Tug-o-War

In older times Tug-o-war contests were popular events in the town and the Northend fishermen were unbeatable, even against strapping young policemen and after all, they were horny handed, hardened professional rope pullers back in the days of sail.

Young fishermen were not allowed to take part in the contests which meant that the Northend teams were made up of the elder members of that community and they would have spent many hours drinking before taking the field and even then the anchor man would have found all the time in the world to neatly coil the rope as his 'crew' reeled in the opposition.

Eventually they were beaten by a professional team (who illegally wore studs in their shoes) but only after the fishermen had been drinking for many hours and even then it took the professionals three tries to achieve a victory.

The race home

At the end of a tide it was all about getting back to the King's Lynn fleet before anyone else could hog an inner berth....Sometimes the tide would not be quite high enough to get more than one vessel into the mouth of the fleet and a 'log jam' would ensue with much subsequent pushing, shoving and various bits of skulduggery.

Off below

Another Northender illustration featuring the ritual of provisioning for the coming tide. This was as simple as it could be...Tea, Sugar, evaporated milk and fuel, in that order.

Dangerous sands

These two illustrations demonstrate what a dangerous place the Wash could be. What with unexploded WWII bombs and the combined efforts of both the RAF and USAF, who use the Wash as a bombing and target range. The clink of rake on bomb casing was not unfamiliar to the Northend fishermen scratching for cockles and the odd strafing kept them on their toes.         

Shopping in the Northend

Shopping in the Northend of King's Lynn for much of the 20th century meant one name, 'Harry Southgates'. I would be dispatched to Harry's on a Friday night complete with shopping list and trade bike. Here I would stand in a queue of mostly women and be prepared for a long, boring wait until it was my turn to be served. Nothing was hurried and because everyone knew everyone, each customer would digest their lives in a blow by blow monologue whilst their shopping list was compiled into goods....do I miss it? Heck no, life's too short as it is.



String theory

In the Northend fishing community of King's Lynn 'string' was a universal panacea....a veritable 'solution looking for a problem'.

Northenders, gossip by the gallon

This illustration from my Northenders series harks back to my 50's/60's recollections of the ladies who would beaver away at a large marble slab peeling shrimps into pint pots made of wood bound with brass hoops. The speed of their nimble fingers would be a blur and would only be matched in speed by their tongues...Apologies to my Aunt Elaine in who's possession this illustration now resides, and who is still peeling shrimps in her late 60's.

Northender's, Hard sand - soft sand

Another of my 'Northender' series of humorous drawings. The Wash is home to several sand banks which generally 'shift around a bit' and they vary a great deal from being very hard to work on to being very soft to work in.. As cockling in my day was a manual task which required raking the wee beasts out of the sand with a short handled rake, the type of sand was going to determine whether it was your arms or your legs that were going to ache by the end of the tide.

This image is available in card form at True's Yard Fisherfolk Museum, King's Lynn. It also features in their 2012 calendar.

The original framed illustration is also available for sale. Please contact me for details.

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.