Anarchy 86/The Hull fishermen and workers' control

97

The Hull fishermen
and workers’ control

PETER HOWDEN

s1

It took the disaster at Aberfan in 1966 to bring home to people, in the most ter­rible way con­ceiv­able, that a pub­licly-owned in­dustry could be run with the same indif­fer­ence to human welfare as the system of capit­alist ex­ploit­ation whose habits and tradi­tions it inher­ited. And it has taken the loss of the Hull fishing trawl­ers early this year to remind us that the condi­tions and the ideo­logy of 19th century “private enter­prise” survive un­modi­fied in another basic in­dustry. As Tony Topham puts it, “Owners argue that the loss of trawl­ers is in­evit­able in winter fishing in northern waters; it is no one’s fault. This is a tragic example of the effects of market laws upon men’s minds; re­spons­ibil­ity is dis­sip­ated, and acts of com­merce become somehow Acts of God. Can we doubt that in a society freed of this fetish it would be re­garded as scan­dal­ous to operate small ships, under the hur­ricane condi­tions off Iceland in winter, not as an emer­gency oper­ation to feed starving people, but as a normal com­mer­cial activ­ity?”

  And just as it tran­spired, after the Aberfan disaster, that the Coal Board had had plenty of warning, ignored through inertia, indif­fer­ence and parsi­mony, of the ever-present danger, so the risks of cata­strophe in the trawl­ing in­dustry were as clear to the trawler-owners as they were to every out­sider who studied the in­dustry, and above all, to the trawler crews. “The fear of death per­vades the occu­pa­tion of trawl­ing, con­trib­ut­ing to it a flavour of gloom and fatal­ism” wrote Jeremy Tunstall in his book The Fishermen, pub­lished in 1962, where he re­marked that “the lull during the last few years in the mor­tal­ity rate may only be a pause before a big tragedy”. This lull fol­lowed the loss in January, 1955, off Iceland of the Lorella and the Roderigo, when forty men died as a result of the over-turning of the vessels due to icing-up of the super­struc­ture, which appears to be the reason for the loss of at least one of the three trawl­ers sunk in January and Febru­ary, 1968. Tunstall showed stat­istic­ally that fishing was the occu­pa­tion with the highest indus­trial death-rate in Britain.

  In 1965 Pro­fessor R. S. F. Schilling of the London School of Hygiene again ana­lysed indus­trial death-rates and con­cluded that the figure for the fishing in­dustry was twice that for coal-mining and many times that in manu­fac­tur­ing in­dustry. In the fol­low­ing year, in his

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pres­iden­tial address to the occu­pa­tional medi­cine section of the Royal Society of Medi­cine, Pro­fessor Schilling ob­served that between 1960 and 1966, 223 fisher­men were killed on British fishing vessels—about one per cent of the work force.

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  <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: Rear-Admiral">Rear-Admiral Ievers, of the Trawler Insur­ance Company, has re­cently made a number of press and tele­vi­sion state­ments about the inev­itab­il­ity of the deaths of 59 fisher­men. He is further repor­ted in the Hull Daily Mail (Febru­ary 7th) as saying: “We are not sur­prised when a vessel is lost in a typhoon in the China Seas—but we express surprise when a trawler is lost in the cir­cum­stances which existed when the Ross Cleveland sank. I fail to see what more could have been done by the skipper or by anyone else at the time” (my italics).

  This attitude ignores the fun­da­mental fact about trawl­ing in winter in the northern seas: that such condi­tions are not unusual, and that there­fore it is wholly irre­spons­ible to defend the con­tin­ued opera­tion of ships in such condi­tions, not as some dire emer­gency need, but as a normal com­mer­cial activ­ity.

  Of course nothing else could have been done “at the time”. I know of no one who has sug­ges­ted it. Rear-Admiral Ievers’s com­par­ison with the Cina typhoon is de­signed to give the im­pres­sion that the recent condi­tions off Iceland were ex­traordin­ar­ily rare. But the fact is that all fisher­men dread black ice as a normal ex­pected hazard. Later in his state­ment Rear-Admiral Ievers is re­ported to have said that the problem of icing-up had been in­vest­ig­ated, but that no method had been found “of prac­tical value”, and that the devices which were tried out in­volved “a pro­hibit­ive cost”.

  So it comes to this: trawl­ers have been lost in the past, and men killed, by black ice; black ice forms regu­larly in the north­ern waters in winter, not just in the very severe weather of this year. The owners made some attempt to dis­cover a solu­tion, but failed, or were de­terred by the cost. They have con­tin­ued never­the­less, to accept fishing in those waters. Yet when at least one of the three recent tra­gedies was prob­ably caused by icing up, we are told (a) not to be sur­prised; and (b) that noth­ing could have been done: that no human re­spons­ibil­ity is in­volved. It is in­cred­ible.

  Perhaps the only form of edu­ca­tion which would cut through the fetish of inev­it­abil­ity would be for the next trawler to sail from Hull to be skippered by the Rear-Admiral, and crewed en­tirely by trawler owners.

Hull.

tony topham.

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  On March 6th, 1883, oc­curred one of the worst dis­asters ever to happen to the fishing com­munity of Hull. Twenty-three fishing smacks and about 150 men were lost in a storm on this day. The dis­aster shocked the town and when the fisher­men paraded with banners against “winter fleet­ing” on October 1st, public opinion this time was on their side. The strike began form­ally about a week later.

  The strike was weak­en­ing in the early days of Novem­ber, with the owners able to get away with an in­creas­ing number of smacks, and on Novem­ber 10th the Trades Council, acting for the Fisher­men’s Society, accep­ted terms. The two main points were: that winter fleeting was not to be carried on beyond 55N; and that each fleet was to be limited to 50 vessels. Other points were that there should be no vic­tim­isa­tion, and the men should have a say in the ap­point­ment of the “admirals” of the fishing fleets.

—<span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: john saville">john saville: “Early History of Hull’s Water­front Workers”

(Humberside Voice).