A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  15 William Daniell, A Voyage round Great Britain, volume VIII, London, 1825.

  16 Noall, op. cit., 1972.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Captain William Roberts, Perranporth Cornwall (North Coast): Reminiscences of Perranporth from the Year 1833, Truro, 1939.

  19 Noall, op. cit., 1972.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Ibid.

  6

  FISHING THE IRISH SEA

  From a fishing point of view the Irish Sea is of prominence as it encompasses part of each region of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also includes a chunk of the Irish coast. Bang in the middle is the Isle of Man whose growth has been accredited with the development of a fishing industry (and centre of a smuggling trade) several centuries ago. The Irish Sea thus gave all the coastal settlements along the coastline that have survived from the fisheries a common bond.

  It’s a fish-rich sea with a biodiversity almost matching that of the North Sea. Channels either end – the North Channel between Scotland and Ulster, and the St Georges Channel between southwest Wales and Ireland – link it to the Atlantic Ocean (north) and the Celtic Sea (south). With a proximity to the Bristol Channel with its second highest tidal range in the world, the Irish Sea is washed twice a day by the tide, helping it to maintain a diverse amount of sea-life.

  Fish traps were once prolific along this coast as attested in an earlier chapter. Although shellfish have also long been caught in the tidal waters and other fish caught with lines, it was the herring that was the first fishery of any significance and the Manx were the first to prosecute this fishery to any serious degree. But even so, before it became an organised fishery in the nineteenth century, the herring had been landed into the island from the earliest times. Certainly there is documented evidence of herring being landed during the first half of the fourteenth century, and some of this was by strangers from outside the island, according to the Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles, in which it is stated that Thomas, Bishop of Sodor (c. 1330–48) was the first to exact from the rulers of Man one tenth of all the taxes paid to them ‘by all the strangers in the herring fishery’.1

  By 1610 various regulations were laid down in the Manx Statute Book including a law enforcing a close time for the herring from 1 January to 5 July, within 9 miles of the shore, and prohibiting the shooting of nets before sunset.2 It would appear that the fishing was highly controlled and operated in an organised and disciplined manner by a Water Bailiff ashore and Admirals of the Herring Fleet at sea. The latter reported misdemeanours while at sea to the Water Bailiff who held a court every Saturday during the herring season and was able to summon skippers held to break the rules. These included shooting nets too soon, crossing another boat’s nets, cutting buoys or corks from other nets and taking their fish. Fines were also imposed for minor offences such as bad language.3

  Blundell tells us that, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the fishermen had to hand over a good percentage of their catch. The Lords of the Isle took 20 per cent and the Church the same while the Water Bailiff only demanded a modest share of 5 per cent, leaving something in the region of 55 to 60 per cent remaining.4 Blundell also noted that ‘the sea feedeth more Manksmen than the soil’ and that they are eaten as they are and never smoked. Among the other fish they caught are salmon, cod, haddock, mackerel, rays, plaice and thornback.

  At about the same time (1603) it was reported that such was the abundance of herrings around the coast of Pembrokeshire it was as if it ‘were enclosed in with a hedge of herrings’.5 All sorts of fish were available according to the same source:

  … turbot, halibut, burt, sole, plaice, fluke, flounder, ling, millwell otherwise called cod, hake, mullet, bass, which breeds twice a year as says Rondelet, conger, gurnet, grey and red, whiting, haddock, shad, the friar, bowman, sea smelt, sea bream, the cow, swordfish, sprat or sandeel, the earl or needle whose fins grow forward contrary to the nature of all fish, rough hounds, smooth hounds, thornback ray, shark, with many other kind of sea fish …

  A further list gave the various shellfish present at that time. Of the herring, it was said that fish:

  … collect in large numbers and so large are the shoals of herrings that they cannot be caught, but after the autumn equinox they divide themselves into columns. They change their places and wander through the oceans in shoals, as a result of which it happens that many are caught at the same time.6

  Tenby, on the south Pembrokeshire coast, was the centre of a huge herring fishery about this time. In fact, its Welsh name Dinbych-y-pysgod literally translates to ‘the Little Fort of the Fishes’, a fact reflecting its fishing position from the fourteenth century when its harbour was built, and probably earlier.

  In North Wales documented evidence comes from much earlier with regard to the herring fishery. In 1294 at Llanfaes, a custom of one penny on every mease of herring landed was charged, a mease being about 500 herrings. Furthermore, every herring boat entering or leaving port owed the king one mease, worth about two shillings. Llanfaes at the time was home to a thriving trade in fish even though it was a tiny hamlet on the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Mon), at the eastern end of the Menai Strait. Probably the money thus raised went to pay for the castle at nearby Beaumaris which was finished the following year.7

  The Welsh Port Books show the extent of the export of herrings from the island and the amount suggests that a further development of the fishery occurred in the sixteenth century. Salt was brought in from the Cheshire salt mines by ship via Chester, with salt herring being sent back to the port, or sometimes to Liverpool. By the sixteenth century herring was becoming a well-traded commodity. In 1564 a Scottish boat was said to have landed ‘6 lasts, 4 hogshead of shotten herrings, 30 copules of ling, 20 copules of codfish’ into Milford and in 1566 the Pembrokeshire fishers were working in Irish waters as well as up the River Severn and into North Wales. In 1571 a French boat landed sixteen lasts, eight barrels of white herring into Carmarthen and four years later a Tenby boat brought sixteen barrels of herring from La Rochelle to Milford. Strangely, though, little mention is made of exported herring during this time which suggests a lull in the shoals.8

  Herring certainly must have been an important part of the local economy in Beaumaris by the following century, as in 1722 and 1723 the town elected two men – Lewis Davies and Richard Morris – as the official packers of fish there.9 In 1797 huge shoals ‘sometimes visit the Anglesea coast, which are taken, dried, and exported; being considered by the knowing ones in delicacies, as particularly excellent’.10

  To the south of the Irish Sea, across the Bristol Channel, lies the delightful village of Clovelly, on the north coast of Devon, with its tiny harbour at the foot of the cliff. In 1630 Thomas Westcote noted that herring was being caught there and up the coast at Lynmouth, the latter being known ‘for the marvellous plenty of herrings there taken’.11 The Rev. John Robbins, vicar of Clovelly from 1730 to 1777, reporting the ups and downs of the herring, wrote that:

  In this year 1740, God was pleased to send his blessings of a great Fishery among us after a failure of many years. This thro’ His mercy continued in 1741. In this year 1742 the fish was small and poor and in less quantity. In this year 1743 but an indifferent fishing. In this year 1744 worse than in the preceeding. In this year 1745 still worse. In the year 1746 much worse.12

  One wonders whether it could have got any worse! However, this is the very nature of the herring: a fickle fish that can change its migratory pattern at the drop of a hand. Nearby Minehead had a vibrant fishery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the small quay was crowded with smokehouses. ‘Herring and bread, go the bells of Minehead’ so the saying went. In late autumn some 4,000 barrels of herring were being exported. By the twentieth century the fishery had all but disappeared. Clovelly, however, bucked the trend. At the beginning of that century Charles Harper reported that ‘Clovelly fishermen are famed for their endurance and Clovelly herring for their flavour.’
13 Nothing can be truer today when each autumn Stephen Perham goes out fishing in his small open picarooner (the small single-masted lugger of the village), sculling or sailing depending on the wind, to lay drift-nets not much more than half a mile from the harbour, and catch several thousand of the small sweet-tasting fish. His is a niche market – and two others fish though using engined boats – and over the last few years the quality of the herring has improved year on year. To celebrate the fact, the village holds an annual Clovelly Herring Festival each November, the only annual herring festival remaining in Britain.

  Gordon Perham in his Clovelly picarooner shaking herring from his nets before they are basketed ashore. Stephen Perham has continued fishing in the same way although the prospect of a total ban on drift-netting in the European Union threatens one part of his livelihood.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century the Irish herring fishery was thriving along the coasts of Counties Down, Louth, Dublin and Wicklow. Here small boats reminiscent of Scandinavian design worked inshore while larger boats worked offshore, many being second-hand Manx vessels. Ardglass became a major fishing station where, in 1835, there were some 300 boats based there for the summer season, a third coming from Penzance, the rest equally between Irish and Manx boats. Scottish fish dealers came to Ardglass to buy the catch and cure it there, and it was later sent to Liverpool or Dublin by lugger or wherry.14

  But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was the northern part of the Irish Sea that benefited from a thriving herring fishery. By the time the English Crown took possession of the Isle of Man in 1765 after the passing of the Revestment Act, bounties had been introduced in the buss fishery. Duty on the import of herrings into Great Britain was abolished and, in some cases, the Manx fishers prospered from the bounties. Towards the very end of the eighteenth century the numbers of boats increased dramatically after the bounty was introduced for small boats. After the Douglas Bay disaster of 1787 the Manx had adopted the smack as a fishing vessel and numbers belonging to the Island amounted to some 343, according to the Custom House in Douglas, of twelve tons, and each carried a crew of seven or eight men, although larger vessels were being introduced at that time. Some fifty larger smacks were buying the herring and salting them aboard before being barrelled ashore. These were then sent to ports such as Liverpool or Dublin. The fishers were paid on a share basis and were not full-time but only worked the four-month season. Outside of this they were employed as farmer labourers or mechanics.

  There was a steady expansion of the herring fishery in the first decade of the nineteenth century when there were as many as 600 local boats at times working the herring. By 1823 numbers of local boats had fallen to 400 and three years later had further declined to 250. However, Cornish and Scottish fishermen had by that time started following the herring around the island. Both fished in large luggers which had stemmed from Cornwall, where two-masted dipping luggers had been drift-netting for mackerel as described in the last chapter. The Manx fishers liked the rig, finding it more powerful than their smacks, and especially effective when lying to the nets with the mizzen lug set. During a decline in the fishery in 1835, they shortened the boom of their gaff sail and added another mast with a small dipping lugsail, creating a dandy rig. At the same time they stepped the mast in a tabernacle on the deck instead of it passing through the deck to the mast step resting on the keelson. In this way they could lower the mast when lying to the nets just as the Cornish and Scots did.

  Then, in 1860, the obvious happened and they copied the design of the Cornish boats, building their own two-masted luggers. These became known as ‘nickeys’, the name said to have come about through the high number of Cornishmen called Nicholas, although another suggestion was that the first boat from Cornwall was in fact the Nicholas. The first boat of this design was Alpha, built by William Qualtrough of Port St Mary in 1869. Thus, not for the first time, fishermen broke the local tradition of using the same boat of their forefathers and adopted that from another area because of the effectiveness of that vessel. In Britain, for the herring fishery in the days of sail, two boats from opposite ends of the country were found the optimum – the West Cornish lugger and the Scottish fifie, and both shared so many similar characteristics that it is hard for some to realise that they evolved independently of each other. They were designed by fishers for fishers and, until the Scottish Zulu came about in the last days of sail, were the very best in vessel technology for the intended use of drift-netting.15

  The nickeys were larger than their Cornish counterparts and were renowned for their speed, increased possibly by the use of mizzen topsails and mizzen staysails. They could accommodate seven fishermen and a boy in a space in the aft end some 15ft in length. This included a stove for cooking. Forward of this was the fish hold, then a net room with a bosun’s locker up front. These boats sailed south to join in with the lucrative mackerel fishing off Kinsale, on the southern coast of Ireland where French, Cornish, Scottish and other English boats mingled with the Irish boats during March and April. Then it was back home for the summer herring and some nickeys sailed to the east coast of Scotland to follow the shoals southward into East Anglia. It was almost possible to fish continuously all year, with a little time off in the winter to overhaul the boat.

  In 1879 it is said that a thousand boats were fishing in the waters between the Island and the Irish coast including native Manx boats and those from Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall. In 1881 there were 334 Manx boats recorded as taking part in the herring fishery, most being registered at Peel or Port St Mary. Such was the trade in these boats that renowned Cornish boatbuilder William Paynter from St Ives began a boatbuilding business in Kilkeel to satisfy the local demand. Sadly, this enterprise did not thrive and, after a fire burnt down his yard, he retreated back to Cornwall. However, he left a great legacy of the boats he built atop the beach at St Ives.16

  It was around this time that the Manx fishers began to follow the Clyde fishermen in their use of the ring-net. Locally, this initially raised anger because of the supposed destruction to the habitat and to the quality of the herring. Trawling was also being blamed for the disappearance of the herring spawning grounds off Douglas and Laxey, although this has never been proved one way or the other. From the available evidence it seems that the herring was already in decline in the Irish Sea, a point that soon became apparent and thus cannot necessarily be blamed upon the antics of the ring-net fishermen. What did happen, though, was that for the second time the Manx fishers turned to other areas to copy the type of boat in use, this time northwards to the boats of the ring-net – the nabbies and Lochfyne skiffs.

  Although outside the geographical area of the Irish Sea, it would seem pertinent that what occurs in the Clyde affects the whole of the Irish Sea. Ring-netting, as it became known for it is the setting of a net around a shoal and thus creating a bag as in seine-netting, the difference being that the net is trawled between two boats in the process. A very brief summary is needed.

  The introduction of ring-netting at Tarbert in the 1830s gave rise to serious arguments among the fishermen, with those from the upper reaches of Loch Fyne particularly in favour of retaining the traditional drift-netting and believing that the huge hauls of the ring-netters would all but empty the loch of herring within a few years. This was discussed in Chapter 2.

  Once trawling had recommenced in earnest and some of the original objectors had joined in, as had one fish-curer who had realised the advantages of the method. In that same year, 1867, under great pressure from all sides, the government repealed all the Acts and amendments, making the use of a trawl-net legal once more: within a year all trace of an era of law enforcement had disappeared.17

  Initially the Lochfyne fishers had used wherries to fish, a common type of boat around the northern part of the Irish Sea and favoured by the smuggling trade. They then adopted the half-decked smack in the 1820s and then introduced the lugsail sometime in the 1840s. In turn they developed the double-ended lug-r
igged drift-net and line-fishing boat similar to the boats of the northwest coast. The lug rig was introduced from Ayrshire where double-ended nabbies were small open line boats. Ring-netting necessitated a larger boat as a crew of four or five was needed, and so the Lochfyne skiff was introduced into the ring-net fleet in the early 1880s, a similar size increase taking place with the nabbies of the east side of the Clyde. Accommodation was available aboard the vessel for the first time so that they no longer needed to sleep ashore in temporary shelters or take a large lugger for use as sleeping quarters. For by this time the fishermen were spending longer periods from home in the quest for herring.18

  Two years after the Lochfyne skiff was born, the first of the new types arrived in Peel and soon became known as the Manx nobby, though bearing no relation to the Morecambe Bay prawners across the sea, also referred to as Lancashire nobbies. The nickey owners at first adopted the nobby rig of a much smaller mizzen but then they were quickly phased out in favour of the new type which was smaller and required a smaller crew. Like their predecessors, they followed both herring and mackerel where the Irish, so impressed with the vessels, built their own versions which worked both on the east and west coasts.

  The next development in the fishery was motorisation, which began to take effect on this area in the first decade of the twentieth century. Steam had impacted in the previous century and steam trawlers were working out of Fleetwood, a deep-sea fishery port that had grown out of a tiny hamlet at the mouth of the River Wyre. Sailing trawlers, and then steam, worked the rich grounds off Iceland and further north, bringing back vast amounts of cod and other fish (this will be the subject of another chapter). Milford Haven briefly became a major herring port in the 1920s when steam drifters landed there but the business was short-lived even if several smokehouses survived into the 1960s.