My thanks to Liam Robinson for passing on the link to this video about the openin of a new fish dock to boost Grimsby’s fishing industry.
Digging about on YouTube also reveals the following British Pathé clips.
Category: History
The Marine Quarterly, summer 2014
The summer edition of the excellent The Marine Quarterly came out a couple of weeks ago. If you have almost any interest in the sea, it’s well worth reading for its solid, informative and often entertaining articles on sailing, fisheries, adventuring, merchant shipping, conservation, natural history, culture and heritage, trade, naval matters, nautical books, and anything else that relates to life on salt water. Subscribe here.
In the latest The Marine Quarterly, you’ll find:
- Richard Hopton describing the Tai-Mo-Shan’s 1933-4 voyage from Hong Kong to Falmouth via Japan, where the unfortunate crew were suspected of spying because officials did not find women or drink on board
- Nigel Sharp penetrates the mysteries of oyster dredging in the Carrick Roads on the River Fal, a place where oysters have been harvested since the middle of the nineteenth century, and where in order to preserve the stocks and protect the beds from overfishing, a bye-law prevents oyster fishermen from using engines while dredging
- Rudyard Kipling describes fishing on the Grand Banks ‘The dories gathered in clusters, separated, reformed, and broke again, all heading one way; while men hailed and whistled and cat-called and sang and the water was speckled with rubbish… ‘
- MQ editor Sam Llewellyn editor crosses the Pacific on a container ship and is woken by the shock of a big wave a thousand miles from land
- Philip Marsden debates Marine Conservation Zones with Britain’s biggest trawler owner.
- Roger Barnes writes a paean to the joys of small-boat cruising
- Douglas Lindsay brings an antique across the Atlantic – the replica galleon Golden Hinde
- Rod Heikell outlines the early history of yachting
- Sophia Kingshill navigates in the general direction of the mythical island Hy Brasil, which somehow remained on the charts until 1853
- Jonathon Green goes looking for linguistic lowlife and discovers the influence of the 19th century American merchant marine.
- Oscar Branson goes us deep under some very cold water ‘At around three hundred metres there is no light at all. It is an ice-cold world, and it feels stone dead. Nothing could be further from the truth.’
- And there is the usual The Marine Quarterly departments – North Sea News, Flotsam and Jetsam, book reviews, items on seamanship, eccentricity, and even the odd poem, all edited by the meticulous Sam Llewellyn and decorated with the drawings of Claudia Myatt
Lifeboat hero Henry Blogg passed away 60 years ago today
When Henry Blogg retired in 1947, after 53 years service and at age 71, 11 years past the usual retiring date, he had been coxswain for 38 years of his service, during which he had launched 387 times and rescued 873 people. The photo above is from the Wikimedia.
Blogg is often referred to as ‘the greatest of the lifeboatmen’. Through a career that began in 1917 and included his near drowning in a service to the SS English Trader in 1941, he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution three times and the silver medal four times, the George Cross, the British Empire Medal, and a series of other awards.
On his retirement, Blogg’s nephew ‘Shrimp’ Davies took over as coxswain. Here’s a link to Shrimp talking… And here’s another to Shrimp and the rest of his crew having a beer and a bit of step dancing.
Old Henry is still remembered in Cromer – there’s the splendid monument pictured above, and the town also has its RNLI Henry Blogg Museum.
My thanks to Malcolm Woods for reminding me of this anniversary.