A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Icing up was something else: a build-up of ice above deck, on the rigging, anywhere where ice could build up layers and thus increased the height of gravity of the vessel; and the more it crept above the centre of buoyancy, the greater the chance the boat would capsize. And they did, going down without any trace of them, the dreaded news to relatives back home arriving days later with the simple implied message – such and such a boat is missing, presumed lost with all hands. It was a cold, dangerous place to work on top of the long hours, and it has been said that tiredness in some cases resulted in skippers making the wrong decision such as when to seek shelter when the clouds warned of storm conditions on their way.

  In the year up to June 1909 some 222 men who crewed aboard fishing vessels were killed and out of these over half were the fishermen (121) themselves as against the other members of the crew such as skippers (twenty-six), second hands (twenty-one), apprentices (five), boys (three), engineers (fifteen), firemen and trimmers (fifteen), and cooks, stewards, etc. (thirteen). The official figures give individual numbers for sailing and steam vessels and is further subdivided between those registered under Part 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 and those that aren’t – i.e. first class or not. With regard to first-class steamers, the figures still show a total of 110 deaths, almost half of which (fifty) were fishermen. Read further and the cause of death is surprising. For these first-class vessels there were no men lost through founderings that year though twenty-one died in strandings and six in collisions. Ten died working fishing gear, seven were carried overboard or killed on deck and six when throwing ashes over the side. Ten died through ‘miscellaneous accidents’ and one when ferrying fish. Six were drowned returning to their vessel, presumably under the influence when in harbour and one was ‘“found drowned” in rivers, docks, harbours etc’. Three committed suicide, including one skipper and another died of a ‘supposed suicide’. Two were listed as missing at sea and seven died of disease. In all six skippers of steam vessels died, two in strandings, one working fishing gear, one when returning back to the vessel, one in suicide and one from disease. Read what you like into these figures but Walter Howell, at the beginning of his report, states that the total death rate among fishermen was one in 475 while for those registered under Part 1 of the Merchant Shipping Act quotes one in 229.17 Fishing beyond the continental shelf was indeed the most dangerous fishing of all. Compare with the rates in 2010: a total of 12,703 fishermen in the UK and there were five fatalities, giving a death rate of one in 2,541.18

  Notes

  1 M.G. Dickinson (ed.), A Living from the Sea – Devon’s Fishing Industry and its Fishermen, Exeter, 1987.

  2 Evan Jones, ‘England’s Icelandic Fishery in the Early Modern Period’, in D.J. Starkey et al. (eds), England’s Sea Fisheries, London, 2000.

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

  4 Ibid.

  5 Jones, op. cit., 2000.

  6 Robb Robinson, The Rise and Trawl of the British Trawl Fishery, Exeter, 1996.

  7 Mike Smylie, Fishing Around Morecambe Bay, Stroud, 2010.

  8 John Knox, View of the British Empire, more especially Scotland, with some proposals for the Improvement of that country, the extension of the fisheries and the relief of the People, London, 1784.

  9 Charles MacLean, The Fringe of Gold, Edinburgh, 1985.

  10 Dyson, op. cit., 1977.

  11 Michael Graham, The Fish Gate, London, 1943.

  12 Dyson, op. cit., 1977.

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

  14 Dyson, op. cit., 1977.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Excerpt from Toilers of the Deep (1893) as quoted by John Dyson, op. cit., 1977. The piece was entitled ‘The Black Monday Gale’ and occurred in December 1883.

  17 HMSO, Return of the Deaths of Seamen and Fishermen reported to the Board of Trade in the Year ended 30th June 1909, London, 1910.

  9

  COCKLES, MUSSELS,

  YSTERS AND SCALLOPS

  All too often fishing is regarded as being at sea, away from the land, shooting nets or lines and so on down into the sea and landing thrashing-around, bumper quantities of fresh fish, whether it’s by a longshoreman or someone deep-sea. But, away from the excitement (or humdrum for those doing the work), fishing close to and even on the foreshore, still remains an important sector of the job.

  Cockles, mussels and oysters can either be picked fresh from the foreshore or dredged from vessels. Scallops generally are only dredged as they tend to live in deeper water. In Britain 98 per cent of scallops are caught using dredges and the rest by divers.

  Cockles

  There is much archaeological evidence from middens of prehistoric humans eating cockles among other shellfish, as did the Romans. In Australia, such middens have found the Sydney cockle (Anadara trapezia) to have been part of the diet of early Aboriginal humans. In more recent times, the accounts from medieval religious houses prove that cockles were widely eaten. Later on, the consumption of shellfish was regarded as the food of the poor people. Angus Martin mentions that between 100 and 200 horse-loads of cockles were removed from the Barra sands at low water every day of the spring tides over two summers in the late eighteenth century. These were either boiled and eaten out of their shells or stewed in milk and eaten as a soup.1

  According to another source, cockles ‘live in sandy areas … they are collected for sale as food for the public from Barra in the Outer Hebrides to the south coast of England, as well as Ireland’.2 There are four notable areas in which cockle gathering is a distinct commercial fishery: Morecambe Bay, the Burry Inlet in South Wales, the Rivers Thames and Swale, and the Wash. Other areas of somewhat lesser importance, although not insignificant, are the Solway Firth, the Ribble and Dee estuaries, the Lafan Sands and parts of the Menai Strait and Anglesey, parts of Cardigan Bay, the River Towy, parts of Cornwall and Devon and many more sandy estuaries and small creeks.

  Morecambe Bay

  Morecambe Bay is an area about 10 miles across and 18 long, and consists of huge sand-flats at low tide. There’s approximately a 30ft tidal range and the tide can flood in at an enormous rate – once said to be quicker than a trotting horse. It is also an estuary of five rivers – the Wyre, Lune, Keer, Kent and Leven.

  In 1868–69 records show that £2,000 worth of mussels and cockles passed through Morecambe station. The occupation was primarily a family affair, and usually was the job of the women and children. Children were often reported absent from school during the season that was then mostly in winter and spring. Some say the women used to work barefoot throughout the year.

  A tool used for bringing cockles to the surface is the jumbo, which consists of a metal framework of two uprights and a crossbar, attached to a wooden base, about 4ft by 18 inches. Some called them ‘tamps’. All-wood versions have been used for possibly centuries to expose the cockles that lie about half an inch below the sand. They are rocked forwards and backwards to suck the cockles upwards. Both Jenkins and Davis mention them as being used.3 According to Kennerley though, use of jumbos was illegal through most of the year in the nineteenth century for it was believed they damaged the cockles.4 For a period in the twentieth century they were banned altogether.

  Although some used jumbos at times, others looked for the telltale air bubbles in the sand that denote their presence. According to Jenkins, keen observers could spot ‘the siphons of the cockle, the tubes through which the respiratory and food-containing currents of water are inhaled’. Another trick was to tread the sands with the feet, thus bringing the cockles to the surface. It has been said that, at times when the use of jumbos was banned, that children had planks of wood tied to their shoes to stamp around, unseen, to bring the cockles up. A craam, a five-pronged rake, is used to gather the cockles.

  The jumbo purportedly came about after the working mothers brought their babies out onto the sands in their cradles, the rockers of which were seen to bring the cockles
to the surface as they rocked vigorously. According to Wakefield, a woman with a two-week-old baby was heard to say she wouldn’t feel well again until she ‘could get to t’ cockles again’.5

  In those days the only mode of transport available to move the shellfish off the beach was by pony and cart, the pony, according to Wakefield again, looking ‘as if it had been dried in the sand and salt water for centuries’. Horses were also used to drag a shank-net over the sands behind a horse to catch shrimps. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that tractors gradually replaced horsepower.

  In the Report of the Commission on Sea Fisheries 1879, it was estimated that £5,000 worth of cockles were taken from the south side of Morecambe Bay and that it followed that some £20,000 worth were taken from the whole Bay. Furthermore, they were unable to trace any decrease in the yield of the fishery. Thus it must have been a substantial fishery. In 1890, according to Wakefield, 3,162 tons were fished at Flookburgh, at an average price of £2 8s a ton. This was the best year ever known. Three years later it had shrunk to 1,335 tons. In 1895, after a devastating frost that killed much of the harvest coupled with poor demand, the take fell to 822 tons. But the next year it was down to a meagre 50 tons after a minimum size was introduced, although improvement followed, the take increasing to 195 tons the following year. Such is the capricious nature of fishing! However, by 1911, 65,500 cwts (3,275 tons) were taken, indicating a substantial revival.6

  The cockle fishers of Morecambe Bay have received more than their fair share of publicity when, on one cold night in February 2004, twenty-three Chinese cockle gatherers were drowned on the notoriously treacherous sands of the Bay after failing to return from gathering, the blame being attached to unscrupulous gangmasters who sent them out without a thought of the conditions. Only one survived.

  A few years ago I spoke to one of the pickers working on the same sands as the Chinese about the nature of the job:

  We get about five hours out on the sands. Us locals, the British so to speak, go out four hours before low water but some of the others chance it and go earlier. But it can be pretty dangerous out there. We’ve lost three tractors before and that’s £120,000 each. I took one up to the Solway a few weeks ago, but that’s closed now.

  I asked how much someone can earn:

  Price depends on time of year and quality but it’s about £450 a ton right now. Most are going to South Wales just now. Sometimes it’s as high as £1,400. Each bloke picks by the bucket, two buckets to a bag and six bags is the average right now. Sometimes he can get a ton but the pickings aren’t very good at the moment here. But they should recover in May and then the Spanish buyer comes and the price goes up. They should really close this area now.

  The East Coast of England

  In the Wash they used to have an ingenious method of ‘blowing out’ for cockles. For this they needed a boat with a large engine power and a heavy stern anchor. Once anchored firmly on the cockle beds, the backwash from the three-bladed propeller was used to pile up the cockles around the anchor so that they could then be sieved and shovelled aboard the boat once the tide had ebbed. But the Wash fishery, like that of the Thames and the Burry Inlet, is a regulated fishery, not a public one as Morecambe Bay, and therefore is closely monitored by the Eastern Sea Fisheries Committee (ESFC) and ‘blowing out’ was banned in the mid-1980s, largely because it caused a high mortality rate to cockles, and other species caught in the backwash.

  The fishery is today controlled through an entitlement system where there are sixty-four entitlements owned by fishermen which cannot be passed on or sold, but which revert to the Committee when given up. This entitlement enables the fisherman to fish for any shellfish such as mussels, cockles, whelks, clams and oysters. Each fisherman must buy either an annual or monthly licence at least once every two years to keep his entitlement to fish.

  The majority of the cockles taken are dredged, in vessels that must be less than 14m long (unless fishing in a larger boat under the same ownership prior to mid-1991 can be proved) although some is handpicked. The fishery occurs in July and August and is confined to 8 tons per boat per day and fishing continues until the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is achieved. In 2004 this was 1,500 tons and the fishing lasted for about four weeks. According to Rob Blyth-Skyrme of the ESFC, the fishery for 2005 was much lower. When the fishery falls below a level of 70 per cent of a takeable size, it is closed. This takeable or minimum size is 14mm, much smaller than the west coast fishing, and prices are accordingly lower, on average between £350 and £800 a ton. Most is processed in factories in King’s Lynn and Boston, and much is then exported.

  On the Thames, the cockle fishery is centred at Leigh-on-Sea where the fishery has been in existence for at least 200 years. Naval punts, surplus to requirements were used, which were taken out to the cockle grounds and grounded, and then the men raked up the catch before loading up and returning. These were later replaced by sailing cocklers, flat-bottomed boats that were capable of being run ashore where they waited for the tide to ebb before filling the hold. Sometimes they worked a double tide if the cockles were sparse. The 34ft Leigh cockler Mary Amelia, built in 1914 at Southend and now belonging to Jonathan Simper, often used to carry over 4 tons of cockles aboard, with only the top plank showing above the waterline. Just after the Second World War these were replaced by motor cocklers until, in 1967, handpicking was outdated by dredging.

  South Wales

  The South Wales cockle fishery is perhaps the best documented in all Britain, largely thanks to the recent work of J. Geraint Evans who was, until 1991, the curator at the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagins, outside Cardiff.7 The fishery also has the distinction of having some of the finest shellfish in Britain and supplies almost a quarter of that gathered in Britain. Today the Burry Inlet cockle has the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification as a sustainable and healthy fishery, the only one for this species, achieved in April 2001. The MSC, a global, non-profit, independent organisation, is ‘dedicated to reversing the decline in fish stocks worldwide and to encouraging a more sustainable fisheries management through the promotion of its seafood certification and eco-labelling programme’, according to Rupert Howes, the chief executive. Once given accreditation, the product is labelled with the MSC logo, ensuring traceability right back to its fishing. To date, twelve fisheries have been certified, with nineteen more under the assessment process, which together account for some 4 per cent of the world’s total wild fish supply.8

  George Owen mentions cockles, among other shellfish, as being collected in Pembrokeshire in the late sixteenth century.9 When they were first harvested in the Burry Inlet will probably never be known, for it must have been centuries ago. The first documented evidence seems to come from D.C. Davies who gave a paper to the Liverpool National Eisteddfod in 1884 and who noted that ‘some five hundred families find employment; and the cockles and mussels taken are valued at over £15,000 a year. One little village, it is said, passes £2000 a year through the Post-office.’10 Much of the catch was taken to the market at Swansea where the cockle sellers, women in flowing Welsh costume, were well known. Others went selling house to house, carrying baskets on their heads. Local lore has it that they walked in bare feet until reaching a particular bridge on the outskirts of Swansea, at which point they put on their best, and only, pair of boots.

  In 1910 there were 250 pickers and these were almost exclusively women from the surrounding villages of Penclawdd, Croffty, Llanmorlais, Gowerton and Loughor – probably even the same women who sold the catch. Again they used a small rake or cramm, different from its Morecambe counterpart in that it had seven prongs, a small knife and a sieve. Whether the difference in spelling between ‘craam’ and ‘cramm’ is regional or erroneous is unclear. Net-bags were used at one time but banned in 1996 in favour of rigid sieves. Today little has changed and only hand-raking is allowed.

  There are in fact two cockle fisheries under the jurisdiction of the South Wales Sea Fisheries Committee (SWSFC) after it was giv
en the powers in 1965. The first, the Burry Inlet fishery, is carefully regulated with fifty-two licences being sold each year to, first, those fishing the previous year, and then any remaining to those on a waiting list that, currently, has 180 people on it, proving the popularity of the fishery even if a licence costs £684. The fishery, which covers the area of the inlet between Loughor Bridge and Pembrey Harbour, is open all year round, except for Sundays and at night. Each person has a daily quota of 250–350kg, depending on the level of stocks and other factors determined by the authority.

  The other area is called the ‘Three Rivers’, these rivers being the Towy, Taf and Gwendraeth, and is the area north of line between Tywyn Point in the east and Ginst Point. Again there is a history of fishing in this area with, in 1910, 150 people active at Ferryside, fifty at Laugharne, fifty at St Ishmaels and twelve at Llansteffan. Matheson gives a landing figure of 9,949 hundredweight at Laugharne, worth £1,741 in 1925 and 25,905 cwt at Ferryside worth £4,532.11

  Today, however, unlike the Burry Inlet fishery, this is a public fishery so that all that is needed is a no-cost permit from the SWSFC on demand, similar to the system at Morecambe. As Phil Coates, the chief executive of the SWSFC, says, they have no powers to charge even an administration fee for these permits. From the table below it will be seen how, up to 1998, important the Three Rivers cockle fishery was. The minimum size for both these fisheries is that cockles must be unable to pass through a sieve of 19mm by 19mm mesh. Interestingly, according to Phil Coates, jumbos were at one time used at Ferryside, although the Committee prefer to see hand-raking as the only means of gathering the fish. The practice didn’t seem to last that long, although he did state that, technically, their use is not illegal. Because of the different nature of the sand, and the fact that the tidal range is lower, the only assumption is that they are not as effective here as they are in Morecambe Bay. J. Geraint Jenkins shows a hand-pulled cockle dredge in use on the west side of Carmarthen Bay in the 1950s with some success, and another unsuccessful attempt was made to reintroduce this form of dredging into the Llanelli beds in the mid-1960s.