The Naked Shore by Tom Blass

Author:Tom Blass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

10

A North Sea Outrage

I miss those brave young fisher kids, coming home to shore,

Spending all their money, then going back for more.

I even miss Criterion – a very quiet pub –

And a little lass from Subway Street our kid put in the club

Dave Williams, ‘Good old Hessle Road’

The Hessle Road district is a working-class suburb of Kingston-upon-Hull built on the banks of the Humber River as it leads out onto the fishing grounds of the North Sea. Two generations ago the Road was synonymous with fishing, and one way or another almost all the inhabitants of its little red-brick terraces had some connection with Hull’s deep-water trawlers, as fishermen, or working on the quayside as bobbers unloading the heavy crates of ice-packed fish from the holds of the boats, or in the warehouses or repair yards. And if they didn’t, they depended on the custom of the fishing community – big spenders who liked to dazzle.

In the very middle of the district there stands a statue to a fisherman called William Leggett. It isn’t a very polished piece of work – he appears clumsily constructed and there is something about the way he holds his binoculars in the air that is jarring but charmingly gauche. But, unlike the obsidian memorials to long-dead generals that blight so much of central London, everybody in Hessle knows that ‘the Fisherman’ remembers a curious incident (which has rippled through successive decades) that occurred on the night of 21 October 1904 – the ninety-ninth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The Gamecock Fleet – one of Hull’s largest, indeed one of the largest in the United Kingdom – of forty-six steam-driven beam trawlers (so named for the way they dragged the trawl from the beam and not the stern) had enjoyed a good two days’ fishing since setting out from St Andrew’s Dock in Hull on the early tide the day before. It was a box-trawling fleet, utilising a system whereby the boats cruised the grounds together, the fish being packed into boxes transferred each day to a cutter, a fast boat that made the run back to Billingsgate, Hull or Grimsby with the catch and then returned for more. Box trawling allowed the fleet to travel further and to stay out for longer, while delivering a fresher catch. And it relieved all boats bar the cutter of the need to carry space-consuming ice.

That night a forgiving sea and absence of gales allowed for routine maintenance, net-mending and fish-packing to be undertaken at an easy pace, and had put the crews in a relaxed mood. These were highly professional fishermen. The previous year an American zoologist, Dr Benjamin Sharp, had trawled with the same fleet and found them ‘a fine set of fishermen . . . all young men and a hardy, jolly lot’, who sailed with almost no nautical instruments other than a log, a compass and barometer, and depended on instinct and sea-lore accrued over generations. The captain and mate of the vessel on

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