The British Fish Trade

In the Edwardian era, by the time of the Dogger Bank incident in October 1904, Britain was not only the world's leading military and mercantile maritime nation, it also possessed the largest and most sophisticated fishing industry the world had ever known. Tens of thousands of fishermen worked from many hundreds of fishing stations – large ports and small villages alike – scattered all around the country's long coastline. The rich waters surrounding the British Isles were home to countless species of fish, many of which were taken by different groups of fishermen in a diversity of locations using a bewilderingly varied range of catching equipment and craft. But although the British fish trade was both complex and considerable it was by this time dominated by two well capitalised and seemingly modern sectors: these were the trawl and herring fisheries, and both employed very large numbers of Edwardian fishermen and fishing vessels.

The Trawling Sector

Trawlers were thus named because they deployed trawls: these were large bag-shaped nets which were towed, or rather dragged, along the seabed. Their catches of white fish – cod, haddock, and the like – were destined primarily for the home market. The British trawling trade had expanded markedly since the mid-nineteenth century when the construction of the national railway network had provided swift and reliable access to inland markets. Railways had transformed the market for perishable foods and in the process helped make fresh white fish an article of cheap mass consumption in many burgeoning inland industrial towns and cities, a much-needed source of protein and a wholesome meal for many working-class families. Somewhere, some time in the following decades, some genius – and no one really knows who – had put fish with chips and created what became a national institution.

Initially, the trawlers deployed by this flourishing trade were wooden-hulled sailing vessels, often owned by the skipper or by very small companies, but from the early 1880s these craft were rapidly displaced by steel-hulled ships fitted with triple expansion steam engines. By the end of Victoria's reign, only Lowestoft in Suffolk and Brixham in Devon retained substantial fleets of sailing trawlers and their replacement elsewhere by the more expensive but far more efficient steam trawlers had been accompanied by a radical reorganisation of this branch of the fish trade.