by Mike Smylie
Further down the coast, into Suffolk, and the story isn’t quite the same. From just south of Lowestoft, at the small village of Pakefield, right down to Bawdsey, close to the mouth of the River Deben, a series of small (and larger) villages were once served well by the sea. These communities favoured a transom-sterned punt to work off the beaches and some continue to do so today. The largest fleet lies at Aldeburgh and a 1588 map clearly shows boats and crab capstans on the beach, so this beach fishery appears to have been long established then.15 The beaches are shingle here, and shelve more deeply than the sandy beaches of north Norfolk, and the Suffolk punts evolved to cope with this.
The herring and sprat fishery was the lucrative fishery of the autumn. Boats were known to have been overloaded with sprats and Robert Simper tells of one fisherman, Billy Burrell, who recalls how, in 1938, after engines had just been fitted to Aldeburgh boats, these were removed for the sprat fishing so that more fish could be loaded aboard. In summer they chased the salmon and took trippers out.
Simper also mentions the small hamlet of Shingle Street where the people lived with little outside contact. They fished, and at the same time were wildfowlers, poachers and beachcombers, all contributing to a meagre living. They even devised a huge underwater spoon which they used from a boat to dredge up coal from sunken ships off Orfordness.
Many of the fishermen of these east-facing Norfolk and Suffolk beaches were often life-savers. The sea offshore the coast is wild and in the nineteenth century hundreds of vessels sailed past in these waters, often coming to grief. The fishermen set up beach companies to act as rescue and salvage operators, working with what have become the renowned East Anglian beach yawls. Each beach company had its own headquarters and open double-ended yawl (or yol from the Norse jolle, meaning open boat). Some beach landings had more than one beach company and competition could be fierce. Although primarily acting as rescue boats, they were also used as supply boats for the passing ships, taking out whatever was needed. They maintained a twenty-four-hour lookout and if a vessel was spotted in distress, the yawl was launched with speed and raced to the scene. From Happisburgh in the north, right down to Shingle Street, beach companies were based in almost all the places were boats could be launched and landed. This was often a much more lucrative business than fishing, which then took second place.
But the sailing the yawls was often more risky than fishing, given the urgency with which they were sailed. First to the casualty got the job. Some boats were three-masted, setting big dipping lugsails. Simper tells of several that were lost: two from Sea Palling in 1842 and twelve men lost in the space of five weeks which would have been a great loss to a small community. The three-masted Increase from Great Yarmouth, which had the largest number of beach companies, capsized in 1853 and only one of the eight men aboard was rescued.
The Southeast Coast
Today Hastings is probably the best known beach-based fishing community in Britain. It is a place where boats that fish out into the English Channel are landed and launched from the shingle beach and is said to be the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Europe today. Although declined from its heyday, it is still a magnet for folk – holiday-makers and residents alike – who come to lap up the atmosphere when the boats come in to the water’s edge, to be dragged up the beach using wooden sleepers under the keel and tractors to do the hauling work.
A century ago things weren’t that different except that the boats were sailing craft, full and round, mostly clinker-built and rigged with two lugsails. There were big craft – the luggers – and smaller vessels – the punts. The luggers exhibited lute or elliptical sterns while the punts were transom-sterned. All were built on the beach and, being rounded in the hull, sat upon the beach pretty well upright.
However, although Hastings is today the only real survivor in terms of the longshore fishing, this whole coast was one of small fishing communities in the nineteenth century. From Selsey Bill to North Foreland, beach fishers worked from Selsey, Bognor Regis, Worthing, Brighton, Newhaven, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Dungeness, Hythe, St Margaret’s Bay and Deal. Newhaven, Folkestone, Dover and Ramsgate, although having fishing fleets, had harbours to accommodate these fishers so were not beach based.
Tourism overtook some of these towns in the eighteenth century with the popularising of sea-bathing for health reasons. Then, with the growth of the railways in the nineteenth century, day-trippers flocked to the south coast from London and the days of commercial tourism had arrived, filling the pockets of the local traders and town councils alike. Fishing became the work of undesirables and they, in their insular communities, were pushed to one end of the town. This is obvious today in Hastings where the Stade is their base today on the east side of town: the well off were housed to the west. The irony is that, with its renowned tall net sheds and vibrant beach, it is today more popular than the west side of town.
‘Lugger on the beach’ by E.W. Cooke from the early nineteenth century. Although this lugger was probably from near Brighton where Cooke produced many etchings, the boat would be similar to those in nearby Hastings.
Brighton might be the gem in the crown but was once merely the small fishing community of Brighthelmstone that is said to have sent boats into the North Sea to fish for ‘linge, codd and herrings’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century.16 The Brighton ‘hog-boat’ was the favoured vessel and, like many of the craft of the Sussex coast, mirrors those of the French–Belgium border area across the Channel. These were all flat-bottomed craft, squarish in plan and sluggish to sail. Many were featured in drawings by such artists as Edward Cooke.17 Like the Hastings fishers, those of Brighton (as it became known) were also pushed to the edge of the town. Unlike Hastings, the fishing didn’t survive in the same way, partly due to the construction of a marina and partly from the growth of the town in other ways.
Trammel-netting is the mainstay of the Hastings fleet.18 It’s an old method of fishing and is pretty ingenious. The net is in fact three layers of net – a central net or lint with a small mesh of between 4 and 5 inches either side of which hang larger mesh nets with head and foot ropes attached. These outer nets are known as the ‘armouring’ or ‘walling’ and hang looser when set on the seabed. Fish swim in through the large mesh, force their way through the inner mesh so that fish and inner mesh pass through the other large mesh netting to form a bag from which there is no escape.19 According to Holdsworth, the name of the net is said to come from the Latin tres maculae (three meshes) and was introduced to English fishermen from those of France, which seems fairly likely given its proximity.20 The trammel is used extensively along this coast for plaice and sole in the spring and is also used in the Channel Islands and Cornwall. Hastings men trawl from May onwards, and occasionally set gill-nets. In the summer they also hand-line for mackerel, and drift-net for herring in early winter.21
Today the Hastings fleet survives, though not with the help of the policy makers in Brussels. Sheer determination is what keeps the beach alive. The boats have changed somewhat and now catamarans and mono-hulls made from fibreglass, steel or aluminium are more likely than wooden elliptical-sterned craft. But the traditions handed down through generations show through just as brightly allowing the fishers to continue to make their livelihood. For sure, crews amount to just one which adds a further danger to the job but these men are built for the sea and take this in their stride just as they do up and down the coast. Longshoremen have so much to offer society by way of their local knowledge, their crewing lifeboats, their watching the coast for unusual phenomena, as well as the obvious supply of freshly caught fish into the food chain using methods of fishing that are, mostly, as ecological as is possible. Long may they continue.
Notes
1 Personal communication in 2012.
2 See Robb Robinson, ‘Inshore and Local Fisheries, c1530 to 1880’, in David J. Starkey et al. (eds), England’s Sea Fisheries, London, 2000.
3 See Gloria Wilson, ‘The English North Sea
Coast’, in Julian Mannering (ed.), The Chatham Directory of Inshore Craft, London, 1997.
4 Peter Frank, Yorkshire Fisherfolk, Chichester, 2002.
5 Mike Smylie, Traditional Fishing Boats of Britain & Ireland, Shrewsbury, 1999.
6 Gloria Wilson, Freshening Breezes – Fishing Boats of Cleveland and North Yorkshire, Stroud, 2013.
7 John Dyson, Business in Great Waters, London, 1977.
8 David Brandon, Along the Yorkshire Coast, Stroud, 2010.
9 See Barrie Farnill, A History of Robin Hood’s Bay, Helmsley, 1966.
10 Fran Weatherhead, North Norfolk Fishermen, Stroud, 2011.
11 Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, London, 1725 [1927].
12 Peter Stibbons, Katherine Lee and Martin Warren¸ Crabs and Shannocks, Cromer, 1983.
13 Frank Buckland, The Fisheries in Norfolk – especially Crabs. Lobsters, Herrings and the Broads, HMSO, 1875.
14 Michael M. Marshall, Fishing – the Coastal Tradition, London, 1987.
15 Robert Simper, Beach Boats of Britain, Woodbridge, 1984.
16 Smylie, op. cit., 1999.
17 See Edward Cooke, Shipping & Craft, London, 1970 (facsimile edition).
18 Marshall, op. cit., 1987.
19 F.M. Davis, An Account of the Fishing Gear of England & Wales, London, 1937.
20 E.W.H. Holdsworth, Deep-Sea Fishing and Fishing Boats, London, 1874.
21 See Steve Peak, Fishermen of Hastings, St Leonards-on-Sea, 1985, for a full history.
5
WEST COUNTRY PILCHARD FISHING
On 22 November 1872 fleets of both mackerel and pilchard drivers – so-called as they were regarded as driving the fish into the drift-nets – from the Cornish village of St Ives were fishing some miles offshore when a gale-force wind rose up unexpectedly. The smaller pilchard luggers were nearer to home so they hauled in their gear and safely reached shelter, but the bigger mackerel drivers had a harder beat home. By the early hours of the next morning eight boats were still unaccounted for and though some made it to safety, two making Newquay, one to St Agnes and one to Ilfracombe. However, two boats – Mystery and Captain Peter – never did and ten fishermen were lost, leaving six widows. But of course this wasn’t the only instance on this weather-battered coast where just the loss of one single boat was a tragedy. In 1880 the Mousehole lugger Jane was smashed to pieces on the rocks just outside the harbour entrance and all the crew killed as those on the shore watched, being completely unable to do anything to help. That night boats sank at nearby Newlyn while eleven sank at their moorings in Mousehole harbour.1 Just as the small coast-hugging fishing communities of most other parts of the British coast suffered their own tragedies, the fishermen of Cornwall certainly had their own, their working grounds facing, as they do, the onslaught from the Western Approaches. Whether pilchard fishing, potting for shellfish or trawling for white fish, there are always stories to tell. Here, though, for the moment, we are only interested in fishing the pilchards.
Fishing for pilchards was done in one of two ways: driving and seining. Both had advantages and, seemingly forever, there were disputes and verbal arguments between the two branches of the fishery. It seems that seining had the upper hand, largely due to Acts of Parliament from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was often said that the drift-net fishermen were the poorest while the seines were run by well-off businessmen. Given the fact that drift-netting involved a far greater investment in terms of lugger and nets in contrast to the small boats of the seines, then this is perhaps understandable. The Acts, it was said, were to protect the interests of the majority in that they virtually prohibited the use of the inshore drift-net during the pilchard season.2
Perhaps the most severe was enacted in the time of Charles II when harsh penalties were placed on the drift-net boats so that:
… from and after 25th day of May, 1662, no person or persons shall in any year, from the first day of June, till the first day of November, presume to take fish, in the high sea, or in any bay, port, creek or coast, of or belonging to Cornwall or Devon, with any drift net, trammel stream net or nets, or any other nets of that sort or kind, unless it be at the distance of one league and a half at least from the respective shores, upon the penalty of forfeiture of the said nets so employed, or the full value thereof, and one month’s imprisonment, without bail or main prize.
Pilchard seining, by its very nature, was an age-old profession dating back from at least the Middle Ages. It has been described as a ‘colourful and extraordinary sight unique to certain parts of Cornwall and south-west Devon’.3 Some of the legislation protecting its use dates back to the late sixteenth century, the time of Elizabeth I. In 1602 there was much discussion about the seines and drivers:
But the least fish in bigness, greatest for gain, and the most in number, is the pilchard. They come to take their kind of the fresh (as the rest) between harvest and Allhallowtide, and were wont to pursue the brit, upon which they feed, into the havens, but are now forestalled on the coast by the drovers [sic] and seiners. The drovers hang certain square nets athwart the tide, through which the shoals of pilchards passing, leave many behind entangled in the meshes. When the nets are so filled the drovers take them up, cleanse them, and let them fall again.
The seiners complain with open mouth that these drovers work much prejudice to the commonwealth of fishermen, and reap thereby small gain to themselves; for (say they) the taking of some few breaketh and scattereth the whole shoal and frayeth them from approaching the shore; neither are those thus taken merchantable, by reason of their bruising in the mesh. Let the crafts-masters decide the controversy.4
The pilchard is one of the commonest fish around the western part of Britain and is, in fact, a mature sardine, as those seen off the western coasts of Portugal, Spain and France, and into the Mediterranean. It also has been caught off southern Ireland and off parts of west Wales, such as at Fishguard where Richard Fenton introduced ‘the business of preparing these fish [pilchards], their fry or sprats, in the same way as the Spaniards did and export[ed] them to Italy’.5 That was in the eighteenth century when, it seems, a sprat was regarded as being the fry of anything that looked in any way similar! Fenton built a tall, four-storied warehouse with cellars and racks for curing both herrings and pilchards, the building existing still.6 Two hundred years or so before, in 1603, it was said that the pilchard was not so rife as it had been in earlier years and that pilchards and mackerel took second place and were nothing in comparison to the herring.7
From a Cornish perspective, there were few parts of both the north and south coasts that didn’t participate in the annual pilchard fishing before the end of the nineteenth century. They didn’t swim much beyond, say, Trevose Head although Port Isaac, Port Gaverne, Port Quin and even Harlyn Bay just north of the Head, were bases to seines. Furthermore, rarely is a pilchard seen further up-channel than Start Point, though, in 1722, a considerable amount was caught at Totnes Bridge, right up the River Dart, after a shoal was chased in by porpoises. When landed by the locals with their boats, Daniel Defoe says they fed the locals for several days.8
Not only is there a distinct difference in the way pilchards are caught using drift-nets and seines (and we will have more of the latter soon), but the way shoals are spotted is somewhat distinctive in British fisheries. I say ‘somewhat’ for the task of spotting pilchards from cliff tops has been copied in other fisheries but was first practised in the process of pilchard seining.
The job of spotting is that of the ‘huer’, sometimes called a ‘balker’, a man who: standeth on the cliff side and from thence best discerneth the quantity and course of the pilchard, according whereunto he cundeth [instructs] (as they call it) the master of each boat (who hath his eye still fixed on him) by crying with a loud voice, whistling through his fingers, and wheezing certain diversified and significant signs with a bush which he holdeth in his hand.9
In later times this was traditionally shouted as ‘h
eeva, heeva, heeva’ through a trumpet-like speaking horn when he had spotted a shoal. However, a huer was only useful when fishing close to the shore where the cliffs were high enough to be of use. Offshore, the man in charge was the Master Seiner who directed the operation. As to the word ‘heeva’, it has been interpreted as meaning various things and Noall suggest it probably means something like ‘Here they are’.
So how do they spot them from atop the cliff? Like the herring fishermen watching for the ‘natural appearances’, the huer would spot the shoals when they were close by. The huge shoals appeared as stains of red, purple and silver in the water and this would be chased by screaming gulls and diving gannets overhead. They swam in from the west and split on meeting Lands End so that both the north coast and south coast profited from the fishing.
Two or three boats are employed in one Seine Company, as a group of fishermen operating a particular seine are called. Each seine was licensed to work a particular area and often a company owned several seines, such as T. Bolitho & Sons of St Ives who owned thirty-three seines in 1869.
The main boat was the seiner, a low open boat of 35–40ft in length, usually double-ended and carvel-built as these were regarded as the fastest and able to carry the largest net as the seine-net was. They carried no sail and were propelled solely by six oarsmen. The second boat was named variously as the ‘folyer’, ‘volyer’ or ‘stop-seine boat’ and it carried the stop-seine, sometimes called the thwart-seine, aboard and was a few feet smaller than the first boat. The third boat was called the ‘lurker’, much smaller at sixteen to eighteen feet in length, and was used to direct operations with the Master Seiner aboard. When they were working close inshore the lurker was dispensed with, all directions coming straight from the huer’s mouth, so to speak, atop the cliff.10 Often there were two huers, the assistant being responsible for the stop-seine.