New play reels in maritime history research

The World Premier run of playwright Richard Bean's new play, Reykjavik, about 1970s Hull trawlermen, trawler owners and the last days of British distant water fishing off Iceland is at London’s Hampstead Theatre this month.

The play is set in Hull and Reykjavik and it was no surprise that Dr Robb Robinson, Honorary Research Fellow and maritime historian based at the Blaydes Maritime Centre at the University of Hull, was called upon to provide research and to write an article for the programme for the play.

Dr Robinson’s article for the Reykjavik programme tells the story of distant water trawling, the extreme nature of commercial sea fishing, and – with reference to the new play – suggests that: “if you are really looking for the genesis of this story then you could argue that it actually has its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and was as much a product of the railway age and our love of fish and chips as it was of trawlers and trawlermen2.

During preparations for the staging of the play,  Dr Robinson showed the director Emily Burns and designer Anna Reid around some key sites on Hessle Road and the old St Andrew's Dock in Hull.

Distant water trawling: an extreme occupation

In the mid-1970s, after decades of international disputes, the Icelandic government extended their fishery limits to 200 miles and finally excluded most foreign trawlers – certainly all British vessels – from the fishing grounds around their island. But if you are really looking for the genesis of this story then you could argue that it actually has its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and was as much a product of the railway age and our love of fish and chips as it was of trawlers and trawlermen.

Much of Britain’s national railway network was constructed between the 1840s and 1860s. Railways revolutionised life, they connected distant towns and cities, provided fast and reliable transport for people and goods. Many sectors benefited, but none more so than the fish trade. For the first time, it was possible to move large consignments of fresh fish quickly and cheaply from coastal ports to burgeoning industrial cities. At best a perishable commodity, fresh fish had previously been a luxury item inland. But the railways revolutionised the market for fresh fish which became an article of cheap mass consumption when some genius put fried and battered fish together with chips and a national institution was born.

Fish and chip shops sprang up across the country. This wonderful and nutritious food became a virtual staple of life in many households, and to meet an almost insatiable hunger for white fish, particularly for cod and haddock, the country’s fishing fleet grew dramatically, and trawlers, which towed great nets across the seabed, seemed the most efficient means of making large catches. The fish they caught collected in the rear of their net, in the so-called cod end. When the net was hauled aboard, the ropes keeping the cod end closed were loosened, the catch spilled onto the open deck and the crew hurriedly – almost frenetically - set about sorting and gutting the fish which were then stowed below.

When ashore, many trawlermen and their families lived in rows of tightly knit terraces off Freeman Street in Grimsby and Hessle Road in Hull. By the early twentieth century their old sailing trawlers were replaced by much more efficient, steam trawlers. These were too expensive for most working fishermen to acquire and were usually constructed by specialist fishing vessel shipbuilders such as Cook, Welton and Gemmell for a small number of successful trawling companies whose owners not only understood the trade but had access to the requisite capital resources needed to finance their operations. In this new capitalist age, the owners did not go fishing themselves. Henceforward, the highest position a working distant water fishermen could usually aspire to was that of skipper. Successful skippers might make a lot of money but there was no fast track to the trawler’s bridge, all entering the trade started at the bottom as deckie learners – known sometimes as snackers – and worked their way up. The owners ensured there were more skippers than ships and a run of poor landings, or perceived misdemeanours, meant even a reputable skipper could be sacked and face a spell ashore.

By the Edwardian era the North Sea fishing grounds could not wholly satisfy British demand for white fish. The new steam trawlers began venturing to what became known as the distant water grounds, fishing off the Faroe Islands, Iceland, then later the Barents Sea, Bear Island, Greenland and the Norwegian coast.

Because the nets were hauled over the side, these steam trawlers were known as sidewinders. Hull sidewinder trawlers visiting these far-flung grounds typically made a three-week round trip, carrying ice to keep their catch fresh until they returned to St Andrew’s Dock. Such trips involved four- or five-day voyages to and from the grounds but whilst off the coasts of Iceland, vessels and crews were worked hard, fishing almost as intensely as weather conditions would permit. Eighteen-hour days of almost endless trawling, hauling, gutting and stowing were the order of the day. Distant water trawling trips continued throughout the year. In winter fishing took place during the long hours of northern darkness and on sidewinder trawlers the crews worked on pitching, rolling and wave washed decks, exposed to the full force of bitter arctic elements.

Once back in dock many – though not all – trawlermen crammed as much as they could into the three days ashore before their ship returned to sea. Sleep was not the first consideration. Those wildly splashing money around after a successful trip earned themselves the soubriquet of the ‘three-day millionaires’. Celebrations could be both raucous and generous with the dialogue in the trawlermen’s bars perhaps more Fred Trueman than Truman Capote.

The later twentieth century trawling trade had also to contend with many other issues. Not only did sidewinders become larger and ever more powerful but from the early 1960s they began to be displaced by the newer and even more efficient stern trawling vessels, capable of freezing their catch at sea and staying on the grounds for months rather than weeks. But the rich distant water fishing grounds lay off the coasts of other countries who considered fish to be their most important natural resource and states such as Iceland and Norway, concerned about stock depletion, increasingly objected to foreign vessels visiting seas close to their shores and pressed for their national jurisdiction – not least fishery limits – to be extended seawards. But Britain disagreed and, like a number of west European states, regarded three miles – said to be the maximum distance of a cannon shot from the shore – to be the natural and traditional limit of a state’s offshore jurisdiction.

In the late 1940s, Norway, took the UK to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, in a dispute over its claim to have a four-mile limit and to the surprise of many, not least the British trawling trade, they won. Other challenges to the three-mile limit soon followed, led most notably by Iceland. Fish products then made up 95% of Icelandic exports and Icelanders strongly supported taking control of what they saw as their natural resources. Over the following decades Icelanders made a series of unilateral extensions to their limits which the British and other European nations opposed. These disputes, known as Cod Wars, involved attempts by Icelandic gun boats to arrest foreign trawlers fishing in the contested waters whilst British warships and sometimes powerful ocean-going tugs were deployed to stop them.

On one side was a country of only 300,000 people and on the other a global powerhouse but Iceland played its cards well. The struggles took place off their shores which caused the British all manner of logistical problems. This was also the era of the Cold War; Iceland was able to use its strategic North Atlantic position to ‘encourage’ other NATO members to pressure Britain into settling these disputes. Further strategic global political changes played their part. During the post-war decades a number of UN Conferences on the Law of the Sea were held. Although the UK fought a series of rearguard actions against extensions to fishery limits their position was compromised by their intent to claim the oil and gas reserves discovered off British coasts. To cut a long story short, the UK, on the losing side of a series of Cod Wars, was gradually pushed further and further from Icelandic coasts and from the end of 1976 obliged to leave the island’s waters for good.

For the Hull trawling trade – owners, skippers and crews alike – this could not have happened at a worse time. Voyage costs had already escalated after global energy prices quadrupled as a result of the Israeli-Arab War in 1974 and, of course, a condition of joining the Common Market in the 1970s was accepting the Common Fisheries Policy which meant British waters would have to be shared with other European states.

Fishing was said to be the UK’s most perilous occupation, and was claimed to be four times more dangerous than coal mining. Over the years, there has been a steady and seemingly relentless attrition of trawlermen lost over the side in bad weather, but it was usually only the dramatic losses of entire vessels which captured media attention. And this was a hazardous way of life. During wild winter storms the spray hitting a trawler’s superstructure and rigging could freeze and when this happened, no matter what the sea state, all hands had to turn out to chip away the ice, their lives depended on it. If they could not stop the build-up of ice then the vessel might become top heavy and capsize. Losses of lives at sea were appalling – over 6,000 fishermen from Hull alone have been lost at sea since the 1830s – but this was the territory of this extreme livelihood. Almost everyone from a fishing family knew at least one friend or relative, often many more, who had been taken by the sea. However, the loss of three Hull trawlers and all but one crew member over a few weeks in the winter of 1968 marked something of a watershed in attitudes to health and safety thanks to implacable national campaigning – not by the fatalistic trawlermen themselves – but by a group of women from Hull’s fishing community led by the legendary Lilly Bilocca.

Commercial sea fishing has always been a unique activity. It cannot be defined as agriculture, industry or transport though it shares many of their characteristics. Yet there is also something far more elemental, perhaps primeval, about fishing. All fishing vessels, even sophisticated modern trawlers with all manner of electronic aids, are in essence hunting. The ability to weather their way across great maritime wildernesses and understand the haunts and habits of a fugitive prey have always been essential skills for any would-be skipper. In the nineteenth century the waters in which they worked were considered open seas and the fish stocks therein contained were not only thought inexhaustible but unappropriated. Even today, it is the actuality of capture that converts what was previously wild into private property. Over the last century questions about overfishing, who has the rights to fish stocks and the limits of the seawards jurisdiction of coastal states, have come increasingly to the fore.

But back in the nineteenth century, trawling spread quickly along the east coast of Britain. By the 1880s hundreds of sailing trawlers worked out of Hull and Grimsby said it was the greatest whilst Hull knew it was. Their huge fleets required a large labour force. The lure of better money meant many fishermen came to these towns from traditional trawling ports such as Brixham or Ramsgate, but in the nineteenth century other potential trawlermen were recruited in their mid-teens from packed workhouses across Victorian England. Indentured as apprentices for up to seven years, workhouse youths, many of whom had never seen the sea before, were signed up and sent on trips for weeks at a time.

Within less than a couple of decades the British distant water trawling trade could scarcely be described as even a shadow of its former self. Vessels were scrapped, many trawlermen were left high and dry, some went to work in the North Sea oil and gas industries or the coastal fisheries whilst others took jobs ashore or were left unemployed when the country was gripped by recession. A unique labour force and a way of life were dispersed and the skills and experiences it collectively retained were scattered to the winds. Unlike the workers in many other traditional industries which were shedding labour at this time trawlermen did not always receive the benefit of compensation. Classed as casual labour – they signed on for each trip – trawlermen with years of service had to fight on for decades for redundancy payments – rough justice for a remarkable and unique workforce.

Fish and chips are still a much-loved national dish, but much of the cod and haddock we British crave are now imported from the very countries off whose shores we used to fish. Despite Brexit and all that was promised to the fishing industry, the last British government did not manage to negotiate sufficient access to fishing quotas on distant water grounds to maintain even our now tiny distant water fleet.

Dr Robb Robinson is a maritime historian and an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Hull. He is the author of, amongst other publications, Trawling: the rise and fall of the British Trawl Fishery (Exeter University Press) and Viola: The Life and Times of a Hull Steam Trawler (Lodestar Books).

This article features in the Hampstead Theatre programme for Reykjavik, a new play by Richard Bean. The play is showing at London's Hampstead Theatre until 23 November 2024.