All maritime countries are interested in the edibles a-swim along their coasts, but in Britain, sea-fishing has long had a near-talismanic significance. In 2016, trawlermen personified the “island nation” for many Brexiteers — adventurers, out there on the high seas risking their lives to find food for us. The patriotic piscatorial pack was long led by Grimsby — which was, by the early 20th century becoming not just Britain’s, but the world’s, largest fishing port. It maintained this distinction with tough pride until the Fifties. But now, the name conjures bleak deprivation, rather than heroic trawlermen.
The docks today are eerily still, with boarded-up Victorian and Edwardian buildings, chain-link fences, and the occasional vessel, up out of the water, waiting to be serviced, dismantled, or quietly abandoned. There is a memorial garden to lost trawlers, with rusted anchors instead of gravestones. I have the nameplates of one Grimsby trawler, the Nimrod, found burned out on a beach, on the wall of my house. All along the shorelines south of the Humber, fragments of a once-great industry wash up after northeasterlies — bits of boat or quay timbers, sections of net, lifebelts, lobster pots.
This town was founded on fish. According to a 13th-century epic, it was fathered by a Danish fisherman called Grim, who saved the infant son of Denmark’s legitimate king instead of obeying orders to drown him. Not that such mythmaking feels relevant to many Grimbarians today. For most of the town’s history, any fish caught locally was for local consumption, although it has been a busy port since at least the 11th century. The simultaneous 1848 arrivals of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and the East Lincolnshire Railway, changed everything. Fresh fish, from the apparently endless stocks of the North Sea, could now be carried quickly aboard 40-wagon “Fish Specials” to the bottomless markets of the South. Grimbarians perfected the technique of preserving fish in ice, at first brought from Norway, until the Grimsby Ice Factory was established in 1900. Long the world’s largest, it produced up to 1,200 tons of ice daily, until it ceased production in 1990. The Factory survives, still with much of its machinery, the unique but crumbling centrepiece of the network of surviving dockside streets known as the “Kasbah”.
A century ago, Grimsby was frantic with fishing. Over 160 trawlers might unload their catches in a single day, with boats moored two deep along quay walls. Between a third and half of all residents were directly employed in the industry, everyone connected to it in some way. Fishermen from as far away as the Thames and even Devon relocated up here. (Between 1841 and 1901, the town’s population grew from 3,700 to 75,000.) They prospected the wide and unpolluted German Ocean as far as Greenland, almost imperial in their ambitions. A vastly expensive, Italianate-style, 309-feet-tall Dock Tower was opened by Prince Albert in 1854, evidence of the trawling industry’s importance to the Empire. The Tower still stands: a striking seamark and symbol of vanished might.
Trawling is one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. A few years ago, the Marine and Coastguard Agency reported that UK fishermen were six times more likely to die at work than those in any other profession. Apart from falling overboard, dangers include being injured by nets, ropes, and occasionally even the quarry, with “sea cats” (Atlantic wolffish) able to inflict nasty bites. Deckhands are not even well paid, with average salaries of under £16,000, although they often get a share in any profits.
All this would have been even worse in Grimsby’s glory days. In the 19th century, apprentices as young as 13 endured desperately hardscrabble lives aboard stinking smacks, sometimes brutally or incompetently captained. The bulwarks were only two feet six inches high, and inexperienced hands could easily be swept overboard, even in moderate seas. A list of losses between 1878 and 1882 shows 169 causes of accidental death, ranging from “Lost during heavy gale” to “Fell asleep whilst holding light when net was being drawn in” and “Fell overboard when larking in rigging”.
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