Trawling Lives and Culture – A Portrait up to 1976

Abstract

This chapter provides an important baseline for understanding the subsequent maritime disruption that is the subject of the book. Using secondary sources and new oral histories, it gives an overview of the development of Hull’s distant-water fishery up to the 1970s, with a focus on the post-war period. The chapter defines the operation and culture of the industry, examining the established rhythms of life in the 1950s and 1960s for those at sea, on shore and at home. It introduces Hull’s fishery as strongly place-centred, situated in the locality of Hessle Road. Dockside facilities were Hull owned and the industry operated for a domestic market. Long trips to the Arctic fishing grounds with predominantly Hull crews began and ended in the city, masking the international dependencies of this ‘local industry’. By the early 1970s, an expanded fleet of cutting-edge stern freezer trawlers was beginning to change long held practices, whilst the continuation of older vessels still nodded to the past, even as the industry prepared for the future. However, a global shift in the politics of fishing meant that for Hull a trawling future was not to be.