Long-spined Sea Scorpion and Chips

By Bob Huxford

The news that Boris Johnson has put warships on standby to prevent European fishing boats entering UK waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit has a familiar echo. It evokes memories for me of conversations between my parents and grandparents I’d often overhear as a child growing up in the seventies and eighties in the fishing port of Grimsby.

My grandparents would visit every Saturday night for a drink and game of cards and my brother, sister and I would eagerly look forward to these evenings as they would spoil us rotten with sweets and kindness. My Nan was just about the loveliest person I’ve ever known (admittedly that may be the case with everyone’s Nan) and my Grandad was a tough old sea dog who would give you a bear hug to almost break your ribs and would always invite us into the grown-ups card game just as my parents were trying to get us to bed, where he’d always let us win whatever money was at stake.

Often he would regale us with stories of his life on the trawlers, such as when two fishermen were ordered out onto deck in a storm to secure some loose rigging. One of them was swept overboard into the icy waters of the North Atlantic and by the time his colleague had notified the skipper and the boat had turned around to look for him it was all but too late. With the wide turning circle on the boats he would have been near impossible to find in time but luckily the flock of birds that typically trail the trawlers hoping for easy pickings from the deck where flocking above the hapless seafarer, curious as to whether he might represent a possible meal. The boat headed straight for them and somehow they pulled him out of the water alive.  

He would also tell the story of a less fortunate trawlerman. My Grandad, on one of his first trips to sea as a 15 year old deckhand, tried in vain with his crewmates to pull a man from the water who’d also been washed overboard. Despite some 50 years having passed since the event, this story would always make my Grandad shed a tear as he described the look in the man’s eyes as he went under the surface for the final time. This rare display of emotion from the old man would always make the stories telling that much more powerful, especially to us spellbound kids.

On a more prosaic note talk would often turn between my parents and grandparents to the series of intermittent battles between the UK and Iceland over North Atlantic fishing rights, commonly known as the Cod Wars, which effectively destroyed the fishing industry in the UK, with my home town of Grimsby being one of the worst to suffer.

The waters surrounding Iceland are some of the most fertile in the North Atlantic and especially abundant in the few species of fish favoured by the British, namely cod and haddock. From 1958 onwards Iceland began expanding its territorial waters in which it banned foreign fleets from fishing. This led to a series of confrontations, with the British Navy escorting our fishing boats to Iceland’s waters and the Icelandic coast guard chasing them away and cutting UK fishing nets. Boats were rammed on both sides although only one life was lost, an Icelandic engineer following a collision with the British frigate Apollo. One Grimsby trawlerman was also wounded after being hit by loose cordage following an Icelandic gunboat cutting his vessel’s nets.  

Iceland eventually won every battle and achieved all of its ends. By 1975 they had imposed a 200 mile limit around their country and this effectively ended Britain’s long distance fishing industry. In thirty years Grimsby had gone from being the largest fishing port in the world, in terms of tonnage handled, to having virtually no fishing industry at all. Thousands of jobs were lost in a town of roughly 100,000 heavily reliant upon a single industry and it affected my Grandad and all of my family. I’m the first generation never to have gone to sea.   

The town’s problems were exacerbated by European quotas on fishing in the UK’s own waters in the eighties and, although the damage was pretty much done before the European Union got involved, this is one reason why so many people in Grimsby voted for Brexit in 2016 and why fishing waters are such an emotive subject and the focus of current negotiations. 

The infrastructure in Grimsby still exists, with giant ice houses still being used to store and process food. However, 95% of the fish that arrives there comes by road rather than boat. Most of the catch from Britain’s waters is exported to the continent as we’re too squeamish to eat almost all of the 40 species of fish that live in the North Sea, but the Europeans love our mackerel, gurnard and red mullet. The vast majority of the cod and haddock we eat doesn’t come from our waters and is almost all imported. 

With a no-deal Brexit potentially leading to tariffs on both the fish we export and import it may be time the British widened our palate to include some of these more exotic breeds from its own waters. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t as there are very few that can’t be eaten, as the Europeans demonstrate, and it has often struck me as odd how little fish we eat for an island nation. 

My Grandad (that’s him in the picture) died in 1999, just a year before the fishermen whose livelihoods were damaged by the cod wars finally received some compensation; £25 million was paid out in 2000.  What my Grandad would make of gunboats patrolling our fishing waters now is anybody’s guess. The stirring up of further trouble or heralding hope that the UK’s fishing industry may return to its glorious past? Either way, we might do well to be a bit more adventurous in our diets. Long-Spined Sea Scorpion and chips anyone?