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

quinquennium when Scotland’s production of cured herring reached a
peak. On the eve of the First World War, earnings from the herring
fishery exceeded £2.25m, thereby dominating the non-trawling sector of
Scotland’s fishing interests. 245 The factors explaining this trend were
similar to those which underpinned the development of distant-water
trawling. Demand, again, was a critical determinant, though the herring
fishery depended almost entirely on the supply of a cured product to the
overseas market. Railways featured prominently in this context, for it
was the exploitation of the continental market, opened up by rail
connections to Baltic ports, that gave the business its greatest impetus.
Typically, fishermen responded to such propitious conditions by
intensifying their catching effort and prosecuting more extensive
grounds, a combination of factors which led to the rapid adoption of
steam propulsion in the early 1900s. The collapse of demand for cured
herring, most notably in Russia, as a consequence of the Great War,
meant that this sector of Britain’s fisheries went into long term decline,
though related branches such as mackerel and pilchard fishing have
experienced short-lived booms off the coast of southern England.
The herring fishery adopted the motor as well as the steam engine. In
contrast to the steam trawling sector, the application of the internal
combustion engine to various other fishery activities did not require such
a radical restructuring. These engines took up less space than their steam
counterparts and were much cheaper to acquire and operate. Moreover,
many existing sailing vessels were initially adapted for motors. Thus,
motorisation, while increasing efficiency and encouraging the
introduction of new techniques, including seining, allowed the tradition
of small scale ownership to continue to flourish in many sectors outside
of the middle and distant water trades.
Inshore fishing, too, has remained a part of Britain’s fishing effort.
This small-scale, dispersed activity has generally been neglected, as
fishing historians, not surprisingly, have focused their attention on the
dynamic sectors of the industry, especially the herring boom and the rise
and fall of distant-water trawling at Hull and Grimsby, Aberdeen and
Fleetwood. Yet the aggregate output and local significance of fishing
based in the so-called ‘traditional’ communities, from Staithes and Robin
Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast to Mevagissey and Newlyn in
Cornwall, from the diminutive harbours of western Ireland to the
245 M Gray, Fishing Industries, 148-9.
138