The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  Even Hitchens can’t quite bear to follow through on what begins as a rant, conceding by the end of his article that the high street (West Street, now nicknamed East Street) boasts half a dozen Polish, Russian and Baltic food shops – and a Latvian patisserie – and that had the migrants not set up home here ‘these places would be boarded up, or charity shops’. But he qualifies the admission: ‘What consolation is that to born-and-bred Bostonians who see parts of their home town transformed into a foreign zone?’ The distinction between foreign and not-foreign remains as transient as it was when the Jutes arrived on the shores of Kent or the Jews of Berlin on the playground beaches of Borkum.

  In the northern North Sea the national question was becoming acute as the writing of this book drew to a close. There are, say the analysts, another three or four billion barrels of oil yet to be recovered from British waters, and these could be worth £200 billion to the economy of what is still the United Kingdom. The British government says that only by sharing the custodianship of this huge resource can it be exploited fully, and that as much for this reason as any other England and Scotland should remain in the union formed in 1707. In the run-up to the referendum on independence in 2014 the Scottish government pointed to what it considered the Westminster government’s shoddy record in managing North Sea oil resources and said that if Scots voted to shear themselves away from their southern neighbours Edinburgh would put in place a fund after the Norwegian model, and could put away £30 billion for the benefit of its successors. A slim victory for the ‘No’ campaign has pushed the debate back – but it is certain to return within a generation.

  I still regard it as curious that assets so far from the land, so deep beneath the sea, unhusbanded and with origins so utterly ancient and alien, can give rise to such disputes. What right can anybody possibly have to them? And yet the stakes are high. Scots independence would have necessitated the drawing of a maritime boundary with England, with even a difference of a handful of square miles making a multi-billion-dollar difference to the coffers of the two countries. Once exhausted that particular issue will be rendered irrelevant. But what then of the wind – could that fickle, flickering resource also become subject to disputes over custody?

  Ironically, while public opinion continues to tilt quixotically at wind turbines (unsightly and imposing – bad for birds) they have already consummately altered the aspect of the North Sea – always present on the horizon, in the middle distance or looming, whumping, almost toppling. On Humberside wind is touted as the long-awaited successor to fishing. A joint venture between the German company Siemens and Associated British Ports is predicted to create 1,000 skilled jobs in a plant casting the seventy-five-metre-long blades for the turbines. But could wind ever provide the nucleus of a community as fishing once did? Could it create the kinds of shared references, superstitions, instincts, conventions that only a generation ago determined the identities not only of the trawler men but of their wider social sphere?

  In 2009 the visionary architect Rem Koolhaas unveiled what he called a zeekracht – a master plan for the North Sea – which if realised would realign it wholly with the energy needs of the communities at its rim. The core of the kracht is a ‘super-ring’ of offshore wind farms. The plan demands a new kind of intimacy and engagement. Ecology and industry are integrated by ‘stimulating existing marine life alongside wind turbines and other installations’; ferries provide ‘eco and energy tourism’ excursions; decommissioned oil and gas rigs are repurposed – reimagined – as ‘cultural hubs and service islands’.

  Koolhaas is Dutch and thus belongs to a nation that possesses a less adversarial, more entrepreneurial stance towards the North Sea than some others. In England we are half aghast but half enjoy the spectacle of cliff-top cottages crumbling into the briny; Dutch engineers are exploring the potentialities of water-borne homes that rise and fall with the tide, anticipating further meteorological disruption for later generations. If the future develops in this way it is likely that others will import the technology that the Dutch develop. A more conventional if ambitious British plan is afoot that would also radically alter the North Sea environment, or at least a part of it. Nicknamed Boris Island after its chief spiritual sponsor, the Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson, the hubristically and more offically named London Britannia Airport would sit like a platter on an artificial island in the Thames estuary in imitation of Hong Kong International Airport – built on the reclaimed island of Chep Lap Kok.

  The estuary has already, within the past two generations, evaded such a fate. In the early 1960s and the 1970s there emerged a series of proposals for airport and dock developments to be built close to the shore on the north side of the estuary. In 1972 a report was published with the title ‘Balancing Foulness’ – alluding to the location of the proposed scheme – that weighed the economic benefits against the costs and environmental impacts. A (Dutch) engineer told the authors that were the project to go ahead it would represent ‘the biggest job of the twentieth century’.

  Conservative Environment Minister Eldon Griffiths said at the time of the paper’s launch, ‘We plan to have the first runway in operation by 1980 or earlier if practicable. We want it built to the highest possible standard as a full international airport with capacity to expand up to four runways if the demand justifies . . . There is an impression, still persisting in some quarters, that the airport will never be built. If there are any doubters present today, I can assure them that we intend to build the airport.’

  Griffiths, who died in 2014, will never see the airport’s completion, the first desecration of the exquisite and so perfectly balanced estuary ecosystem that itsbuilding would demand.

  A large number of undersea habitats have already been destroyed, among them the reefs of coral and sea-fans that graced the bed of the North Sea’s southern basin until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was scoured by steam trawlers dredging for the ever-delicious oyster. Now climate change campaigners warn that global warming is raising the temperature of the North Sea, disrupting the natural cycles of the phytoplankton at the base of its food chain. They predict that a number of North Sea fish – cod and haddock among them – will be pushed further north in search of cooler ambient water temperatures. Rather than leaving a vacuum in their wake, the changes will draw in more exotic creatures, joining the dramatis personae of invaders – like North American slipper limpets – that have hitched rides in the bilge tanks of ships like rail-riding hobos.

  Marine biologists believe that there could be at least eighty such aliens in North Sea waters, many long-settled and raising again the perennial question of who or what constitutes a stranger. Some were brought hundreds of years ago on the hulls of Mediterranean caravels or longboats from the Baltic. And nor is it one-way traffic: the dastardly North Sea crab Carcinas maenas has been charged with the crime of ‘gigantism and strong predatory effects’ off the coasts of California and Tasmania, to which its larvae were inadvertently introduced in ballast water.

  Inexorable as global warming may be, it appears to take the occasional step backwards, illustrating the truism that just as a trend becomes apparently fixed, an event occurs that confounds it. In the Easter of 2013 I travelled to the Neuk of Fife to visit the puffins that breed on the islands of the Firth of Forth, but I saw only their little corpses tangled in the kelp. Every so often another would roll in on a wave, the sea nudging it gingerly onto the beach as a soft-mouthed hunting dog might bring game. The colour had leached from their ridiculous beaks, and their bodies lost their puff.

  The cause of the carnage was a cold spring following a cold winter, which in turn had followed from an edgy, saturnine autumn. Sustained chill and unforgiving easterlies sap the puffins’ strength and leave them without the wherewithal to dive below the surface for the sand eels on which they depend, and thus they starve or collapse while fishing. On a quarter-mile stretch of beach between the villages of Elie and Largo I found nineteen dead puffins, three guillemots,
a cormorant and a razorbill. This, said the ornithologists, could have been the largest puffin wreck, as such a disaster is called, for over sixty years. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, had washed ashore on beaches from Banffshire to Yorkshire.

  Despite such glitches the mercury nudges upwards. Some foresee the return of bluefin tuna, which – though nobody knows why – were so plentiful off the coast of north-east England in the 1920s that during a halcyon interwar period Hollywood moguls and the international glitterati rerouted their big-game fishing adventures from Key Largo and Havana to Bridlington and Scarborough. Yet the North Sea is too substantial, too terrible, to be glamorous. Yes, in places it can sparkle with sufficient intensity to attract the interest of the beau monde, but these are patches of fluorescence on a great elemental force that shrugs and shirks the qualities we vainly strive to etch into its surface.

  I felt proprietorial about the North Sea on adopting it as a writing adventure, as I suppose any biographer might about their subject. But I have yet, despite my profligate use of mood words en route, to find anything in it that can be anthropomorphised or indeed vested with an identity other than the sum total of its cold blue-grey mass.

  Words can only fail the North Sea. It divests itself of abstraction; falls apart as a singularity. This beast that tickles my calfhairs cannot be the self-same thing that stretches hundreds of miles (enfolding octopussies, whales, the Radiant Star and Lewis the cook) and fathoms deep – or at least not within the span of a single human consciousness.

  In the moment of striving to fold the North Sea into those two short syllables, the effort reveals something of the shoddiness of language at large. But here is the rub: that self-same thing, the shadow gap between words and the world they reach out towards, that grey, grave, terrible discrepancy – a dreadful chasm – looks something like the North Sea itself.

  Here, perhaps, I’m taking large clumsy steps towards the end of my North Sea journey, up to my thighs in churning moss-green spume-flecked unfriendly uncertainties, but (curious that we ask the question so seldom) is this why the sea possesses a siren’s charm for those who know, by dint of age or infirmity, that their mortal days are quickly counting down? The elderly on the pier or the esplanade, in their sea-view care homes, are they searching the horizon, listening in the softly soughing, sawing of the tides for a hint, an intimation, of what oblivion might have in store?

  I have spent many hours on the North Sea’s shores, and what I know is that it is everything we say it is and none of those things, that it exists inside us and yet transcends us – possesses no boundaries other than those we inflict upon it, neither moral values, nor narrative structures. They are all with us and not the sea. That is what I know of it.

  Further Wading

  The following is not an exhaustive bibliography but lists by chapter sources implicitly or explicitly referred to in the text – or otherwise of assistance to the reader looking to wade a little further into the waters of the North Sea…

  Chapter 1: A North Sea Crossing

  Childers, Erskine, The Riddle of the Sands, Smith, Elder & Co., 1903

  Conrad, Joseph, The Mirror of the Sea, Doubleday, New York, 1924

  Roding, Juliette and Van Voss, Lex Heerman, eds, The North Sea and Culture 1500–1800, Verloren, Hilversum, 1998

  Hay, David, No Star at the Pole: A History of Navigation from the Stone Age to the 20th Century, C. Knight, London, 1972

  Kirby, David and Hinkkanen, Merja-Liisa, The Baltic and the North Seas, Routledge, London & New York, 2000

  Taylor, E. G. R., Haven-finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook, Hollis & Carter, London, 1956

  Trinder, Ivan F., The Harwich Packets 1635–1834, Ivan Trinder, Colchester, 1998

  Van de Noort, Robert, North Sea Archaeologies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011

  Chapter 2: In Defence of the Estuary

  Author Unknown, The Wreck of the “Princess Alice”, on the Thames, September 3, 1878, with a list of the principal calamities which have happened on water during the last 100 years, etc., A. Heywood and Son, Manchester, 1879

  Author Unknown, The Official Guide to Canvey Island, British Publishing Co., Gloucester, 1965

  Carter, H. M., The Fort of Othona and the Chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex, Provost and Chapter of Chelmsford, Chelmsford, 1972

  Cekota, Anthony, Entrepreneur Extraordinary: The Life of Tomas Bata, University Press of the International University of Social Studies, Rome, 1968

  Defoe, Daniel, A Tour through the Eastern Counties, London, 1772

  L’Estrange, Robert, The Life of Michael Adrian de Ruyter, Admiral of Holland, Newman, London, 1667

  Leather, John, The Northseamen: The story of the fishermen, yachtsmen and shipbuilders of the Colne and Blackwater Rivers, Dalton, Lavenham, 1971

  Pollard, Michael, The North Sea Surge: The Story of the East Coast Floods of 1953, T. Dalton, Lavenham, 1978

  Weaver, Leonard T., The Harwich Packets: The Story of the Service Between Harwich and Holland Since 1661, Lindel Organisation, Seaford, 1975

  Chapter 3: The Question of the Scheldt

  Belloc, Hilaire, The River of London, T. N. Foulis, Edinburgh and London, 1912

  Bindoff, S. T., The Scheldt Question to 1839, G. Allen & Unwin, 1942

  Great Britain: Parliament, A collection of Papers relating to the expedition to the Scheldt, A. Strahan, London, 1811

  Howard, M. R., ‘Walcheren 1809: a medical catastrophe’, British Medical Journal, 1999; 319(7225):1642–1645.

  Rawling, Gerald, Cinderella Operation: The Battle for Walcheren 1944, Cassell, London, 1980

  Rodger, N. A. M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815, Allen Lane, London, 1980

  Chapter 4: With Ensor and Octopussies in Ostend

  Department of Transport, Herald of Free Enterprise Formal Investigation: https://assets.digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk/media/54c1704ce5274a15b6000025/FormalInvestigation_HeraldofFreeEnterprise-MSA1894.pdf

  McGreal, Stephen, Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids 1918, Pen & Sword Military, Barnsley, 2007

  Southern Railway, Ostend and the Coast of Belgium, London, 1924

  Swinbourne, Anna (ed.), James Ensor, Museum of Modern Art (Moma), New York, 2009

  Van den Bussche, Willy, Ensor and the Avant-gardes by the Sea, PMMK, Brussels, 2006

  Chapter 5: Shapes and Shingle on the Naked Shore

  Benfell, Roy, Spurn Lifeboat Station: the First Hundred Years, R. Benfell, Hull, 1994

  De Boer, G., A History of the Spurn Lighthouses, East Yorkshire Historical Society, York, 1968

  Jarratt, George A. (revised Welton, Mike), Memories of Spurn in the 1880s, SKEALS, Easington, 2010

  Leach, Nicholas, Lifeboats of the Humber, Amberley, Stroud, 2010

  Mathison, Phil, The Saint of Spurn Point: Wilgils, father of St Willibrord, Dead Good Publications, Newport, 2010

  Neal, Geoff, The Birds of Spurn – a comprehensive checklist, Spurn Bird Observatory, Kilnsea, 1996

  Ostler, Gordon, Lost Villages of the Humber Estuary, Hull College of Further Education, Hull, 1990

  Van de Noort, Robert and Stephen Ellis (eds), Wetland heritage of Holderness: An Archaeological Survey, Humber Wetlands Project, University of Hull, 1995

  Chapter 6: Last Resorts

  Borut, Jacob, Antisemitism in Tourist Facilities in Weimar Germany: http://www.yadvashem.org/download/about_holocaust/studies/borut_full.pdf

  Corbin, Alain (trans. Phelps, Jocelyn), The Lure of the Sea: The Lure of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, Polity, Cambridge, 1994

  Dickens, Charles, Sketches by “Boz”, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People, John Macrone, London, 1837–1839

  English Tourist Board, The future marketing and development of English Seaside Tourism, 1974

  Granville, Augustus Bozzi, The Spas of England, and Principal Sea-bathing Places, H. Colburn, London, 1841

  Hannavy, John, The Eng
lish seaside in Victorian and Edwardian Times, Shire, Princes Risborough, 2003

  Walton, John K., The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1983

  Chapter 7: Mare Frisium, Fris Non Canta

  Black, William George, Heligoland and the Islands of the North Sea, W. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1888

  Ring, Jim, Erskine Childers, John Murray, London, 1996

  Schultze-Naumburg, Sylt: The Dream Island, Sun & Health, Harrow, 1966

  Storm, Theodor (trans. Boyden, George), The Rider on the White Horse, Pen Press, Brighton 2011

  Chapter 8: Myths of Origin – a Land Beneath the Sea

  Flemming, N. C. (ed.), Submarine Prehistoric Archaeology in the North Sea, Council for British Archaeology, York, 2004

  Gaffney, V., Fitch S. and Smith, D., Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland, Council for British Archaeology, York, 2009

  Hygen, Anne-Sophie and Lasse Bengtsson, Rock Carvings in the Borderlands, Warne Förlag, Gothenburg, 2000

  Reid, Clement, Submerged Forests, Cambridge Manuals, Cambridge, 1913

  Spanuth, J., The Atlantis of the North, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980

  Sprague de Camp, L., The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature, Dover, New York, 1970

  Chapter 9: A Postcard from Atlantis

  Black, William George, Heligoland and the Islands of the North Sea, W. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1888

  Buckle, G. E. (ed.), The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1886–1890, Vol. 1, John Murray, London, 1930

  Drower, G. M. F., Heligoland, The True Story of German Bight and the Island that Britain Betrayed, Sutton, Stroud, 2002

  Gatke, Heinrich, Heligoland as an Ornithological Observatory: The Result of 50 Years’ Experience, David Douglas, Edinburgh, 1895

  Chapter 10: A North Sea Outrage

  Credland, Arthur G., Harvest from a Common Sea: The North Sea Fishery, 1870–1940, Association of North Sea Societies, 1997