Fishing nostalgia

  • Christmas cracker crews

    Christmas cracker crews

    25th December 2023

    Ashore for Christmas? For Hull trawlermen, Yuletide trips were often an obligation – and were fraught with added danger. By Alec Gill Christmas was a time of conflict within Hull’s trawling industry. The clash was between love and money. Trawlermen…

  • Hull heritage: Picturing the past

    Hull heritage: Picturing the past

    10th March 2023

    Documentary photographer Russell Boyce revisited Hull fishermen’s pub Rayner’s after 40 years to compare old images with new. Brian W Lavery met up with him to find out more… ‘Eddie and Tommy’ back at Rayner’s bar in one of Russell…

  • Looking back – 1973

    Looking back – 1973

    20th January 2023

    1973 was a momentous year for the British fishing industry – but not in the way that, with hindsight, one might imagine… The big story of the year was the second Cod War, which had begun in September 1972 when…

  • Hull’s Fish Dock: The Wet Side

    Hull’s Fish Dock: The Wet Side

    13th January 2023

    Photographer Alec Gill recalls the memories evoked by his pictures of St Andrew’s Fish Dock, taken around 50 years ago as its era was drawing to a close Hull’s St Andrew’s Fish Dock worked around the clock – 24 hours…

  • Herring’s French Connection

    Herring’s French Connection

    6th January 2023

    For three decades, the East Anglian herring fishery’s highest accolade was the award of the Prunier Trophy. John Worrall gets a first-hand account from a spare hand The crew on the Silver Crest at Lowestoft in 1956: Rodney Forster on…

  • Trawling in the Shadow of War

    Trawling in the Shadow of War

    30th December 2022

    Brian W Lavery looks back to 1960 when disaster struck the Hull trawler St Hubert, which sank after a mine caught in her nets exploded, killing four men… It was 26 August, 1960, near Baatsfjord, off the Norwegian coast, and…

  • Exmouth’s Christmas Tragedy

    Exmouth’s Christmas Tragedy

    23rd December 2022

    While families were relaxing on Christmas Day 1956, the crew of the Exmouth lifeboat were facing a tragic ordeal. Mark Blanchard reports… The South Devon town of Exmouth, with its small commercial docks and fishing community, forms the gateway to…

  • The Demise of the Newby Wyke

    The Demise of the Newby Wyke

    16th December 2022

    Photographer Alec Gill recalls his 1975 project documenting the breaking up of a deep-sea trawler as Hull’s distant-water heyday came to its end Nothing lasts forever – no matter how permanent it might seem. Hull once anointed itself ‘the greatest…

  • Remembering the Great Gale

    Remembering the Great Gale

    9th December 2022

    Last year marked the 150th anniversary of one of the UK’s worst maritime disasters, when some 70 sailors, fishermen and lifeboatmen were lost off Bridlington. Brian W Lavery reports… The memorial to those lost in the Great Gale of 1871,…

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