by Tom Blass
By the end of the Second World War the industry had dwindled to an echo of its former self, partly on account of the danger of mines and U-boats, but also through the mass recruitment of boats and fishermen for war service. In Britain trawlers had been requisitioned in great numbers by the Royal Naval Patrol Service, often into the perilous business of minesweeping, and were also used as spy boats. The Fishing Times frequently ran news stories of ‘heroic actions’ – of how, for instance, the cook of the Grimsby trawler Warren ‘manned the machine-gun’ against a Heinkel bomber though sprayed with shrapnel, but went on to put the tea on for the boys while near-identical stories featured in the German trade press; and stoically, silently, fishermen were killed in even greater numbers than they were in peacetime.
Peace brought reparation in the form of a North Sea brimming with fish, but the dividend would only last so long. From 1958 the Icelandic government extended the boundaries of its territorial waters, locking other nations’ fleets out of the rich grounds that they had come to rely on. In 1975 the Reykjavik government enlarged its exclusive economic zone to 200 miles. By this time inshore North Sea fisheries were already feeling the impact of EEC Common Fisheries Policy, which greatly degraded native fishermen’s rights to exclusivity in what they had traditionally regarded as home waters. Though the economic and political forces behind the decline in fishing and other European heavy industries (mining, steel, shipbuilding and so forth) might not be the same, they’re comparable. Even if the workers themselves strived to cling on to their livelihoods, the nations had become weary of their heft, grime and proletarian clumsiness, so out of kilter with modernity. Many of the old players sold up their quotas and took the decommissioning money, watched their good boats being scrapped and turned away from the sea with ne’er a glance.
Though fewer in number than once they were, trawlers still scour the North Sea. But fishing has become a furious, infuriating game, demanding submission to a web of bureaucracy and acronyms. Quotas, usually obtained through historical fishing rights, or purchased, are extraordinarily expensive, even dwarfing the cost of equipping a trawler. EU rules determine how much of a given stock can be caught and for how many days a vessel can remain at sea. And fishermen are bemused by scientific evidence that appears to contradict their own observations, or feel hectored by NGOs, policymakers, celebrity chefs and scare-mongering journalists whose understanding of the reality of fishing is mostly informed by people like themselves.
From the distance of the shore it’s still tempting to imagine fishermen to be bound by a single invisible thread, loosely stitching together their lives through oceans and ages with the sinew of the cold and the constancy of slime and scales. Fishermen seldom boast or indeed talk of the sea when on the land, but gently consent to the chronicling of their exploits by outsiders. A noted cod historian wrote, ‘The illiteracy of the fishermen is the reverse side of the literacy of the diplomat. The fisherman is intensely individualistic and suspicious,’ adding that those who fish for eel are much worse in this respect.
Even in the Mersea estuary the oyster fishermen are wary of being photographed lest their secrets be given away. Just like poker players, they watch for ‘tells’ – small signals like wind shifts and surface ripples – and attempt to exert some influence over the essentially unknowable by the use of mascots, the avoidance of dangerous words and colours. Superstitions can be rooted in practicality: until even the early twentieth century it was almost a distinguishing mark of a fisherman that he couldn’t swim. Here a brutal logic applied: given the slim chances of a man overboard being rescued, it was more merciful to die a quick death by drowning than a prolonged one. Other taboos are harder to explain: the prohibition of words like ‘pig’ and ‘rabbit’ more closely resemble symptoms of a collective obsessive compulsive disorder.
For any other sailor the purpose of going to sea is to reach an intended destination in the minimum possible period of time. But fishermen linger and drift, roughing out the worst weather even if safe harbours beckon. It’s a different kind of relationship with the sea. And again like gamblers, they stand to win either nothing at all (or even to lose everything) or unquantifiable rewards entirely disproportionate to their efforts.
Perhaps this is all landlubbers’ fantasy. Fishermen no more adhere to the stereotype than do urbanites, country dwellers or office workers. But by being taciturn, they have allowed others to speak about them or on their behalf, if sometimes with dubious authority. A reputation for hard drinking, womanising and profligacy has blighted the industry for ever. In 1888 the governments of Britain, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, ‘having recognised the necessity of remedying the abuses arising from the traffic in spirituous liquors among the fishermen in the North Sea outside territorial waters’, signed the Convention Respecting the Liquor Traffic in the North Sea, prohibiting the sale of booze by ‘any person on board or belonging to a British vessel’ within ‘the North Sea limits but outside territorial waters’ to anyone belonging to a fishing boat. Over a century later a sociologist published a paper suggesting that up to 40 per cent of fatalities on Norwegian fishing boats could be attributed in some measure to alcohol. More recent studies have uncovered heroin use among some trawler crews.
Victorian Britain wagged its finger at the rough ways of fishermen but portrayed them as flawed heroes in torrents of books that, though clunky, convey something more than dull tables of fish landing weights ever can. In one of the best-read collections of North Sea yarns, Walter Wood’s Tales of the Dogger Bank, several sea-brutalised skippers meet their end, though not before undergoing some kind of last-minute epiphany. ‘The Atonement of the Vanguard’s Skipper’ sets the tone. Its growling godless whisky-sodden protagonist sets out to sea in the face of an imminent storm, driving his boat with a kind of diabolical fury. ‘It’s goin’ to be a snarly night,’ he tells his crew, ‘an’ there’ll be some mischief done afore the sun shines again. But if it blew six times as ’ard as it’s going to, I’d carry every rag I’ve got. This breeze is too fair to let any of it be missed.’
The boat is swamped, killing the first mate and sweeping the crew overboard. The wise and cautious mate had long warned the captain that his impetuous nature would be the death of all of them, his dying words being, ‘You was a bit too rash for once, an’ would carry on too long. We should ha’ been close-reefed two hours since. Yes, I’m done for, an I’ve a wife an’ child at ’ome.’
Only the captain and the cabin boy – whom he’d previously beaten with a belaying pin – are left on board the Vanguard until finally somewhere off the Norfolk coast they are spotted from the shore and, wishing to finally atone for his arrogance and pride, the skipper ensures that the cabin boy is saved before facing his own fate: ‘The deadly liquid wall advancing – the last mad charge of his relentless foe. He had seen too many hills of death like that to misconstrue its meaning. He rose to his full height, majestic in his last stand, and steadied himself against the jagged mast.’ ‘“Tell ’em ashore to give the insurance money to the widders, and the ten pun in the bank to the boy,”’ he cries before the sea ‘broke in a towering cloud, and crumbled around the dissolving smack. The strained timbers were rent asunder once and for all, and the skipper was carried into deep water.’
If Wood’s fishermen are redeemed by God, in the Danish novel Fiskerne by Hans Kirk the best characters are saved from their piety through gradual humanisation and tolerance. Fiskerne (The Fishermen) was based on the migration in the last years of the nineteenth century of a community of fishermen who abandoned their village on the isthmus of Harboøre after successive years of storms had all but pushed it into the sea. The villagers, members of a revivalist and puritanical Protestant sect, resettle on the eastern side of the isthmus by the protected banks of the inshore Limfjord but struggle to adapt to the hedonist mores of their new neighbours. With sympathy but not unsparingly, the villagers are depicted as struggling to escape the parochialism, dogma and intolerance that has, like some ha
rd carapace, sheltered them for so long from the wind, the sea and the privations of poverty.
If some North Sea fishermen stayed firmly within sight of their home shores, so others have been nomadic. From the late nineteenth century Scottish herring boats would sail south to chase the ‘silver darlings’, migrating with their prey past the Yorkshire coast and on to the East Anglian ports of Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The presence of women was a major social component of great migrations; the herring gutters and packers of Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Lerwick and Anstruther would travel down by train, putting up in lodgings or sheds, each bringing with her a sea-kist – a chest of cloths, towels, boots, a gutting knife and an oilskin coat.
Nobody worked like the herring lasses. A good gutter could get through sixty in a minute; if the catch demanded that they stay at their farlans (troughs) beyond midnight, so it was. But this annual trek was also enormously enjoyable – a release from the strictures of home and an occasion for courting and dancing. For almost a century the ritual was as certain as the herring themselves. Slackening off during the First and Second World Wars, the fishery was vigorous again by the end of the 1940s, with over a thousand curers working in Yarmouth each summer. But within five years there were virtually none, and by 1969 the silver darling party was over, the Fishing Board of Scotland reporting, ‘No boats made the voyage to East Anglia this year.’
One explanation was that as European prosperity burgeoned, its population could afford to diversify its sources of protein. A German dish called labskaus consists of mashed herring, hashed beef and beetroot in proportions which traditionally vary depending not only on the taste and discretion of the cook but also on the respective fecundity of the sea, the dairy and the fields. Invariably, a good year meant less herring and more beef.
Fishing communities around the North Sea share traits and experiences, but have always diverged in the social structures underpinning them. In 1913 the men of a German fleet went on strike in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain free food while aboard the boats. Crewmen possessed little security, their skippers owing no obligation to employ them on subsequent trips, and obliging them to buy what they ate at sea was another source of profit for the owners. In Denmark the tendency was for ships to be communally owned, profits and risks shared among all aboard. In the Hull and Grimsby fleets the boats tended to be owned by companies employing both crew and skipper and hierarchies both ashore and at sea to be rigid, though frequently the cause of conflict, although the Shetland whitefish boats – perhaps following the Danish model – were staunchly democratic, camaraderie usurping coercion as the tool for success.
There are few accounts of women fishing though it has created opportunities for women to ‘fill the gaps’ while the men were away, running businesses in order to compensate for their husbands’ low or erratic income. During the period of the Dutch Republic such women enjoyed higher status than their peers by dint of a system of power of attorney that gave them licence to set up their own businesses and arrange their husband’s and father’s business affairs – perhaps another instance of fishing’s contribution to the Dutch golden age.
We overlook fishermen. And fish too are mostly out of sight. Conceptually shoaling with money, seldom seen in the raw state, reduced to numberless abstraction, future stocks loaned against, capitalised, securitised and speculated upon. Fitting, then, that close to the capital (or to a capital, London) a fishery thrives on the island of Mersea, a roughly diamond-shaped morsel of fields protruding just shy of the mud of the Blackwater estuary.
My friend the fishing lawyer Daniel Owen arranged an introduction to Richard Haward. We met in a lay-by just beyond the causeway, a narrow road suspended a few feet above the mud which would be beneath the water soon, given the high autumn tide. A neatly lettered sign warned: PRIVATE MARSH – SAMPHIRE GATHERERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.* Richard, his teeth the colour of digestive biscuits, his hair and beard luxuriantly creamy-grey, was friendlier, though I had arrived late and disrupted his schedule. ‘The green dory will take you out to the oyster boat. Don’t take photos of anyone else oysterin’. They don’t like it.’
I followed Richard’s orders, walking out past a row of freshly painted beach huts to a hammerheaded spit of shingle beyond which skulked a typical estuary vista. Not fog per se but the sea and air still washed-out and drab. The dory came to meet me, drawing up on the shingle with a crunch, and we headed out to the little dredger, twenty-five feet of her, shelter-less bar a tiny fo’c’sle the size of a Portaloo. I met Richard’s son Bram, the captain, a young man called Sam and sixteen-year-old Bubby, the hand. Later I asked Richard where his son’s name came from. ‘Abraham Stoker, Bramwell Booth, Bram whoever you want him to be.’
We motored into the ash-white void – in reality just half a mile around the coast. There was less than a twitch of wind but still it was achingly cold. The boat was heading out to a thick patch of rock oysters that Bram had recently spotted. Soon half a dozen boats were in the same vicinity. Bubby waved to a blue one 300 yards away and pointed to other boats at various points of the compass. ‘That’s me daad an’ uncle,’ he said, the old Essex accent still very strong. Remarkable, I thought, considering the 1934 observation of a man called Hugh Edward Cranmer-Byng, who decried the ‘swamping’ of the native accent ‘by a polyglot population whose affinities to Essex are actually as remote as Mesopotamia’. Almost all of the crews were related to each other – these were friends and family, not deadly rivals.
‘Who are you all hiding the oysters from, Bram? It looks like a very open secret,’ I said.
He nodded out towards the mouth of the estuary, whence, he said, ‘Other boats – outsiders – might come. It’s best to keep it among the Mersea men.’ The Mersea men have long been known for their oystering.
We set to work – or at least Bubby and Sam set to work while I nursed a cup of tea in my fast-cooling hands and tried to strike up a conversation with Bram, who also seemed to have few obligations other than to keep the boat in the right place.
An oyster dredge is a big purse made of steel rings. It scrapes the bed and is raised above a shelf at the stern of the boat, where it is opened, releasing the oysters with a clatter like a sudden hailstorm. On the seabed the oysters form into thick muddy clumps of dozens of shells, and after each haul Sam and Bubby chipped away at these with miniature pickaxes, putting the separated oysters into crates and stacking them amidships until the shelf was cleared. It was hard, monotonous work and precluded conversation. And so we carried on all day. Dredge, chisel, crate. Dredge, chisel, crate. On the other boats a single man manoeuvred the vessel, worked the dredge, opened the purse, chiselled the clumps, crated the oysters. It seemed uneviable. And yet, said Bram, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other ways.’
In sentences broken by long glances out into the grey, Bram described the complexities of the oyster fishery: how his mum owned the boat; Richard owned the purification plant; his sister was his employer; Richard bought the oysters. Bram didn’t really understand it, but the fishing was straightforward. ‘We just catch ’em. Just go out there and catch ’em.’ And that was it.
Later in the day Bubby offered to take me back in the dory. In the dredger he’d been very quiet, but now that Sam and Bram weren’t around he became almost talkative. Perhaps he hadn’t yet acquired the fisherman’s knack of being tight-lipped. He’d left school as soon as he could, he said, and no one complained when he did because he kept getting into trouble. He wanted a living from the sea, and there wasn’t much school learning that stood you in good stead on the boats. But, he added, he was bored of oysters – gill-netting, that was the life for him. And he revved up the little outboard, carving deep furrows in the still waters and leaving a straight wake behind.
*My favourite North Sea sign to date: SAY NO TO THE SEA-EAGLES (Pin Mill near Ipswich, 2010).
14
Radiant Star of Shetland
I inquired what they generally had for breakfast. They answered, ‘Piltocks.’
Wha
t for dinner? ‘Piltocks and cabbage.’
What for supper? ‘Piltocks.’
Some of them declared that they had not tasted oatmeal or bread for four months.
Patrick Neill, ‘A Tour Through Some of the Islands of Orkney and Shetland’, 1862
On a Kentish beach in the village of Kingsdown a pub called the Zetland Arms graces the gravelly shore. Kingsdown is right where the North Sea becomes the English Channel, and from it you can see, if mist or cloud have deigned not to intervene, the French coast as a thin chalk line laid lightly on the horizon. I like the pub’s nod across eight hundred miles to the North Sea’s opposite extreme, Shetland, erstwhile Zetland, the northern tip of which shares a latitude with Nanortalik in Greenland. The cliffs of Shetland face the Faroes, Norway, Orkney and Iceland, and though none of these are within eyeshot, there is a sense that it is to this exotic maritime world, long slipped out of the mainstream of Europe’s cultural tidal flow, that Shetland belongs.
Its hundred or so islands are scattered like batter-splats, craggy and intricate, slipping and ripping through the grey waters of the seas that embrace them, the Atlantic on the west and its strange orphan, the northern North Sea, to the east. At low tide the archipelago possesses 1,700 miles of indented coast. In places auburn sand sweeps the shore. Elsewhere black cliffs thrust out of a white spuming froth of sea. The islands are deeply notched by clefts, or geos, natural tunnels and caves. Voes and wicks, deep, cold, lake-like bays, elide the distinction between the elements, mirroring the heather-topped hills in their glassy gaze. There are few villages of any size. Settlements as often as not are little more than a quayside, school and kirk, and a shop with a petrol pump which might or might not be open, depending on an obscure and unwritten almanac known only to the islanders.