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…
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…
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,…
On 25 December, 1966, 12 of the 25-strong crew of the Hull trawler St Finbarr died in an explosion off Newfoundland. Brian W Lavery tells their story The ‘perfect trawler’: the St Finbarr ahead of her maiden voyage in November…
Brian W Lavery tells the story of fishing’s first ‘celebrity’ – skipper Albert ‘Hurricane Hutch’ Hutchinson – and of the adventuring ex-con-turned-writer who made the Grimsby trawlerman a household name more than 80 years ago Television has made ‘reality stars’…
Why a Scarborough trawler was driven onto the rocks in September 1976 remains a mystery. Brian W Lavery retraces the night she perished – and the incredible rescue mission that followed The eerie outline of what remains of the wreck…
Women had not long got the vote when Dora Walker became the North East’s first female coble skipper. Brian W Lavery charts the career of the woman who went wartime fishing with a pistol strapped to her waist Dora Walker…
The Scottish port of Eyemouth suffered Britain’s worst-ever fishing disaster when 189 men and boys perished on what locals still call Black Friday. Brian W Lavery recalls the tragedy Eyemouth’s fishermen were renowned as takers of great risks and getters…
Many of the classic wooden boats built by the Dixon’s yard in the 1960s and 1970s are still going strong – and still fishing. Mark Blanchard reports There aren’t many ports along the south coast between Salcombe and Newhaven, or…
Tom Watson, who skippered the Wyre Victory FD 181 during the second Cod War of 1972-3, recalls an encounter with an Icelandic gunboat in which Britain came out best Tom Watson. There had been a lot in the press of…
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