Indeed, ”The Smacksman” is itself a capstan song, which contrasts the idyllic appearance of life at sea with its grim reality. Nothing could be more quintessentially British than this cheerful sing-it-on-the-job ditty about having a horrible job:
Once I was a schoolboy, on the shores I used to roam
And watch the boats go out to sea, at the setting of the sun.
I thought I’d like the seafaring life but very soon I found
It wasn’t common sailing when we reached the fishing ground.
It was, “Heave on the trawl my boys, never mind the storm!”
When we get the fish aboard we’ll have another haul.
“Heave away the capstan, merrily heave away!”
It’s the same old cry in the middle of the night as it is in the early day.
The rhythms of fishing life occupied not just those at sea, but everyone onshore too. The whole community turned on the rhythm of the ‘long-tripper’ boats that by the onset of the First World War employed some 17,000 full-time fishermen. ‘Fishwives’ would mend nets, bait lines and process the catch, selling fish from the docks or carrying it to market in woven baskets. Even lullabies had a tang of the sea: the Northumbrian lullaby “Dance to your daddy” promises the baby “You shall have a fishy/When the boat comes in”.
As North Sea white fish grew in popularity, inland fishing declined. Britain lost the taste for herring (today, we export 93% of the British herring catch) and embraced cod-and-chips. Meanwhile, advances in fishing technology began to transform the industry from the dangerous sail-powered work of the 19th-century smacksman to something more industrial, increasingly carried out by huge trawlers with refrigerated holds and even on-board canneries, that could put to sea for weeks at a time.
Then, in the mid-20th century, a sector focused not on inland fishing but North Sea trawling collided with the ‘rules-based international order’ — and sank.
The 1970 Common Fisheries Policy was an attempt to address the growing problem of overfishing resulting from the ever more efficient design of 20th-century trawlers. It wasn’t the first such attempt to allocate fishing rights; the nations signing the 1964 London Convention on Fisheries are all now EU members.
But when Britain joined the EEC in 1973, it was allocated quotas set based not on the total catch by British vessels, but only on fish caught in EEC waters. And these didn’t include the more distant North Sea fishing-grounds where the bulk of the British trawlers worked.
Thus it’s both true and not true that ‘Ted Heath sold British fishermen down the river’, as the popular perception has it today. Yes, CFP quotas were skewed against Britain — but this wouldn’t have mattered had Britain been able to go on fishing further afield. And Britain’s ‘long-tripper’ fishermen were defeated not by Brussels, but by geopolitics.
In the 1970s, in another effort to manage the excesses of overfishing, the UN established Exclusive Economic Zones around coastal states, giving each state the sole right to economic exploitation of these waters. This triggered the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland, over the right to fish off the Icelandic coast. At the height of the Cod Wars, British trawlers were shot at by Icelandic fishermen, and one large vessel was even shelled by Icelandic artillery after it was spotted fishing inside the limit.
Britain’s military clout seemed sure to guarantee victory in the Cod Wars. But Iceland had a trump card up its sleeve: geography. The Cod Wars took place at the height of the Cold War, and the US naval base on the Reykjanes peninsula in western Iceland was critical to America’s efforts to track Soviet movements via the key chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland and the UK.
So Iceland threatened to withdraw from Nato if the British did not stop fishing in Icelandic waters. Fearful of losing its naval base, the United States put pressure on Britain. Britain folded: the Cod Wars ended in 1976 with Britain agreeing to respect an exclusive 200-mile Icelandic fishing zone around its coast.
But by then there was nowhere else for the British fleet to go. As an EEC member, quotas for British territorial waters had been set meanwhile by the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s no surprise, then, that that the peak year for British fishing was around 1 million tons of fish caught, in 1973 — the year Britain joined the EEC.
Thus British fishing sank under the triple weight of European treaties, marine conservation and Cold War geopolitics. Neither the Right nor the Left saw fit to fight for it: too working-class for the 20th-century Tories, and too old-fashioned for the Thatcherites, nor was fishing ever a unionised power-base for the Labour Party. No one noticed as Britain’s once-thriving coastal communities slid into despair, becoming some of the most deprived in the country.
But if Brexit teaches us anything, it’s that ignoring something lots of people care about doesn’t make that thing go away. Today, fishing once again threatens to blow Brexit off course — and Boris may find that even his ‘compromise’ position is not enough to calm the political waters.
The Leave vote was as much about identity as substantive economic matters. And below the surface of Britain’s supposedly modern 21st-century culture is a powerful undertow of maritime memory, that has nothing to do with imperial grandeur — and everything to do with fish. Boris’ deal may yet founder on our yearning for the unquiet sea.
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SubscribeVery interesting. I raise my glass to you. ðŸº