A fisherman ashore could always be recognised by his weatherbeaten complexion the red and toughened skin around his neck and wrists. Salt-water boils, caused by the constant chafing of his 'oily-frock', thickened the skin in those areas. painful though the affliction was, it would not stop him turning to for the next haul. Their hands would give them away, too. Thick and tough from immersion in salt water, their fingers were swollen and the skin rough and thick with calluses from pulling wet nets inboard. Theirs was a gallows humour. Injuries were part and parcel of the job and an injured man received little or no sympathy for an injury that was not perceived to be life threatening. They would not expect nor want any. Trawlermen would laugh at how old 'so and so' fell off the casing and broke his leg but any one of them would take the most appalling risk to himself to stop an accident from happening to someone. It was not that they were bereft of feelings and emotions it's just that these were very private things that were to be kept locked away inside themselves, it's the way they were. When my uncle was washed over the side into the bitter waters off Iceland, the first words that the mate said to him as they pulled him back aboard was "Na then Peter, tha' takes a bath in yer own time." One deckie was also heard to remark that was "A bloody ugly girt fish" that they'd just brought inboard, "let's get it gutted and iced back."

After docking, the fish was landed by lumpers and auctioned off the following day at the early morning auctions on the dockside. Once the owner's expenses were deducted, the crew could be paid. They would gathered at the office of the company cashier for their money - less any subs or expenses - and for the free 'fry' of fish that they always got, before heading off to the nearest available pub, usually in each others company. Each man was only too well aware that his survival was often in the hands of his fellow crewmen and the tragic loss of a man or vessel, as did happen, devastated everyone connected with the industry. Small wonder then that the fishing community was such a tight knit and cohesive unit and who could begrudge the trawlermen their rip-roaring, hard drinking reputation during the 36 hours that they had ashore before starting the cycle all over once more?

The thirties saw a downturn in the fortunes of the Fleetwood fishing community. In 1929 there was almost 200 vessels sailing from it, a number that contracted to 112 and the number of owners operating from the port had fallen from 60 to 21. Despite the lean years of the depression, two notable companies moved to Fleetwood in the early thirties one, the Iago Steam Trawler Company Ltd., was founded by Commander E.D.W.Lawford after being invalided out of the Royal Navy. The first vessel owned by this company was the Iago, from which the company took its name. The Hewitt Fishing Co. was another new firm to see the benefits offered by Fleetwood. The oldest established fishing company in England Hewitts, at one time, had as many as 200 sailing smacks working the East Coast grounds. One intriguing fact that I came across while reading a book on the history of the lifeboat service, involved an east coast fleet of smacks which fished under a short blue flag and were known, not unsurprisingly, as the 'Short Blues'. The funnel emblem of Hewitts was a short blue flag and I am left wondering whether or not this was the same company. More than likely it was. It was this fact that gave me the first clue towards solving a mystery that had puzzled me for a long time. My mother's uncle, Billy Wilson, owned one of these little boats prior to his death from a stroke. At one time he wanted me to crew for him but my parents, mindful of the fact that prawning was a casual and not a full time occupation, were against it. The name of the boat was the Short Blue, an odd name and I always wondered how it came by such a name but, perhaps, it stemmed from the Hewitt fleet.

The MacFisheries fleet of 'Northern' trawlers joined the Hewitt fleet. Built in German shipyards these boats were fast, modern and well liked by the men who worked them. For some years fishing carried on as normal. Fleets were built up and business boomed, and then the madness began all over again. With the advent of the second world war Fleetwood trawlers were, once more, called upon to act in the role of escorts, patrol vessels and minesweeper, as they had been in the previous conflict and, almost immediately, two of Marr's boats fell victim to submarine attack. The Lord Minto and the Arlita were sunk by gunfire after their crews had been transferred to a third vessel, the Nancy Hague.

Some seventeen vessels were requisitioned by the Admiralty for naval use and, in the first few months of the war, seven of the fleet that had been left fishing had been lost. This was a total that rose to seventeen and included the Oona Hall, run down in thick fog by an armed French Auxiliary Cruiser, in the Irish Sea. Trawlers from the Fleetwood fleet were called upon to assist in the evacuation of Dunkirk, rescuing troops from the French beaches while under almost constant attack by enemy aircraft. One of the vessels was the Evelyn Rose, a 138ft. trawler of some 327 gross tons and under the command of Arthur Lewis who would, eventually, became the manager for the Boston Deep-Sea Fisheries Fleetwood operation. Returning from a trip to the fishing grounds, the Evelyn Rose was quickly landed and re-provisioned and then sent south the next day. Arthur Lewis managed to rescue 317 soldiers and transport them to Ramsgate, after being guided into the beach by patrol vessels - the men being ferried or swimming out to the trawler - despite the vessel taking some damage from shells and bombs landing close aboard. Not content with this feat, Arthur returned to Dunkirk harbour where he managed to embark some 400 of the British, French, and North African troops that were fighting a desperate rearguard action. On the voyage back to England, 37 of the passengers were wounded by enemy aircraft fire and the vessel had to be beached at Ramsgate to allow the wounded to be taken off. The Evelyn Rose was the last vessel to leave Dunkirk harbour and Arthur Lewis received a well-deserved O.B.E. for the part that he had played. After the war the Evelyn Rose returned to fishing and worked until 1954 when, on the 31st. of December, she went down off the island of Mull. Arthur Lewis was not on board, illness had taken its toll of him shortly after Dunkirk and he had been forced to come ashore.

My father recounted a curious tale from this period. Serving in the army he was one of the soldiers taken off the French beaches. Because of the congestion on the Dunkirk Beach he and a companion headed further up the coast. They came across a small port with a stone quay alongside of which lay a Fleetwood trawler, the Cloughton Wyke. Oblivious of the shells whistling overhead the crew was lined up in and excited bunch on the forecastle head. Wagering each other packets of cigarettes they were trying to ring the church bell with shots from .303 rifles. Being from Fleetwood it is not really surprising that Dad was known to some of them and they were only too happy to take him off and return him home.

Three of the Marr fleet also served with distinction at Dunkirk, the Jacinta, Edwina and Velia. With the cessation of hostilities in 1945, some of the Admiralty requisitioned boats were returned to their trade. Others were still needed, however, to carry out the dangerous task of clearing the extensive minefields left, both Allied and German, so that the sea lanes could be opened to the desperately needed commercial traffic. Designed to tow a heavy trawl in the worst of conditions, trawlers made ideal minesweepers and several of them continued in this work for a long time after the end of the war.

The Boston Deep-Sea Fisheries Co. was not the only one to see Fleetwood as an ideal operating base. J.Marr, another large company had already played a major part in the development of the port. After the war these companies undertook a period of rapid expansion. Iago, who had seen all twelve of their trawlers go off to war, The Hewitt Fishing Co., Wyre Trawlers - whose Lord Lloyd would be the last coal burning steam trawler to sail from the port - all began a program of modernisation of their fleets. It was after the war that it was realised that the era of the coal fired trawler was almost at an end. Oil fuel was not only cheaper but it also was much easier and cleaner to handle and gave more power than coal.

The first oil-fired boat ordered by the Marr Company was the Southella, sailing out of Hull and built in 1945 by Cook, Welton and Gemmell. Six other boats two of which, the Marinda and Navena, were to strengthen the Fleetwood fleet soon followed her. The Boston Deep Sea Fishing Co., in a co-operative venture with the Marr company, were instrumental in incorporating the first oil fired vessels ever built for the British fishing fleet, eventually extending the co-operation to ordering the first of the diesel motor trawlers to be built.

As the fifties came around, they ushered in a period of change unlike any that the industry had seen. The more modern oil fired steam trawlers that were much cheaper to run, as fuel oil was extremely cheap at that time, were rapidly replacing the older coal fired boats. Some of the finest and most elegant steam trawlers ever designed came into service during this period. The zenith of these fine vessels was reached with the last of the steam powered boats just prior to them being ousted by the more economical diesel boats that started to enter the service, Low slung and with graceful, flowing lines, the last of the oil burners had an aggressive and purposeful buccaneering air about them. The older vessels such as Royal Marine, Imperialist, Kingston Diamond, Westella, Kirkella and vessels of this ilk all achieved a curious elegance out of all proportion to their intended purpose. With their raking stems and long forecastles, low midships sections and swept back funnels, all features that complemented each other, the vessels were lent an air of purpose.

The advent of the diesel boats, however, presented the opportunity to refine the design of the trawler even further. But a lot of work and research was required to improve the performance of the diesel engine as it lacked power and torque. Tall funnels were no longer needed to carry the smoke clear of the wheelhouse, diesel fuel produced much less smoke than fuel oil, so the funnel became an integral part of the bridge superstructure. The mizzenmast, so long a feature of boat decks disappeared, as davits appeared to handle the lifeboats. No longer was a mizzen staysail required to help keep the vessel head to wind. Eventually, even the fishing gear along one side was sacrificed and the space saved was utilised as living accommodation. The basic outline of the trawler had, however, remained static and would do so until the advent of the stern trawler. Undoubtedly, the area that had the most impact was in the field of electronics. These were improving by leaps and bounds. Radar was making an appearance and the honour of being the first company to fit it to Fleetwood boats went to Iago when they equipped the Red Rose and Red Hackle with it. Navigational improvements such as Loran allowed more accurate pinpointing of position to take advantage of the fish finding sonar that could locate a shoal of fish and also indicate their depth.

Once the diesel powered motor trawlers had become generally accepted, the pace quickened. At first, they worked alongside the oil burners but soon began to replace them as the oil burners had ousted the coal-fired boats. A series of international crises saw the price of fuel oil rise to a point where the boats were struggling to make a living. The relative economy offered by diesel sounded the death knell for the oil burners. Diesel powered motor trawlers were the obvious road ahead. As the Margaret Wicks, registered as FD 265, and built for Clifton Steam Trawlers, had been the first oil fired steam trawler to be built for a Fleetwood company, so the Samuel Hewitt, built at Beverley in 1965, saw out the oil fired era by being the last of Fleetwood's oil burners to go to the breaker's yard in 1968, at the young age of 12 years. Thereafter, the diesel engined side trawlers - or sidewinders, as they were known - became the mainstay of the industry, at least until the advent of the stern trawler. The last sidewinder ordered for Fleetwood was the Boston Kestrel, built in the yard of Cook, Welton and Gemmell of Beverley, in 1966. The Kestrel was just one of a long line of fine trawlers to be built by that yard and she met her untimely end at the hands of the breaker in 1993.

Stern trawlers were a totally different breed to anything that had gone before and represented a radical change in design. Fleetwood's first stern trawler - or stern dragger - was the Criscilla. At 952 gross tons she was the largest vessel sailing from the port and was one of Marr's large fleet. She was unique inasmuch as she had been designed with the dimensions of the lockpits in mind, and to enable her to take best advantage of the unloading facilities offered by the port. The side fishing boats had their main superstructure situated amidships and running aft. This allowed the foredeck to be open for the crew to work on. The low slung rail made the job of getting the nets, with the heavy bobbins and otter boards attached, over the rail when hauling, relatively easy. It also meant that the crew was fully exposed to everything that the elements could throw at them.

Stern fishers abandoned the low foredeck and were built up with accommodation forward. The net was deployed from a trawl deck aft, down a chute over the stern. The fish caught was then tipped down a hatch onto the fish deck where it could be cleaned and processed. The offal was then discharged by chute over the side. The high bulwarks surrounding the stern trawler's fish deck offered a degree of shelter and safety to the crew that the sidewinders couldn't. A large wave hitting the boat from the beam would be less likely to take a man over the side, as had happened to my uncle, Peter, while fishing in off Iceland in the Boston Phantom. He was one of the lucky ones; another wave washed him back aboard. It finished his career, however, as he was never free of the effects of a knee injury that he sustained. But the stern trawlers came too late. By 1975 things were really deteriorating for the industry and for Fleetwood especially, although it should be realised that the town's problems really started as far back as the sixties.

Isolated at the end of a peninsula, Fleetwood was a dead end. It was not on the road to anywhere else and thus got no casual, passing trade. It relied on the railways for its very existence, in the first place, and for much of its prosperity. In 1966 the infamous Dr. Beeching swung his equally infamous axe and severed the town's main artery. Both Fleetwood and Wyre dock station vanished along with the goods and passenger services that had helped to sustain the town. Overnight, it seemed the very thing that had made the building of the town possible in the first place, the railway, had vanished along with the hopes and the aspirations of those who had relied upon it for their livelihood. The loss of the rail link did not just mean unemployment for those that worked on it, however, there was a more sinister, knock-on effect. With the loss of its railway the town began to wither. Most of the fish landed and sold at the fish dock was shipped out of town by rail with the fish trains being a regular feature throughout the day. Trains had also brought thousands of visitors from the inland towns, as had been envisaged by Peter Hesketh Fleetwood. In 1969, the last of the big side trawlers ordered for the Boston fleet sailing from Fleetwood - the Boston Kestrel - slipped quietly out of port to sail to her new home, at Grimsby. Because of already existing doubts over the future of the town and the fishing industry in general, this caused much panic and widespread speculation that Boston was leaving the town for good, a fact that the company's local manager, Arthur Lewis, was at great pains to deny. What he did confirm, however, was that the era of the distant water side fishing trawler was at an end. The way forward - and the only chance for fishing companies to survive - lay with the stern trawler and its capability to range much further afield. They could also stay a sea for greater periods thereby making them more economical to operate.

But a series of problems was building up that the industry would not be able to weather. Not only was fish becoming noticeably scarcer but also by the 70s a series of price hikes in the cost of fuel oil made the oil burners uneconomical to operate. The cost of fuel oil rose to £44 per ton with the average trawler burning around twelve tons a day. Many a fine boat met a premature fate in the breaker's yard as owners, seeking economies, switched to motor trawlers that weren't as fuel hungry, running on the cheaper diesel. By 1959 the fleet of J.H.Marr, at Fleetwood, would be the first at the port to consist solely of diesel engined motor trawlers. Foreign governments, beginning a systematic policy of extending national waters under the guise of conserving fish stocks had a severe impact on fishing and British boats found themselves excluded from many of their traditional grounds.

Iceland's limits had, previously, been three miles measured from the low water mark. In 1952 they had extended this to four miles, a distance measured from the headlands. Under the conservation pretext the Icelandic Government, claimed (and, perhaps, with some justification) that modern fishing methods involving the increasingly sophisticated fish finding electronics were decimating the stocks of fish in their coastal waters. Britain refused to recognise the new limit, which encompassed in excess of 4,000 square miles of excellent fishing grounds, but a compromise was, eventually, reached. British boats would not fish the disputed area whilst the British Government would not have to recognise the Icelandic claim. This problem could, perhaps, have been overcome by implementing conservation measures that were under consideration at the time. Instead, the Icelandic government fired the opening shots of what became known as the first of a series of cod wars. They extended their national limits, in June 1958, to twelve miles thereby further enclosing grounds that had been traditionally fished by British trawlers. Ones that they had been instrumental in developing.

Despite a rather weak protest from the British Government, the limits stayed although the distant water fishermen chose to ignore them and risked having gunboats cut their trawls away or inflicting severe fines on those unlucky enough to be caught and arrested. There was a political angle to all this. Iceland, at the height of the cold war, had a considerable U.N. presence, including American bases on their territory. Because their efforts to prevent fishing within their waters were to no avail and their unilaterally declared exclusion zone seemed doomed to failure, the Icelandic's threatened to expel all U.N. personnel and close down all the foreign bases. The threat against bases with such strategic importance carried a good deal of weight and the Americans rapidly applied pressure against a weak British Government, which quickly capitulated. By 1972, and with the twelve mile victory still fresh in their minds, The Icelandic's extended the limits to fifty miles and, despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice, they once again began harassing British trawlers with their gunboats thereby initiating phase 2 of the cod wars. Despite a token presence by the Royal Navy, many trawlers had their trawls cut away by the gunboats. In 1974, the British Government once more sold out the fishermen by capitulating to the same threats and recognising the new limits in exchange for 139 boats being allowed to take a pitiful annual catch of 139,000 tons, for a two year agreement. During 1975, however, the situation became ludicrous when the limits were extended yet again, this time to two hundred miles. In spite of this and despite the scant protection afforded them by the Royal Navy, trawlers continued to fish within the two hundred-mile exclusion zone in the third of the cod wars. No one seems to have given much thought to the threats made by the Icelandic Government to remove all foreign bases from their soil. As Iceland was in such strategically important position it would have been one of the first targets for the Russian military machine. Should the cold war have exploded out of rhetoric and into action, the Icelandic's would have had the most to lose. It is unlikely, given this line of reasoning, that any personnel other that a token number, would have been expelled.

Other countries, notably Canada, Norway, and Russia, then began to extend their limits further and the available grounds for fishing became almost negligible. The writing was on the wall for the fishing industry and many well known companies left the industry, companies whose industrial heritage had stretched back to the sailing smacks, companies whose names were a bye word in their home ports. The problems that beset Fleetwood were felt all over the country. At 0400 hours on 31/11/75, the last trawler ever to sail from St Andrew's Dock, Hull, the Arctic Raider, slipped her moorings and set out on her last voyage, to Spitzbergen, leaving behind her a dock that was empty of trawlers for the first time in 92 years. It was a period of unrelieved doom for the industry nation-wide. By 1978, all of the side fishing distant water fleet sailing from Britain's biggest fishing port, Hull, was laid up, rusting, waiting for the attention of the breaker.

Not one sidewinder made a trip that year. The only vessels to sail were the stern trawlers who could stay at sea for much longer periods. By the early eighties, and despite the radical changes and desperate restructuring that went on within the operation of their fishing fleets, most companies were finding it increasingly difficult to survive and the era of the distant water deep sea trawler was drawing to a close. British boats were forced to go as far afield as Canada and Argentina in a last ditch attempt to try to earn their upkeep while the fish around our own coasts were plundered by foreign interests making full use of the European Community's iniquitous quota system. Many of Boston's vessels - one of the largest fleets in the country - were laid up awaiting their fate. Some met an undignified end in the breaker's yards while others found a new lease of life as standby vessels for the oil and gas industries.

By 1988 St.Andrew's Dock itself had disappeared. Slipways, jetties and offices had been bulldozed and the dock filled in. Bowling alleys and fast food outlets now occupy the site where it once was. A sad end to a proud life. On the West Coast, at Fleetwood, the Boston Company, part of the town since 1923, was almost finished. They had, over the years, maintained a constant presence at the port, owning or operating some 84 vessels. Many fine, tough and seaworthy boat passed through their hands in the years that Boston had reigned almost supreme and the company had proved itself to be at the forefront when it came to innovation and design, often being the first to implement newer and safer improvements. Most of their boats were sold or scrapped and some, sadly, lost at sea. Perhaps this fact, more than any other, reflects more accurately the price of fish on the fishmongers slab. The cost in human life.

By the mid eighties there were no more distant water boats operating from Fleetwood and the Boston Deep Sea Fisheries was no more. Hundreds of men who had known nothing for their entire working lives other than the heave of a deck under their feet suddenly found themselves thrown onto the scrapheap of life.

Gone, but never forgotten by the survivors of that pre-EEC period when the British distant water fleet was the envy of the world and the men who sailed in the trawlers were renown for their toughness. Marr, however, did not lay down and die. Instead, they chose to diversify their operations. As the Boston Deep-Sea Fisheries had attempted to make inroads into the Canadian market, so too had Marr entered into co-operative ventures with South Africa and Australia but they had come to nothing. Now they searched for new markets for their stern trawlers to exploit. Five of their vessels were requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1982 and saw service in the Falklands conflict. A timely reminder of other uses that a healthy trawler fleet could be put to. Crewed by the Royal Navy, the five vessels, Cordella, Farnella, Junella, Northella and Pict, went on to give sterling service as minesweepers, as had their company sisters before them in two world wars.