ENGLISH FISHERMEN FACE RUIN

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 84, 3 January 1935, Page 7

ENGLISH FISHERMEN FACE RUIN

Herrings Thrown Back

Into Sea

(From, a Special Correspondent).

(By Air Mail). London, December 15. The British herring season has just straggled to a close. It ended in poverty and disaster for the men of the herring fleet. Nearly every one of the owners of the 800-odd drifters that put to sea from the East Anglian ports during the short seven-week season has lost £3OO. 1 No money is left to refit the drifters for next year.

Millions of herrings have been thrown back into the sea in a last desperate endeavour on the part of the fishermen to break the monopoly ring of buyers ashore and force prices above the farcical level of five or six shillings a cran of about 1000 fish.

The sudden jump in prices, which followed the entry of German buyers into the market came too late. The season is over. The herring are gone. Along the quay at Lowestoft the drifters are now lying stern-on, packed like sardines in a can. It is hard to imagine, looking at these calm men with the pale blue eyes, that they are facing poverty and ruin. Age does not weary them. Sixty-seven-year-old George Manthorpe has served the sea since he was a boy of 12. And now, as the owner of Sunnyside Girl, he stood on the quay and looked down into the empty hold that meant yet another profitless trip. ... •

“Fuel up,” he said to the skipper, ‘and.j?et out there again.”

“I went to sea in 1879 as a cabin boy in the forecastle,” he said, “but I’ve never seen times like these before.

“But still we go on. We shall always go on. And just as people’s appetites changed and brought, us ruin, so they’ll change again and make it worth our while to send a drifter to sea.”