The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100-1976 - University of Hull

eyond the means of the inland urban masses until mid-century. Given
this inertia in the transport sector, it is hardly surprising that a further
constraint on the market for fish, the slow development of fresh fish sales
and marketing agencies, remained a feature of the fish trade until the
mid-1850s.
Gradually, however, a mass market for fish emerged between 1840
and 1860. During these pivotal decades, railway mileage expanded and
there emerged a network in the place of a collection of discrete lines,
thereby facilitating the passage of fish from the coast to the interior.
Rates for carrying fish declined as railway companies, following the lead
of the Manchester & Leeds Railway, took positive steps to serve the fish
trade from the early 1840s. Meanwhile, outlets like the pioneering
shop-cum-stall opened in Manchester by the Flamborough and Filey Bay
Company in 1842, were rapidly established. Before long, increases in the
value of fish carried to markets as distant as Sheffield and Billingsgate
were evident. By 1860, fresh white fish had become an important
component of the working class diet in Britain’s urban centres, a position
that it was to maintain for over a century. 239
Such major changes in demand inevitably held ramifications for the
supply side of the fishing industry. Though traditional inshore activities
and offshore line fishing all benefited from the growing mass inland
market for fresh fish, it was the massive increase in trawling activity
which enabled the supply side to satisfy growing demand. Trawling was,
of course, an ancient activity, but until the late eighteenth century the
practice had been largely restricted to the ports of Brixham and Plymouth
in the south west and the approaches to the Thames which were fished by
smacks working out of Barking. Thereafter, there was a gradual
expansion from these centres, particularly along the English Channel and
into the North Sea. The railways, however, created the environment for
the rapid expansion of the activity from the 1840s by providing
marketing opportunities for the large catches of cheap fish taken in the
trawl.
Just as farmers in times of growing demand seek to increase crop
yields by bringing more land into cultivation, so the nineteenth-century
trawl fishermen, facing similar circumstances, searched for new grounds
to exploit. The gradual expansion of trawling in the first decades of the
239 Robinson, ‘Evolution of Railway Fish Traffic Policies’; Scola, Feeding the Victorian
City.
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