Community and Occupation in the Hull Fishing Industry

Abstract

r NHIS ARTICLE is concerned with some of the interrelationships of community and occupation in the fishing industry at > Hull, and in particular their relevance to the practical problems of recruitment and planned urban redevelopment as well as to the wider theoretical issues in these fields of industrial and urban sociology. Industrial sociologists have so far confined their attention to the more 'basic' industries, notably coal-mining and steel, and fishing has remained sociologically unexplored. By comparison with the industries mentioned above, fishing occupies only a minor part of the economy. Thus in I95I, fishermen accounted for only OrI per cent of the total male working population of England and Wales.l Even in Hull, the port which lands the most fish, the proportion of the working force so engaged was only 2-8 per cent,2 though fishing is the largest single industry in the city. Partly in an attempt to fill in this gap in our monographic knowledge of British industry, a research project was initiated, in April I954, by the Social Studies Department of the University of Hull, with the present writer as research assistant. 3 The project was broadly conceived as a community study, rather than as a study in industrial sociology. This conception of the project was based on what is common knowledge in Hull that the fisherman inhabit a particular area of the city, and that they constitute to some extent a separate community. From the beginning, we heard such comments as, 'Fishermen are a group apart' and 'Hessle Road is a world in itself'.4 Accordingly, this community aspect was the first to be investigated, but, as the work proceeded, it became clear that other aspects would have to be given attention at the same time. A full understanding of the-community seemed impossible without some knowledge of fishing as an occupation, diSerent in kind and degree from shore occupations and even from other sea-going ones. Since little or no work had been done in this field on which the present project could build, the writer felt it necessary to build up gradually an understanding of the whole field, rather than investigate the specific