by Tom Blass
Iris’s plight had a gravitational force of its own, drawing in others like Sven, Frank and Andreas – who had designs on Iris himself judging by the way he tried to crowd in on her. Frank was a cooler character. With the upright bearing of a nautical man he looked physically tough, not menacing but fit and strong. It was said that when Frank was not managing his bicycle shop in Bremerhaven he was quite possibly the best sailor in the German North Sea. Was this true? I asked Frank. ‘Neh, not the best,’ he replied, ‘but I have the heaviest balls.’
He put his hand in his trouser pocket and rattled them to prove the point. At four in the morning Frank and I were talking about The Riddle of the Sands. It was a good book, Frank thought, but not half as good as the book he could write about the sea if only he was able to describe his thoughts. He had been drinking hard but wasn’t drunk. At six he would return to his twenty-eight-foot yacht docked in the quay and catch an hour’s sleep, and at 7.30 would slip anchor. The glass was falling. Rain was forecast. Frank’s assessment of his own worth began to sound like a statement of fact.
My own departure from Heligoland lacked the Sturm und Drang of Frank’s. I was also returning to Bremerhaven, but on the little Islander twelve-seater plane which comes and goes once a day and is pleasingly like a minibus, and from which, as it bounced up to altitude, the island looked so much less than the sum of its parts, like a remote straggle of godforsaken rock a very long way from anywhere. It seemed improbable that such a place could ever have generated the piles of paperwork I’d seen in the archives, or that upon it had ever hinged the fate of a continent. Yet all this was true. As for my quest to discover what it meant to be a Heligolander, I felt like the woman in the W. H. Auden poem who asks to be told the truth about love, receives many answers but emerges little the wiser.
In Krebs the night before, in a brief intermission from Iris’s all-consuming histrionics, Sven and I had discussed the bombing of Heligoland and Germany generally. Fiercely patriotic, he told me that Bomber Harris ‘was in the same circle as Goebbels and Himmler and Goering’. I was unsure whether he was saying this as a German or a Heligolander – he is Scottish on his mother’s side. He considered this carefully and slowly and sagely wagged an index finger. ‘Let me tell you something about Heligoland,’ he began. Then his eyes closed and his head swayed on its gimbals. He was out for the count. Outside I could hear the sea thrashing furiously at the cliffs, whittling them into submission. One day, I thought, Heligoland will become Atlantis again; Krebs will be found at the bottom of the sea, with Queen Victoria’s portrait and the bombs and the wrecks. But for the moment it contends with Michael Bates’s gun turret for the status of the smallest would-be nation in the North Sea.
10
A North Sea Outrage
I miss those brave young fisher kids, coming home to shore,
Spending all their money, then going back for more.
I even miss Criterion – a very quiet pub –
And a little lass from Subway Street our kid put in the club
Dave Williams, ‘Good old Hessle Road’
The Hessle Road district is a working-class suburb of Kingston-upon-Hull built on the banks of the Humber River as it leads out onto the fishing grounds of the North Sea. Two generations ago the Road was synonymous with fishing, and one way or another almost all the inhabitants of its little red-brick terraces had some connection with Hull’s deep-water trawlers, as fishermen, or working on the quayside as bobbers unloading the heavy crates of ice-packed fish from the holds of the boats, or in the warehouses or repair yards. And if they didn’t, they depended on the custom of the fishing community – big spenders who liked to dazzle.
In the very middle of the district there stands a statue to a fisherman called William Leggett. It isn’t a very polished piece of work – he appears clumsily constructed and there is something about the way he holds his binoculars in the air that is jarring but charmingly gauche. But, unlike the obsidian memorials to long-dead generals that blight so much of central London, everybody in Hessle knows that ‘the Fisherman’ remembers a curious incident (which has rippled through successive decades) that occurred on the night of 21 October 1904 – the ninety-ninth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.
The Gamecock Fleet – one of Hull’s largest, indeed one of the largest in the United Kingdom – of forty-six steam-driven beam trawlers (so named for the way they dragged the trawl from the beam and not the stern) had enjoyed a good two days’ fishing since setting out from St Andrew’s Dock in Hull on the early tide the day before. It was a box-trawling fleet, utilising a system whereby the boats cruised the grounds together, the fish being packed into boxes transferred each day to a cutter, a fast boat that made the run back to Billingsgate, Hull or Grimsby with the catch and then returned for more. Box trawling allowed the fleet to travel further and to stay out for longer, while delivering a fresher catch. And it relieved all boats bar the cutter of the need to carry space-consuming ice.
That night a forgiving sea and absence of gales allowed for routine maintenance, net-mending and fish-packing to be undertaken at an easy pace, and had put the crews in a relaxed mood. These were highly professional fishermen. The previous year an American zoologist, Dr Benjamin Sharp, had trawled with the same fleet and found them ‘a fine set of fishermen . . . all young men and a hardy, jolly lot’, who sailed with almost no nautical instruments other than a log, a compass and barometer, and depended on instinct and sea-lore accrued over generations. The captain and mate of the vessel on which he had sailed were no more than twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, and Sharp heard ‘no profanity and I do not believe that it was due to the fact that a stranger and an American was among them’. He noted that at all times they adhered to the very highest standards of navigational etiquette, showing the requisite coloured lights to indicate when they were trawling, while at frequent periods the ‘admiral’ of the fleet would let off flares and rockets to indicate his position and that of the trawls. Quite possibly, it was these rockets that determined what would happen next.
Unknown and of no concern to the fishermen of the Gamecock Fleet, far away in the (even icier) waters of the North Pacific the two nascent modern powers of Russia and Japan were battling for influence and territory in China and Korea, and Russia’s Baltic Fleet under the command of Admiral Rozhestvensky had three days previously left the Latvian port of Libau to strengthen naval forces some 18,000 miles distant. Rozhestvensky’s fleet was in skittish mood. Rumours of Japanese torpedo boats in the Baltic, and even possibly a minefield, had been dogging it even before departure, and it made progress slowly, zigzagging quixotically to avoid non-existent hazards – its course culminating in an encounter, on the fishing grounds of the Dogger Bank, with the fishermen of Hull.
When the fishermen saw the silhouettes of warships through the mist they thought them to be the Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet, and stopped to watch what they presumed to be a set of manoeuvres. What happened next was quite unexpected. Hull’s trawler men were accustomed to violence. Sometimes there were spats with fleets from other ports, both British and foreign, over fishing rights or even over whether it was permissible to fish on a Sunday. But now they found themselves caught in an inferno of smoke, deafening noise and shell-churned sea, the whole illuminated by powerful spotlights, in the glare of which they were held by the Russian ships.
The political and strategic temperature of the North Sea had been warming for some years. The effect of The Riddle of the Sands on the British public was still palpable. But the prospect of the Dogger Bank becoming, however fleetingly, a theatre of war between two powers fighting in the Pacific Ocean seems, even in hindsight, highly improbable. Although to the Russians it made perfect sense that the Japanese would attempt to prevent them sending reinforcements from the Baltic by ambushing them in the North Sea.
The shelling lasted a terrifying twenty minutes. The trawler men held up fish to demonstrate the harmlessness of their activities, but the Russians stopped only t
o turn their fire on vessels of their own fleet which they also mistook for Japanese craft. Two trawler men, George Henry Smith (of Flora Street, Hessle) and William Leggett (of Ribble Avenue, a stone’s throw from Flora Street), were decapitated by shells. Two others were injured, one losing his hand and the other’s thigh smashed open by shrapnel. One of the trawlers, the Minto, was sunk, and the remaining vessels limped back to Hull in a state of shock. Word of the events somehow reached home even before the trawlers did, and by the time they were safely inside the Humber the whole community had lined the wharfs to greet them.
Briefly the sense of outrage was so intoxicating that the British Home Fleet was ordered to sea, and the Russian ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office. In a letter to The Times Joseph Conrad described the incident as ‘so extraordinary, so amazing, that it passes into the region of fantasy that borders on the incredible’. For the trawling community (whose Promethean struggles inhabited the realm of the fantastic as a matter of course), it was as unforgivable as it was bizarre. But the Russians were bemused – ever so slightly hurt perhaps – by the fact that the affair had caused such outrage. An officer on board one of the warships wrote to his wife, ‘As a matter of fact they were to blame themselves. They must have known our fleet was coming, and they must have known the Japanese wished to destroy it. Why did they not cut adrift their nets? The nets could be paid for afterwards.’
On the Hessle Road – Hull’s fishing community in spirit even now – the matter has not been forgotten. The Royal Antidiluvian Order of the Buffaloes, to which Leggett belonged, raised a memorial to him in 1907, and thus, in a prominent position on the main Hessle thoroughfare he still stands, cast in white concrete and set upon a red marble plinth. The Russians took their time to put things right. At a centenary event in 2005 a Russian naval attaché laid flowers at Leggett’s feet and made a speech apologising for the miscalculations of his former colleagues.
My introduction to Hessle Road was through Hull writer and historian Alec Gill. I was fascinated by the documentary photographs he’d taken in the 1970s and his accounts of the last years of Hessle as a working town, so I tracked him down – not to Hessle but to a terraced Victorian house close to the centre of Hull, where he lives with his poetess girlfriend, Andrey, who writes verses celebrating the North Sea, the city, the river and the low flat fields.
Alec is not a tall man. Born with a congenital curvature of the spine and afflicted by retarded growth, he was sent to a school for the mentally infirm as a child. There he acquired a reputation as a Machiavellian fixer of gang fights, putting his keen intelligence to use in staying out of trouble himself. Now he lectures in psychology and English at Hull University, writes books about the ‘old days’ and collates photographs of Hull before bombs and maniacal development reduced it to the hodgepodge of theme pubs, outlet malls and university buildings it has become.
‘I’m happy to show you around. If you could put a wee bit in the kitty for the petrol, you know . . . I am a Yorkshireman after all.’
Hessle’s trawler men once provided Britain with as much as 20 per cent of its protein intake. It lies on the western edge of Hull by the old fish docks, and has the familiar feel of other red-brick northern towns. In the high street, supermarkets have failed to displace a butcher, a bakery selling stotty cakes, several proper fishmongers and a plethora of bookmakers. If Hessle has moved with the times, it is to meet the needs of its growing Eastern European population (it boasts several Polski Sklep – Polish food shops) and to provide that ubiquitous and mysterious service, ‘mobile phone unlocking’. There are patches of economic gangrene in the form of empty shops and boarded-up pubs, but otherwise it appears almost thriving, at least compared to the glossy soulless retail outlets in the city proper. But as a cohesive, singular community bound together by a common industrial activity Hessle Road is dead.
Behind the high street lies a warren-like cluster of terraces with small front yards. Swathes have been demolished to make way for factories which are now closed, but those remaining are largely unchanged since the days of the Dogger Bank Incident, once allowance has been made for satellite dishes and cars. There have been other alterations. In The Fishermen, a 1962 book about the local community, Jeremy Tunstall described the old fish-curing houses ‘with their tall kippering ovens [giving] the Hessle Road its distinctive and characteristic skyline, and their black smoke [helping] to thicken the winter fogs’, but these are long dismantled and the fogs cleared.
It’s too easy to over-endow this community with a kind of continuity that it never quite possessed. Fishing here began with men in small boats trawling the Humber for their own consumption, seldom needing or daring to venture beyond Spurn Point. As an industry it was greatly eclipsed by shipbuilding, whaling and docks. By the mid-nineteenth century southerners had started to settle: fishermen in large, tan-sailed, black-hulled, sharp-bowed smacks from Brixham in Devon and Ramsgate in Kent, who came to mine the Silver Pit, a crater in the North Sea bed which brimmed with quantities of sole that could seemingly scarce be dented.
The extension of the rail network to Hull enabled fish to be transported quickly and more or less hygienically to the insatiable bellies of Leeds and the mill towns, and thus, as the national appetite for fish increased, so did the burgeoning population of bobbers, women to fix the nets, shipwrights, ice makers, gutters and smokers. Expansion accelerated further in the 1880s, when fishing made its sudden, brutal transition from sail to steam, pulling in droves of engineers from the rail industry and sucking the life out of the traditional fishing towns of the north, like Staithes and Robin Hood’s Bay, which, though blessed with picturesque winding lanes and cottages, lacked the large deep-water quays the new larger boats required. Hessle Road developed rapidly and acquired a sense of its own apartness, by dint of social lore, proud indifference to the snobbery of outsiders and of course a shared dread reverence for the sea.
It was on Ribble Avenue, one of the low-rise residential streets that turn off Hessle Road (and upon which once lived William Leggett), that we met Betty Cullen, her arms folded on her front gate, chatting to a nonagenarian neighbour with a baby-soft face and hair like the fluff on a dandelion. Both were happy to share their acquaintance with long waits on cobbled docks, often in anticipation of grief. For dozens, even hundreds, of Hull trawlers have been lost since the sinking of the Minto.
Betty was the daughter of a trawler man and the wife of a bobber. She was as trim as a stoat and fond of her fags and remembered that the Russian attaché was ‘a very handsome man’. But his visit was ‘long overdue . . . We’ve got long memories here on Hessle, very long memories.’
Indeed, she said, waiting was ingrained into the lives of Hessle women. They were always waiting, for good news or bad. ‘We’d be at the lock gates waiting for hours to see the lights on the boats as they came up the mouth of the Humber. The news [of the loss of one or more vessels] would come, and the entire community would shudder.’
I couldn’t help thinking that Betty was recalling those occasions with mixed emotions – grief but also the togetherness of that shuddering. She said that she thought Leggett’s statue now stood not only for what happened on that night in 1904, but for all the mishaps that the Road has endured, which have kept the community strong. Although the fishing has died now. ‘Is that a tragedy also?’ I asked. She wasn’t sure.
Alec told me later that it was now a rare thing to be welcomed into a house, as we were Betty’s. It was reached through an alley to a small yard in which grew a clematis. She apologised that the alley had a gate, but the council had put it up after drug addicts had defecated in it. ‘That’s how things have changed around here . . .’
In the early 1960s Tunstall wrote of houses like Betty’s,
Each has two bedrooms and from the front one you can just about spit onto the doorstep of the house opposite . . . The lavatory is outside in a small yard, with a narrow back alley behind. The front door leads straight from the terrace into the front ro
om [but often] the family lives all its communal life in the back room. Here is a table and chairs, a radio and usually a television, a budgerigar in a cage and except in mid-summer a coal-fire burning in the grate. The walls of the house are very thin . . . Intimate sounds come through the walls.
Then, overcrowding was endemic. A family of fifteen in a two-bed house was not unknown, and nor were domestic violence, alcoholism and all the other vices attributed to poverty in industrial towns. Betty, though, was all alone in a house that seemed spacious if a little gloomy. She offered us tea and a biscuit and the news that she was recovering from bowel cancer. Her husband, a former bobber (‘Well, they say you marry your father, don’t they?’), was in a home. Alec Gill she seemed to regard as both father-confessor figure and favourite son. They hadn’t met before but, she said, ‘Everyone knows about our Alec.’
While I sipped my tea, soporific on Betty’s oversize sofa, the two of them waltzed a soft carousel of shared memories – individuals, incidents – each increasingly iconic with the passage of time. They remembered Rayners, where fishermen from across the North Sea and beyond would meet to drink and fight and pick up whores: ‘Not just our boys; Dutch fishermen, Icelanders when we weren’t at war . . . The Danes loved our prostitutes. Lovely girls. They’d just sit quietly in the back room, sipping a Coke.’ (There were also, although it wasn’t Betty or Alec who told me this, other clubs, where fishermen went to meet fishermen.)
Betty was, she said, ‘an embodiment of Hessle history’. She laughed through a throaty cough. Her credentials were impeccable: beneath her bed she kept, wrapped in tissue and carefully boxed, the caul in which she was born – a relic believed by superstitious trawler men to confer such extraordinary luck on those who possess one that they are prepared to offer incredible sums to buy them. ‘It’s my rainy-day fund.’ She laughed again, eyeing the Embassy cigarettes on the mantelpiece she was too polite to smoke in our presence.