The Rise and Fall of Hull's Fishing Industry

For the best part of a century, Hull was one of the great fishing ports of the world. At its peak in the 1950s, the city's distant-water trawler fleet numbered more than three hundred vessels, and St Andrew's Dock on the western edge of the city was a place of ceaseless, clamorous activity: trawlers arriving and departing on the tide, fish being landed and sorted and auctioned, ice being loaded, nets being mended, and the whole vast apparatus of the fishing trade grinding on through every season of the year. The industry shaped Hull as profoundly as any other. It created entire communities along Hessle Road and Boulevard, gave the city its character and much of its wealth, and exacted a terrible human cost that is only now being fully reckoned with.

The men who crewed the distant-water trawlers were among the hardest-working and most poorly rewarded in any British industry. They sailed to the fishing grounds off Iceland, Bear Island, and the Norwegian coast, voyages that could last three weeks in some of the most dangerous waters on earth. Conditions aboard the trawlers were brutal: cramped, wet, bitterly cold, with eighteen-hour shifts on deck in seas that could sweep a man overboard without warning. The casualty rate was appalling. Between 1945 and 1975, more than nine hundred Hull fishermen lost their lives at sea. Every family on Hessle Road knew someone who had not come home, and the grief and anxiety of the women who waited on shore was a constant, grinding presence in the life of the community.

The worst single disaster came in the terrible winter of early 1968, when three Hull trawlers were lost in the space of just a few weeks. The St Romanus went down on the 10th of January with all twenty hands, the Kingston Peridot followed on the 26th of January with all twenty aboard, and the Ross Cleveland was lost on the 4th of February, taking eighteen of her twenty men. The Triple Trawler Tragedy, as it became known, convulsed the city with grief and fury. From that fury emerged one of the most remarkable figures in Hull's history: Lillian Bilocca, a fisherman's wife and fish house worker from Hessle Road, who organised a petition demanding better safety conditions for trawlermen. Big Lil, as she was known, gathered ten thousand signatures and took her campaign to Parliament and the national press. She was mocked, threatened, and eventually blacklisted by the trawler owners, but she forced real change. Safety regulations were tightened, and the days of sending men to sea in unseaworthy vessels with inadequate equipment were, at last, numbered.

Yet even as Bilocca fought her battle, the industry that had sustained Hull for generations was entering its final decline. The Cod Wars, a series of disputes with Iceland over fishing rights that escalated through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, ended in decisive defeat for Britain. When Iceland extended its exclusive fishing zone to two hundred miles in 1975, and the British government accepted the new limit in 1976, Hull's distant-water fleet lost access to the grounds on which it depended. The effect was devastating. Trawlers were laid up, sold off, or sent to the breakers. St Andrew's Dock fell silent. The communities that had grown up around the fishing trade were left stranded, their livelihoods gone and their skills rendered obsolete almost overnight. It was an economic and social catastrophe from which parts of west Hull have never fully recovered.

Today, St Andrew's Dock stands derelict, a forlorn monument to an industry that once defined this city. But the memory of the fishing trade is kept alive by those who lived through it and by a growing determination that its story should not be forgotten. The Arctic Corsair, Hull's last surviving sidewinder trawler, has been preserved as a museum ship and is being restored as part of the city's heritage quarter. Memorials on Hessle Road commemorate the men who were lost at sea, and the story of Lillian Bilocca has been rightly celebrated in recent years as an example of working-class courage and determination. Hull was made by the sea, and the sea took much from it in return. The least we owe the trawlermen and their families is to remember what they endured, and to tell their story honestly and well.