“T’ boats all full—ha’n’t had sech a catch this summer,” which news gladdened me almost as much as if the catch had been my own. No one can watch these grand fellows, the Dogger Bank fishermen, and not feel, a sort of blood-relationship to them, and the keenest sympathy with their heroic business on the great waters. So, thinks I, I’ll go down to the quay directly after breakfast, and see them all at their best, those hard-handed, big-bearded, soft-hearted sea-kings from all the East and South Coast towns of England, from Sunderland to Penzance. When they are such grand, silent, kindly creatures on every day in the week, even when the catch has been poor and light, what will they be to-day?
I had spent most of my mornings for some days on the quay, watching the fish-market there with much interest. It goes on nearly all the forenoon on the pavement, just above that part of the harbour-wall to which the herring-boats run when they come in from their night’s work on the Dogger Bank. A simple, hand-to-mouth kind of business, the auction; but well adapted, at any rate, to clear the boats, and get their daily contents to market in the quickest and cheapest way. As soon as a boat comes to the quay, one of the crew (generally numbering five men, or four men and a boy) comes on shore with a basket half-full of herrings, and turns them out on the pavement. The fish-broker who acts for that boat comes up, looks at the sample, and makes an offer for the ship’s take by “the lash” or ten thousand. If this is accepted, the unloading begins at once; but if not, as is oftenest the case, the take is put up to auction. The broker rings a bell, which soon brings round him the seven or eight other brokers like himself, and other buyers (if any) who are within hearing. Up goes the first last of ten thousand at once, and no time is lost or talk thrown away. In very few minutes the whole is sold, and a cart or lorry from the railway is standing by to carry off the barrels in which the herrings are packed then and there. Now, on the previous day I had heard the prices ranging from £7: 10s. to £8 for “the last,” and had not remarked that only some six boats of the whole fleet had come back from the fishing-grounds, and that none of these had made anything like a big catch. Consequently, I came down prepared to hear something like the same prices ruling, and to see most of the crews drawing at least from £15 to £20 for their night’s work.
Well, in a long life I don’t remember ever to have been more hopelessly wrong or unpleasantly surprised. I could see at once that all was not right by the faces of the men and women in the small groups scattered about the market, which now drew together as the broker’s bell rang for the sale of the herrings, which lay, a lovely, gleaming mass, at least three feet deep in the uncovered hold of the Mary Jane, as she rocked gently on the harbour swell, some twenty feet down below us. I could scarcely believe my ears as I heard the bids slowly rising by 5 s. at a time till they reached 30s. the last, and there stopped dead. The hammer fell, and the whole catch of the Mary Jane passed to the purchaser in about two minutes at that figure. The next boat, and next but one, did no better. Broker after broker knocked his client’s catch down at 30s. Once only I heard an advance on that figure, and this was by private contract. The handsome Hercules, in long leather boots and blue jersey, who represented one of the Whitby boats, appealed in my hearing to the broker, who relented with no very good grace, and agreed to give £2 per last of ten thousand of the catch of Hercules’s boat.
It was a depressing sight, I must own, even in the bright sunshine of this most picturesque of English harbours, and Sam Weller’s earnest inquiry to his master, “Ain’t somebody to be wopped for this?” rose vividly in my mind as the fittest comment on the whole business. Just then a tug which had been getting up steam was ready to leave the harbour, and two Hartlepool smacks, whose freights of herrings were still unsold, hitched on, to be towed out to sea and then run home, in the hope of finding a better market in the Durham port. An old salt stood next me, whose fishing days were well over, and who had just taken a good bite of the blackest kind of pigtail to comfort himself. I looked inquiringly at him as the tug steamed out between the two lighthouses, with the smacks in tow; but he shook his head sorrowfully. “Well, but they can’t do worse than here,” I remonstrated; “herrings maybe scarcer in the colliery district.” He jerked his head towards the little group of brokers and buyers,—“They’d know the prices at Hartlepool in five minutes,” he said. This telegraphing was to his mind the worst thing that had happened for fishermen in his time. “Did prices often go up and down like this?” I asked. “Yes,” and worse than this. He had known them as low as 15s. and as high as £15 within a few days. No, he couldn’t see what was “to odds it” much for the better. Last time he was across at Liverpool he had stopped at a big fish-shop where he saw barrels standing which he recognised. “What’s the price of those herrings?” he asked. “Eight for 6d.” the man answered. “So I told him I saw they was from Whitby, and that he got them at Whitby for 6d. a hundred.”
Whitby and the Herring Trade, 31st August 1888.
I had got thus far last night, and posted down again early this morning to the market, which has a sombre kind of attraction for me. Only two boats in, with light catches of from one and a half to two lasts each. The first sold at £5: 5s., which price the second boat refused. Theirs were a first-rate lot, and they shouldn’t go under £6, for which they were holding out when I had to leave, and there seemed to be a general belief that they would get it. This was puzzle enough for any man, to see under his own eyes the same fish sold on three consecutive summer days for £7:10s., £1:10s., and £5:5s.!—a sort of thing no fellow can understand. To add to my bewilderment, I learnt that at Great Grimsby yesterday (the £1:10s. day here) the last had sold for upwards of £15! So that my old salt’s view as to the telegraph doesn’t quite hold water, and the two smacks which shook the water off their bows and sailed for Hartlepool, may have made a good day’s work of it, after all. Indeed, a sailor on the quay declared that they had sold at £5, so that, after paying £2 apiece for the tug, which had towed them all the way, they still got £3 a last, or double the price they would have realised at Whitby. “So it comes to this, that the more fish you catch, the less pay you get,” I said to my informant. “Yes,” he seemed to think that was mostly the case, adding that to his mind it was the railways that made all the money out of fish—
Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes.
It is an old story enough, but scarcely less true or sad in 1888 than when most of the world’s hardest work was done by slaves. However there are, happily, signs in the air that, here in England at any rate, we are waking up to the truth, that if we can find no better way of organising industry than competition run mad, we are going to have real bad times. Royal Commissions on the sweating system; Toynbee Hall interventions in great strikes; co-operative effort springing up all over the country, and finding its most zealous and devoted advocates at least as much amongst those who don’t work with their hands as those who do,—all go to prove that the reign of king laissez faire, with his golden rule of “cash payment the sole nexus between man and man,” is over. Indeed, our danger may soon be from too much meddling with and mothering industry. Nevertheless, no one can spend a few hours on the quay here in the herring season and not long for some one—scholar, philanthropist, political economist (new style), co-operator—to come along and teach these fine fellows to read their sphinx riddle. It would not be, surely, such a difficult task as it looks at first sight. There is no need to begin with the vast herring-fishing industry, with its distant markets at Billingsgate, Liverpool, and Manchester. The reform might begin at once on a modest scale. Beside the herrings, one sees every morning other fish lying on the quay—skate, cod, ling, whiting, rock-salmon—brought in by the smaller and less venturesome boats by dozens, not by lasts of ten thousand. Take the cod as the most valuable of these fish. I saw four fine cod-fish sold by auction yesterday on the quay for 5s. 3d. Within a few hundred yards, and all over the town, cod was selling at the shops at 6d. the pound. Surely a very moderate amount of organising ability would enable those who catch these fish to get the retail prices prevailing on the same day in the home market, and then the experience gained might assist materially in the solution of the larger problem.