the Shore as hastily as it would have been on Land if he had cry’d Fire; and by that time we reach’d the Keys, the Town was all in a kind of an Uproar.

  The matter was, that a great Shoal, or as they call it a Scool of Pilchards came swimming with the Tide of Flood directly, out of the Sea into the Harbour. My Friend whose Boat we were in, told me this was a Surprize which he would have benn very glad of, if he could have had a Days or two’s Warning, for he might have taken 200 Tun of them, and the like was the Café of other Merchants in Town; for in short, no body was ready for them, except for a small Fishing Boat, or two; one of which went out into the Middle of the Harbour, and at two or three Hawls, took about forty Thousand of them.12

  Local bye-laws restricted the fishing ability further. For fishermen there must have been a confusing amount of legislation, perhaps comparable to that which fishermen have to cope with under today’s EU Common Fisheries Policy, which we will attempt to clarify in a later chapter. These bye-laws included prohibiting fishing on a Sunday night. But it wasn’t just the seiners that attracted the attention of the lawmakers, as we’ve seen, so that the drift-net boats were not to be shot during neap tides, nor before half-tide in spring tides. In 1631 an order was made that no herring fishing boats were to shoot nets before the feast of All Saints ‘but if they Drive with nettes before they may according to the auntient custome’.13

  Some of the photographs of seining tell the same story: large groups of people involved in the process of emptying the nets, called the ‘tucking’ of the pilchards. The seine boat was pulled into the seine so that the pilchards could be removed with the tuck-net which was lowered into the seine and brought out, bringing up with it some pilchards which were then transferred to the seine boat using dip-nets or baskets called dippers. Once full, the seine boat then carried the pilchards to the shore where it was beached and then unloaded once the tide had dropped, using horse and carts. Some writers refer to a tuck-net boat which presumably was a boat for carrying the pilchards to the shore in the same way as the seine boat was used, while others call the boat for carrying the pilchards to the shore a dipper. Nevertheless, the tucking was another spectacle not to be missed and was described thus:

  Tucking is a sight which the stranger should not, on any account, neglect to witness, especially when it is performed on a calm, clear night; it is then impossible to imagine a more exquisite scene: the boats moving to and fro, their oars scattering brilliants at every stroke, and the quiet, yet busy action of the fishermen, as they plunge the basket into the water, and at each dip, raise, as it were, a stream of liquid silver, produce an effect at once unique and beautiful.14

  The scene is easy to imagine. The fish splashing and writhing in the seine, the splosh of the baskets as they are plunged into the oily water, the shouting of the men as the work progresses and the general hubbub of the spectators, for it wasn’t only at night that a stranger could witness the performance as seining itself was a daytime occupation. Night-time tucking happened when, in winter, the daylight hours were short. For the men it was back-breaking, cold, monotonous and dangerous work for little pay.

  All along the south Cornish coast there were few beaches or coves that did not have a seine company. For the rockier north coast, the places seines operated were more drawn out. Wherever a seine worked, nearby there would be a pilchard cellar, the place where the pilchards were cured. Take Portwrinkle, for instance, a small village close by Rame Head. It has a small drying harbour and above this are today the remains of the seventeenth-century pilchard cellars. In 1813 there were simply fishermen’s huts along the shore and a curing house.15 At that time the whole population of the hamlet would be involved in the pilchard fishery, especially the tucking and curing. A decade earlier some 200 hogsheads – a hogshead was a barrel containing about 3,000 fish – were captured. In 1834 an advertisement announced the sale by public auction of the equipment and cellars of ‘The Portwrickle [sic] Fishery Company’, consisting of three seines, boats, tackle and all shore equipment, and ninety tons of new and thirty tons of old salt.16

  At the other end of the scale – and the county – St Ives, the principal Cornish seining station, had the largest number of seining companies. The numbers recorded in the St Ives Seine Registrars’ Book show fluctuations: in 1867 there were sixty-one seines, the following year 266, 286 in 1869, 285 in 1870 and seventy-two in 1871. Numbers declined thereafter and were down to thirty-six by 1882. 1870 is said to have been the peak year and afterwards catches fell due to several factors – a dearth of fish, the pilchard drivers and loss of the traditional markets.17

  Other places with a tradition of pilchard seining were Newquay, Mousehole, Newlyn, Mevagissey, Fowey, Polperro, Looe and Cawsand. Other smaller villages renowned for seining were the tiny village of Portloe on the Roseland Peninsula, Cadgwith Cove, better known these days for its crabs, Portreath on the north coast and the nearby expanse of beach at Perranporth. Here a huer patrolled the cliff top and sounded his trumpet at the sighting of a shoal. Several seines were based here and there were some one hundred fishermen, between whom there was considerable rivalry.18 Porthleven, traditionally a fishing harbour, was closely connected with the drift-net fishery though there was a little seining there.19

  Men were normally paid a wage – in about 1670 this was 3s 8d a month plus a further £1 14s 6d at the end of the pilchard season – though a part-share system was adopted in the nineteenth century as an incentive bonus. Fishermen were also paid extra for specific jobs such as barking a net or hauling the seine-net to a boat while huers and Master Seiners received a lot more than the average fisherman. They were in a top class while shooters were second class and the seiners (average fishermen) third. Blowsers were men ashore and they received a minimum wage too. The season was rarely longer than eight or ten weeks though very occasionally went to four months.

  Work on the drift-netting luggers, on the other hand, was not seasonal and offered a more stable employment and earnings. Pilchard driving occurred f
rom June to late autumn and it was not unusual for the fishermen to hand-line for hake while drifting to their nets. Catches of two hundred hake were not unusual, adding to the income. Out of the pilchard season many drivers went to the hook and line fishery, and to the mackerel drift-net fishery, so that many of the crew aboard the luggers were employed throughout the year. During the off season in late winter, the boats would be overhauled, scraped and re-painted with pitch. Sails and the boat’s rig had to be maintained, and it didn’t matter whether you were a seine fishermen or crew aboard a driver – the old hemp nets, later replaced by cotton, had to be constantly repaired and barked in a tannin solution of oak bark (and later cutch) to stop the seawater rotting the fibres.

  Once ashore, the pilchards had to be cured in a speedy manner as, like all oily fish, they go off quickly. Salt has for centuries been used for this purpose, both dry salting and brining, though smoking has long been another fine way of preserving fish. Before the onerous Salt Laws were abolished in the nineteenth century, it was an expensive commodity. However, just across the channel, French salt was untaxed and this led to boats bringing in cargoes for use locally, regarded as free trade though others termed it smuggling!

  That there was a considerable amount of money made from operating seines is obvious by the amount of investment needed. A seine company needed a pilchard cellar, boats, nets and tackle. Businessmen do not invest if the envisaged returns are not high, and they were. For instance, the most profitable fishing ever seen in Cornwall was at St Ives in 1862 when 3,500 hogshead were taken. These fetched seventy-five shillings per hogshead (total £14,112 10s including sale of oil and other), and the overall profit was calculated as £10,153 18s 5d after wages and expenses were paid. Salt was the highest expense. However, it was not a meagre sum for a day’s fishing!20

  The pilchards were carried ashore from the dippers in gurries, open wooden boxes with carrying handles at either end which could hold some 1,200 fish. These had to be 30 inches long, 21 inches across and 19 inches deep and were marked by the Registrar as being compliant. The Registrar was empowered to enter any cellar or boat to measure nets, ropes, gurries or casks to ensure they were of the correct size. Any new seine net had to be inspected prior to use.

  The floor of the pilchard cellar consisted of smooth pebbles set in cement, sloping so as to drain away. The pilchards were then ‘bulked’ – built up into solid rectangular blocks between layers of salt some 5ft high, this work being mostly done by women and girls. The fish remained in this for four or five weeks with the oil, blood and brine seeping out and draining into a sump called a train-pit. The oil was sold off for manufacturing and the ‘drugs’ (dregs – blood, brine, etc.) sold as manure (hence ‘other’ above). The pilchards were then washed and laid into casks known as hogsheads, these being more straight-sided than the traditional barrel. On top of the pilchards was laid a circular wooden cover, called a buckler, which was weighted to press down on the fish. Heavy boulders of a hundredweight or so were used to create the pressure necessary to bear down on the bucklers and these bore down for a week, with more oil being forced out between the timbers of the cask. In that week more pilchards were added as the level shrank. The hogsheads were then sealed and branded with the curer’s name. They were then ready for shipment as some 95 per cent of the cured pilchards were exported, a large amount going to Italy.

  Processing the pilchards in a pilchard cellar. The presses are counter-balanced by the heavy beam running overhead and pressed down onto the barrels with their packed fish. Although this scene doesn’t compare to that described by Collins, nevertheless the actual pressing task didn’t alter much in generations.

  In the region of up to 40,000 hogshead were needed in a good year, which in itself created a vast industry, just as the Scottish herring fishery had a need for huge numbers of barrels. One can again imagine the bustle of activity at a pilchard cellar with the arrival of the gurries, coopers making the hogsheads and the women preparing to bulk. The smell itself must have been overwhelming but Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins in his Rambles Beyond Railways (1851) was one to overcome this and describe the vivid scene he saw in St Ives:

  Here we must prepare ourselves to be bewildered by the incessant confusion and noise; for here are assembled all the women and girls of the district, piling up the pilchards on layers of salt, at three-pence an hour; to which remuneration, a glass of brandy and a piece of bread and cheese are hospitably added at every sixth hour, by way of refreshment. It is a service of some little hazard to enter this place at all. There are men rushing out with empty barrows, and men rushing in with full barrows, in almost perpetual succession … then we advance further, get out of the way of everybody behind a pillar; and see a whole congregation of the fair sex screaming, talking, and – to their honour be it spoken – working at the same time, round a compact mass of pilchards which their nimble hands have already built up to a height of three feet, a breadth of more than four feet, and a length of twenty. Here we have every variety of the ‘female type’ displayed before us, ranged round an odoriferous heap of salted fish. Here, we see cronies of sixty and girls of sixteen; the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump; the sour-tempered and the sweet – all squabbling, singing, jesting, lamenting, and shrieking at the very top of their very shrill voices for ‘more fish’, and ‘more salt’; both of which are brought from the stores, in small buckets, by a long train of children running backwards and forwards with unceasing activity and in the hands move as fast as the tongues; there may be no silence and no discipline, but there is also no idleness and no delay. Never was three-pence an hour more joyously or more fairly earned then it is here!

  Collins also writes of cabing, the snatching of pilchards from the gurries by children. Boys, armed with sticks, were employed to accompany the gurries on their way to prevent such attacks. The children received a smart blow across their hand if caught in the act.21

  The use of the seine-net declined sharply after about 1870 as seen above, and hardly figured in the twentieth century: the last seine was shot in 1922 though nothing worth talking about was hauled in. The fortunes of the drivers continued somewhat longer, thanks to the development of canning, though the disappearance of the pilchard did later bring about their abrupt end and it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that any pretence of a pilchard fishery surfaced. Most of the cellars were idle and the market was little if not sparse. However, Newlyn, with its single Pilchard Factory, did survive and went a little bit further by developing a growing market.

  Today’s fishery for pilchards is a very different fishery however. Health regulations simply do not allow fish to be processed in such unhygienic surroundings. No longer are drift-nets used, while a seine is, but, alas, a very different seine-net, something half way between a purse-seine net and a ring-net. It’s shot from one boat – two fishermen usually working at night when the pilchards feed off the surface of the sea – and is some 600 yards long, shot around a shoal found, not by the huer or the natural appearances, but by sonar. Pilchard fishing, like all fishing, has adopted the technology of computerised fishing. The sonar shows the fish as dark red squares looking like blocks of high-rise flats on the screen. Sometimes, when the shot is made, the dark red squares dive and swim out before the net is closed. Once the shot is made and the end of the net is picked up, then the bag is closed by tightening the purse rope which is threaded through rings attached to the bottom of the net, to create a bag out of which there is no escape. The fish can then be brailed aboard, to be later landed and taken to market.

  Today’s Cornish sardines in their little jars and pretty cans are, in reality, simply Cornish pilchards relabelled as, for many, the word ‘pilchard’ has the ring of poverty and obnoxious times. However, just as likely, the same consumer will have on the shelf a can of pilchards from South America, given the state of today’s fishing market. At the same time sardines come from the Mediterranean, Portugal and the West African coast and are welcomed on the shelves. Go
ne are all the traditions of the pilchard industry and, sadly, few remember it. The Cornish used to refer to pilchards as ‘meat, money and light’ – food, a living and oil for their lanterns. Today few eat it, a very few get an income from it and no one lights their lamp with its oil. It’s gone, largely, as has a whole way of life.

  Notes

  1 Keith Harris, Hevva! Cornish Fishing in the Days of Sail, Redruth, 1983.

  2 Cyril Noall, Cornish Seines and Seiners, Truro, 1972. Noall has a complete history of the pilchard industry.

  3 John Dyson, Business in Great Waters, London, 1977.

  4 Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall 1602, Redruth, 2000.

  5 Richard Fenton, A Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire, London, 1811.

  6 Mike Smylie, Working the Welsh Coast, Stroud, 2005.

  7 George Owen of Henllys, The Description of Pembrokeshire (1603), Llandysul, 1994.

  8 Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, London, 1725 [1927].

  9 Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall 1602, London, 1602.

  10 Mike Smylie, Traditional Fishing Boats of Britain & Ireland, Shrewsbury, 1999.

  11 Cyril Hart, Cornish Oasis … A Biographical Chronicle of the Fishing Village of Coverack, Cornwall, Mullion, 1990.

  12 Defoe, op. cit., 1725.

  13 Noall, op. cit., 1972.

  14 John Sampson Courtney, A Guide to Penzance and Its Neighbourhood, Penzance/London, 1845.