What It Means To Lose A Cod War: Visiting Hull 50 Years After The Decline Of Fishing

Growing up in Iceland, you will at some point become aware of the Cod Wars. This awareness is comfortably nestled in the Patriotic Fun Fact Files, somewhere between “Iceland discovered America” and “Iceland beat England in the 2016 Euros.” The Cod Wars were the days when Iceland fought and won a series of fishing disputes with Britain. The British, arrogant and slippery, were busy hoovering up our fish with their vast fleets of trawlers. We told them to stop and they didn’t. So we complained to the Americans, threatened to leave NATO, and our Coast Guard cut their nets. Eventually the British got sick of it all and went home. This happened three times. The result was that little old Iceland kicked the Limeys out, with a good deal of derring-do and pluck, and a bit of sly diplomacy.

These “wars” were not wars in the traditional sense: only one person died, an Icelander, and that was in an accident. It was fitting that these should have been bloodless wars, for we had and still have no armed forces. We see ourselves as a peaceful nation. Winning without fighting fit our self image very snugly. The Cod Wars still have the ability to give many an Icelander a warm patriotic feeling.

It wasn’t until I read Cod Wars and How to Lose Them, a memoir by one of Britain’s ambassadors to Iceland, Andrew Gilchrist, that I started to have some doubts about this triumphant narrative. In the book Gilchrist writes at great length about ptarmigan hunting, but he also found the space to complain, with some bitterness, that Icelandic diplomats played up the island’s poverty and reliance on fishing, while in reality they weren’t much worse off than the English fishing communities of Hull and Grimsby. This framing was a revelation to me. Iceland versus the British Empire is one thing, Iceland versus Hull and Grimsby was another. It seemed much less like David and Goliath, and more like David and David.

This is why I was drawn to Hull to find out what life was like now, 50 years after they lost their Icelandic fishing ground. I knew that they’d stopped fishing and that it was one of the poorer areas of the UK. I live in London, so I took the journey up north to Hull by rail. I was scorning a certain tradition by arriving by train, for Hull, like Grimsby, was traditionally visited by Icelanders on a trawler, filled to the brim with fish ready to be unloaded to the British markets. My uncle and grandfather had come to Hull this way. Hundreds of Icelanders had.

In the 70s, a special bus would sometimes take Icelandic fishermen straight from St Andrew’s Docks (the main fishing dock) to the department store in central Hull. They’d spend their salaries on canned ham, canned pineapples and beer (illegal to buy in Iceland at the time). Almost everything except fish was cheaper abroad, so they filled their holds with whatever was needed at home. Even my aunt had once tagged along on my granddad’s fishing vessel to go shopping.

Entering a war zone

My train rumbled into Hull. Some part of me, for the sake of sensational journalism, was hoping to get beaten up by angry ex-sailors, or be thrown out of my hotel once they noticed the hated Icelandic patronymic. I’d imagined Hull to be filled with roving gangs of youths, stooped over goblins chanting “death to Iceland,” jabbing at each other with fish-gutting knives, scrapping for bony seconds of tonight’s kill. I expected to catch glimpses of families huddling around bin fires, kept flaming day and night, in the holds of beached and rusting side trawlers.
“I’d imagined Hull to be filled with roving gangs of youths, stooped over goblins chanting ‘death to Iceland,’ jabbing at each other with fish-gutting knives, scrapping for boney seconds of tonight’s kill.”

No such luck. The centre of Hull felt like any other British town: rough around the edges but on the whole doing okay. The English weather wasn’t doing it any favours; the sky above was uniformly grey, so completely clouded over that it was possible to imagine that there was nothing beyond them.

Visit a place intending to write about it and you begin to ask yourself insane sounding questions such as “What is this town about?” You pace around looking for answers and making up theories. One theory is that Hull exists to stop teenagers from skateboarding: every possible surface in central Hull is equipped with anti-skateboarding studs and benches are composed of widely spaced vertical planks of wood. This appears to work, for a healthy crop of awkward semi-gothy teenagers hang around the centre carrying skateboards, unable to grind along anything. They carry them as a symbol of virility and for the sake of tradition, like military officers that still carry swords.

Another theory is that Hull is a big monument: it has seven museums clustered together, one of them an art museum, the rest dedicated to various aspects of its history. Then there are memorials everywhere. Walk around Hull and you will learn that it was bombed relentlessly during the war; that it was the first port of call for millions of people on their way to America; that it faithfully sent men to die in the Boer War, the first World War and the second; that it had seen thousands of fishermen swallowed up by the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

Together the museums and memorials give Hull the feeling of a place where things used to happen but not much more was expected to. You could still be employed serving coffee, shaking cocktails and selling tickets to exhibitions, but you sure as hell weren’t going whaling or deep sea fishing, and you could forget about skateboarding.

If that was central Hull, the area around Hessle Road felt even more attached to the past. Hessle Road is an area just north of St Andrew’s Docks, where the catch once came in to be gutted and packed. It was on Hessle Road that fishermen, dock workers and their wives and children lived, where those school children could tell by the smell alone when the boats were in.

For more than half a century the neighbourhood was in an eternal Saturday: fishermen were always coming off the boats, flush with money and thirsty. They went home and changed into cowboy-inspired clothes. The pubs waited, so many pubs, there used to be a pub on every corner, I was told. Some of the pubs had men-only rooms, women confined to smaller rooms known as “snugs.” In other less reputable pubs prostitutes targeted the temporarily wealthy sailors.

Waiting for Jerry

Large swathes of Hessle Road were demolished in the 70s, but a lot of the old buildings still stood. One of them housed the Hull Fishing Heritage Centre. Inside, on bright blue conference chairs, two men and a woman sat drinking tea. One of them, an old man in a beanie, stood up to welcome me and asked what my connection to the fishing industry was. I explained about my grandfather, which seemed to pass muster. The man in the beanie told me that Jerry would be here soon to show me around.

Meanwhile, I milled about with the beanie man, making pained small talk, acclimatising to a room filled to the brim with model trawlers and dockside dioramas, rescue rings from long sunken ships and example kit bags, beatific paintings of safety campaigners, church service programs for long lost trawlers. I asked my interlocutor if he had been, by any chance, a fisherman. No, no, he hadn’t been a fisherman, he said, he’d just been in the merchant navy. I was given to understand that in here that impressed no one. In here you needed to have been on a fishing boat. But he was retired so he liked coming down to the heritage centre regardless.

Then in came Jerry, clutching a ten-pound note which the café across the street had donated to the centre. He rang the cash register and deposited it. It was obvious that Jerry ran the place. He wore a heritage centre branded jumper and cap, with faded tattoos on his forearms. He paced the centre as if on the deck of a tussling trawler: chatting to his wife, the other ex-fisherman and the merchant mariner, answering phone calls and emails, showing me around the museum, showing me his database of trawler sinkings, and an impressive log of Cod War incidents, with corresponding folders of images and newspaper screenshots.

Forty Icelandic fishermen from Akureyri had come to visit in March. He’d been very happy to receive them. They’d presented him with a poster with all the known British trawler sinkings off the coast of Iceland between 1934 and 1975. Jerry appreciated the posters enough to hang two identical versions of them on the wall. One of the sinkings, numbered 91 on the map, had carried off his grandfather. He hadn’t known where it had happened until he’d gotten the poster. In 1973 Jerry had himself narrowly escaped a similar fate when his trawler, Ian Fleming, was wrecked off the coast of Norway with the loss of three lives. He was 17 at the time.
“One of the sinkings, numbered 91 on the map, had carried off his grandfather. He hadn’t known where it had happened until he’d gotten the poster.”

The poster ended in 1975 because there would be no more British trawlers off the coast of Iceland, but Jerry said there was little in the way of animosity between the British and Icelandic fishermen now. They’d all gone to the pub together. He just wished that the British had done what Iceland had done and protected British waters after the Cod Wars: joining the Common Fisheries Policy had been a mistake. I asked about the fishing bosses selling their quotas and he granted that was a part of it too.

Jerry would soon go on a joyride on a mackerel fishing boat. He was visibly giddy at the idea, showing me pictures of the ship. At this point his wife almost groaned, and everyone laughed. I asked her whether she was as excited about fishing as he was. She was not. “I have to listen to this all the time. Two to three times a day. I’ll only get peace when he’s in his coffin.” She said this more as a statement of fact than in any real anger. Jerry was still obsessed, as so many ex-fishermen are, with fishing, completely taken with it.

The Dutch-owned, Hull-registered fishing vessel would fish in British waters around the Shetland islands. He explained how the ship operated with a much smaller crew than in their day: it was mechanised in a way they could have only dreamed of in the 70s. Despite being registered in Hull, it had no actual connection to it, except, from what I could gather, the quota it had bought.

On Thursday mornings ex-fishermen would gather here to drink tea and swap stories, giving the heritage centre even more of the feeling of a British Legion Hall. This was a space old veterans could come together and relive the defining, the most heightened, the most adventurous time of their lives.

Fishing in the 70s was an especially deadly profession. Much deadlier than mining. It’s estimated that between 1835 and 1980, 6,000 fishermen from Hull drowned at sea. They’d die in batches: five, ten, twenty at a time. A trawler would go down, and Hessle Road would go into mourning. And it still does. On large anniversaries they still hold church services for the trawlers that went down 50, 60 years ago.
“It’s estimated that between 1835 and 1980, six thousand fishermen from Hull drowned at sea. They’d die in batches: five, ten, twenty at a time.”

All this sacrifice still gives fishing a hallowed glow. There is something noble about dying at sea, as opposed to dying on a construction site, or in a mine, because the deaths feel inevitable and a part of the job, a part of a calling. There is only so much you could do in the way of safety, so you needed bravery.

For this and many other reasons everyone at the Hull Fishing Heritage Centre agreed how important it was to teach the younger generation about Hull’s fishing roots. When Jerry speaks at schools he often begins by asking the kids if they have any connection to fishing. “Some say they do, but they don’t remember any names.” Jerry knows a lot of names.

A whole way of life had simply disappeared in the space of a lifetime. A thick fog had rolled in, obscuring sailors and ship names and heroic deaths and lucky escapes. Most of it had been recorded on plaques and in Jerry’s database, but the raw feeling dissipates with every year. That was part of the job of the heritage centre, to keep the fire burning, but the fishermen are all in their seventies and eighties now. Who will be left to remember twenty years from now?

I was filled with all this second-hand nostalgia as I left the heritage centre and walked through the industrial park toward St Andrew’s Docks. But I also felt that this locally extinct way of life, where whole crews regularly drowned and where women stayed at home raising children alone, confined to their “snugs”, was maybe not worth all this sorrow. They had hauled up, gutted and sold a lot of fish, sure, but were those really the days?

A purpose-built town, without purpose

Towns exist for a reason. London is located at the widest point where the Thames could be bridged and grew from there. Venice was in a perfect location to capture Medieval trade between North European markets and the Silk Road. Selfoss exists to be driven through. Hull, meanwhile, is a convenient port from which to fish the North Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Now it exists because it’s simply there.

Once it stopped relying on fish, Hull became a variation on a well-known theme. Post-industrial towns cover Northern England and Wales. Places where they once produced cars, engines, mined for coal, quarried for slate, smelted and worked steel. Other towns – Clacton-on-Sea, Blackpool and Margate – were built around the Victorian tourist boom. There were once compelling reasons for them to rise but now those reasons are gone. The towns differ only in who’s to blame (the EU, Margaret Thatcher, globalism) and which backbreaking industry the local museum mourns as the Good Old Days.

The last fishermen of Hull

I’d walked ten minutes from the heritage centre. Here was the apocalyptic scene I’d wanted when I’d stepped off the train. St Andrew’s Docks. Where Hull’s lost fishing fleet had once confidently sprawled, trawlers coming and going on high tide, off to Iceland, Greenland and Norway. The dock is now disused and filled with reeds. A few buildings still stood around it, abandoned since the 70s: the hydraulic station and the Lord Line Trawling Company office, its name carved in stone on the building in a show of absolute confidence: LORD LINE. Inside, fires had charred some rooms black, elsewhere every good white inch lay under graffiti. Iceland’s prosperity had partly been built by reducing these docks to ruins.

It was a lonely place, but not bereft of life. Two men milled about the entrance of the LORD LINE building, a dog walker ambled past, and on a round point that jutted into the River Humber, where the dock’s tidal gauge had once been, two boys angled for flatfish and eels with a stick, duct-taped to the parapet. I went up to them to chat. They didn’t know if their families had been fishermen but they hung out here a lot, fishing, graffiting, skating, and, from what I could see, smoking weed. They didn’t want to eat fish from the Humber; everything they caught they threw back in. Attached to the parapet were memorial plaques to lost ships, one of them was to Ian Fleming, Jerry’s ship.

The boys said that there used to be crackheads in the crumbling buildings, but for mysterious reasons there were fewer of them now. They said that once, until the police came to put an end to it, some kids had gone on the roof of the LORD LINE building. They loosened and threw brick after brick from the building, scaring passing pedestrians for the hell of it. They did their bit to tear apart the place where their grandparents once worked, a building which controlled a small but proud fleet of trawlers that had once sailed to the coast of Iceland.