by Mike Smylie
The English coast of the Channel is home to numerous small beach-based craft such as the Beer luggers, the Chesil Beach lerrets, Poole fishing boats, Itchen ferries from the Solent, Portsmouth seiners, Selsey crabbers, Bognor lobster boats and a variety of Sussex beach craft, the best known perhaps being those of Hastings where an active beach-based fishing industry still survives (these boats were briefly discussed in Chapter 4). Folkestone was known for preferring to have their craft built in Cornwall and many such luggers have been based there. Smaller beaches employed small lug-rigged craft such as at St Margaret’s Bay, east of Dover. The one thing all the south coast boats have is that they have evolved through influences from across the Channel and even today the traditional boats of both sides display a common heritage.
The Thames estuary is home to an array of bawleys and smacks, both big and small. Bawleys were River Thames boats, said to have evolved from the cutter-rigged ‘Peter boats’ that worked the river. Bawley is probably a corruption of ‘boiler’, denoting the way of boiling shrimps while at sea. They were transom-sterned vessels with little sheer and a shallow draft for working the shoal waters over the sandbanks of the estuary. They were common around Margate, Faversham, Chatham, Strood, Gravesend, Leigh-on-Sea and Southend. They were instantly recognisable for having a short mast, tall topmast and long gaff on the loose-footed mainsail. Many, it seems, were built by Aldous of Brightlingsea, famous for their smacks, although there were, of course, builders such as Gill & Son of Rochester, E. Lemon at Strood, Fiddle of Gravesend and Stone of Erith in Kent, Heywood at Southend and Cann at Harwich.
Smacks of Essex are renowned for their speed, their voracious fishing of, especially, oysters and the fact that many have survived and continue sailing today. These days they seem to be everywhere in the Essex rivers and backwaters, though some have now got free in their retirement from fishing and gone looking, sailing to other quarters around the coast. There are a few in Cornwall that, over the years, have migrated from perches upon muddy creeks to a more resplendent place among the other traditional craft of that county. Some say the West Country folk don’t restore them in the same way as the Essex folk but I wouldn’t want to comment on that.
The oldest, Boadicea, CK213, was built in 1808 and has stayed true to her birth-county, staying much of her life in the hands of the family of her original owner. She was built as a clinker-built boat, though in 1890 during a refit, she was rebuilt in carvel planking. She retains a transom which is how the early boats were, though around the middle of the nineteenth century lute sterns were added onto the transoms and, by 1860, counter sterns had been generally adopted by builders. Nineteenth-century smacks came in three sizes and were mostly registered at Colchester (CK) or Maldon (MN). The smallest were under 35ft and worked oyster dredges and trawls. The mid size were up to 50ft and generally spratted with a stow-net, dredged for oysters or trawled while the largest dredged for oysters away from home, as far away as Luce Bay, North and South Wales, the Firth of Forth and closer to home off Shoreham and the Norfolk coast. Some went to the Dutch island of Terschelling and obtained the nickname ‘skillingers’.
Further north, cod smacks were built at Harwich specifically for the Icelandic fishery as described in Chapter 8. Many were used to fish the North Sea in winter. Numerous other small types of boats worked this coast – dobles were the Kent equivalents to the Peter boats, the bumkins were small open oyster dredgers at West Mersea, double-ended whelk boats worked the Kent coast, modelled on Cromer crabbers and winkle-brigs were small winkling boats.
Herring, of course, was king in East Anglia, and large lug-rigged drifters worked out of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, as did the trawlers already mentioned. Some drifters even adopted the gaff rig. Beach boats were transom-sterned, small, two-masted punts which drifted for herring and sprats, trawled and potted. At Yarmouth, a particular type of shrimper evolved, of which there were eighty boats at one time. These were half-deckers and did not boil the catch aboard but took it home, often to sell outside their houses to promenading holiday-makers. Double-ended beach yawls worked the northern part of the coast, between Cromer and Aldeburgh, attending to shipping in the Yarmouth roads and up towards the Haisborough lightship. Some of these fished when not otherwise busy, and sometimes carried herring ashore from the larger drifters. All these beach craft sometimes took trippers out during the summer season.
The Cromer crab boats have been discussed, as have the cobles and keel boats of Yorkshire and Northumberland. King’s Lynn was home to the Lynn yoll, a cockle and mussel collecting boat that worked the Wash, while King’s Lynn also had its own smacks, the smaller of which fished for shrimps and the larger dredging for oysters and fishing for whelks. Many were built by the well-known builder Worfolk Bros, while nearby Boston had its own small fleet of smacks built by local builder Gostelow. We’ve also seen that Grimsby and Hull were bases to the deep-sea fleet and trawlers from the North Sea. Shrimpers also worked out of Paull. (See Chapter 4)
Of course, numerous types of boats fished rivers and some such as the stop-net and compass-net boats, the coracles and the long-net punts, have already been mentioned. In Ireland a host of small boats worked the rivers and inshore fisheries such as the Cheekpoint prongs, the Ballyhack yawls, the Towelsail lobster boats and mackerel yawls of Roaringwater Bay, the Achill yawls, the Shannon gandelows, as well as the well-known skin boats of which there are various types.2 Clovelly picarooners worked from that harbour.
The advent of the steam era, in comparison to industry and the railways, had a late impact on the fisheries. Steam trawling, although initial experiments occurred in the 1850s, didn’t really get going until the 1880s and for the herring fishery not until the turn of the century. However, once that initial impact was made, the fishing fleets soon absorbed the innovation and built steamers and we’ve seen in an earlier chapter their effect on the fisheries.
In the same way, there were many in the fisheries who didn’t take to the idea of the internal combustion engine. A few did and one such pioneer was skipper, Robert Robertson, of Campbeltown. He was the first to fit an engine into a Lochfyne skiff, his being the Brothers, CN97, in 1907.3 This was a Kelvin 7.9hp unit made by the Bergius Launch & Engine Company of Glasgow, in the early days of the Kelvin company that became world renowned for its engines. Indeed, there were few fishermen on the west coast of Scotland that didn’t have a Kelvin engine. Others went for Gardner of Manchester, Thornycroft, later of Southampton, the Ailsa Craig Motor Co. of London or Gleniffer of Anniesland, Glasgow. There were, by the outbreak of war in 1914, some fifty companies that had fitted engines into British fishing vessels over the previous decade or so.4
Robert Robertson was at the forefront in modernising the fishing fleet and in the early 1920s visited Scandinavia and was impressed with their design of vessel. When he returned he commissioned the Glasgow naval architect W.G. McBride to design a boat based on the craft he had seen in Norway. The resultant boat was a canoe-sterned vessel of approximately 50ft in length and he showed this to William Miller of renowned Scottish boatbuilder J.G. Miller & Sons of St Monans and placed an order for two boats. The first, Falcon, arrived in Campbeltown in April 1922 and the second, Frigate Bird, a month later. Both had Gleniffer engines and the total cost of both boats was £1,277 14s, excluding nets and gear. These boats were totally unlike the Lochfyne skiffs.5
Although at first not entirely successful at the ring-net, they soon proved the opposite though the rest of the fleet remained sceptical. Four years later, Robertson ordered another boat from the same yard – all his successive boats were built by Millers – but this one being smaller at almost 42ft. It was deemed that the freeboard was lower for lifting baskets aboard the Crimson Arrow. Two years later he ordered a larger 46ft boat – the Nil Desperandum – which had a forward wheelhouse and a ring-netting winch aft. By this time other fishermen had been convinced as to the sense in building similar boats and several arrived from the yards of Walter Reekie of St Monans and William Weather
head of Cockenzie. By the 1930s, with more vessels being built, the true canoe-sterned ring-netter had arrived in and around the Clyde, many based on the Ayrshire coast. Robertson himself, with his eyesight failing, retired from fishing in the late 1930s and died in January 1940 at the age of 59. Nevertheless, he goes down in history through his technological expertise that brought so much to the development of the ring-net; he will be remembered for his pre-eminence among the ring-net fishermen and undoubtedly among the few who can be regarded as the most innovative of British fishermen.
Meanwhile, on the east coast, the cruiser-sterned fishing boat was gaining ascendancy after the adoption of the Danish seine-net. The design spread rapidly throughout Britain so that cruiser-sterned boats were being built as far away as Cornwall and by several yards in Ireland through grants from the BIM (Bord Iascaigh Mhara), the Irish Sea Fisheries Board. Previously to the BIM’s establishment in 1952, the Congested Districts Board (CDB) had promoted fishing by buying in Scottish fifies and Zulus in the late nineteenth century and which fished the west coast. Tyrrell’s of Arklow had launched the first motorised fishing boat in Ireland – the Avoca – in 1908 and this set off a chain of events that resulted in the BIM designing several standard boats for the Irish fisheries. The best known of these was perhaps the BIM fifty-footers, eighty-eight of which were built between the mid-1950s and late 1960s.6
Pretty ring-net boats lined up at Carradale, north of Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula. Always varnished, these boats were built both on the Scottish east coast and by Nobles of Girvan on the west.
In conclusion, British and Irish boatbuilders have undoubtedly produced some of the finest fishing boats the world has seen. I was reminded of the great days of Scottish boatbuilding by a clip of a film I saw recently. This was the Gosling fifteen-minute short, Build Me Straight, well worth watching. It begins with the naval architect – complete with his Senior Service fags of course – putting the finishing touches to one of his drawings of a boat, the type of which is given away by the model of a fishing boat on his desk. The scene changes abruptly to the sections being fared on the mould loft floor before it switches again to the felling of an oak tree. Then the building of the vessel gets underway, starting with the keel and sternpost. The date is 1963 and the yard William Weatherhead’s of Cockenzie. The film then highlights the building of the vessel from fixing frames and steaming and nailing the planking, to laying the deck and caulking. This is in the days before disposable saws and electric planers and there’s plenty of adze work for the workforce. Once the structure is completed the tanks are manhandled in and the smart new pill-box wheelhouse craned aboard with a man crouched on the roof. The eight-cylinder engine – looks like a Gardner to me – is also craned in and suddenly the hull is varnished and the local sign-writer has arrived to paint on the registration – BA208. The game is given away and we realise we have just watched the birth of the renowned Sloan family ringer-netter Wistaria which, as many Clyde fishermen will tell you, was a good boat, neighbouring with the Watchful, BA124, at the ring-net. She slides down the ways into the water and sits proud and high in the water before being fitted out. Then she’s towed over to the quay in preparation and, as the lines are thrown ashore, we are given a profile view of her. How pretty she is with her extreme sheer line, especially in the upturned stern. Suddenly the continuity of the film is lost and we are aboard the ringer, Maryeared TT57, built for the McAlpine family of Tarbert, as she heads out to sea for her trials. Both boats look wonderful in their varnished elegance. Maryeared is, as far as I know, still afloat, in Brixham, I’m told, though I had a look while recently there and couldn’t see her.
It’s one of those moments where the viewer is taken back to the heyday of wooden fishing boatbuilding, when health and safety was only a figment of someone’s imagination, when phone numbers were just four figures before STD codes, before hard hats replaced flat caps, when people could smoke to help them concentrate on the job at hand and when wooden ladders were homemade. An era, that is, that many yearn back to – judging by some boatbuilders, some still adhere to the same rules!
Wooden boats continued to be built into the very last decade of the twentieth century, this one at Macduff Shipyards in about 1998. (Courtesy of Bodie’s of Banff)
Notes
1 Nick Miller, The Lancashire Nobby, Stroud, 2009.
2 See Criostoir MacCarthaigh (ed.), Traditional Boats of Ireland, Cork, 2008, for a fantastic description of Irish craft.
3 Mike Smylie, The Slopemasts – A History of the Lochfyne Skiffs, Stroud, 2008.
4 L.W. Hawkins, Early Motor Fishing Boats, Norwich, 1984.
5 Angus Martin, The Ring-Net Fishermen, Edinburgh, 1981.
6 See Pat Nolan, Sea Change, The Rise of the BIM 50-footer and its Impact on Coastal Ireland, Dublin, 2008.
14
FISHERMEN AND FAMILY
There’s no doubt that fishermen the world over were once a unique and remarkable band of men tied together by the sea, the common bond. Sadly, that has somewhat changed today because of technology though there still remains a very large contingent that still work under the impression that theirs is a livelihood worth cherishing and that their methods and attitudes alone will ensure its survival. Some fishers, who are in the minority of course, are damaging both the marine environment and the fish stocks with their persistence in building and operating vessels that have little concern for what they leave behind, only interested in what they can catch to maximise profit and so ensure continuity in the economic world of today. Ever-increasing efficiency through bigger engines, more electronic screens to stare at, more sophisticated mechanisation in deck gear, hotel-standard accommodation to stay at sea longer – what hope is there for the rest of the world because of those that abuse the sea to appease the bankers and financial institutions that already have much to answer for.
With around 95 per cent of fishers working on what is considered to be a small scale, they are the vast majority who adhere to certain traditions, not for any sentimental reasons but because they have respect for the past and stick to their superstitious prejudices. In Britain the percentage was approximately 78 per cent in 2010.1 That respect itself is in their genes, nurtured through childhood. It is for the same reason that many of them go into fishing in the first place. Even today there are some that fish because they say it’s in the blood: their ancestors did it therefore they do. However, this percentage is now rapidly decreasing as the traditional fishing communities are displaced by the advance of second homes. Where in the past it was local councils who frowned upon the conditions that fishermen lived in, and in some cases transplanted these people onto the periphery of their town or village, nowadays it is those with the money that can afford to have a home in the city and weekend retreat in the country. ‘Country’ so often means in the middle of a seaside town – and this is most obvious in Cornwall, west Wales, Yorkshire and north Norfolk.
So what exactly is a fishing community? In the same way as, for example, a mining community lived in close-knit quarters, so did fishers. In towns they would generally be housed in one quarter and various examples remain, though perhaps the best is in Aberdeen. Here the fishing quarter was based in Footdee – locally called Fittie – an area of land at the eastern end of the River Dee. It is widely assumed that the name came from ‘foot of the Dee’ though in actuality it comes as a dedication to St Fothan. The planned housing development was set out in 1809 by the then Superintendent of the town’s public works, John Smith, to re-house the fisherfolk from what were considered to be the hovels they were living in previously. These original fishermen of Aberdeen were said to have been a race apart, coming from Scandinavia.2 The village, when it was built, consisted of two-storey cottages set out originally in two squares of twenty-eight dwellings although various additions were made during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, some of the houses were added to due to the influx of fishermen from outside the town.
In 1885 Footdee was described as a quaint
suburb of Aberdeen and at the time had some one hundred families in residence and the writer regarded it, like all others of fisherfolk, as being peculiar, though differing from those of other working people:
In many things the Footdee people are like the gipsies. They rarely marry except with their own class; and those born in a community of fishers seldom leave it, and very seldom engage in any other avocation than that of their fathers. The squares of houses at Footdee are peculiarly constructed. There are neither doors nor windows in the outside walls, although these look to all points of the compass; and none live within the square but the fishermen and their families, so that they are as completely isolated and secluded from public gaze as a regiment of soldiers within the dead walls of a barrack … the total population of the two squares was 584 – giving about nine inmates for each of the two-roomed houses. But the case is even worse than the average indicates. ‘In the South Square only eight of the houses are occupied by single families; and in the North Square only three, the others being occupied by at least two families each – one room apiece – and four single rooms in the North Square contain two families each! There are thirty-six married couples and nineteen widows in the twenty-eight houses; and the number of district families in them is fifty-four.’ The Fittie men seem poorer than the generality of their brethren. They purchase the crazy old boats of other fishermen, and with these, except on very fine weather, they dare not venture very far from ‘the seething harbour-bar;’ and the moment they come home with a quantity of fish the men consider their labours over, the duty of turning the fish into cash devolving, as in all other fishing communities, on the women. The young girls or ‘queans,’ as they are called in Fittie, carry the fish to market, and the women sit there and sell them; and it is thought that it is the officious desire of their wives to be the treasurers of their earnings, that keeps the fishermen from being more enterprising. The women enslave the men to their will, and keep them chained under petticoat government. Did the women remain at home in their domestic sphere, looking after the children and their husbands’ comforts, the men would then pluck up spirit and exert themselves to make money in order to keep their families at home comfortable and respectable. Just now there are many fishermen who will not go to sea as long as they imagine their wives have got a penny left from the last hawking excursion.3