Tea & Sprats

The Northend fishermen of King's Lynn were never very far away from three essentials, a mug of hot sweet tea, a cigarette and some string. String is a subject for another time but for now this image brings the realisation that no matter what the task in hand, no matter how strenuous or difficult the job....a mug of tea was either in hand or at hand.

I based this image on an old black and white photograph in a magazine and the character in the middle was my grandfather. You'll notice that he has both hands full of net while the other two taunt him with their mugs of tea....life below was hard...and cruel.

Below deck

Another in my 'Northender's' project featuring the everyday lives of King's Lynn's fisher folk.
Today in this country, Health & Safety has been embraced to the point of extremism and when paired to the 'public liability' law's our society feels more like a Monty Python sketch. It makes me laugh when I hark back to my youth when crewing with my father and various other relatives, health & safety was unheard of and in fact, danger, was treated with the utmost contempt even when the consequences were disastrous (which was often the case).
One seemingly simple daily task...The lunch break...would hardly raise a sense of foreboding to most people but if I were to detail a typical 'Dinner break' on board one of those fishing smacks today's folk would recoil in horror. 
The 'hold' which resided under a forward hatch or below a wheelhouse, if your boat had such a luxury, would be a very small compartment below the deck...just enough room for 2/3 people so long as they stooped/crouched and were friendly. Often the crew would number 4/5 which meant the heat blasting from a small tortoise stove atop which sat the ubiquitous kettle of tea created an extremely uncomfortable and hot 'dungeon'.
The stove would be lit at the start of the tide and the kettle full of water would be placed on it and it always amazed me as to how it defied the pitching and tossing of a sea swell, but it did and when it eventually came to the boil it would have numerous spoons of tea added along with at least a full can of evaporated milk and about a pound of sugar. This kettle, which must have held about half a gallon would 'stew' on the stove all the way to the end of the tide by which time it would be a kind of grayish/purple colour and have a slightly 'sandy' texture.
The only time the kettle came off the stove was when one of the crew wanted to have a fry-up. Often everyone wanted a fry up so they would take it in turns to use the large frying pan into which sat a good inch deep layer of lard which may have been in residence for a few weeks....it was a kind of 'self filling' frying pan which topped itself up with grease from enormous quantities of sausages, burgers, faggots and things that defied description...oh and a layer of sand, everything has a covering of sand, in fact sand was a part of the fisherman's staple diet.
This hold space was also used to store everything from old thigh boots to oilskins as well as coal for the stove, old bits of netting, provisions for the kettle, sea socks and mittens and old newspapers....what you wouldn't find were thing's that might clutter the place up ...such as a fire extinguisher or life jackets, distress flairs or even a first aid box...oh no, none of those sissy, mamby pamby accessories.

So, there is the story behind the picture...imagine a dark cramped dungeon of a hold unlit save for what light stole in from the hatch, packed with large hairy fishermen squashed around a fiercely hot stove with a giant kettle full of scalding...lets call it tea, alternating with a sizzling, spitting frying pan of exploding fat, offal and sand...on a 100 year old, wooden, 40 foot fishing smack which sat on a sandbank miles from the mainland without so much as a  sticking plaster or radio to call for help......Health & Safety...read this and weep.

Going below

As I get older I seem to spend more time reflecting on the past (probably because there's more of it than the future) and I quite often think back to my teenage years as a crew member on one of my grandfathers fishing smacks. I was born into a Northend fishing family of many, many generations that worked mainly in the Wash ( a stretch of water between King's Lynn and the North sea filled with shifting sandbanks and deep channels). The catch was mostly cockles and occasionally mussels, once in a while I would go shrimping with my father (the Wash was home to the unique 'pink' shrimp) but I do remember at least once we went fishing for spratt's...very exciting but unfortunately spratt's all but disappeared in large numbers by the late 60's.

Anyhow, I thought that I should probably immortalise my memories of the old fishing fleet and its odd assortment of characters and traditions and I will begin with that least looked forward to event 'the early morning tide'....whether it was summer or winter the early tides meant going below (what locals call putting out to sea) at ungodly hours of 2 and 3 in the morning, an especially unpleasant prospect if your smack didn't have a wheelhouse and steering a course meant standing at the rear of the hold, or even worse, sitting aft with a tiller in hand....the only comfort a mug of hot, sweet tea and plenty of baccy.

Re-discovered drawing

After moving to West Winch nearly 2 years ago we are still....yes still... unpacking the odd box and stuff and I came across this old LOTR illustration I completed some 20 years ago...long before Peter Jackson's magnificent epic's.

I've lost count of how many times I have illustrated various scenes from this book over the years but it has been a lot.

I kept this one as I started it in hospital while recovering from a heart attack. At first it was just a pen & ink drawing but a few years later I decided to either dump it or colour it in....I did the latter....obviously...and decided to keep it again despite knowing I could do better.

These day's I know that I could do much, much better but it has a charm about it that seems to somehow mature....either that or I'm getting more sentimental.

Would I ever part with it for money asks my wife...yep, I probably would.....so much for sentiment then.