Cod war

Christmas in Grimsby

Jack Waterman

Grimsby has never had pretensions to being the Venice of the North-East Midlands. Only one architectural feature might give a visitor a disturbing fugitive reminder of more ambitious, less secular Italian campaniles. That is the Dock Tower, an improbable, soaring, square Pencil of red brick topped by a vast lantern. It commands the littoral of Humber mudbanks,

Visible alike to the sheep farmer on the distant Lincolnshire Wolds as to the homecoming trawlerman as he rounds Spurn Point withstill several miles to go to port.

In practical terms, it was built to provide a head of hydraulic pressure to work the

lOck-gates separating the docks from the tides a the estuary. More symbolically, it visually demonstrates the tallness of Victorian confi

dence with which Grimsby grew in the great era of railway expansion (Queen Victoria herself visited in the royal yacht, and a hundred navvies pulled a train through a triumphal arch before Prince Albert laid a dock foundation Stone). The Dock Tower also symbolises, for all tO see, the continuing boast that Grimsby is the World's Premier Fishing Port."

To that claim, these days, enshrined in the _current handbook of the Grimsby Fishing

vessels Association, is added the phrase "and

Frozen Food Centre" thus indicating one of the Main post-war changes in Grimsby, and in its rnethods of marketing, namely deep-freezing: Ilut no amendment to the slogan seems likely to be Minted to cover the provisos that, however Prenlier Grimsby may still be, the going is Currently very tough, that fishing is no longer h_the commercial proposition it used to be, or, to right up-to-date, that a cod-war with Iceland Is one further, greatly-unwanted threat to the economy of the town.

Since the war, of course, there have been 08ther industries spreading along the Humber

.r,ank. Chemicals is one of great importance. ne original commercial docks at Grimsby, too, With their brisk Baltic and Continental trade, re often overlooked. Yet fishing, with all its ancillary support, from net-braiding to ice

'king, from repair to the immense activity

°I unloading catches, auctioning them and Processing them either for the fresh fish market br for the freezer Plants which now employ !Ouch labour, is still the town's main livelihood. With the fishing industry in decline (a clnarter of the total British fleet has gone out of sbeerv. ice in the past year, and no new vessels are log built) Grimsby reflects all too well the general atmosphere of unease, worry, and the !r°wing suspicion that what seemed a limitless,

Panding future has now curled at the edges. t in addition, there 'seems a particular rnalaise About the place, which, is more .frla.roiliarly known, from the trawler registration I:dais, as GY to its 'inhabitants (population .Wer than 9,000 in 1850, now with Cleethorpes, woe.ich adjoins, more than 100,000).

at r-Terficially it seems not to have changed, clet east in the central fish dock area in certain _ ails. for decades. The cloud of gulls still ,woo eels, like the eye of a small, screaming fliarj1° scavenging by the long covered et known as the Pontoon from the days When catches were landed on a floating,

wooden jetty, and where, five days a week, the holds are unloaded by "Iumpers" at midnight and sorted into "kits" — ten stone metal boxes — for auction at 7.30 a.m.

Opposite a huddle of seine-netters, the bigger trawlers, log-jammed, bow-inwards the length of the wind-swept North Wall of No. 3 Fish Dock, are still an impressive sight: the Lord

Jellicoe (GY 709) appositely next to the Lord Beatty (GY 91), and so on down a long line of black prows, and upperworks scored and scarred with rust bearing witness to the harsh and continual life at sea, as far as the smart, big, modern stern trawler Roman.

From the repair yards of Doig's and Sir Thos. Robinson's and elsewhere there still comes the staccato violet of welding in flecks of brief lightning, and the tugs in the basin still nudge, push, and hoot as persistently as ever, sending a wash under where the old coal hoists used to be.

This much remains, but it is not the prosperous, bustling, brash Grimsby I knew when I grew up there in the iate 'thirties. Nor yet that of my grandfather who sailed the Cambridge from these very docks in the 1880s (when more than 800 vessels were registered) and who kept a house of some substance in Orwell Street, within walking distance of the jetties. Of the smack owners' tall houses, with their apprentice quarters, not a vestige remains

today.

By the 'thirties, when sail had disappeared and more than 500 company-owned steam Crawlers filled the port, Orwell Street had already begun to sink to slum status. Now the bulldozers have been and gone, as elsewhere in the town, vast tracts of which, still not rebuilt, look as if the blitz took place only last night. Orwell Street today is a long nonentity of a bleak, bare thoroughfare, of the kind that might be imagined in a street-guide to a nightmare, alternating seemingly endless car parks, with the slab architecture of windowless cold stores and freezing plants. Occasionally there is a glimpse of human activity, girls working in the frozen smoke-haze of the freezing plants, men emerging with great piles of solid cod like the excavations from some new ice-age.. The demise of Orwell Street as it was, and its chilly new rebirth, represent to me, at least, a Grimsby which has had some of its heart removed, and one possibly (whether cause and effect or vice versa it is difficult to judge).which has lost some of its steerage way in the economic undertow and rip-tides of the times. But these are only outward signs — one with the fact that no fish trains leave Grimsby today as they used to, with hundreds of wagons per day, and instead the most common sound is of the articulated lorries grinding through the gears in Fish Dock Road to take the huge loads away. Or with the fact, seemingly unimportant, but of significance, that Grimsby Town Football Club, the prowess and prestige of which in the First Division used to spread the fame of the place, now is yet one more undistinguished Third Division side commanding smaller gates than the reserve team used to forty years ago.

Behind the changes, and the depressed state of the town are two main factors: first the soaring cost of fuel oil which has trebled since 1973, which inflates not only the millions of pounds spent on bunkers, but adds to the cost of much capital equipment such as nets which are now exclusively synthetic. Secondly there has been a recession in prices paid for fish at auction, and a reduction in amounts landed. Skipper Jim Hodson of the trawler Gillingham earlier this month landed at Grimsby a world record catch of prime plaice, 1,759 kits which fetched £54,785. Following a record catch by her sister ship Notts Forest, these were exceptional and welcome rays in the gloom which has deepened since the cod-war began.

The trawlers leaving Grimsby in the last week or so, some of them at least are on their way back to Iceland for Christmas, which barring a truce in the cod-war, is hardly a festive thought. The other morning at 2 a.m. Ross Revenge, Vivaria and Northern Eagle slipped through the narrow Grimsby lock-pits butting into a north-easter and under a frosty moon towards the loom of the light at Spurn Point, and thence to turn for Iceland past the shoals called the Binks.

Earlier, tied up at the North Wall, they had at least some provisions loaded for Christmas Day. Over the steep ladders on the bows went two large turkeys apiece, slab cake, plum cake and other items to supplement the rations laid down. In the Crew Department of British United Trawlers, at the same time, the hands were signing on. None of them had much they wanted to say about the cod-war, nor for that matter, Christmas at sea. Of the danger of gun-boats, said one deckhand: "It's not so bad, kiddie, it's not so bad." More to the point was the loss of fishing and the consequent loss of money (the crew's "take" is dependent, over and above their wage, on how much is caught).

One engineer, Ernest Walker, who has spent the last eight years at sea at Christmas, put it. like this: "The cod-war, the main trouble isn't the danger, but it's disappointing when you can't get the fishing — oh aye, there's a party on board at Christmas, but in the cod-war if the warps are cut it delays things. You can lose eighteen hours if the warps are cut — recovering, splicing, and starting again." So Christmas, even with turkeys provided, takes second place to the priority of getting the fish: aginst the odds of the Icelanders, a possible Force Nine gale, and, not least, the sea itself. That attitude certainly has not changed in the Grimsby fisherman, witness the bare dates of the following log: "Sailed Dec 24 with the wind from the NNE. Squalls of snow. Nice breeze, Dec 25 Still going off the wind from the ENE Nice little breeze. Very cold.... Dec 27 Shot the lines from 35 fathoms into 35 fathoms and got 7 score Cods 10 Line 3 Cole Fish 2 Baskets Haddock. Wind from the SE. Very fine." That was the log of the Grimsby smack King Arthur. The time, not that it is mentioned, was Christmas 1887.