Abstract
This article revisits Paul Thompson's major oral history project of Britain's early twentieth-century fishing industry, situating it within the emergence of oral history as a practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and interrogating assumptions over the fixed category of 'fisherman' which informed the original research. Through a detailed look at interviews collected with those involved in the herring fishing of East Anglia and north-east Scotland, it finds that Thompson and his colleagues were still as informed by social science interviewing practices as they were oral history as an evolving methodology, and framed their approach at a time when fixed worker identities were taken as given. Revisiting the transcripts with a different set of research questions revealed how 'fishermen' moved in and out of fishing, with 'farmworkers' equally being found as regularly employed on boats. Thus the article argues that instead of fixed and life-long fisher identities, precarity, migration and seasonality were key features of many fishers' involvement in the herring industry. Through focussing on mobility - across place and types of employment - this piece also reveals the central role of personal preference and intimate decision-making in mediating individuals' choices to 'follow the herring'.
Highlights
This article revisits Paul Thompson’s major oral history project of Britain’s early twentieth-century fishing industry, situating it within the emergence of oral history as a practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and interrogating assumptions over the fixed category of ‘fisherman’ which informed the original research
Through a detailed look at interviews collected with those involved in the herring fishing of East Anglia and north-east Scotland, it finds that Thompson and his colleagues were still as informed by social science interviewing practices as they were oral history as an evolving methodology, and framed their approach at a time when fixed worker identities were taken as given
In the spring of 1960, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger spoke to Sam Larner, an octogenarian ex-herring fisher, whose words formed the basis of MacColl’s song of the East Anglian herring industry—‘Shoals of Herring’—they were charting new territory
Summary
This article revisits Paul Thompson’s major oral history project of Britain’s early twentieth-century fishing industry, situating it within the emergence of oral history as a practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and interrogating assumptions over the fixed category of ‘fisherman’ which informed the original research. His was a working life which stretched from rural Norfolk to Australia and the Dardanelles, saw him sailing the world’s seas in ocean liners, navy vessels as well as fishing craft, and found him running a public house, hauling carts of stones, and and for the longest stretch of years, farming.
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