by Tom Blass
Some would have you think that superstition was a potent feature of the Hessle Road community, which didn’t as a rule give a fish for the Church and used the Bethel (seamen’s mission) for pastoral and sometimes financial, but perhaps less frequently spiritual, support. Alec’s books are full of Hessle lore: how uttering the word ‘rabbit’ or for that matter ‘pig’ or ‘cat’ was about as unpropitious as anything one might do save drilling a hole in the hull. Or wearing a green jumper at sea.
Superstition wasn’t the sole prerogative of the men. Women who practised pyromancy – staring into the grate for augurs of impending doom or the faces of lost fathers and sons – could be identified by the blotches on their fire-chafed shins. And if wives neglected their husband’s dirty shirts and underwear once they’d left for the docks (always by taxi – never seen off by their women, which was bad luck), this was less a symptom of slovenliness than of the laws of sympathetic magic, which turn a tumble dryer into a storm at sea – or at least that’s what was said.
Betty was glad her husband hadn’t been at sea. She had seen how painful the long lonely weeks were for her neighbours before their husbands returned, and how quickly joy could turn to heartache when they did.
The noblest and most distinguishing characteristic of a Hessle Road trawler man (so at odds with the Yorkshire stereotype and the prim East Hullsider in particular) was his profligacy. While their wives drew a living wage from the men’s earnings, any bonus related to a share of the catch was for them to spend as they liked. The hoarding of wealth was so frowned upon and setting to sea with money in your pocket was seen as so unlucky that what hadn’t been spent on drink, women and threads was thrown into the air from the gangplank for children on the dockside cobbles to scramble for. ‘The three-day millionaires, is what they used to call themselves,’ said Betty. (Grimsby fishermen, by contrast, possessed a different attitude to money – although famously for a brief period in the boom years of the 1960s more Rolls-Royces were sold there than in any other city in Britain.)
As we spoke and as she reminisced with Alec, Betty shifted easily between planes of time and place. She declared, ‘We’re hospitable, that’s what we are, on the Hessle Road.’ But it wasn’t the Hessle Road of now to which she referred, but that of the past, which dwarfs it. Moral and other truths danced elusively around each other, at arm’s length. ‘Was life better then?’ I asked. She seemed bemused, made uncomfortable even by the question, and answered with little vignettes of the Hessle Road in its cod-fishing prime which were neither straightforwardly good nor bad.
‘You could tell that a boat was due home cos the women would clean their houses for the first time in a fortnight. Slobs they were otherwise.’ When the men came home they blew their wages and spent three days drinking and fighting and procreating before heading off to sea again. ‘They were wild. But they deserved it. They were heroes. How can you be a hero working in a sticking-plaster factory?’ This was a pointed reference to the medical device factory that briefly absorbed surplus labour around Hessle in the late 1980s.
Now, she complained, ‘the Poles are drunk and fighting by lunchtime. There are addicts all over the Hessle Road. The girls flaunt themselves in the streets. Those big Norsemen are no more to be seen in Rayners.’
Nor indeed was anyone. For it was closed in 2011 on account of mouse infestation. Today’s foreigners, boozers, fighters and tarts are a poor crowd set against yesterday’s.
For all her nostalgia Betty knew that fishing was a brutal trade and one that not all men were cut out for. Traditionally, the route in was to go to sea as a deckie learner, a brutal initiation for a sixteen-year-old into a world not only of elemental danger but also often physical and emotional abuse compounded by home-and-sea sickness. ‘You’d never push a son to go to sea. You’d never want them to anyway. It’s a cruel living,’ said Betty. Heroism comes at a price.
For Hessle Roaders, life skirted around the ever-lurking abyss of loss at sea, a term which cruelly euphemises the agony of bursting lungs, exploding engine rooms or the sudden capsize of a vessel made top-heavy with Arctic ice. A third mate or deckie slipping into the murky blackness or being crushed beneath heavy equipment or nets was as good as routine. But the subsequent ripple of sadness could take a generation to dissipate.
Fishing has always been dangerous – up to four times more dangerous than coal mining by some estimates. In the age of sail, smacks sailing close together for comfort in the North Sea would cripple each other inadvertently. The transformation to steam in the 1880s reduced the likelihood of a sinking, steel hulls being more robust than wood, but the new boats voyaged further, kept longer seasons and experienced new perils: larger, colder seas and a greater likelihood of ice. And the risk of misadventure as a result of fatigue or stress or alcohol was increased by longer trips.
Six hundred and seventy-five Hull trawler men were killed during the First World War, and eighty-five during the Second. During the latter in particular, few of the trawlers were fishing; they had been requisitioned by the navy, so the deaths were in effect on active service during a period when the world had become accustomed to death. And then came a flurry of sinkings that disabused Britain of any notion that fishing was just another job. In 1955 two Hull trawlers, the Roderigo and the Lorella, sheltering from a storm off the coast of north-west Iceland, received a radio message from another vessel, the Kingston Garnet, that its propeller had been fouled, and set out to give assistance. In fact the Garnet had been able to free herself, but the radio message confirming this was lost in the maelstrom.
The weather deteriorated further, the size of the seas such that any course of action other than meeting each wave head on would sink the boats. Two days after leaving their anchorage the Lorella radioed the Roderigo to say that the trawler’s deck was ‘solid with frozen snow. Lads been digging it out since breakfast,’ to which the skipper of the Roderigo radioed back, ‘Same here, George, and the whaleback [the sheltered portion of the forward deck] a solid mass.’ The boats had encountered a freak combination of gales and ice, spray from the waves freezing onto their increasingly top-heavy superstructures. Lorrella radioed, ‘Heeling right over and can’t get back,’ and that was the last that was heard from her. Some hours later, almost exactly the same message, suffixed with, ‘Going over. Going over,’ was heard from the Roderigo.
For decades acceptance of the perils of fishing and the stoicism, taciturnity and social disadvantage of fishing families shielded those who could have improved fishermen’s chances of survival (trawler owners and the government) from blame. But in fun-loving, tie-dyed 1968 a triple tragedy sent a howl of anguish from the north of England to Westminster and beyond, to Harold Wilson’s bedroom window.
In early January a vessel called the St Romanus left Hull’s St Andrew’s Dock and disappeared in the North Sea en route to the fishing grounds of Norway. Inexplicably, though the ship sent out a Mayday distress signal on 10 January, it was a fortnight before a search and rescue operation was launched. Nothing was recovered save a semi-inflated life raft off the coast of Cromer. Then, on the 26th, another Hull vessel, the Kingston Peridot, sank while attempting to take shelter from an impossible storm off Skagagrunn in Iceland. The same number of crew, twenty, died. And in the same week a third Hull vessel, the Ross Cleveland, was knocked sideways while sheltering from a hurricane in an Icelandic fjord. Miraculously (at least that was the word used by the media, by the Icelanders who found him and by his father) a single fisherman named Harry Seddon survived.
A plane full of press arrived in Reykjavik, anxious to understand how, despite being knocked off his sinking vessel, Seddon had been able to climb up a cliff and walk eight miles around the edge of the fjord in drenched and freezing clothes, spending a night in the open before being rescued by a farmer, who warmed him up with mare’s milk and whisky. ‘What was it like?’ ‘What did he think might happen to him?’ The reporters were demanding that he do what fishermen seldom do even for the benefit of their own fami
lies – describe to them his experiences at sea and his fears. In the BBC archive footage he seems bemused by the fuss. The episode was as he had said it had been, no more and no less. What more did they need to know?
To compound the scale of the potential for tragedy, another boat, the Notts County, ran aground, and its crew of eighteen would have been lost had the Icelandic gunboat Odinn, one of the most aggressively engaged against Hull trawlers during the Cod War, not rescued them.
Once more noises were made in Parliament – an inquiry launched, condolences made – but it took a mouthy no-nonsense Hull fisherman’s wife with her hair in a beehive wrapped in a headscarf to force a change. ‘Big Lil’ Bilocca (her husband was Maltese) came to London with a train-full of Hessle Road wives and a petition. She would, she said, ‘camp outside Harold Wilson’s window till he does something’. That was sufficient to force the government to require trawlers to carry a radio operator and to close Arctic waters to British fishing boats in the perilous winter season.
A pedestrian subway once ran from Hessle Road beneath a railway line to the clamour and stink of St Andrew’s Fish Dock. The railway is now the A2381 dual carriageway, flanked with the sub-architectural blight of out-of-town retail. Subway Road (notorious in the good old days as the locus of regeneration) remains, but the underpass is blocked, and the dock has been filled. Where trawlers once jostled gunwale to gunwale scarlet poppies nod on waste-strewn scrub bounded by bollards and capstans. The nearest parking is in the lot of a curious standalone Chinese restaurant, reputedly much frequented by one-time deputy prime minister, John ‘Two Jags’ Prescott.
In 1904 Dr Sharp, his stomach no doubt churning as he set out on his first North Sea trawl, recalled coming to the lock gates, ‘where a crowd had gathered to see us pass out. The gates opened and soon we were moving on the broad, muddy waters of the Humber.’ Those same gates, which counted in and counted out the great fishing fleets heading to the hunting grounds of the northern seas, have been left to rust in a fly-tipped wasteland given to dubious crepuscular pleasures. Sharp had reported of the dock itself that it was
entirely given up to steam-trawlers. Here we may see them tied up two or three deep along the stone sides of the dock with their trawls triced up in the rigging to dry and the great ‘otter boards’ hanging from the davits at their bows. Some are taking in coal and ice, the latter chopped fine and sent into the ice hold on a chute, others are being repaired and painted. If we are early enough in the morning we may see the ‘single-boaters’ from the North Sea and Iceland unloading their fish and shovelling the old ice overboard. Along the north side of the dock, a long shed has been erected, where the fish is landed in baskets. Cod, coalfish, haddock, ling, gurnards, plaices, witches and soles. On the cement floor may be seen great halibut and skate the size of barn-doors dressed and auctioned off to the highest bidder . . .
The only part of that description that still rings true is that the waters of the Humber, tapping impatiently against the quay, remain muddy and broad.
As in the case of the murder of Cock Robin, any number of antagonists could own up to being responsible for the death of Hessle’s fishing community. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the fisheries boomed. Not only was there an insatiable appetite for protein, but the fishing grounds of both the North Sea and much of the North Atlantic had mostly lain fallow for five years or more, and the trawler-owning companies made record profits. But the boom turned into a bust. Having invested heavily in new capacity, the boat owners found that the catches weren’t sustainable. With the end of rationing, cod and haddock competed with battery-farmed chickens and New Zealand lamb for the nation’s appetite.
Geopolitics also wielded a big stick. Since before the Second World War British trawlers had been searching for larger and more reliable fish stocks beyond the North Sea, particularly around Iceland and Norway. But as those countries looked to the seas to fuel their own economic development, conflict became inevitable. What British trawler fleets had come to regard as an unassailable right established by custom was challenged. The first Cod War broke out in 1956 and resulted in an uneasy truce – as did the second in the 1960s. But it was the third chapter in the 1970s which scuppered Hessle Road. This time Iceland played its trump card, its fortuitous position in the North Atlantic between the United States and Russia. The United States had a key airbase in the Icelandic town of Keflavik from which it spied on Russian air defences; and ultimately it was the politics of NATO that did for Hull’s long-distance fleet.
I have heard it said that Henry Kissinger’s arrival at Humberside Airport sealed Hessle’s fate (though it isn’t an episode that his many biographers have dwelt on), the story being that during the course of a Grimsby Town home game, he told the foreign secretary and local MP for Grimsby Anthony Crosland that, in the interests of the Western alliance, Britain should back down and respect Iceland’s unilaterally imposed 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. But it would be too neat to point the finger of blame wholly at Kissinger’s corpulent frame. Britain had negotiated greedily, indeed clumsily, with the wily Icelanders, refusing a generous quota offer which should have more than sufficed, given that fishing, like all heavy industry in Britain, was on the wane as the country sought more sophisticated, value-added livelihoods in keeping with the aspirations of the ‘white heat’ generation. Fish processing came into such a category, slicing and filleting and freezing, coating in breadcrumbs and putting into fancy boxes – which is what Betty found herself doing for much of the 1960s and 1970s, supplementing her husband’s bobber’s wage, and enjoying the camaraderie and economic emancipation that came with her own income. Even during the Cod Wars much of the fish she worked with came from Iceland, arriving in heavy crates lined with polystyrene.
‘Do you know,’ she said as Alec Gill and I were about to take our leave of her nut-brown parlour, with its photographs of her son, who works on an oilfield support vessel on the North Sea, and her daughter, an occupational psychologist, ‘sometimes we’d find stuff written inside the crates. Rude stuff. Once they wrote “F— off, Britishers.” But another time they’d stuck a five-pound note in there, and written, “Buy yourselves something nice, girls.” They was funny times. Very up and down. It’s all gone now, of course.’
Alec and I went to take stock and say our own goodbyes in a fish-and-chip shop within view of the Leggett memorial. I had a small cod and chips and he the ‘Senior Citizen’s Discount Meal’. We started talking about Russia – which he knew quite well, it turned out – and about the Incident, and how things had changed and how they hadn’t. I said I’d settle up and asked for the bill, but when it arrived the girl from behind the counter asked Alec if he’d sign it. There were almost tears in her eyes as she did so.
To me she turned and said (as Betty had), ‘Everyone knows our Alec. He helps us remember what we used to be.’
11
In the Halligen or an Axolotl in the Almost-Islands
[T]his was no magic island but a Hallig of old North Friesland which had been rent into these smaller islands by the great flood of five hundred years ago; the white birds were herring gulls which glided along the shore above their nesting grounds.
Theodor Storm, ‘Eine Halligfahrt’ (Journey to the Halligen)
I first came across the Halligen in a few column inches of newsprint, part of an article about places that might, courtesy of global warming and an attendant rise in sea level, have disappeared within four or five generations. I asked a German friend whether he had heard of them. ‘Are they a small mountain range close to the Swiss border?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re an archipelago of half-islands in Schleswig-Holstein, north of Heligoland and south of Sylt and Amrun.’
‘They are unknown to me,’ he said, and then tittered. ‘They must be very low profile.’
The article was accompanied by a photograph – taken from the air – in which the Halligen resembled green blisters bursting through a grey-blue epidermis. Rooftops were
visible as well as landing stages and roads. They looked like the remotest places in the North Sea – and give or take a Shetland Isle or two, I think they might be.
The boat for Langeness, the Hilligenlei, leaves not from the harbour at Husum but from an out-of-the-way landing stage at a place called Schlüttsiel. As the vessel threads its way as if on cat’s paws through the channels, the cook ladles out big bowls of a rich pea soup, the centrepiece of which is a frankfurter, and proudly displays his trademark trays of Apfelkuchen.
Theodor Storm said of his first approach to an un-named Hallig, ‘In front of us a grey dot now appeared on the horizon, gradually broadening and finally rising up as a small green island before us. A winged guard appeared to surround it; as far as the eye could see along the shore, the air was swarming with great white birds rising and falling through each other in ceaseless silent turmoil . . . It was almost like a fairy tale.’
Formally speaking, Halligness is reinforced by introducing the word before the name of the Hallig; thus Hallig Hooge, Hallig Langeness, Hallig Hamburg, Hallig Grode. Fewer than a hundred people live on Langeness, but it is the most populous Hallig. Some are entirely uninhabited. The full-time population of Grode, all of them members of a family called Momsen, is seven, one of whom is the Bürgermeister.
But a Hallig is not an island – of this their inhabitants (who call themselves Halligers), are uncompromisingly certain. Unlike islands proper, they point out, the Halligen have no rocky core but are merely the remnants of old polders, the rest of which were washed away by the Great Mandrenke of 1362, which killed 6, 000 people, ten times as many cattle, and destroyed the city of Rungholt, the church bells of which (so they say, as do Suffolk people of Dunwich) can still be heard by ships passing on still nights.