A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  Numbers then decreased over the next few years. It was said that foreign boats were fishing some of the traditional grounds, bait was costly, as were the boats to run, and the crews preferred other forms of fishing which was largely due to the nature of lining. It’s a long and tedious job with the baiting of the lines and most boats operated on a share system in which the men had to produce their own gear, whereas the trawler crews were being paid a set wage and had no gear to buy.7

  Anstruther, on the East Neuk of Fife, built four new motor liners in the 1950s: Verbena, KY97; Silver Chord, KY124; Brighter Hope, KY37; and Radiation, A115. The latter, at 97ft in length, was the largest liner built in Britain and was, ironically, launched from the Smith and Hutton yard in Anstruther on 31 January 1957 in a force 10 storm. She was powered by a Mirrlees National TLSGMR6 engine. Built in wood, as it was regarded that steel would double her cost, she principally fished for cod, skate, ling and halibut. She set forty-two fleets of lines, each 300 fathoms long with 100 hooks fixed to snoods on each. She fished throughout the 1960s when most remaining liners were either laid up or converted to trawling and only finished fishing in 1978, after which she went into museum ownership.8

  On 1 September 1958, the Icelandic government expanded its territorial waters from 4 miles to 12 and the British government declared almost at once that British trawlers would continue fishing under the protection of the Royal Navy in three areas. Various confrontations between Icelandic gunboats and British trawlers ensued though British warships came to the rescue. In one particular case in November 1958, an Icelandic patrol vessel encountered the trawler Hackness which had not stowed its nets legally. Hackness did not stop until the Icelandic vessel had fired two blanks and one live shell off its bow. HMS Russell came to the rescue and its captain ordered the Icelandic captain to leave the trawler alone as it was not within the 4-mile limit recognised by the British government. The Icelandic captain refused to do so, and ordered his men to approach the trawler with the gun manned. In response, the Russell threatened to sink the Icelandic boat if it so much as fired one shot at the Hackness. More British ships then arrived and the Hackness retreated. However, an agreement was settled later that month which stipulated that any future disagreement between Iceland and Britain as to where Britain could fish would be sent to the International Court of Justice. In total, the First Cod War saw a total of thirty-seven Royal Navy ships and 7,000 sailors protecting the fishing fleet from six Icelandic gunboats and their 100 coastguards.

  Steam trawlers leaving Lowestoft. Often these boats would be at sea for two weeks or more, returning to unload for only a short period in which the crew were able to spend with their families.

  During the late 1940s the design of the distant-water fleet altered drastically, due to the adoption of diesel engines. The very first of these ‘oil burners’ retained the old pipestalkie tall funnels and wheelhouse though within a couple of years a more modest funnel and redesigned wheelhouse was adopted, giving the boat a more modern feel, although the mizzen steadying sail continued to be part of the standard gear. Such a boat was the one 178ft 1949-built Cape Cleveland, H61, owned by Hudson Brothers Trawlers Ltd. Built by John Lewis & Sons Ltd of Aberdeen, her name was changed in 1965 to Ross Cleveland when Hudson’s were taken over by the Ross Group. The hull form of these boats was considered to be the best for the Arctic trawling:

  … deep, low and magnificent in the water, with high flared bows to thrust breaking water aside, throwing it away from the ship instead of back board or digging it up by the hundred-ton to fill her working decks. Minimum rigging reached aloft to hold high ice up there – the radio aerials and their spreaders, one stumpy, sturdy mast: the small stack stood abaft the compact, instrument-filled bridge. Could she ice up and fall over? Dodge to her death, overwhelmed at last in the murdering sea? Or capsize in shrieking squall of hurricane force under assault by some swift-moving mountain of wind-maddened water coming in at change of tide or over foul ground, sweeping over the bulwarks and remaining there, pinning the ship down? For high-flared bows can blow off, too, when the ship lies-to and, having driven her across the sea’s trough, hold her there. And that could also be fatal.9

  The Ross Cleveland was ‘dodging’ during the northeast storm that was blowing right into the Isafjordur on 5 February 1968. In the preceding month two trawlers – St Romanus and Kingston Peridot – had been lost, the first it is believed on 11 January and the second on the 26 or 27 January. Dodging means steaming ahead very slowly, heading into the gale as anchoring would have been impossible. In force 11 winds the conditions are just as awful as can be imagined: screaming wind, the sea throwing all it can, freezing temperatures and a motion without any pattern. Ice build up above threatens the very boat as the waves turn her around. The Ross Cleveland did just that, and another wave pushed her down, the sea filling her decks and she was wounded. Unable to fight, another wave hit her, the mortal blow that took her over on her port side. The skipper in the wheelhouse on his radio, speaking in a quiet voice was heard by another skipper who, too, was fighting for his ship’s survival. ‘Help us, Len. Help us, she’s going over, she’s laying over. Give my love and the crew’s love to the wives and families,’ Phil Gay said. And then quiet. Skipper Len Whurr recalled seeing her lights on and suddenly they went out. One crew member did survive in a life raft which fetched up ashore, though two others in it had died from exposure. Mate Harry Eddom, aged 26, had been chipping ice from the radar apparatus and was dressed in full oilskins which saved him. ‘When she began to go she went in six seconds,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the ice. It was the wind and the sea.’ For Hull it was the worst tragedy, made worse by the loss of the single-screw side motor trawler Notts County, GY643, which went ashore the same night, and another Icelandic trawler that was lost with all hands.10

  When the news filtered back home about the first two boats, it was a devastating blow to the tight-knit fishing community in Hull and the trawlermen’s wives began a safety campaign, meeting with trawler owners and government ministers. Some wives picketed the dock to ensure all departing ships carried radio operators, attracting much national media attention. As the wives’ deputation arrived at the dock in front of TV cameras and journalists on 5 February 1968 for the meeting with the trawler owners, news broke of the loss of Ross Cleveland. The following day the women travelled to London, again with massive media coverage, and met ministers to discuss a variety of reforms to the fishing industry. The same day, trawler owners were instructed to implement new safety arrangements based on the outcome of the meeting, with immediate effect.

  The Holland-Martin Report of 1969 followed from these tragedies. In the report it was calculated that trawlermen had a mortality rate seventeen times that for the male population and that those fishermen aged from 15 to 44 were twenty times more likely to die as a result of an accident at work. Fifty-seven men were lost in a matter of weeks after the three losses above and the report also found that in the ten years preceding that 208 trawlermen had lost their lives. The report told the world just how dangerous fishing was, especially in the distant-water fishing.11

  The Second Cod War, as these wars became known, started when Iceland increased its fishing limits to 50 miles. Again the British refused to recognise this. Numerous British and West German trawlers continued fishing within the new zone on the first day. The Icelandic leftist coalition which governed at the time ignored the treaty that stipulated the involvement of the International Court of Justice. It said that it wasn’t bound by agreements made by the previous centre-right government, with Lúdvik Jósepsson, the fisheries minister, stating that ‘the basis for our independence is economic independence’.

  During this war, the Icelandic Coast Guard started to use net-cutters to cut the trawling lines of non-Icelandic vessels fishing within the new exclusion zone. On 18 January 1973, the nets of eighteen trawlers were cut. This forced the British seamen to threaten to leave the Icelandic fishery zone unless they had the protection of the Royal Na
vy. Then, on 17 May, the British trawlers left the Icelandic waters, only to return two days later with British warships. Various altercations followed between boats until, after a series of talks within NATO, British warships were recalled on 3 October. An agreement was signed on 8 November which limited British fishing activities to certain areas inside the 50-mile limit, resolving the dispute that time. The resolution was based on the premise that British trawlers would limit their annual catch to no more than 130,000 tons. This agreement expired in November 1975.

  Then, of course, the Third Cod War began when Iceland declared a 200-mile limit and the British government again refused to recognise this. The conflict, which was the most hard-fought of the Cod Wars, saw British fishing trawlers have their nets cut by the Icelandic Coast Guard, and there were several incidents of ramming by Icelandic ships and British trawlers, frigates and tugboats. Over the course of three months various incidents were reported in the press. Britain deployed a total of twenty-two frigates and seven supply ships, nine tug-boats, and three support ships to protect its fishing trawlers, although only six to nine of these vessels were on deployment at any one time. Iceland deployed four patrol vessels and two armed trawlers. The Icelandic government tried to acquire US Asheville class gunboats, and when denied by the American government they tried to get Soviet Mirka class frigates. A more serious turn of events came when Iceland threatened closure of the NATO base at Keflavík, which would have severely impaired NATO’s ability to defend the Atlantic Ocean from the Soviet Union. As a result, the British government, under pressure from the Americans, agreed to have its fishermen stay outside Iceland’s 200-nautical mile (370km) exclusion zone without a specific agreement. That, then, was the end of distant-water trawling and a series loss to Britain’s fish consumption requirements.12

  On the other side of Britain, in and around the northern Irish Sea, the Clyde and parts of western Scotland, the ring-net fishing was booming. Some say the 1950s was the peak of that fishery with the so-called modern developments in the method having perfected it. Boats had become bigger because of the need for more deck space after the use of deeper nets brought on by introduction of winches and bigger boats had larger engines which needed greater buoyancy aft. Thus the cruiser stern was incorporated into the ringer, a transition from the canoe. Angus Martin tells us that, as a general rule, pre-war ringers were of the canoe-stern design and the post-war vessels of the cruiser-stern design.13 Other innovations in the process of ring-netting since the early part of the century included additions to the net, the feeling-wire, brailers, echo-sounders and pursing rings. With a decline in the herring in the Clyde in the post-war years, more concentration was played upon fishing the Minches. At the same time many of the fishers increasingly adopted seine-netting and some bottom-trawling for prawns, which was to become almost the only profitable fishing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Dual purpose boats with power-blocks for mid-water trawling, larger wheelhouses for all the electronic equipment for navigation and fish-finding needs and powerful engines of 200hp became the norm. By the 1970s more boats were trawling than ring-netting and, with eventual closure of the herring fishing after the collapse due to the vast amounts being fished with the purse-seine, herring fishing in and around Loch Fyne almost came to an abrupt halt.

  Ullapool in the 1950s, at the peak of Scottish west coast fishery in the twentieth century. The boat is Crimond, BCK118, built as a herring drifter.

  It was, of course, the fisheries policy of the European Union (what we then knew as the Common Market) that ordered the closure of the herring fishery as stocks were close to an absolute collapse. Britain entered the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973 after Prime Minister Edward Heath had negotiated entry and part of the agreement was the acceding of the British territorial fishing limits into a joint pan-EEC fishing area. When it was first decided upon in 1970, it was agreed that fishermen from all countries within the Community should have access to all waters. Britain – whose territorial waters contained 65 per cent of Europe’s rich fishing grounds – had to accept this otherwise membership would be denied. Some say it was Charles de Gaulle of France who insisted upon this. In 1976 the EU extended its fishing waters from 12 to 200 miles (22.2km to 370.4km) from the coast, in line with other international changes. This required additional controls and the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) as such was created in 1983. This now had four areas of activity: conservation of stocks, vessels and installations, market controls, and external agreements with other nations.

  Meanwhile, down in the southwest of England, fishing was also undergoing huge change. The pilchards had long gone, mackerel was unpopular and while Brixham boats were engaged mainly in beam trawling, the Newlyn boats, those that weren’t trawling, were gill-netting out in the Western Approaches, off the south coast of Ireland.

  Going back to beginning of this chapter, the Efficient was renamed Excellent after the sailing lugger owned by William Stevenson until 1888, and re-registered with her present letters and numbers which, too, were those of the original boat, PZ513. Over the next forty years she remained the backbone of the Stevenson fleet. As the fleet expanded, Excellent always managed to compete favourably with the new craft. In 1962 she was re-engined for the second time, receiving a naturally aspirated Lister Blackstone ERMGR5 – 280hp at 750rpm – which she still has today. She continued to trawl up to the 1990s.

  In 1998 I joined her for ten days fishing in the Western Approaches. On the first morning of fishing, while I’d been slumbering in my coffin berth, the crew had already shot the nets, each tier consisting of about twenty nets, with anchors and floats at each end. Excellent had six tiers of these nets, each net being 120 yards long by 3 fathoms deep, set about 18 inches above the seabed, so in total amounting to over 8 miles of netting with a mesh of 4 inches.

  A complete net with sole, foot and head rope cost about £160, the sheet of net alone costing some £70. As the nets are often broken, their upkeep is costly. Once the nets have all been shot over the stern, they are left for twenty-four hours or so and the vessel tediously steams up and down the 8 miles, taking over an hour in each direction.

  That night I was put to work, assuming watches as normal as any other vessel. I can still recall watching the other Newlyn boats patrolling. Gill-netters show the normal red over white lights, but to differentiate them from other fishing boats operating static gear – i.e. not trawling – they also display a flashing yellow light. These vessels all marched up and down their gear, like soldiers on guard. Not hovercrafts, as the book on lights will tell you, but fishermen guarding their livelihood from the dangers of marauding Spanish trawlers! That night I also saw the loom of the Fastnet light low on the horizon.

  We hauled at first light, using the hydraulic winch, one crew-member scanning the net all the while for hake, at which point a shout of ‘Hake-o’ alerts the winch operator in the wheelhouse to slow up and the fish untangled. Two other crew feed the net back into the pound, while the fourth guts the fish. In calm conditions they work fast, perhaps an hour a tier. Rough conditions, or with a glut of fish, can triple the time. On that first haul we brought aboard about 15 stone of hake and 10 of cod, haddock, ling and monkfish. Not a good haul, so we motored south for about 50 miles and by midnight the nets had been shot again. After that, business adjourned to the galley for roast pork (or curly-tails as pigs are referred to through superstition) washed down with tea – all the boats are generally ‘dry’ at sea.

  April Fools’ Day brought sunshine, and a sense of excitement: the lure of the kill. Hauling began at 3 p.m., and the excitement was short-lived. Mack – or mackerel – filled the net. Mackerel, like herring, perishes quickly and has to be landed immediately unless you have the huge refrigerated salt water tanks to keep it fresh. We didn’t, and since we were 180 miles from Newlyn, it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to land it, so it had to be cleared from the net and chucked over the side. Adding insult to injury, the hake was scarce.
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  That afternoon I took over from Joe in the wheelhouse, while he helped on deck with the clearing and the gutting of what fish there were. I was amazed how quickly time went, concentrating as I was on the hauler, another winch that fed the net aft and the engine controls to keep the vessel’s head upwind along the line of the net – although the crew probably didn’t agree as they were stung by jellyfish and soaked by the spray. More importantly, my wages weren’t dependent on the fish caught.

  The whole operation of hauling a tier, steaming back again to shoot it in the same place, and then proceeding with the next ones in turn, took twelve hours. As the fish came aboard, they were gutted and packed in the plastic fish boxes, and immediately these went down into the fish room to be layered with ice.

  We had taken aboard six tons of ice at £15 a ton before departure, and it’s amazing just how long ice does remain in a mass when packed tightly into the hold. On a subsequent voyage aboard Excellent, I found ice in the hold that had been there for over two weeks and it was still able to cool food and beer. On this occasion the ice was shovelled into the fish boxes before these were stacked. Hake went to port, white fish to starboard, although the catch of hake was poor and there was a disappointing imbalance in the number of boxes on either side. Once this was all below, we could eat and sleep, although even after an exhausting day, we all had to suffer another two hours on watch.

  I recall thinking one night on watch about the Common Fisheries Policy and how its resentment by Cornish fishermen is caused by the insult of French craft fishing within sight of the north Cornish coast with ten times more cod quota than they have. When Britain sold out its fishermen through equal access to a common resource at the negotiations for British entry to the EEC, some say Cornwall lost out more than any other part of the UK because of their proximity to the Western Approaches with its rich pickings. Possibly the Scots will disagree, but there’s no doubt that the Southwest has seen a tumble in trade as many of the fleet have packed up through decommissioning and retirement. It seems that now the coastal fishermen – some call them artisan fishermen – are expendable to politicians who consider it justifiable for them to lose their livelihoods so that the industry can be controlled by the few big players. Fishing, then, is to be taken down the same road as coalmining, shipbuilding and the cotton industry, handed piecemeal to ever more powerful businessmen who direct operations from some sun-soaked tax haven by telephone, while those that have lived through fishing all their lives are unjustly discarded into a sea of despair, just like all those fish that are thrown back through the impractical mechanics of the Common Fisheries Policy. Basically fishing will disappear from the British traditional way of life.