Welsh Country - Issue88 - May - Jun 19

Fishing Folk
the Hickses of Angle,
Pembrokeshire,
in the 1950s/60s
Angle lies in a shallow valley, on the
tip of the Pembroke peninsula, and
is practically surrounded by the sea,
the Milford Haven waterway to the north and
the Atlantic to the south. You can’t go on: the
next stop is Ireland, miss that and you end up
in New York!
The Hickses lived in a flat-roofed,
castellated house overlooking a tidal creek
which fed into Angle Bay, a convenient
situation as Cecil, the father of the family,
had once been a coxswain of the Angle
lifeboat, the house he and his family occupied
was built in 1909 so as to be near the
station.
Later it became an even more convenient location for
earning a living as they were fishing folk, selling their catch
throughout the village.
The family, when I knew them in the 1950s/60s, consisted
of Cecil, his son Alastair, and daughters Margie and
Audrey, though other offspring had flown the nest. One
son, Billy, went to Plymouth and visited Angle, particularly
at Christmas, bringing two pretty daughters with him, they
kindly providing some of the pictures for this article.
Cecil and Margie I knew well as they both sang, like me,
in the Angle church choir, the former an old man who was
hard of hearing and often, though he had a fine bass voice,
singing a bar or two behind everyone else which didn't
Freshwater West laver-weed hut by Roger MacCallam
The Hicks family
please his daughter. She gave him a stern look from her
choir stall to the one behind where my brother, Peter, sat
next to Cecil, he finding the pages in Hymns Ancient and
Modern for him.
He was a lovely-natured old man. A pipe smoker, he smelt
of tobacco and had a sweet smile. He wore navy-blue serge
trousers and a blue woollen pullover, peaked sailors' cap, and
a broad belt with an integral money pouch.
Not that, I suppose, he had much money; but he kept at
home a bottle of rum, providing me with my first experience
of alcohol.
Visiting him on one occasion with my father, the village
parson, I recoiled when plied with some of this potent liquor,
a reaction which amused both Cecil and my father as they
drank the contents of their glasses happily enough.
The fish the Hickses mostly caught (and it would have
been Alastair who did the catching, his father, Cecil,
mending the nets draped over the wall) were flatfish, caught
in Angle Bay. They were delivered by Margie, alive and
kicking, for my mother to deal with: the head first, and then
the guts!
But it wasn't only fish they caught: the womenfolk
rode their bikes to nearby Freshwater West where they
collected the laver weed from the rocks and brought it back,
distributing the strange black stuff to those of us who loved
it, an acquired taste as I find it's only people from Swansea
westwards who like it.
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