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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
