by Tom Blass
Up at the tip I met three Chinese girls. The night before, in a pizza joint, I had amused them by trying to speak Mandarin, so we spoke a little more. Learning I was from London (they had recently arrived in Denmark from Beijing and were studying business administration in Aarhus), they immediately wanted to know whether I had ever met Dr Who. ‘He is so cooool!’ they shrilled. I took their pictures, and they took mine with my battered Leica, bemused by the fact that it was impossible to review the image once the shutter was fired. I left them to flirt with the white horses and wandered back towards my bicycle by way of the old bunker.
Now it was actually cold, though there were few clouds, and the sky kept its enamelled sheen. It came to me that the men in suits (the first had been joined by others, and young women in nice dresses, all stoically gripping flutes of champagne) made up a wedding party. Had they been here only yesterday they could have recreated something of the romance of the old days – toasting the bride as she tiptoed on the shore of the Baltic, bowered by blue and serenaded by gentle waves that snored like children as they crept back and forth upon the sun-warmed sands. But they huddled against the concrete, looking cramped and uncomfortable.
I stole glances at them as I carried on, labouring against the wind and, reclaiming my bicycle, took a different path back into Skagen, one which took me by chance along the Sonderstrand, the beach upon which P. S. Krøyer painted Marie and Anna. Looking north, it was unchanged from its depiction in scores of paintings by the Skagen set – broad, peaceable, other-worldly – but at its other end abbreviated by a giant fishmeal factory, the smell of which is like that of cat biscuits, diluting the breeze that rolls across the marram grasses.
Skagen, I thought, is the place where not only two seas but also two Denmarks meet, sometimes but not always without rancour. I held my nose and let my gaze rest on the kindly blues of the Baltic.
13
The Fishing Game
‘Just as when you’re doing well, and hoping for a throw that will land you on top of the board, damned if you don’t hit a snake, and come down to the bottom, and have to start all over again; while the chap who’s missed every ladder, and hit almost every snake, lands home.’
‘Marney’ in Leo Walmsley’s Three Fevers
Fish are political beasts. They can make or break a man, a town or even a nation in a way no other animal can. And they do so with scarcely a thought.
The office of the last trawler fleet in Grimsby is located at the southern end of the town’s old fishing quarter, long known as the Casbah, reflected the bustle of its oriental-esque labyrinths and booths. A plain-fronted 1920-something building, even the interior has changed little in decades. Coffee-coloured tiles line the passages to waist height. The first-floor landing meets visitors with a white hatch, above which is written the word RECEPTION, and before this I waited, hesitating to knock.
My own tentative steps up the ill-lit uncarpeted staircase were followed by those of a real-life trawler man clad in oilskins and boots. He barked loudly to announce his arrival. The noise – guttural, unintelligible (at least to me) – elicited the opening of the hatch and revealed a pretty girl in a white blouse. She smiled. The man handed over a plastic bag. ‘There you go, love,’ he said. ‘Nice bit of cod for your tea. And a bit for Andy.’
The hatch closed on the smile, and the heavy tread descended the stairs. A few minutes later, Andy Allard, chief executive of the Jubilee Fishing Company, last trawler owner in Grimsby, greeted me with a firm handshake. A large sandy-haired and clear-eyed man in a smart cream suit and white shirt, he didn’t look like the anachronism I was expecting to meet. His was a hereditary role, one that he might not have willingly sought out, though it looked as though he’d grown into it comfortably, if wistfully.
Andy’s office was panelled in oak. A large map of the North Sea showing the fishing grounds, hazards, lightships and channels and the approximate positions of his vessels at any given time hung behind his desk. Elsewhere, the walls were hung with grainy photographs of members of the fishing dynasty of which he is a scion, and the boats that made it wealthy.
There were concessions to modernity: a 1970s gas fire, in front of which slumped a pair of old sea boots like hounds worn out from the hunt, and of course there was a computer on the desk separating us, the trawler owner and the writer.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘let’s see what we can do for you. OK?’
There was only so much that Andy Allard needed to say; his office window overlooked the fishing-dock basin, which was as good as empty. He handed me a photograph of the dock in the glory days. At least one hundred trawlers, berthed like sardines in a tin, where now there was only one. Back then, like St Andrew’s Dock at Hull, Grimsby’s great rival, the Casbah had rattled and groaned with smoking and curing, boat repairing and outfitting, bobbing and lumping, filleting, packing and crating. Today it’s like a North Sea Pompeii, sufficiently well preserved to allow some glimpse of what it once was, but its residents, bar ghosts, are now on a permanent leave of absence – almost.
The trade is still important to Grimsby. There is a daily market, fish arrive by both truck and boat to be bought by the local merchants, who send it on to Billingsgate and restaurants around the country. They make judgement calls on the quality of the fish based on what they know about the trawlers, how long they’ve been at sea, how and where in the hold the fish was packed. Each trader has its market niche. CCS Fish Company specialises in dogfish – a fine eating fish, cooked quickly in batter or baked. Others look for less-than-premium fish for the fish-and-chip trade. Next door to CCS, Peter Guest & Sons sells Danish foods, and not just fish but also cookies and packet soup. Grim, founder of Grimsby, was himself a Dane. Trawler-loads settled in the war. There’s a lot of Danishness on the Lincolnshire coast.
And there is a handful of smokeries, slow-smoking haddock against the headwind of a changing national palate. Even Richard Enderby of the Enderby Smoke House seemed to have lost his taste for it. ‘To be frank with you, Tom,’ he said, having shown me ranks of spatchcocked haddock laid out on ancient racks in his ‘heritage’ smokery, its walls bubbling with decades of tar, ‘I’m a bit fed up of the whole thing really. The price of haddock is up because the Icelanders are keeping it to themselves. The EU quotas are tightening. And people aren’t eating smoked haddock like they used to.’
It might be, he said, because they don’t know how to cook it properly. Bring a pan to a boil, literally put it in and take it out, then pop an egg in to poach, put it on the haddock and tuck in. Or it might be because, in a Britain agog with exotic taste sensations, haddock and egg isn’t the teatime treat it was once.
Grimsby is in limbo, a fading damsel waiting for a second chance. Energy from wind is the ‘next big thing’, but even the ‘renewables’ strongest proponents don’t deny that it’ll never restore the town’s fortunes. All the while the Victorian dock buildings are crumbling into the most delicious state of dilapidation. The most magnificent of all of them, the gargantuan red-brick ice factory, is being willed to death by its owner, Associated British Ports, which cannot think quite what to do with it, lacking both the money to fix it and the stomach for a fight with the heritage lobby. And Richard Enderby would really like to chuck it all in to take photographs of the Wolds.
Over 230 species of fish live in the North Sea. Cod and herring are the most economically important – certainly on account of their tastiness, but also, in the case of cod, the ease with which it can be dried and thus preserved, and in that of herring brined or pickled and its longevity equally well assured. Haddock, plaice and sole arguably constitute the other members of the North Sea ‘big five’, and then of course there are turbot, whiting, tope, pollock and bream, not to mention the blue-mouthed redfish, the very poisonous weaver fish, the delicious but easily bruised saithe, the hooknose, the witch, the scaldfish, bullrout and megrim.
Few other fauna have been as meticulously investigated as those with fins. Since pre-scientific days men have
strived to anticipate their movements. When and where would shoals appear? Why would they disappear just as suddenly? When they went, where did they go? Stubbornly they still refuse to be understood. Rays and sharks prefer the east coast of England to the continental coast but no one knows why, just as biologists puzzle over what it is that causes Ray’s bream, a grumpy-looking little fish that wears a permanent frown, to throw itself plentifully onto the beaches of Yorkshire in some years and fail to show up at all in others?
Making sense of the North Sea ecosystem is difficult because there are so many variables. Taking large quantities of a predator species (and most fish are both predator and prey) increases the numbers of smaller fish – and perhaps some of their other predators, given that extra prey are released. Closing down a herring fishery can result in a spike in the numbers of cod, because herring eat cod spawn. And catching fewer cod has a similar effect on herring, because cod eat herring. Yet no one is certain as to how the mechanisms function because so many other considerations play a role. Fish swim within a column of water which is forever moving, driven by tides and currents. Unusual currents and incursions from the Atlantic can do extraordinary things to populations. And there are the great unknowns: some years fish fail to show at all, killing communities with economies premised on their regularity.
There are also mysteries as to how the first North Sea peoples engaged with fish. These early inhabitants of the shore appear to have had little need to venture far out to sea to profit from it. The most enduring archaeological evidence of human seaside snacking is in the form of middens or piles of opened mussel and oyster shells. As the Neolithic appetite for fruits de mer became more cosmopolitan, people began to exploit the tides and the forces of rivers, building fish traps and weirs, erecting walls of stones on beaches which trapped fish when the sea retreated. The evidence is quite scanty, not least because the Ice Age altered the coast so substantially, but there are beguiling glimpses: the incised depiction of a fish on a Neolithic pig bone, traces of hazel and dogwood fish traps and sinker weights.
Archaeologist Robert Van de Noort has described the homes of such seashore dwellers : ‘a habitation area with hearths immediately above the shore, with refuse and the odd damaged log-boat on the water front, and wicker fences with basketry fish traps running out from the shoreline’.
In our minds land and sea exist as opposites, but around the edges of the heavily tidal North Sea space changes identity every six and a half hours, existing in a permanent state of in between, the ebb tide revealing acres of rich mud or sand traversable by foot until the flood. Spring and neap interfere with what can seem like a kind of wilful arbitrariness. And in places – though their extent is much reduced by drainage and the cutting of reed beds – the North Sea imposes itself on land, in the pockets of the English fens that lie beyond the Wash or the islands of the German coast. In these wetlands, so archaeologists believe, early man travelled as much by log boat as on foot, just as the Iraqi Marsh Arabs used reed boats before the vindictive draining of their environment by Saddam Hussein.
The rock engravings at Tanumshede tell us that by the Bronze Age fisher-people were voyaging far from the coast with line and hook. Mummified piles of fish heads and tails uncovered in Friesland add that the fish were being dried, smoked or otherwise cured and transported elsewhere. Pliny said disparaging things about the ‘fish-eating’ Chauci who inhabited the area – perhaps because his own more ‘civilised’ kind (though otherwise Catholic in tastes) appears to have never acquired a taste for North Sea fish. The Romans settling in Gaul and Britain imported garum (fermented fish sauce) by the amphora-full and salted Spanish mackerel, but never took to turbot, ling and skate.
By the Middle Ages, fish had literally gained new currency. ‘Sterling’ is a corruption of ‘easterling’ – herring from the Baltic or the ‘Eastern’ sea. Ecclesiastical institutions demanded tithes and other taxes to be paid in herring. The self-same fish sustained not only coastal communities but settlements deep inland whose inhabitants might never set eyes upon the sea themselves. A large shoal of herring can be made up of three or four billion individual fish and a cubic mile or more of sea. ‘Herring’ itself comes from an old German word meaning ‘army’ – apposite given their ability to tool the destinies of nations.
The greatest, most dazzling accomplishment of the herring is the financing of the golden age of the Dutch Republic and is thus responsible, it could be said, not only for magnificient art but also for the liberal ideas that emerged from the Netherlands and have nourished civilisation ever since.
But each cause must have a cause. In this case it was a quirk, what the writer Charles Wilson called ‘a mysterious change in the habits of the Gulf Stream’ in the early 1400s that precipitated a shift in the habits of the herring, displacing a tranche of their shoaling from the Baltic to the southern basin of the North Sea.
To their credit, the Dutch seized the opportunity more enthusiastically than other North Sea nations, perfecting methods of catching the slippery armies swarming in their waters, devising techniques for curing and marketing the fish, and trading the surplus. In 1488 a Dutch official wrote that the Netherlands was ‘unable to acquire anything good, profitable or useful except through the agency and intermediary of the sea’, a magnanimous observation, given the efforts expended on the existential battle with the self-same benefactor over the course of the past millennium or so.
The Dutch developed new craft: ‘well-boats’, with a live-well that enabled the fish to be kept alive once caught, ‘busses’ for catching large numbers of fish far from the coast, and herring-chasers to transport the catch to market quickly and so for the best price. A circle of virtue was created. A highly proficient fishing fleet, naval excellence and dominance of trade routes were the mutually reinforcing instruments of Dutch power underwritten by what Adriaen Coenen called in his Visboek of 1578 Holland’s ‘golden mountain’ of herring.
By the 1600s fishing had become the cause of political rivalry between North Sea states. In 1633 Sir John Burroughs wrote a treatise, The Sovereignty of the British Seas (long before any delimitation of maritime boundaries was even conceived), in which he lamented the plunder of fish from English waters by the Dutch. In part it was lambast against the rapaciousness of the Dutch, but it also bemoaned the indolence of the author’s own country, which had robbed it of the ability to compete. Glory and profit were there for the taking, he said. Recently, he observed, a fleet of colliers returning from Newcastle had encountered a shoal of cod, ling and herring of such enormity that ‘with certain Sheep-hooks and other like instruments’ it was possible to draw up such numbers of fish as to out-value the holds full of coal.
But the ‘Hollanders’ had the sea stitched up. ‘Besides Seven hundred Strand-boats, Four hundred Evars, and Four hundred Sullits, Drivers and Tod-boats . . . every one of these imploying another Ship to fetch Salt . . . being in all Three Thousand Sail, Maintaining and Setting on Work at least Forty Thousand Persons, Fishers, Tradesmen and Women and Children . . .’ they possessed ‘some 700 Pincks and Well-boats, and in the herring season, 1,600 hundred busses, each of which made work for three other vessels’. The maintenance of this fleet required the labour of untold numbers of spinners, hemp winders, packers, tollers, dressers, block and bowl makers, tanners, keel men, sawyers, boatmen, brewers ‘and a number of others, whereof many are maymed persons and unfit to be otherwise employed’.
Holland, though smaller than a single English shire, had increased its ‘number of shipping’ to 10,000 vessels – more than the fleets of most of its rivals combined – and almost half of this fleet was sustained by fish caught off British coasts. ‘The number of [Dutch] ships fishing on our coasts being eight thousand four hundred, If we allow but 20 persons per ship, one with another, the total Mariners and Fishers amounted to One Hundred Sixty Eight Thousand: out of which Number they daily furnish their longer voyages.’ Another Dutch advantage was the construction of their ships, their busses being ‘Great an
d Strong, and able to Brook Foul Weather’, while the English boats ‘being small and thin-sided, are easily swallowed up by a rough Sea; not daring to adventure far in fair weather, by reason of their weakness for fear of Stormes’. The Dutch were trading British fish for ‘oyles, Wines, Prunes, Honey, Wools . . . Velvets, Sattins . . . Alloms, Iron, Steel, Copper, Button-plates for armour, pitch, tar, Hungary Gilders’ and the British were missing out.
Part of the blame lay with something approaching a national malaise – complacency, lack of effort – whereas the Dutch were organised and thrifty and fished hard the whole season, ranging far in search of new stocks. British fishermen by contrast stayed put ‘till the Herring come home to our Road-Steads, and sometimes suffer them to pass by, our Herring fishing containing only Seven weeks at the most, and theirs Twenty’. And the Hollanders were ‘industrious . . . no sooner are discharged of their landing than presently put forth for more’; the English brought back their catch and refused to set out again until they’d spent the money. (Even as late as the early twentieth century a typical Dutch rota would be a six-week trip followed by a two-day home break before setting out again.)
Other nations would in time catch up with the Dutch – a golden age will inevitably lose its shine – and by the end of the nineteenth century Germany, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands each boasted large steam trawler fleets chasing the ever more precious and hard-pressed fish of the North Sea. It seems counter-intuitive that such great claims should be made for the right to access resources that are as wild, robustly resilient to husbandry, as transient and wilfully disrespectful of borders as fish. For that matter, so is the notion of sovereignty over the sea, an element over which we clearly do not possess anything other than fictional dominion.