A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  So, we’d realised one half-kilo lobster, value about £7. Just about enough to cover the diesel and the bait. ‘Folk think, when they see us landing three or four boxes that we’re millionaires,’ he said, ‘but they forget the poor times like now.’ He pointed to his stack of broken pots on the quay. ‘And look at that lot that needs repairing, and some for sure throwing out … They don’t see the other side, the upkeep of the boat, the bad days when the weather won’t let us out.’ But he loved the job, wouldn’t change it for anything, the freedom, the sea, the danger, the sense of challenge, the solitude, the ups and downs. He smiled a wry grin, though, as he added, ‘but I do still get a holiday or two in Crete’.

  Notes

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

  2 William A. Bingley, A Tour around North Wales Performed in the Summer of 1798, London, 1800.

  3 J.T. Jenkins, The Sea Fisheries, London, 1920.

  4 E.W.H. Holdsworth, Deep-Sea Fishing and Fishing Boats, London, 1874.

  5 Peter Stibbons, Katherine Lee and Martin Warren, Crabs and Shannocks, Cromer, 1983.

  6 J. Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland, (OSA), Edinburgh, 1791–9.

  11

  WAR AND PEACE

  As Big Ben struck 11 p.m. on that night in August 1914, not only was Europe thrown into disarray but, for the fishing industry, it signalled a major change of direction that was to have an effect over the rest of that century.

  The year 1913 was, as it turned out, the peak for the herring industry. From Shetland in the north, down to East Anglia in the south, and throughout the west coast of Scotland, the Irish Sea and parts of northern and western Ireland, herring were still King of the Sea. That year officially some 650,000 tons of herring were landed, among the 1.2 million tons of fish in general landed that year: a colossal amount. In Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft alone, in the fourteen weeks of the season there, 1,359,213 cran of herring was landed, an increase of about 20 per cent from the previous year. The official measure of a cran was a thousand fish but in reality in was closer to 1,300 fish. That year there were 1,165 Scottish drifters fishing the autumnal East Anglian fishery, 854 of which were steam-driven. A third of these came from the Moray Firth port of Buckie. Only Lowestoft had a higher number and the combined British fleet numbered more than 1,800 steam drifters. Each drifter was said to have given work to a hundred people, from the crews, the gutters, dock workers, tug crews, railwaymen, shipwrights, engineers, salesmen, curers, fishmongers, coalminers, coopers, rope-makers, net-makers, sail-makers and others.1 The total catch for England and Wales was two million crans while in Scotland the summer herring produced 1,324,000 crans, a combined total of 3,324,000 crans which is approximately 606,000 tons. Add to this the catch for the west coast of Scotland, the Isle of Man and the smaller catches of Northern Ireland, Wales and north Devon (and some say it was over 700,000 tons). Lowestoft had, on one day, thirty-three drifters landing some 200 cran each, which was a large amount for the trade to cope with. Scotland, during the summer herring, landed 1,324,000 cran.2 The total value of the British exports of salt-cured herring that year were almost ten million hundredweight (half a million tons), with a value of £5.9 million which would be over half a billion at today’s rates. Eighty per cent went to Russia and Germany. The value of the fresh herring sector was £4.5 million, some of which was exported as smoke-cured herring. Fishing, at times, employed a quarter of the working population.3

  A typical east coast of Scotland harbour scene, with boats drying their nets, this being St Monans in Fife.

  Rates of pay for that year were good too. A steam drifter earned an average of £795 while motor boats averaged £365 and sail boats £235. The average value of all fish landed was eight shillings a hundredweight. One estimate is that in total there were 6,500 million herrings landed that year.4

  With the exports to Russia and Germany so high, it’s hardly surprising that when Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, and then Britain declared war on Germany three days later, that the vast majority of that market collapsed immediately.

  But what was the immediate impact of war? On that fateful day, 4 August 1914, there were hundreds of steam drifters, some sailing smacks and motorised vessels fishing as usual out in the North Sea. The order from the government, down via the Admiralty and the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, and to the harbourmasters, was for all fishing boats to return to port by daylight the following morning. This message was to be passed on to all vessels with a wireless set and via other boats that didn’t. For the sailing vessels, whether trawling or drifting, steamers were sent out to pass the message along. Furthermore, any vessel in port was to be prohibited from being allowed to sail. The North Sea was to be cleared to await the great naval battles that were to follow.5

  Two German vessels were detained in Aberdeen. Ironically these boats, a drifter and a trawler, had come in to unload bumper catches. At the same time, four boxing fleets of steam trawlers – the Red Cross, the Great Northern, the Gamecock and the Hellyers – were working the various banks of the North Sea towards the German coast. These were fleeting boats in that smaller boats raced the catch back to port while the trawlers continued fishing and could stay out for a number of weeks. Most skippers and crew did not believe that Britain had declared war on Germany as it had previously been thought wholly unlikely, even if trouble was brewing in Europe. Nevertheless, the fleets eventually made it home.

  The initial attitude of the Admiralty was to prohibit any fishing boat from going to fish in the North Sea though the various fishing grounds of the North Sea were by far the biggest contributor to the supplies of fish. When these dried up within days the Admiralty had to rethink their policy so that, by the end of August that year boats were once again fishing in restricted areas under heavy control of their movements. Steam trawlers had to remain within sight of the coast and be back in port by nightfall, whereas drifters were prohibited from entering ports at night. Both fished at their own risk. Part of the problem was the mining of areas and in late August fishing was restricted to west of a line drawn from the Hook of Holland to Sumburgh Head and in East Anglia south of the latitude of Lowestoft as there was a minefield off Southwold.6 Another problem was that fishing boats were considered to be a convenient disguise for enemy agents to infiltrate ports and undertake acts of sabotage.

  However, the reality of war soon hit home to the fishermen. Two Grimsby boats, Capricornus and St Cuthbert, were sunk by torpedo boats off Spurn Head that month. In early September, the trawler Fittonia, GY390, was sunk by a mine in the same area.7 In the first year of the war, Grimsby lost a total of seventy-three vessels. Nevertheless, the boats continued to bring in the fish, with landings in 1914 of 907,000 tons, which had fallen to a not inconsiderable 390,000 in 1917. Prices had, though, risen on average by four and a half times that of those at the beginning.

  Trawlers and drifters were open to attack anywhere by torpedo boats or submarines. But, after the Russian affair of 1910, some boats were accustomed it. Then the Russian Grand Fleet, on its way to Japan, came across the Gamecock fleet fishing some 200 miles west of Spurn Head. Having been warned of a Japanese surprise ambush, they opened fire on the trawlers and sank one, the Crane, killing the skipper and third hand, wounding several others and damaging two other vessels. After a national outcry and an international commission, Russia was eventually forced to pay £65,000 in damages. The Russian fleet was eventually destroyed by the Japanese.8

  As well as boats fishing in coastal waters, trawlers continued to work in the northern latitudes, around Iceland, the White Sea and Greenland and, although some fishing continued, boats there were sunk by enemy action.

  Throughout the conflict 1,467 trawlers and 1,502 drifters were requisitioned by the Admiralty for minesweeping and patrol duties. Some 394 of these were lost on naval duty during the war (246 trawlers, 130 drifters and eighteen Admiralty trawlers) and the majority of the 2,058 men lost on acti
ve duty were fishermen. As for those that remained fishing, 439 fishermen were killed while working, with 675 boats lost. Of these, 156 were trawlers and 270 drifters. Furthermore, 249 sailing smacks were sunk (127 in the North Sea, sixty-two in the Channel and sixty on the west coast) with the loss of fifty-three lives. Some 178 smacks were sunk by German U-boats surfacing, casting the crew adrift in their small boats and laying charges to scuttle the fishing boats. In the Firth of Forth, on one night in March 1917, a submarine sank eleven small herring boats in this way, leaving one small boat afloat for the crews.9

  In the Channel it was the Dover Patrol that kept the vital routes between England and France open. John Dyson quotes thirteen million men, two million horses, half a million vehicles, twenty-five tons of ammunition and supplies and fifty-one million tons of coal as having crossed over to Dover. The drifters on patrol shot trains of nets made of thin galvanised steel that was intended to wrap around a submarine as it attempted to lay mines in front of troopships. Later they laid mines in a ladder fashion alongside the nets to prevent ingress of submarines. To stop German craft sneaking on the surface, patrols were made day and night which were largely successful in closing the Channel to them. In February 1918, German destroyers did attack at night when the drifters were lit up, and sank seven of them and two trawlers, killing seventy men and wounding hundreds.

  Some trawlers gained recognition for outstanding service during the war. The Gowanlea, FR105, was one such vessel. She operated in the Mediterranean and saw active service in the Adriatic, ferrying troops to Corfu, until she was hit by enemy fire in 1916. However, holed and without a funnel, the vessel reached port for repairs, even though some of her crew had been killed. Credit was given to First Engineer William Noble who kept the vessel steaming at full speed under the most arduous conditions. The Gowanlea later gained repute the following year while standing up to the might of the Austrian navy by firing on a cruiser and escaping sinking, even though her crew had been instructed to abandon ship by the Austrians prior to their threat to sink the ship. She returned to Britain after the war and recommenced fishing, and was sold to Lossiemouth some years later.

  Once the Armistice came on 11 November 1918, fishing began again in earnest though the numbers of vessels available was small compared to those fishing at the start of the conflict. One of the biggest tasks facing the country was to get the requisitioned fishing vessels back into use and this involved stripping out all their war equipment and installing fishing gear such as winches. By the end of June 1919, over a thousand vessels from English and Welsh ports had undergone refitting. On 30 August that year, the Admiralty allowed fishing to resume in all waters around the country except where mines and other dangers classified an area as closed.10

  Such was the performance of these vessels that a building programme for a standardised boat was begun to replace those lost. These vessels became known as the Admiralty standard drifters. However, with the loss of the German markets because of the war and the Russian one after the revolution, the herring fishery never recovered to anything like its level of the beginning of the century. It is said that before the war 97 per cent of herring went for export.11

  The Sprat Fishery

  It wasn’t just the herring trade that suffered from a loss of markets. Take the sprat fishery, for instance, of the estuary of the River Thames and the surrounding Essex rivers, and the offshore sandbanks and channels. These were fished by the fishermen using an ancient method that was at least 500 years old, called a stow-net. At first glance it appears to be a complicated system of a net suspended beneath a sailing smack at anchor. It extends from two baulks of timber, the lower one weighted, attached to ropes called handfleets which were attached to the boat’s anchor chain. This was the mouth of the net which was attached to the baulks and flowed beneath the boat so that the cod-end was somewhere several boat-lengths astern of the boat in several fathoms of water. Using this method great supplies of sprats were caught which, like herrings, were pickled in barrels in towns such as Brightlingsea, which became the sprat centre. Some were sent straight to London or unloaded at ports such as Chatham, Leigh and Southend. In its heyday Brightlingsea firms could process 8,000 bushels a day, a bushel being the equivalent of eight imperial gallons. A barrel held three and half bushels. The pickle they used was a mixture of bay leaves, Spanish hops, cloves, sandalwood, pimento, sugar and salt, dissolved in brine.12

  Before 1914 the boats worked in fleets with a bawley – a square-sterned sailing boat typical of the Thames (see Chapter 12) – carrying the catch to port. There were at least thirty working from Leigh and Southend and, though a little trade continued during the war, these numbers declined. In Brightlingsea it was a case of a growing trade with pickling yards opening. Canning factories also opened, including one in Colchester, and these survived until the 1930s when Brightlingsea’s sprat fishery also declined. By the 1950s the stow-net had disappeared.

  Motorisation

  One of the biggest effects on the fishing industry had come into play during the few years before the war, though its impact perhaps wasn’t as great as it otherwise would have been. This was, of course, the installation of engines into the sailing boats. Although steam drifters and trawlers continued fishing, the latter back in the northern Atlantic waters with a vengeance, motorisation at this stage only affected the smaller inshore craft.

  The fitting of engines into these fishing boats seems to have originated in Denmark years before, in 1895, when a boat had a paraffin motor fitted, but it wasn’t something that took on, probably because of the unreliability of the unit, the cost, the use of steam and the fact that many fishermen were afraid of change.

  In Britain the first vessel to be engined was the 64ft drifter, Pioneer LT368, which came from the Lowestoft yard of Henry Reynolds in 1901. Built on smack lines with a normal rig, she had a 38hp four-cylinder Globe Marine Gasoline engine from Philadelphia, USA that itself cost £680. The overall price of the boat was £1,600 excluding her fishing gear. At first she was viewed with scepticism until she started realising startling results and, in 1905, she earned £788.

  Another Pioneer arrived on the scene in 1905, built at Anstruther to Scottish Fisheries Board requirements and launched with a 20hp Dan engine. At 72ft between perpendiculars, she was a hefty boat and she retained her rig. The foremast alone weighed three tons. A 20hp was obviously not very powerful for such a big vessel though she did make 5 knots in calm conditions. However, the fishermen were not impressed as they could make more speed under sail. The vessel was sailed to the Thames, where various MPs came to inspect her. She returned north for more inspections in Aberdeen and the crew listed several objections with the capstan that didn’t perform well at all. She later went to the East Anglian herring that autumn and fared well, grossing over £479 in almost eight weeks.13 At the same time, other boats were being fitted with engines, such as the 35ft Sheringham whelk boat, Reaper YH34, that had a Gardner paraffin engine fitted. In Scotland, the first real successful conversion was the fitting of a 55hp Gardner engine into the 1901-built fifie, Maggie Jane BK146, from Eyemouth in 1907. On the west coast of Scotland, the Lochfyne skiff, Brothers CN97, was the first to have a Kelvin 7.9hp engine fitted in 1907, while on the Moray Firth it was two years later that the Zulu, the 42-ton Mother’s Joy, was the first one motorised on the Firth, having a Fairbanks-Remington 60hp unit fitted.14

  Peterhead harbour with various fishing boats.

  And so the process of motorisation continued, although, as we’ve seen, there was a flood of auxiliaries fitted between 1910 and 1914. However, that was exactly what the engines were considered – secondary units to help with the hauling of the nets and steaming in and out of the harbours. Reliability was still poor and all boats retained their rig although, in some cases, this was shortened. Figures for 1914 suggest that there were 694 motorised fishing vessels in Scotland that year, an increase of 171 over the previous year, and an overall increase of 613 since 1910.15

  During the w
ar there was a great increase in knowledge and expertise in these engines, mainly directed at the war effort but this enabled better and more reliable units to be manufactured and it is said that by 1919 there were 8,124 fishing vessels in Scotland, and of these, 1,844 were motor boats. But Britain was entering a time of austerity and depression, the herring fishery was not doing well and the fishing industry needed an injection of something to perk it up. Then, from across the North Sea, came another method of fishing that was to completely revolutionise the fishing industry.

  The Danish Seine-Net

  This, then, was the seine-net which, like motorisation, had its origins in Denmark and we will have to go back to 1848 understand it. Not only Britain, this was a mode of fishing that impacted on the fishing fleets all over the North Sea. This is generally recognised as being invented by fisherman Jens Laursen Vaever from Salling in Jutland. Like most of the farmer/fishermen from the Limfjord, after the sea broke through the western sea defences in 1825 allowing cod and plaice to invade, Vaever caught these fish using a Kratvoddet, a large beach seine-net run out from the shore using a small rowing boat and fixing one end of the net to a post. In the same way that the herring fishermen of Tarbert, Loch Fyne, experimented with beach seines to develop the ring-net in the 1830s, Vaever, in the late 1840s, experimented using a net in the same shape as the Kratvoddet, running it out as usual but then hauling the net back to another anchored boat. His first attempt was disastrous, much to the bemusement of the onlookers, although that changed to chagrin on the second attempt when Vaever landed 2,640 plaice. The fishermen working from the beach were happy to land forty or fifty fish, mainly plaice, a day. When Vaever landed 4,000 on his third attempt, there was a rush to follow his example. It is said that over his first two days of fishing he earned enough money for his wedding to Anna Marie Neilsdatter. Vaever was one of the great innovators in the fishing industry of the last 200 years, and in an industry slow to change, this was relatively rare.