by Mike Smylie
From the point of view of the herring industry, it was the development of the motorised ring-net boat that started in 1922 at Campbeltown when the first of two canoe sterned boats arrived to work. In time this led to what became the motorised ‘ringer’, a beautifully shaped, varnished hull with a substantial sheer line, low on the waterline to enable the net to be worked over the side, pretty wheelhouses and a small sail until the engines became reliable enough to dispose of any rig except a boom used for lifting the baskets of herring ashore. These were built mostly in Scotland, with Alexander Noble & Sons Ltd of Girvan producing some of the best craft, although others came from east coast yards and several from the Isle of Man.19 In time the Scottish type of fishing boat became the ubiquitous boat seen all over Britain and many worked the Irish Sea ports such as Maryport, Workington, Whitehaven, Liverpool, Holyhead, Aberystwyth, Swansea and Cardiff, as well as the smaller Cardigan Bay ports. Liverpool was said to be the base of a thousand herring boats in the mid-nineteenth century though these, according to Robinson, were fast cutters and sloops that sailed from the Mersey to buy the catch all over the west coast.20 They sailed home and cured the catch, ensuring it was barrelled within the requisite three weeks demanded by regulation.21 Holyhead enjoyed a brief flurry of herring activity in the 1950s but this was short-lived. Moelfre, on the east side of Anglesey, was base to a small beach-based herring fleet which survived until the 1960s, with a daily train from the local station that took the fish to Liverpool market. It was said that the Welsh sea captains who sailed the seven oceans in their trading ships, came home for the brief herring season in the autumn, making more money in those six or eight weeks than they did all year. The same was said for all the small Welsh ports and creeks.
The herring fishing survived up to the 1970s when the last ring-net was shot. With a decline in stocks, the European Union placed a ban on herring fishing after Norwegian and Scottish boats clobbered the stocks with their huge purse-seine nets. After the ban was removed, fishing in the Irish Sea was never the same again. Herring were scarce except for sub-species types as caught today at Clovelly. Irish Sea fishermen relied upon trawling for white fish and prawns, potting for shellfish, and mussel, cockle, oyster and scallop fishing to survive.
A fine view of Morecambe Bay nobbies gathered at the Mersey River race in about 2002. These boats that fished for prawns and white fish, sometimes even drifting for herring, have survived well and an active fleet still sails and gathers for annual races around ports of the northwest. Note the beam trawl on the nearest boat. (Courtesy of David Wilson)
The one fish we have not mentioned so far, and one that was once caught in abundance, was the salmon. Generally in these parts, the salmon was fished in the rivers – though in some parts it was fished in drift-nets off those estuaries of the rivers where salmon were known to swim into to spawn – and these rivers saw some varied and ingenious ways of catching what was once a widely eaten fish until stock declines brought about the opposite: the food of the privileged few. There were days when the servant population of the middle and upper classes threatened strike action when they deemed they were being fed salmon too many times a week. Ah, if only we could now made such claims. Instead we see salmon upon salmon lining the supermarket fish counters – insipid farmed salmon containing inferior chemical-fed colourings and antibiotics and other additives on which it is fed to counter the disease from parasites such as sea lice, and bacteria from its faeces. For the home market most is farmed in Scotland and northwestern Ireland by companies today largely Norwegian-owned. Norway, with its fjords of cold fresh unpolluted water, appears to be the market leader in what is a thriving business. Other species such as bream, turbot, tilapia, sea bass, carp and trout are also farmed with success while other fish such as cod are not having the same results.
In the Irish Sea rivers the following methods of salmon fishing are practised: the drift-net in various Irish estuaries, the haff-net in the Morecambe Bay rivers, whammel-netting in the River Lune, draft-netting on the River Dee, coracle fishing in many Welsh rivers, the compass-net of the River Cleddau, and seine-netting in various rivers. In the rivers that feed into the Bristol Channel other methods include the lave-net, stop-net and long-net of the Rivers Severn and Wye, the pitch-net in the River Parrett, the putchers and putts, withy constructed baskets to trap fish, in all these rivers, and the draft-nets of the Rivers Taw and Torridge in north Devon. In Bridgwater Bay the stake-nets occasionally catch salmon. On the Irish side, salmon were caught with draft-nets in the River Boyne where coracles were once used too, and in the southeast, in the Rivers Suir, Slaney and Nore, both snap-nets and draft-nets were used. Draft-nets were basically seine-nets set across the river as were long-nets. For each of these fisheries, a particular boat evolved through usage and thus we have the Lune whammel boats, the Dee salmon boats, the compass-net boats of the Cleddau, the stop-net boats and the long-net punts of the Severn and the Taw salmon boats. Across in southeast Ireland, various different cots worked snap-nets and draft-nets, while coracles and prams worked the River Boyne. Coracles from the Welsh rivers and the Severn and Wye came in various sizes and shapes.
Often a forgotten mode of fishing, trawling for shrimps and prawns in Morecambe used to be practised using horses and carts to tow trawls. Perfect for shallow water trawling, the horses were superseded by tractors in the twentieth century. (Courtesy of Jennifer Snell)
The stop-net, like the compass-net which was the almost same thing on a smaller scale, was unique and both were probably the most interesting and ingenious of all the salmon fishing methods. The stop-net was a bag-net suspended on two 24ft-long pieces of stout Norwegian spruce called ‘rames’. These were held in a ‘V’ by a spreader while weights at the apex of the frames completed the frame. Once the stop-net boat was moored fore and aft to its ‘chain’, one of the many wire warps lying perpendicular to the stream attached to a stake ashore and anchored in deep water, broadside on to the river, the frame was lowered into the tide so that the bag opened up below the boat. Hence the shallow draft of the vessel and lack of much of a skeg which would both entangle the net and create more drag as the boat sits across the current. Five feeling strings were attached to different parts of the net and to a ‘tuning fork’ – a wooden stick – which was held by the fisherman. A wooden prop supported the weighted apex. Once a fish was detected through vibrations in one of the feeling wires which resonated in the stick, the fisherman kicked the prop out – called knocking out – and helped by his weight the net came up out of the water with, hopefully, the fish still in. If so, this was extracted through the ‘cunning hole’ which, when untied, was a concealed entrance to the cod end where the fish ended up. A quick thump with the ‘knobbling pin’ consigned the fish to the thereafter and the net was again tied up and dropped back into the water, propped up to await another unfortunate fish. When the fishing was good several salmon could be landed during the three hours of fishing though when the tide was strong or the water calm they might get nothing.
Coracle fishing was undertaken in pairs, two coracles floating down stream with the current with a net suspended between both vessels. Again feeling strings told the fisherman of the presence of a fish and the net would be hauled up to trap the fish. Haff- and lave-nets were similar in that the fisherman stood in the river, facing the direction from which they assumed the salmon would come, and when a salmon struck the net it was flipped up to trap the fish. The art was in the positioning of oneself in the path of an oncoming salmon. Pitch nets were similar and used in the muddy waters of the River Parrett where the swimming salmon had to come to the surface to clear, and the fisherman then judged by experience where he would surface the next time to net him. All these methods pitted man against fish and those who understood the patterns of the fish tended to gain most and, this in many quarters, was regarded as an art. But, like so many other traditional skills, much of this fishing has disappeared as technology takes over at the expense of skill and overfishing has seen stock
s plummet. Added to the problem for these river fishermen is the angling brigade who are supported by riparian owners who can earn a huge income from them. Licensing authorities, often in the hands of these owners, have reduced both licences and the fishing season while raising the fees for the licences so that those determined to see the traditions kept alive do so at a financial loss. But, other than a bit of trawling, prawning, lobster and crab potting, and mussel, cockle and scallop fishing, that’s about all that’s left in the Irish Sea for the fishermen to take a living from.
Notes
1 See the resource booklet Manx Sea Fishing 1600–1990s published by the Manx Heritage Foundation, 1991.
2 W.C. Smith, A Short History of the Irish Sea Herring Fisheries, Liverpool/London, 1923.
3 Manx Sea Fishing, op. cit., 1991.
4 William Blundell, A History of the Isle of Man (1871), 2008.
5 George Owen of Henllys, The Description of Pembrokeshire (1603), Llandysul, 1994.
6 Guillaume Rondelet, Libri de Piscibus Marinis, in quibus Piscium expressæ sunt. Quæ in tota Piscium historia contineantur, indicat Elenchus pagina nona et decimal. This was the first French work ever published on fish in 1554.
7 Mike Smylie, The Herring Fishers of Wales, Llanwrst, 1998.
8 Colin Matheson, Wales and the Sea Fisheries, Cardiff, 1929.
9 E.A. Lewis, The Welsh Port Books 1550–1603, London, 1927.
10 R. Warner, A Walk through Wales in August, 1797, London, 1798.
11 Thomas Westcote, A View of Devonshire in MDCXXX, Exeter, 1845.
12 Mike Smylie, Herring – A History of the Silver Darlings, Stroud, 2004.
13 Charles Harper, The North Devon Coast, London, 1908.
14 Smith, op. cit., 1923.
15 Mike Smylie, Traditional Fishing Boats of Britain & Ireland, Shrewsbury, 1999.
16 Mike Smylie, Fishing Boats of Cornwall, Stroud, 2009.
17 See Angus Martin, The Ring-Net Fishermen, Edinburgh, 1981, for the full story.
18 Mike Smylie, The Slopemasts – A History of the Lochfyne Skiffs, Stroud, 2008.
19 Sam Henderson and Peter Drummond, Built by Nobles of Girvan, Stroud, 2010.
20 Robb Robinson, Trawling, the Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery, Exeter, 1996.
21 British Parliamentary Papers, Report from Committees on the State of the British Herring Fisheries, 1798.
7
TRAWLING THE SILVER PITS
The ‘Silver Pits’ have, strangely, no connection to the silver darlings, and the only silver to come out of them comes in the form of silver coins. Maybe they should have been named the golden pits, for that was what they became, a source of untold wealth for fishermen – in the short term.
Many charts name this phenomenon the ‘Silver Pit’, as that is exactly what it is: one undersea valley stretching some 25 miles in a north–south direction, the northern end being 28 miles out from Spurn Head at the mouth of the River Humber. This valley, 300ft at the deepest point, lies close to the southern edge of the sandbank known as the Dogger Bank which occupies an area of 6,800 square miles of the southern North Sea, half way between England and Denmark. In contrast to the Silver Pits, Dogger Bank is in effect a large sandbank with depths ranging from 48 to 120ft. The name comes from the dogger, the Dutch fishing boat that resembled something like a herring buss but one that is said to have trawled over the banks in the seventeenth century.
The first documented evidence of trawling as such in Britain comes from 1376 when a device called a wondyrychoun was being petitioned by the Thames ports to Edward III against its continued usage. This was likened to an oyster dredge with a closed-net mesh. A year later what was described as a ‘machine’ which consisted of a 10ft beam with a frame at either end shaped like a ‘cole rake’ and the whole thing was 3 fathoms long. A sketch from 1635 shows a beam trawl affair although there is no sense of size.1 It has been suggested that it was a device imported from the Zuider Zee, another instance of the Dutch teaching the English and Scots how to fish.2
Its use attracted plenty of criticism, and like the ring-net in Loch Fyne in the 1830–1860s, there were plenty of strict regulations enforced and fishermen were fined for using small-meshed nets and ‘unlawful engines’. However, up to the eighteenth century, trawling was confined to inshore waters and sometimes dragged along beaches as happened in Filey. Horse trawling for prawns continues right up to today, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, though nowadays it is tractors not horses that pull the net along.
The beam trawl was described thus in the early 1900s:
The beam trawl was an apparatus consisting of nine distinct parts. These were the beam, the trawl heads, the ground rope, the bosom, the cod or purse, the draw rope, the running pieces, the pockets, and the bridle. The beam was proportionate to the size of the net. The wood usually employed to make it was elm, experience proving that this was the best material. For the smaller beams, which had a length of about 36 feet, it was not difficult to find single pieces of wood which could be used with little or no trimming. If, however, the trawl beam was very large, two or three pieces of elm had to be scarfed together and secured by iron bands. This was the form most commonly seen on the Dogger when the trawling had reached its height. To each end of the beam an iron trawl head was fixed into a socket. A pair of trawl heads stood in relation to the beam as the runners do to a sledge. The lower part was quite flat, the front part being curved and the back and top practically straight. The object of the trawl heads was to keep the beam about three feet above the ground and so afford an uninterrupted entrance to the net itself. The upper part of the net was known as the back, the bottom portion was known as the ‘belly’. The front edge of the back, technically called the ‘square’, was fastened to the beam; but the ‘belly’ part was extensively cut away so as to form a sort of semi-circle on the ground. The middle of this curve or sweep, the ‘bosom’, was thus at a considerable distance behind the beam and in front of the net, the distance, as a rule, being about equal to the length of the beam itself. The ground rope protected what might be called the lower lip of the net. Generally, the ground rope was an old hawser ‘rounded’ or covered with small rope, which served two purposes – to make it heavier and to prevent chafing. But there was a greater object than that to be served, and this was to stir up the ground and so rouse the fish which, as a rule, would immediately make their way into the net, and having once done that, there was little chance of escape. It was essential that the material forming the ground rope should be old, so that in case as obstruction was met – and this frequently happened on rough ground – the rope would be destroyed and the net itself saved.
The net would sometimes have a length of 100 feet, the meshes being of four different sizes, varying from 4 inches square near the mouth to 1.5 inches at the cod end. The net with a length of 100 feet would have a width of 50 feet at the mouth, so that there was an immense triangular bag towing at the bottom of the sea, which, if it came across a shoal of fish, would scoop a tremendous haul. It was a not uncommon for 3 tons of fish to be caught at a time, and on the Dogger I have seen one of the old beam trawls so crammed full with haddock that it could not be hauled; as a matter of fact, the net burst and the dead haddock were as thick on the surface of the water as an icefloe.
The most interesting part of the beam trawl net was in the old days, as it is now, the cod end, for here the fish are found when the net is hoisted inboard and the moment comes for the big bag knot to be unlashed and the catch released. The cod end is a narrow jail for the fish, and once in it and in the pockets there is about as little chance for the creatures to escape as there is for a convict to get out of prison. It must be remembered that the fish are swimming against the tide and that the net is being towed with it, so that, the more they try to escape, the smaller is their chance of freedom. If, however, fish turn about and try to get away from the enveloping meshes, they seek to do so by keeping to the two edges or sides of the net. In this case they are doomed,
because then they swim into the pockets. These pockets, two in number, are placed near the cod end and are made by lacing the upper and lower parts of the net for about 16 feet. Each pocket is practically a reversal of the cod end, and is literally a trap, for the entrance consists of a valve or curtain of netting, called a flapper. This flapper is so constructed that, although it allows free admission to the fish, still, it prevents them from returning. If they turn at all, they must go into the pockets, which are practically inverted cod ends, so that there is no chance whatever for them to escape, especially as fish are constantly entering the net and often enough forming a solid mass.
To the trawl heads, by means of shackles, the bridle was attached, and to this in turn was fastened that important part of the trawl’s equipment – the warp. The warp had a length of 150 fathoms, consisting of two sections of 6 inch rope spliced together.
In the old smacks the trawl was invariably kept on the port side, and when the beam was not in use it formed, with its trawl heads, net and gear, a very prominent feature of the vessel. The great beam usually projected beyond the stern.3
In the same century eating fish became fashionable and, as we all know, when something becomes fashionable on the tables of those able to pay for it, the price rises. And when the price of a commodity shoots up, then the supply has to keep pace and thus those responsible for that supply have to work harder to prosper. Prices thus soar. Out in the North Sea the fishermen had to stay fishing longer hours and developed the well-smack, modelled on Dutch boats that were able to keep the catch fresher longer by keeping it in wells in the belly of their vessel. Long-line boats from Harwich and Barking were foremost at this so that they could stay at sea until the well was full. Harwich was at the time the premier port of this coast, though Barking was later to eclipse it.4 The well itself consisted of bulkheads across the boat to create a watertight box amidships and, with holes drilled in the planking of the boat, the well being flooded by the sea.5
