Iceland
is an island surrounded by some of the richest fishing grounds anywhere in the
world and its history and the
development of its working class is inextricably
linked to fishing. Crews from
Britain have
been fishing off the coasts of
Iceland
for at least 600 years
. By the 15
th century Iceland
was already famous for its stockfish, [Icelandic, harðfiskur]—the wind-dried
haddock and cod
that
stayed edible for months, was light, portable and could feed travelers
crossing oceans and continents.
However dangerous winter fishing was—and every coastal town in
Britain and Iceland has
memories of disasters and heroic rescues—the fish was too valuable to leave
alone. Brian W. Lavery’s book, The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca
and the Hull Triple trawler disaster, published last year tells the story of
the 58 men who died and one who survived when three Hull trawlers—the St
Romanus, the Kingston Peridot and the Ross Cleveland—were lost within a few
days in the winter of 1968 off Iceland.
Winter deep-sea trawling was
notoriously dangerous at the time when British ships often didn’t have the
latest safety equipment because owners wouldn’t pay for it. A ton of ice could
form on a deck in minutes in foul weather and less than 20 tonnes could turn
over a 657-tonne ship like the Kingston Peridot. It had to be chipped off by hand in storms when the men didn’t
even have safety cables to clip themselves onto. Often crews were without a
radio operator and particularly over holidays, crew shortages would be made up
by teenagers or older men without much experience of fishing or these
conditions.
 |
| Headscarf Revolutionaries |
When news of the second trawler sinking reached
Hull, Lililian Bilocca, a
fish worker whose husband and son worked on trawlers, began a campaign that
became international news and completely overhauled safety standards on British
trawlers. I wrote a short
review of
the book in the British magazine Socialist Review and there is an excellent and
much longer
article about the book in Socialist Worker by Annette Makin.
With better safety equipment, training and cold weather gear
some of these men could have been saved but the storm that sank the Ross
Cleveland in the great bay of Ísafjörður of North West Iceland was the worst anyone
there—Icelanders or foreigners had ever seen.
Icelandic journalist Óttar Sveinsson wrote a book about the
same disaster in Icelandic Útkall I Djúpinu, published in English as Doom in
the Deep. It’s a pity that this is currently out of print because Óttar interviewed
the Icelanders who rescued the men off the Grimsby
trawler, Notts County that ran aground at the height of
the storm in Ísafjörður. His book is a tribute to the ingenuity and courage of
the volunteers from the Icelandic coastguard vessel, Oðinn who rescued the freezing
terror-stricken men who had heard the final words of Phil Gay, the captain of
the Ross Cleveland as it sank and expected to be next.
Ísafjörður bay was full of British trawlers that night
because in most storms it was safe. Harry Eddom, the only man to survive the sinking
of the Ross Cleveland, made the point,
“We were only two or three miles from
the 3,000-foot walls of the fjord. We should have been safe as houses.”
 |
| Map of Ísafjörður from Útkall I Djúpinu |
Dick Moore described the storm as the Notts County
ran aground, the engine room flooded and he and the other men scrambled to get out
on deck,
“A howling, screeching, shattering din. The ship was
vibrating with the wind. I thought it was like being out on a runway with ten
jet planes taking off at once. The air seemed to be tearing apart. And the
sound didn’t die down. It went on and on without pause. I put my hands over my
ears; I felt thousands of ice-needles pricking my face, held my head down and
tried to keep my balance on the ice. It was hard to breathe. How could this be
happening?..It was as if the mountains themselves were shrieking and roaring.”
The Icelandic coastguard ship Oðinn was in Ísafjörður searching
for a smaller Icelandic fishing vessel Heiðrun II, missing with its six man crew—Rögnvaldur
Sigurjónsson, his two sons Ragnar and
Sigurjón, Páll Ísleifur Vilhjálmsson, Kjartan Halldór Halldórsson and Sigurður
Sigurðsson. The boat and the crew were never found.
 |
| Icelandic coastguard vessel Oðinn |
Apart from search and rescue, the captain and crew of the
Oðinn spent much of their time enforcing the exclusive 12 mile Icelandic
fisheries zone won by the first “Cod War” from 1958-1961. This “war” had been a
series of sometimes violent confrontations between Icelandic trawlers backed by
their few coastguard vessels and British trawlers backed by the Royal Navy.
Oðinn had used trawl cutting machinery to strip the offending British trawlers of their fishing gear which cost thousands of pounds at the time. Harry Eddom had
been part of British crews fighting the Icelanders for fish.
While the storm raged and it was too dangerous to do anything
about rescuing the men from the Notts
County, the men on Oðinn fought
the ice. Seventeen year old Torfi Geirmundsson later said,
“Several of us lads
had tried to go forward when the ship was keeling over sharply. But as soon as
we got out on the foredeck the gale slung us up against the rail. We couldn’t
stay on our feet. The ice built up so fast you couldn’t let up for a minute.”
The next morning when the wind had dropped to gale force 8
or 9, the Oðinn planned to rescue the Notts County crew by getting as close to
shore as possible without running itself aground. It got within 200 metres of the
trawler. The engine of the smaller covered boat that the Icelanders meant to
use wouldn’t start, so 14 hours after the trawler had run aground Pálmi
Hlöðversson and Sigurjón Hannesson set out in a small rubber Zodiac dingy from Oðinn
with two uninflated rubber life rafts as ballast against the wind threatening
to flip the dingy over at any minute. The Oðinn had radioed ahead so the Notts County
crew were on deck waving and clutching bottles when Pálmi and Sigurjón reached them. The
Icelanders assumed they were drunk and yelled that if they didn’t get rid of
the booze and do exactly as they were told they would leave them where they
were. The trawlermen weren’t drunk but in their cold traumatised state, the
Notts County crew thought they could thank their rescuers with what they had to
hand, rum.
The 18 survivors—one of the crew, Robert Bowie had died trying
to launch a life raft—had to climb and jump down into the zodiac then crawl
into the two life rafts, nine men in each. Pálmi and Sigurjón then towed the
life rafts back through the gale force winds to the Oðinn. These men got home
because a boat load of Icelanders usually hell bent on chasing British
fisherman out of their territorial waters, volunteered to rescue them at the
risk of their own lives. The next day when the wind had eased, they went back
to rescue the body of Robert Bowie.
Thanks to the campaign led by Lillian Bilocca, safety on
British trawlers got overhauled and that spring British fishermen finally got a
mothership, the Orsino launched with a crew of 20 including a doctor, a
meteorologist and medical equipment.
Lillian was shamefully treated, sacked and blacklisted by
the
Hull fish
industry and not properly supported by the trade unions. But Lillian was with
the dock workers and trade unionists at the launch of the Orsino
and said, “Never mind them calling us silly women. This is what we have fought
for.”
Health and safety at work has never been achieved without a
fight but the safety equipment and training on trawlers was wrenched from the employers
and ship owners on the back of immense suffering and human cost. Climate change
means that mega storms such as the one over Ísafjörður that night will become
more common and the right not to die at work will have to be fought for again
.
