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I must go
down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer
her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song, and the
white sails shaking,
And a gray mist on the seas face, and a gray dawn
breaking.
I must go down to the sea again, for the call of
the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be
denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds
flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the
sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant
gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the
wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing
fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and sweet dream when the long
trip’s over.
John Masefield
I
really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea,
except I think it is because … we all came from the sea. And it is an
interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact
same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean and,
therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are
tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail
or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.
President John F
Kennedy, Newport, Rhode Island, 14 September 1962
The picture of the old
salt with the tall hat and leather boots, sorting his lines, is of my
great grandfather, Alexander (‘Sanny Caccy’) Thomson; (Caccy or Caukie, as
he was one of the few Catholics in the community). My forebears on both
sides were fishers, as far back as we can trace. Those of my great
grandfathers’ time were line fishermen operating sailboats, Scaffies,
Fifies and Zulus, [The
scaffie had lines like a Viking sailboat, the fifie had a
straight stem and was built to grip the water better when
sailing close to wind. The zulu incorporated features from both,
and proved ideal for drift net fishing. Some books tell of the design
being a compromise between a strong-minded fisherman and his equally
strong-minded wife. I met ‘Dad’ Campbell, the then aged son of the
zulu designer William Campbell, in Portland Oregon in 1968,
and asked if there was any truth to the tale, but he dismissed it as
jesting gossip.]
and shifting to the drift net for herring in the appropriate season. My
grandfathers operated drifters, both motor and steam driven, and these
larger boats worked year-round for herring.
The town of Lossie was
built chiefly on herring. From about 1900, merchants and farmers loaned
fishermen the money to build the drifters, and the community prospered.
The fleet worked off Norfolk and Suffolk in the autumn, Dunmore East,
Ireland in the winter, then the Moray Firth, Shetland and the Minches in
the spring and summer.
Great
Grandfather, Alexander Thomson, ‘Sanny Caccie’
The bulk of the herring catch was gutted,
dry-salted, and packed in barrels. That continued till after the 1914 –
18 war when the changes it brought to the economies of Russia and East
Europe, meant a collapse of the huge export market for salt herring. So
the drifters were gradually abandoned, and the fishers turned back to
white fish again (haddock, cod, hake, flatfish). This time they looked for
a more productive method than line fishing, and they found it in the
Danish seine net.
Old Scots sailboats (from
Peter Anson’s drawings)
Drifters in a Moray Firth
harbour, in the 1920’s
Drawing of a seine net in
operation
The Danish seine or “snurrevod”
was a light long-winged bag net that could be pulled over the sea-bed
by small, lightly-powered boats. The net was kept open horizontally by a
mile of manila rope, set in a semi-circle on each side. The ropes were
winched in slowly till the wings of the net came together, by which time
any fish encircled by the warps had been herded into the net which was
speedily hauled to the surface. The Danes winched the gear in while their
boat was held fast to a large anchor. Scots fishers preferred to tow the
gear slowly forward while the ropes were slowly warped in. The Danish
method suited the capture of plaice, their chief target. The Scottish
‘fly-dragging’ method permitted the net to take faster and higher swimming
fish like haddock and cod. Along with most of the east coast fleets, our
local boats adopted the gear which soon proved to be a money-earner, in
place of the abandoned herring nets. By the time I left school,
Lossiemouth had the largest seine net fleet in Scotland. The local
harbour could scarcely accommodate all the boats, and many fished from
west coast ports like Oban, Lochinver and Kinlochbervie. Larger seine
netters were later to use Peterhead as their base.
Scaffie and Fifie sailboats in Lossiemouth harbour, circa 1910
I recall the premier
showing of an underwater film of the seine net in operation, in 1953, in
our home town. The film had been shot in the shallow waters of Burghead
Bay by a renowned Naval frogman Commander ‘Buster’ Lionel Crabb RNVR GM
OBE whose disappearance some 3 years later has been the subject of much
speculation. His life ended mysteriously when he went swimming around a
Russian Naval vessel at Portsmouth in 1956. [The
Russian naval ship was the Ordkhonikidze. The previous year Crabb
had inspected the heavy cruiser Sverdlosk, that was carrying Soviet
leaders Bulganin and Kruschev for a meeting with the British Labour
Government (at which Kruschev behaved in typical fashion). Little
information or explanation of the Ordkhonikidze incident was
released at the time by the British and Soviet governments, though there
was much speculation, and Prime Minister Eden later forced MI6 Director
John Sinclair to resign over the matter. Buster Crabb had undertaken a
number of dangerous assignments for the British Navy during the second
world war, for which he was highly decorated.]
Anyhow, the film he shot in the Moray Firth was shown in the local town
hall to a fascinated audience of fishermen and would-be fishermen. It was
one of the first films to record fish actually being caught in a
trawl-type net. The technology however was still at a low stage of
development. The nets were small and made of cotton. Within ten years
they were to be replaced with synthetic high-opening trawls, and the rope
warps were also to be made thicker and of synthetic material.
Commander ‘Buster’ Lionel
Crabb RNVR GM OBE who first filmed the seine net in operation under water
and later lost his life under a Soviet naval ship.
But all that was in the
future. When I went to sea, the technology was fairly simple, though to
me, a young lad, there were no finer boats on the sea, and none better at
catching fish. The Scottish fishing ports and fishing fleets shared a
remarkable camaraderie and culture that was a world apart from sheer
money-making or soul-less materialism. It was a way of life. Fishermen
loved their profession; they were proud to be members of the sea-faring
community. As a visitor remarked perceptively, “there is an ‘esprit de
corps’ about them”. In those days there was no Sunday fishing [Here
I speak only of the family-owned seiners and ringers. Company-owned
trawlers were a different matter.]
The vessels sailed at midnight Sunday, and not a minute before. It was a
great sight then to stand on the pier and watch the fleet sail “out
into the darkness, and eastwards to the dawn”. The first evening
stroll I took with the lovely young lassie who was to become my wife, was
to watch the fleet depart on such a night. That was after I had left the
sea. For the first seven working years of my life, I was on the boats
watching the crowds wave to us from the pier as we set off on our weekly
fishing trip. The practice died out in the 1970’s. Today much of the
fishing fleet works on Sunday as on other days of the week. Yet there are
still some fishermen who respect the day of rest, mainly in the Hebrides,
but also among some devout east-coasters.
The Moray Firth, inner and
outer sections
Once at sea, the
radio-telephones were switched on, and the men on first watch, (usually
the younger deckhands), began to talk and sing to each other. It was
mostly hymns and gospel music they shared. The singers were not
necessarily strong church-goers, but it was the done thing nevertheless. Often they acquired their knowledge of spiritual songs in fishermen’s
missions, gospel halls, or Salvation Army meetings. But it mattered
little what their background had been, the hymn singing was a fishers‘
thing, not a church thing. The singing and exchange of news continued
till daylight or till they reached the fishing grounds and work began in
earnest.
English steam trawler off Ireland in the early 1950’s
Since my father was then
fishing around the Republic of Ireland, my baptism was to take place in
that fishery, and we had to voyage across to the emerald isle. We sailed
into the Moray Firth and west to Inverness from where we went through the
Caledonian Canal built by the great civil engineer Thomas Telford in 1822,
and on down past Fort William to Oban. From Oban we sailed south-west,
and then west past the southern end of Mull, and the famous
Stevenson-built lighthouses of Dubh Artach and Skerryvore near where the
brig Covenant was said to be shipwrecked in RLS’s marvelous tale
“Kidnapped”. From there we punched our way across the north coast of
Ireland, in the teeth of a north-westerly gale, and then headed south to
Rosan Point and Rathlin O’Birne island, then east into Donegal Bay.
Arriving at Killybegs harbour after 12 hours of rough passage, we were
glad to make port, myself especially, having gone through the throes of
sea-sickness most of the way. But within a few weeks I had my sea-legs,
and was working on deck with confidence, and with an appetite that rough
seas could not diminish. Over the next year we visited most of the
fishing harbours in the Republic, and caught our share of haddock, cod,
whiting, hake, skate, gurnards and soles. We even spent a winter at the
herring in Dunmore East on the south coast.
Visit of the Queen to our
harbour, 1956
Each December and January,
huge schools of herring came to the Waterford coast to spawn. Fleets of
large trawlers and drifters fished for them offshore, ring netters and
seiners worked on the schools close to land, and Dutch luggers, many with
crews of young boys from orphanages, brought the herring which they salted
on board in barrels and took back to Holland for additional curing. The
herring were so thick on the sea-bed at times, they could be caught with
almost any gear. We sewed small-meshed herring bags on to our seines and
were soon filling them with up to 20 tons of herring a time. Some tows
there were more, but the cotton bags simply burst. We sold some catches
in Ireland, and sailed over to Milford Haven in Wales with others to
obtain slightly higher prices from processors like Birds Eye. The weather
in winter on that stretch of water from the Fastnet light to the south
point of Wales, was rough to say the least. I recall the boat dipping
under the green swells till the whole deck was awash, then coming up again
like a whale till the next sea hit us. The approach to Milford Haven was
dangerous at the best of times. In darkness and bad weather, and without
the benefit of radar or electronic position fixing, it was a salutary
experience for a 15 year old boy, taking the boat around the dangerous and
exposed ‘Smalls’ rocks before the entrance to the bay and the sound.
My father, Skipper Jimmy
Thomson
Loading up with fish in
the days of plenty
My father’s vessel, MFV
Kincora
The year in Ireland was
memorable, though not without its sorrows. I had lost my paternal
grandmother and an uncle the previous summer. Then we got word that
another uncle had been lost at sea off the north of Scotland. His body
was never recovered. Altogether I lost three uncles and a cousin at sea,
and many, many friends. One of the first boys I befriended in the
Killybegs fleet, ‘Benny’, was lost the following year off Dunmore East.
My other Killybegs chum, Anthony, was washed overboard two years later.
Strangely, despite the considerable loss of life, we did not think much of
the danger, any more than I suppose miners did of their profession. It
was just one of the risks of the job. My home port lost its share of
vessels over the years. During my lifetime, boats that were sunk or
wrecked included the Resplendent, Caronia, Devotion, Trust, Palm, Briar
Rose, Strathyre, Scotia, Polaris, Incentive, Balmoral, Guide On, Arcadia,
Renown, Valkyrie, Sapphire, Ben Aigan, Argosy, Balmoral (2), Premier,
Valkyrie (2), to name but some. At least three of those losses
involved the whole crew, and 4 crewmen were lost in another. Several
individual deaths at sea also happened over the same period. Our small
harbour probably lost more than 20 boats and over 30 men in a period of
around 40 years. Throughout the north of Scotland overall, there has been
a horrific loss of boats and men year after year. Scarcely a winter
passes without another major fishing vessel tragedy occurring.
Myself attending the winch
with Sean Cotter
A bag of herring taken off
Dunmore East
Having been at sea in
times of bad weather, severe gales, and storm force winds, I am sometimes
asked about the element of fear. The truth is, it rarely is a factor.
For me, the exception would be when sailing close to rocks or reefs in
strong tides, heavy swells, or poor visibility from rain, snow, fog, or
darkness. Then, one has every reason to be extremely alert, and a natural
fear is a healthy step in that direction. But to observe a storm at sea,
from a reasonably stout vessel, however small, is an aesthetic experience
rather like climbing a steep mountain, I guess. One feels something like
an inner thrill, - strong feelings of awe, and wonder, and amazement.
This is precisely what was said by that amazingly tough, courageous and
intrepid lassie, Ellen MacArthur, of her single-handed sail voyage around
the world, and her encounter with the storms south of Cape Horn. “This
is nature!”, she exclaimed. “This is the sea, in all its power and
grandeur”! And I cannot but agree with her, though the storms I knew
were much inferior to what she endured. Over the years, I have witnessed
the many moods of our seas and oceans, from the calm, but occasionally
turbulent tropics, to the northern and southern latitudes with their
breezes and active weather patterns, to the Arctic waters, sometimes
frozen over, or carrying huge icebergs. The sea reflects our global
climate and environment, perhaps better than any land mass or vegetation.
It can be incredibly beautiful, remarkably pristine, and it can be dark
and foreboding, or wild and untamed. Yet it is the source and sustainer
of most of earth’s life forms, and without its benign influence, our
planet would die. The primeval poem of Moses in the Book of Genesis,
tells us that all life on earth began when,
“Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved
across (or hovered over) the face of the waters; and God said, ‘Let there
be light’.”.
The remarkable lone
yachtswoman, Ellen MacArthur
In May 1956 we decided to
return to Scotland and join the home fleet which was enjoying good fishing
and reasonable prices. The trip home was unforgettable. We sailed north
past Tory Island on a day that was as pleasant and calm as it had been
rough on my first voyage around that coast. Huge basking sharks were
lazily taking their fill of plankton, and I had fun trying to sail over
them which we occasionally did, but without any damage whatsoever to those
large but harmless monsters. We sailed through the Caledonian Canal in
one day, which you could do in the summertime then provided you started at
the first of daylight, and worked hard at opening and closing the sluices
speedily. Today the locks and sluices are electrically operated, but
bureaucratic rules limit the times of their operation. Yet the canal
remains a great benefit to fishing boats and yachts, and a tribute to its
builder, the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, who designed the waterway
and cut the channels adjoining the lochs, and built the “Neptune’s
staircase” of locks that lift and drop the boats from sea level to the
highest lochs on the route through the Great Glen.
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Two ‘Peters’ who wrote of Scottish Fishers
Peter F Anson, an Admiral’s son from Portsmouth, was a Benedictine
monk for 11 years, yet had a life-long interest in and love for
fishermen, fishing boats, and fishing communities, and founded the
Apostleship of the Sea in 1921. A gifted writer and artist, he set up
the Society of Marine Artists. He wrote and illustrated 35 books, and
was made a knight of the order of St Gregory in recognition of his
marine work. His books cover marine art, the church and sailors, and harbours, boats, and fishermen from Brittany to the Shetland Isles.
But it was Scotland’s fisheries that absorbed most of his attention,
and for most of his working life he lived on the Moray Firth coast.
His drawings of sailboats, steam drifters and the early motor fishing
vessels, are now a classic historical record, as are his descriptions
of life on the fishing boats and in the coastal communities. Among
his best known publications are: Fishermen and Fishing Ways; Scots
Fisherfolk; and Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast
of Scotland.
Comments made by Peter in 1971 (at the age of 82), have a strangely
prophetic relevance to the situation we face today: “I described
what is now a vanished world, for the fishing industry on the east
coast of Scotland, and everything connected with it, have undergone
tremendous changes. Fisheries are now concentrated in (a few) major
ports; the numbers of fishermen and vessels have dropped to half what
they were 40 years ago; and many of the harbours are now empty, except
for a few small yachts, and haunted by the ghosts of long-dead
fishermen. Nevertheless, (Scottish) fishermen have preserved those
qualities of sturdy independence and shrewdness which enable them to
fight against the forces of nature as well as London bureaucracy,
always trying to tie them up with ‘red tape’.”
Peter Buchan – “Oxo” to his friends, - was a fisherman from Peterhead
who served on line boats, steam drifters, and seine net boats, the
family ones named Twinkling Star, and Sparkling Star.
He possessed a natural gift for poetry which he wrote mostly in the
‘Doric’ tongue, the dialect of the Aberdeen / Buchan area. Peter
Buchan is to the fishing communities of north-east Scotland, what
Charles Murray of “Hamewith” fame is to the farming towns of
the same region. I was privileged to be involved in the publication
of some of his poetical works which were published under the title
“Mount Pleasant” after a location where he spent many happy
boyhood days.
Among his best loved poems are; The Mennin’ Laft; Not to the Swift;
Best o’ the Bunch; Home Thoughts at the Haisboro’; The Skipper’s Wife;
and Buchan Beauty. Peter also wrote some couthy stories,
and contributed to local publications on the Doric dialect. It is
very difficult to select a few lines from Peter’s work, since each
poem has merit. But here are four verses from Home Thoughts
that describe the close of the annual herring fishery off Yarmouth and
Lowestoft in the late autumn of the years from 1890 to 1930. For the
sake of non-Aberdeenshire people, this poem is in English !
November’s moon has waned; the sea is
dreary,
December’s greyness fills the
lowering sky;
But we are homeward bound, our hearts
are cheery
For far astern the Ridge and Cockle
lie.
The silver harvest of the knoll’s been
gathered;
The teeming millions from their
haunts have flown,
From Ship to South-Ower Buoy, the
sea’s deserted,
And we have reaped whereof we had
not sown.
When snow lies deep, in cosy loft
a-mending
Our nets, the times of danger we’ll
recall,
The days of joy, the nights of
disappointment,
Each silver shimmer and each weary
haul.
And children, sitting chin-in-hand,
will listen –
Forsaking for the moment, every
toy;
For there’s a deep and wondrous
fascination
In sea tales, for the heart of
every boy. |
Fishing at home proved to
be somewhat harder than in Ireland. We went farther afield to find fish,
and often worked night and day without stopping. The longest I stayed on
my feet in one stretch was two days and two nights, but even when we got
some rest more often than not it amounted to only four hours per working
day. One learned to snatch sleep at every opportunity, even in the galley
with our oilskins on while awaiting the call to shoot the gear. I was in
charge of the ropes and the winch, which meant that I had to be the first
on deck when operations began. That first ice-cold lash of salt spray
across the eyes before daylight on a winter’s morning, is something I will
recall as long as I live, and the recollection makes me grateful for a dry
clean bed and 6 or 7 hours undisturbed sleep each night. After I left the
sea, more modern vessels were constructed with whalebacks or with wholly
enclosed shelter-decks, but in my time deckhands were fully exposed to the
elements. Strangely, the improvements have not seemed to result in any
reduction in the loss of lives or of fishing vessels in the North Sea.
Myself on deck, approaching
the harbour on a fine summers day.
Seine-net boats supplied
local fresh fish markets, and their trips rarely lasted more than 5 days.
Some boats landed their catches daily. This contrasted with the distant
water trawlers from Hull and Grimsby in England, fishing off Iceland and
Spitzbergen, that were at sea for up to 21 days. It is surprising to
think now that their cod catches stored in ice could stay fresh that long.
Other trawler fleets operating from Aberdeen, Granton (Leith), Fleetwood
and Milford Haven fished mainly off Rockall, St. Kilda and the Faeroe
Isles, and would limit their trips to 14 days. The distant water trawlers
packed their fish in bulk, in ice, in compartments in the fish hold which
were separated by pound boards or duck boards. The seine net vessels
placed all their fish neatly in wooden fish boxes that held 7 stones of
fish plus ice. This made the fish more presentable on the fresh fish
markets.
Our fish market full of
catches in the days before the EU CFP depleted our fleet and restricted
our access to fish stocks
We operated in waters
varying from a depth of ten fathoms (60 feet) to 120 fathoms. By present
standards that would be considered shallow. Today only prawn trawlers
would bother to tow their nets in 10 fathoms of water, and few white fish
boats would do so in less than 30 fathoms. Our modern deep water vessels
now fish on the sea bed as much as 700 fathoms below (4,200 feet). This
is for deep water species such as blue ling, grenadier, orange roughy,
rat-tail (or rabbit fish), siki dogfish and black scabbard. In our day we
thought we were exploring the deep when working grounds of 100 to 120
fathoms, such as the “skate hole” off Fraserburgh, or the “Noup deep” off
the northwest coast of the Orkneys. On such trips in the summertime, we
would stay at sea for five days and return with a mixed catch of different
types of skate and ray, witches, megrims, monkfish, dogfish, halibut, cod,
haddock, saithe and hake.
Haddocks caught off the
Orkney Islands
Our regular fishing
grounds were the banks of the Moray Firth, North Scotland, Hebrides, Minch,
Dubh Artach and the Clyde. On soft bottom grounds you would tend to get a
predominance of whiting, especially off the west coast. On the harder
gravel or shingle you found mainly haddock, and some cod during their
spawning season. Plaice were a shallow water fish, and the more valuable
species, brill, turbot, wolf-fish and lemon sole, would be found on harder
bottom, or close to rocky ground. My father preferred to go after quality
fish and was for ever setting his net close to rough sea bed. In
consequence, the gear often snagged, and sometimes got very badly torn.
Dover sole, or black sole were a much prized species, and we caught them
mostly on sandy and muddy bottom in the Irish Sea and on the south and
west Irish grounds. Powerful Dutch beam trawlers were later to
concentrate on this species with considerable success.
When fishing for haddock,
which we did for most of the year, there was not much by-catch. The same
was true of the whiting fisheries. Large haddock, like large cod, were
easy to handle, and a crew could gut them in relatively short time. Small
haddock, or small whiting, were a different story. There could be 150 to
250 fish to a box, and so 100 boxes would contain 15,000 to 25,000 fish.
Whiting have small sharp teeth, and ones hands would be ‘ripped to shreds’
gutting a large number. An average deck crew of five men would have to
gut 3,000 to 5,000 fish each when handling 100 boxes, not to mention the
washing, packing and icing, and the setting and hauling of the gear. Small
whiting and small haddock fetched minimum prices most of the time, and
could be sold for fish meal in the warmer months, which was galling after
so much work. So our crew was glad that the skipper generally targeted
the larger more valuable fish, even though that meant more repair of torn
nets at times.
The Old Man of Hoy, the
towering rock off
the entrance to Hoy Sound
We worked most of the year
on ‘Stormy Bank’ which lies to the west of the Orkneys and near the
Sule Skerry lighthouse. The prime catch there was large haddock and my
father was adept at finding and catching them. We landed our catches
mostly at Scrabster, just west of John O’Groats, except for the last two
days fish which we would carry to our home port. We spent some stormy
evenings in Scrabster, and one wild, snowy December night, were called out
to pull an Aberdeen steam trawler off the rocks under Holburn Head light.
If as often happened, we had to remain there for a week-end (our boats
never fished on Sunday), then we would be royally entertained at the local
Fishermen’s Mission by the junior Salvation Army Band and songsters from
Thurso. Our fish salesman there was a fine man of considerable integrity,
and a leading member of the local Salvation Army. John Sinclair, was also
Lord Lieutenant of Caithness, and a respected friend of the Queen Mother
whose Castle of May was located nearby. One of the superintendants of the
Scrabster fishermen’s mission later married the young Salvationist who led
the songsters. I caught up with them again many years after, in charge of
a Congregational church in Alloa. They were as bright and as enthusiastic
as ever.
When fishing closer to the
Orkneys we enjoyed occasional spells in Stromness harbour. We would enter
Hoy Sound from the west, past the tall and imposing “Old Man of Hoy”, the
huge pillar rock in the shape of a man standing face to the sea, and once
inside turn north into Stromness harbour while the famous former naval
base of Scapa Flow lay open to the south. The Orkney people were
wonderfully hospitable, and it was a treat to be weather-bound there or to
spend a week-end with that happy community. The womenfolk were expert
bakers, producing a marvelous range of scones, pancakes and shortbreads.
It was in Orkney that my path first crossed that of the great Captain
Cook. He had charted the seas around the islands, and a plaque at the
west side of the town marked where his ship had collected fresh water. I
was later to use charts in Newfoundland that were based on Cook’s survey
work in Canada. And in the Pacific, I traveled to many of the islands he
visited on his epic voyages of discovery.
In Caxton Hall, London,
1958 I am second from the left. Admiral Sir William Agnew is in the chair.
In 1958 I was given a
surprise honour in being invited to be the fisherman speaker at the annual
meeting of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, which was
then held in Caxton Hall in London. I had rejected the invitation at
first as there were many fishers much more mature and more deserving of
the opportunity, but the organization insisted and I reluctantly agreed.
It was only a ten-minute slot in a fairly long programme, but my
contribution was appreciated by all including the senior committee member
Admiral Agnew [Sir
William Gladstone Agnew, Vice-Admiral, who commanded HMS Vanguard during
the royal tour of South Africa. He gave valuable and unstinting support
to the Fishermen’s Mission during his retirement.]
who led the applause with a loud “Bravo!”. The long established
mission was still then undertaking extensive social and spiritual work in
the country’s major fishery ports. The RNDSF had begun in the 19th
century when it served Dogger Bank fishers from a mission ship stationed
at sea. The great Dr William Grenfell of Labrador fame, served as a
Fishermen’s Mission worker before moving across the Atlantic.
There was little time for
activities other than work or sleep on a fishing boat, except when weather
bound in a harbour, or at anchor. Books were read at all spare moments,
and the radio provided both news and entertainment. Occasionally a musical
instrument would be played, usually a mouth-organ or squeeze-box (melodian).
My father was adept at both. Playing cards were sometimes produced.
Generally they were not regarded as a wise pastime, though ‘cribbage’ was
popular with the older men. Draughts was the great board game in the
cabin. Matches would be observed intently by all the crew as if the
contestants were top chess players. Another game that suited the smooth
cabin table with its half-inch lip of wood to keep plates and cutlery in
place, was “penny-ha’p’ny football”. It was usually played with two
pennies and a sixpenny bit but any sized coins could be used.
A particular treat for us
in the fishing year, was the annual cod fishery in the Firth of Clyde.
The cod used to arrive there in February to spawn, and would be plentiful
until the end of April. We liked the Clyde fishery because there was
almost no night-time fishing, and the grounds were rarely more than a
two-and-a-half hour steam from port, whether Ayr, Girvan or Campbeltown.
Campbeltown Bay lay inside of Davaar island which you could walk to at low
water. Inside a cave on the island was an amazing rock painting of Christ
on the cross that has had a deep impression on many visitors. In the
1950’s west highland “puffers”, - small, tubby steam-powered cargo boats,
still carried coal and other cargo to and from the small coastal and
island ports. The quaint, romantic puffers were made famous by Neil Munro
in his “Para Handy” tales. We often lay beside puffers at night in
Campbeltown, and occasionally exchanged a fry of fish for a basket of
coal.
The Kincora in the Firth
of Clyde, 1960
Dubh Artach lighthouse off
the island of Mull, SW Scotland
When in Ayr or Girvan
harbour, our cook would stock up with “Land o’ Burns” bakery bread
which I then considered the tastiest in all Scotland. (One of my esteemed
colleagues I was to meet later, Roger Mullin, was a son of one of the
company’s master bakers). The Ailsa Craig, “Paddy’s Milestone”,
dominates the Firth, and we fished on every side of that enormous rock
with its huge colonies of gannets. One of my father’s boats was sunk to
the south of the Craig. It happened in March 1948.
The “Resplendent, INS
199”, a 60 foot seine netter, had sailed from Campbeltown and
reached the fishing area before dawn in the middle of a light blizzard.
My father was “dodging” as we say, - keeping the boat’s head to wind,
while he waited for the weather to clear. Another fishing boat
approached, and my father wondered if it wanted to pass a message, (not
all boats had radio-telephone then). But the other skipper had taken a
momentary black-out and his vessel ran straight into my father’s boat
which was holed under the port light and sunk in minutes. All of the crew
survived though one was injured. My father was the last to be picked up.
He had lost consciousness in the water but had grabbed a rope that was
flung to him. On the rescuing vessel they could not
prise his unconscious hands from
the rope. It was one of three shipwrecks that my father
survived.
The news of the sinking
was broadcast on BBC radio that morning before my mother had been
informed. I had called at a friend’s house on the way to school and was
asked rather nervously about it by his parents. I responded with
remarkable confidence that it must have been another boat of the same
name. Other chums at school approached me to see if my father was safe.
I had no idea, but, accepting by then that the boat had sunk, I told them
with similar assurance that all the crew had gotten off safely. This was
the case, though my father was at that time still unconscious in
Campbeltown hospital. My mother who had not heard the radio reports was
eventually given the news by lunchtime that day.
Recently I made a
nostalgic trip to Ayr of which I have many pleasant memories from the cod
fishing days. We used to visit the home of the Head of the fire station,
John Cooper, an extremely fine man. One of his employees then was a young
Jim Sillars, the future Member of Parliament for Ayrshire South and
Glasgow Govan. John and his lovely wife May were the soul of
hospitality. He was the epitome of the “honest men” of Ayr, and
she of the “bonnie lassies”. [From
the poem “Tam O’ Shanter”, by Robert Burns.]
I would fillet fish for them each week, and for Tom and Ina Martin who ran
a colporteur’s van and shop, as well as the Watson’s, a mining family in
New Cumnock. Anyhow, when I wandered recently down to the former pier and
fish market near the mouth of Ayr river, I was surprised to see that all
trace of the fishing activities had gone. The pier that once thronged with
merchants and boxes of fish landed from seiners, ringers and trawlers, was
strangely clean and quiet. The area had been totally re-developed with
large blocks of modern flats. It left one with a strange feeling that a
world one knew had been lost. I was reminded of how the old Authorised
Version put it, “As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the
field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it and it is gone,
and the place thereof shall know it no more”.
What happened to Ayr has
happened to fishing ports all around Britain, and is continuing as I
write. Britain’s surrender of its 200 mile fishing zone to Europe, and
the rigorous application of the EC common fisheries policy, has ensured
the demise of our once great fishing fleets, and the fishing industry that
thrived for 500 years. Scotland used to have over 40 thriving fish market
ports. Today there are less than ten of any consequence. It has taken
Europe only 30 years to destroy the once great industry that Scots fishers
spent over 3 centuries developing. People’s jobs and community’s future
livelihoods, have been traded on the market place in the form of
“Individual Transferable Quotas”. ITQs were supposed to result in
economic efficiency, but they do not produce a single extra fish, only
widespread social injustice and deprivation. In every place where they
have become a major weapon of government fishery policy, - like in Canada,
New Zealand, and the EU states, they have been a means of legal thievery,
allowing those with money and influence to steal the harvesting rights of
fishers and fishing communities, - rights that their fore-fathers toiled
and invested, and risked their lives for generations to secure.
More fish, - but this
market has been empty now
for over ten years.
The most iniquitous
consequence of that callous policy, I have personal knowledge of, from the
hundreds of hard-working, law-abiding individuals and families who have
lost their livelihoods, life earnings, and sometimes homes as well. And
also from the many once thriving coastal communities from the Hebrides to
the Moray Firth, that now lie stagnant and bereft of any economic future,
save what will come in the form of hand-outs from the Brussels and London
regimes that robbed them of access to their resources in the first place.
Once thriving, self-supporting communities are now economic graveyards.
One might put it all down
to sheer incompetence or bureaucratic stupidity and pig-headedness, but I
suspect worse. Behind all of the irrationality and lies and manipulation
and deceit by politicians and civil servants in Edinburgh and London, and
Brussels, one senses the hidden hand of a right-wing agenda that sees
control over resources and profits in fewer and fewer hands, as being
economically efficient and justified by some unspoken monetarist
philosophy.
One
of the fleet of beautiful seine netters which once operated from our home
port. None of these
vessels remain. Most were forcibly decommissioned.
|
The Demise of the Scottish and English Fishing
Fleets
Our
fishing heritage pre-dates Columbus. He sailed on English line
fishing sailboats to Jan Mayen Island in his preparations for the
Atlantic crossing. Those vessels had live-wells built into the hulls
to enable them bring cod and halibut back alive from the long
voyages. Other fish were split and salted, and some boats even
carried ice harvested in winter from the marsh-lands in Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire. Herring fleets were built to compete with the Dutch who
had pioneered drift net fishing in the 17th century. By
the 18th and 19th century, fleets from Bristol
were fishing off Newfoundland for cod. The British navy regularly
burned down settlers camps in Newfoundland at the end of each year, to
prevent the development of an indigenous new world fleet that might
compete with the English merchants.
The
development of steam power, and the otter trawl led to the growth of
the distant water fleets of Hull and Grimsby. These ships fished as
far north as Spitzbergen, and as far west as Greenland. Fleets from
Aberdeen and Fleetwood operated off Iceland and the Faeroe Isles.
Diesel and diesel-electric power led to the development of the stern
trawler, the freezer-trawler, and the factory trawler. A British
company of Scandinavian origin, Salveson’s built the first two factory
trawlers in the world, the Fairtry 1 & 2. These models were
quickly copied by the USSR which built hundreds of similar factory
ships.
By
1970, the fishing industries of England and Scotland were among the
finest in the world, in technology, efficiency, and quality of
produce. Britain was producing over a million tons of fish a year,
and with the advent of the new UN Law of the Sea, was preparing to
claim its international right to the resources of a 200 mile Exclusive
Economic Zone around the British Isles. (Astonishingly, apart from
Ireland, and the European maritime states that had nothing to lose and
everything to gain, Britain was the only nation in the world to give
up that sovereign right to its exclusive fishing zone, and accept the
principle of ‘equal access to a common resource’ which was made a
condition for all EC members.)
However, in 1970, a rise in white fish prices and a resurgence in
herring fishing was boosting the prosperity of fishermen and fishing
ports. The country’s fishery future looked secure. Then came
Britain’s entry into the then European Common Market in 1973,
negotiated by Edward Heath.
Hours before Britain was to be admitted, the original six members
drafted the notorious addition to the “Acquis Communautaire”
(that applicant states had to accept in entirety). It obliged
new members to surrender the control of their waters to Europe, and to
agree to “equal access to a common resource” as far as fish was
concerned. All new applicants for membership would have to accept the
condition, and that has been the case since. Despite a stream of
subsequent lies and deception that this was not really the case, the
government had sold the fishing industry like a pawn to gain entry to
Europe. The European Commission then assumed the authority to
delegate shares of the fishery resource to member states.
Spain’s entry into the EU nearly doubled the size of the EU states
fishing fleets, and the later entry of the Baltic states brought more
fishing effort. The English and Scottish fleets had to be seriously
reduced in size to accommodate the others.
What it had taken British seamen and merchants 500 years to develop,
was systematically reduced and destroyed by the EU Common Fisheries
Policy in the 30 years from 1975 when measures started to be applied.
No other nation in the history of the world has given up its fishing
industry to foreign interests as has Britain. No state outside the EU
has surrendered its 200 mile EEZ fishing zone to another body. Today,
the vessels that reap the benefits of the UK marine EEZ are fleets
from Spain, France, Denmark, Holland, and the new EU member states of
Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In consequence, much of the
fish purchased by British housewives, though caught in British waters,
are from Continental fishing vessels.
I
was later to describe the destructive impact of the European Common
Fisheries Policy on our fishing fleets and fishing communities, in a
number of publications. Following the Kyoto Conference of 1995, the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation commissioned a number
of studies of vulnerable coastal communities. The studies were
financed by the Japanese government. I was honoured to be asked to
undertake the European study that was to focus on the Hebrides and the
west coast of Scotland. This study was included in the FAO
publication TP 401, A Key to Fisheries Management and Food
Security. On the basis of that study, I then produced a book
entitled The Sea Clearances which was published in 2003. I was
also asked to give a lecture on the subject at Edinburgh University
and other institutes.
However, despite these publications, and numerous letters to the
national press, and submissions to the Westminster Parliament, the
House of Lords, and the Scottish Parliament, our government refused to
budge on its attitude to our fishing industry which they viewed as
small beer, and a pawn well worth sacrificing for other benefits they
imagined the European Union would bring. |
If I was to make a serious
career of the fishing, I had to acquire relevant qualifications, so I
attended some navigation classes led by our town Provost and excellent
mathematician, Roy Tulloch. That enabled me to pass the examinations for
Second Hand (Fishing mate). Two years later I went to Aberdeen to study
for my Skipper’s papers at Robert Gordon’s Technical College (now a
University).
Among the other fishing
students then were Terry Taylor who became one of Aberdeen’s top distant
water trawler skippers, Willie Cowie of Buckie who also did well on his
boat the Strathpeffer, and a really fine young man from Mallaig on
the west coast, Zander Manson who was to become a top herring fisherman.
Sadly, Zander lost his life when his boat the Silvery Sea was run
down by a cargo vessel just off the coast of Denmark in 1995 with the loss
of all on board. But mercifully those future events were hid from
us then.
Certificates of Competency
for Fishing Skippers involved examination in the 32 articles of the ‘Rule
of the Road’ as we called the International Regulations for Prevention of
Collisions at Sea. The character, colour, height and horizontal range of
all ships’ navigational lights, had to be stated with precision. One had
to recognize by models or illustrations of lights, the type of vessel
represented, whether it was under way or at anchor or being towed, and say
within a given arc of the compass, the direction in which it was heading.
Fog signals had also to be recognised. Eye tests had to be conducted
first to ensure candidates had colour vision. There followed a number of
navigational papers on determining position by sextant observations of
stars and of the sun at its meridian. Chartwork took up a morning or
afternoon, and there was an oral exam at which one could be asked any
question the examiner considered relevant. Among the questions candidates
expected were the local lighthouse flashing sequences, fog signals of
various specialist ships, legal obligations of masters, and actions to be
taken in emergency situations. One had to demonstrate ability to read and
send morse code, use semaphore flags, know the main code flag signals,
handle a sextant, and operate pieces of equipment like a radio direction
finder. (Today it is the use of radar and satellite navigation
instruments that predominates).
Along with the other
candidates, I duly sat and passed the three-and-a-half days of
examinations, (my certificate being the ‘full’ one that covered any size
of fishing vessel, anywhere in the world, - now termed class 1 fishing
captain). Having acquired the necessary qualification, I was then ready to
take on appropriate responsibility.
But events had overtaken
me. It was the family’s intention to assist me to obtain a vessel which I
would command. Practically all the boats in our fleet were family owned,
with brothers, uncles, cousins, holding shares of a quarter, an eighth, or
even a sixteenth. Financing such a venture was made easy by a generous
Government grant and loan scheme. We had gone as far as getting plans and
quotations for a 72 foot 200 hp seine netter from boatyards in Buckie and
Fraserburgh. The Head of Gardner’s had promised us the first of a new
range of their marvelous marine workhorse engines. I had compiled a set
of fishing charts, a record of annual fishing activities, and Decca
navigator readings of the position of particular fishing grounds.
But that year, the North
Sea and Moray Firth were replete with small haddock which swamped the
market and brought prices down. Fish that failed to fetch the minimum
price for human consumption were withdrawn from auction and sent ‘up the
road’ to the fish meal plant for about ten shillings per 7-stone box.
(That would be just over a penny per kilo in today’s money). My senior
uncle counseled waiting till prospects improved before taking on the
burden of repaying a new boat, then costing around ₤23,000. Because
interest on the money borrowed was heaviest in the first few years of a
new vessel’s operation, it was important to maximize earnings during that
initial period. So the venture was postponed.
Needless to say I was
disappointed. But another door was about to open.
Far away in East Africa, a
huge dam had been constructed on the river Zambesi at the Kariba gorge. This large undertaking was designed to provide electrical power for the
mines and townships of the ‘copperbelt area’ of Northern Rhodesia. But it
also had a political motivation, to cement the ties that had created a
Central African Federation out of the territories of Northern and Southern
Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. Today such dams are being constructed with
little thought for their environmental or social impact. Despite the lack
of such concerns 50 years ago, the Kariba dam was to be beneficial from
both points of view. The local tribes people were to suffer, but that
was for an initial period only.
The Batonga tribesmen who
lived along the river in the Gwembe valley, had to be moved upland as the
water rose to form a huge lake, 120 miles long, by 25 miles at its widest
points and nigh 400 feet at its deepest, then the largest man-made lake in
the world, extending from near the Victoria Falls to the Kariba gorge. To
compensate the tribesmen, a fund was established to train and equip them
to become fishers instead of farmers.
A Grimsby trawler skipper
was hired to go out and teach the people to fish. He was planning to take
his family with him, but changed his mind at the last minute due to fears
of social unrest in Northern Rhodesia as it approached the transition to
independence.
The Colonial Office,
Department of Technical Cooperation, was contacted to find a replacement
fishery training officer quickly, this time preferably, a single man.
Word was sent from London to the White Fish Authority area offices in the
main fishing ports. The number of responses was modest. I was approached
by the local officer, somewhat casually, as he did not think I would have
any serious interest. But the opportunity had great appeal, only I
thought it unlikely they would take one so young and inexperienced. The
Member of Parliament for Banffshire, a fisherman’s son himself, thought
otherwise, and gave me a strong reference. I was interviewed in London in
April of 1962, and left for Northern Rhodesia in August of that year. |
