CHAPTER FIVE

Hull and the Fishing Trade

Both geographically and economically Kingston-upon-Hull looked out to the sea. Situated on the northwest bank on a bend of the River Hull, the town looked out to the widening mouth of Humber estuary, which emptied into the North Sea.1 And the river and the sea in many respects were the lifeblood of Hull’s economy. In 1871 about one-third of the labor force was directly tied to waterfront commerce in some fashion and other significant manufacturing and processing industries depended on the port for raw materials (Bellamy 1952, 38). However, it was one industry, fishing, employing a little less than 3 percent of the male workforce that dominated master and servant prosecutions in the local court and, as we will see, tough justice was focused on the apprentices in the trade, or fisherlads as they were called. The structure of its labor market, the economics of the trade itself, and apprenticeship as a particular form of labor contract along local judicial institutions led fishing trawler owners to turn to the court with great frequency as a means of controlling their apprentices. The status of these apprentices in the division of labor left them exposed to a despotism that cannot be characterized as either market or paternalistic, but rather a form of bondage that defined their position as unfree. Custom played only a perfunctory role in their labor, and the diktats of trawler owners and ship captains and hands, sanctified by the law, substantively ruled their lives.

By 1872 this town of about 125,000 people was the third-largest port in England, shipping about 9 percent of all its exports (amounting to £23 million) and receiving almost 5 percent of all imports (or £16.5 million), and employing close to 1,800 dock workers. It specialized in exporting manufactured goods such as textiles and machinery from the industrial North, as well as coal and cattle. Imports were largely raw materials, such as timber and cotton, and foodstuffs such as wheat and oilseeds. Trade was anchored in the Baltic region, but there was also a substantial global network of shipping ties. This trade fostered a substantial seed-crushing industry of thirty-seven mills, several extensive cotton hemp and flax manufactories (the largest employing 1,500 hands), perhaps the largest concentration of furniture makers in the country, several large paint and coatings manufacturers, and of course a major shipbuilding industry for both steam and sailing ships, with the largest yard employing about 2,000 workers. It also fostered substantial inland water transport of goods and products.2

In 1871 transport employed almost a quarter of the male workforce, metal trades and engineering 14 percent, the building trades 10 percent, followed by other industries in the single digits.3 No other English port had a higher concentration of workers tied to these industries. In that year Hull’s shipyards ranked sixth in the total tonnage of vessels produced, well below their rivals to the north in Scotland, but equivalent to London in its now-sunset years. In transport the years of its most rapid growth were 1864–74, and shipping tonnage of its firms tipped sooner to modern iron vessels sooner than other ports.4

Compared to other port towns during these years Hull had a relatively quiescent labor force both in terms of the skilled and unskilled waterside workers. Why this was the case is not entirely clear, though several factors might have contributed. One might be the significant expansion of shipbuilding and shipping in these years, which was addressed by migrant labor from other parts of the country (Brown 1972, 10). There is little information on the organization of the Hull shipyards, but in general iron shipbuilding in England was based on a craft division of labor with engineers and metal workers organized in hierarchical work groups with substantial autonomy. Because ships were constructed on order according to the varying specifications of their future owners, little capital investment was made in machinery and, coupled with the cyclical nature of the industry, this craft division was the most pragmatic and flexible organization of labor. The division of labor was relatively new and arose with the transformation of iron shipbuilding from about midcentury, combining new skilled groups such as boilermakers and other engineers, platers, and angle iron workers with older trades such as joiners and caulkers. Within each work group skilled workers supervised a number of assistants and helpers.5 This organization into semi-autonomous skilled work groups might have been the basis for successful labor discipline in the shipyards.

It appears that the boilermakers, joiners, and engineers were in some form of union organizations by the mid-1860s, though the extent to which these unions had organized the shipyards is not clear.6 A substantial influx of skilled labor during the period from outside into this newer craft-based system might have dampened worker solidarity, particularly across skill groups.

In addition, given the importance of the shipping trade, Hull had a higher proportion of unskilled to skilled labor than many other large English towns, and as a port had a substantial transient workforce (Brown 1972, 10–11). While there was a recognized division of labor among dockers, this does not seem to have led to sectional labor organization, and there is little record of any union activity until the early 1870s. It is not clear how permanent the dockers’ organizations were. Raymond Brown suggests that both the casual and seasonal nature of this work, coupled with the large growth of the workforce by migrants in the 1860s and 1870s created a difficult environment for union development, though dock workers had some form of continuous organization during these years (1972, 10).

It is also possible that the relative dominance of a few firms in both shipbuilding and shipping, particularly by the 1870s, created a balance of power in these industries that tipped the advantages further to capital. In shipbuilding firms such as Messrs. Martin Samuelson & Co. (later the Humber Ironworks Co.), Humphrys and Pearson and Messrs. Charles and William Earle employed upwards of 2,000 workers at peak periods, well more than twice the size of the average firms in the more important shipbuilding ports on the northeast coast or in Scotland (Bellamy 1963, 29; Sheahan 1864, 584–86). Growing concentration was similarly found in the shipping lines. By the later 1870s three out of the forty-one firms controlled about 46 percent of the registered vessels, and Thomas Wilson & Co. which had rapidly expanded over the previous decade, controlled about one-quarter of all ships and 30 percent of the total tonnage.7

Neither in cases of skilled or unskilled waterfront work are there many recorded disputes regarding labor discipline and control in the workplace. There was sporadic conflict among the skilled trades and the major shipbuilders over wages, which became a little more frequent in the prosperous early 1870s. The sparse record of these conflicts suggests that unions had a difficult time gaining victories against tenacious employers who on at least several occasions resorted to importing strikebreakers. In 1864 shipyard laborers at two of the largest firms, Messrs. Samuelson’s and Messrs. Earle’s lost a strike over piece rates and the former permanently replaced a number of the strikers (Hull and Easter Counties Herald, May 12, 1864). Engineers and molders successfully struck for wage increases in 1866 but the following year Earle’s rescinded these increases and these groups appear to have engaged in an unsuccessful strike to maintain them. In 1868 Earle’s responded to a strike by bringing substitutes from London.8 In 1874 a strike by joiners at Earle’s in May was quickly followed by engineers at all shipyards. The engineers endured for three months and obtained few if any concessions; while Earle’s joiners persevered two months and received modest concessions, though by the end of the strike many had sought employment elsewhere.9 The largely unskilled dock laborers had formed a union by 1872 and also pressed for improvements in wages and hours. Employers deployed ordinary seamen as replacement workers and at the end of three weeks the strike collapsed and union activists were blacklisted (Brown 1972, 19; Beehive March 30, 1872).

The largest shipbuilding and shipping lines did on occasion turn to the court in their efforts to combat strikes.10 They used prosecution as part of a repertoire of tactics to intimidate workers and cow strike leaders. In an 1863 ruling that was eventually upheld on appeal by the Queen’s Bench, the president of the Hull boilermakers’ union was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for making threats to a society member. The union had voted to cease work in a yard where angle-iron bending work was being given to blacksmiths in violation of trade rules. The president was to warn his fellow member that he would be “despised” and “put to all sort of unpleasantness” if he persisted in working at the yard. The case hints at the ways in which some shipbuilders might have been shifting the customs of work in the yard, and the case might have had some impact of securing the authority of yard owners over the division of labor and their power vis-à-vis craft unions (Curthoys 2004, 41). However, firms employing waterside labor, whatever form of labor control regime they used, generally did not rely on the local court to enforce labor discipline. Rather, as we will see shortly, the use of the law was highly concentrated in the much smaller fish trawling trade.

The Judicial Order in Hull

Raymond Brown has noted that “the Town Council of Hull up to the latter part of the 1890s was not, on the whole distinguished” (1972, 5). Local magnates did not participate in local politics and town government was populated by lesser businessmen and merchants.11 Local politics was organized around networks of “Blues” (Liberals) and “Oranges,” though Liberals generally held advantage in town elections. By midcentury elections were characterized by vote buying, and the town suffered through an embarrassing parliamentary investigation of this corruption in the early 1850s (Gillett and MacMahon 1989, 338–39). Through a Commission of the Peace the council appointed alderman and the mayor to a borough court, and about a dozen and a half council members were members of the bench in the 1860s and 1870s.12 While they met in local petty sessions they do not seem to have been the guiding force in the local justice system. Rather, its backbone appears to have been the stipendiary magistrate Thomas H. Travis, aided by his deputy stipendiary, Walter Wrangham.

Travis was first appointed as stipendiary magistrate in 1854. Along with his deputy he appears to have presided over a substantial number of the borough cases (Hull and Easter Counties Herald, March 16, 1865). In reference to a dispute over increasing his salary the Hull and Eastern Counties Herald observed that “of all the unpopular men in Hull, it may truly be affirmed that Mr. Travis enjoyed the least amount of public favor,” though he clearly had a group of supporters in borough government (June 21, 1866).13 In addition, there are indications that he was integrated with the local commercial elite through charitable institutions. In civic life Travis appeared as a stern moralist, speaking out against the scourges of criminality and drunkenness (Jan. 1, 1864; Aug. 2 and Oct. 21, 1869). Speaking at an annual meeting for a training ship for convicted youth, Travis spoke of the efforts of youth reformation as part of a larger war on crime; “It was confessed that criminals were a class, as much as the army, or navy, or any other class, habitually warring against society, and bringing up their children as habitual haters of what is right. The Legislature now said ‘such being the case we will make exceptional rules for you criminals. We will take such steps against you as to bring war into your own territories and disperse you.’ If that were done what might they not hope” (Sept. 2, 1869).

Travis envisioned himself as a strict and impartial defender of the law and, so far as that benefited working people, a champion of their interests. From his perspective this impartiality was exercised by upholding the contract of service and the laws regulating it. As he noted in a master and servant case concerning a group of striking platers at one of the larger shipbuilders in town, Humphrys and Pearson’s, “He would stand on the side of the men whenever and by whomsoever they were tyrannised over; and on the other hand, he would stand on the side of the masters whenever an attempt was made to do them wrong” (Feb. 8, 1871). Standing on the side of the masters meant enforcing any legally extant agreement. In a case concerning three strikebreakers hired by the local shipping magnates Messrs. Wilson, Sons & Co., he dismissed their defense that they had stayed away from work because of intimidation by the strikers and insisted that the strike was none of their business. He admonished the men to return to Messrs. Wilson: “Well go and make the best bargain you can with them. You had better show them [the men on strike], by your good work how foolish they are. Messrs. Wilson, I am sure, will prove good masters. If you do not carry out your agreement you will find yourselves in very great trouble” (April 4, 1872). In a master and servant prosecution of three other strikebreakers who pleaded intimidation by strikers for not showing up at work, Travis in rendering his decision delivered a stern warning about how labor relations were conducted in Hull,

He would give fair warning, that such audacious conduct could not be tolerated. With respect to the defence of intimidation, it was simply nonsense, because one man had actually passed through the wonderful danger without injury. However much they might talk at their unions and clubs, he would tell them that in this country there was a desire to uphold law and order, which was stronger than any wish of theirs, and the law had abundant strength to protect those who relied upon it. His Worship then, after a few more remarks upon the law, which he said was the same for rich and poor, ordered each of the prisoners to pay £3 compensation, or in default of payment distress would be levied; or in default of that he ordered each of them imprisoned for three months.14

If in Travis’s mind the law was the same for the rich and poor, his strict enforcement of master and servant law, as we shall see, provided little succor for Hull’s fishing apprentices. Before turning to their case we first turn to the court’s rulings on wage claims under the master and servant act and prosecution of seamen under the Merchant Shipping Act.

To analyze the use of summary prosecutions for labor control regimes I have compiled data on all labor cases heard before the court from 1864–75 using the Hull magistrates’ clerk’s minute books.15 I have supplemented this data set by collecting all labor cases mentioned in the weekly “Police Reports” section of the Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, which provides summaries of many of the cases heard before the borough court over the previous week.

Given the size of Hull’s workforce the court did not adjudicate a great many wage disputes. When it did, though, the strict application of master and servant law produced largely favorable outcomes for workers bringing claims for unpaid wages. As table 5.1 demonstrates, in these civil cases workers were successful in winning claims for unpaid wages between half and two-thirds of the time, with the bench arbitrating a settlement in roughly 10 percent of the cases. Where nonpayment of wages was clear, Travis and other magistrates could maintain their stance as impartial and strict upholders of the law.

In upholding the contractual obligations of workers this strict reading produced decidedly favorable results for employers. We can see this in the bench’s rulings in prosecutions of seaman under the Merchant Shipping Act. The act, passed in 1854 and amended in 1862, was intended to protect what Parliament deemed among the most vulnerable population of workers to unfair dealing and abuse. Much of the act was written to protect seamen from lost ages, abandonment, ill treatment, and other abuses in its expanding aqueous Empire. Under the acts marine boards were established in ports and agreements between captain or ship owner and crew had to be signed in the presence of the board. The board also served as a station for reporting complaints (Maude and Pollock 1861, 124–56; Greenhow 1863, 24–33). The act gave seamen rights even if they were far removed from Britain. However, section 244 of the act also provided for stiff penalties for desertion of insubordination that mirror the criminal sanctions found in master and servant law. It imposed up to 10 weeks’ imprisonment for unauthorized leave and 12 weeks and a forfeiture of all wages for desertion. The act empowered magistrates to order the forced return of the seaman to the ship to continue duty, and to permit the transfer of a seaman on board a vessel in the middle of serving a sentence should his labor be required by his master. Further, the act provided for the master or ship owner to seize a seaman without warrant and hold him on board for 24 hours prior to a hearing, voiding basic civil liberties. This law remained in force until a clamor for revision in 1880 (Maude and Pollock 1861, 117–20; Rule 1976, 401).

It is not clear that captains or vessel owners used the law with much frequency in Hull, given the volume of traffic in the port. In 1871, for example, 2,551 vessels sailed from the port (1,417 of which were steam) and 3,236 entered (1,368 steam) while the court heard a total of sixty-eight prosecutions under section 244 (Kelly 1872, 386). Nonetheless, as table 5.2 demonstrates, judgments rarely went in favor of the seamen. A plurality of the time over the period they received prison sentences, and in over three-quarters of the cases they either served time or were sent back to finish their agreements regardless of the reasons they presented to the court. When violating a contract of service seamen rarely received a sympathetic hearing from the bench. The results of prosecutions under the Merchant Shipping Act demonstrate the bench’s exercise of justice and more particularly Travis’s vision of standing “on the side of the masters whenever an attempt was made to do them wrong.” The local institutions of justice, as well as the dispositions of those such as Travis who passed judgment on defendants, provided a welcome venue for employers seeking to exercise control over their workforce. The fishing apprentices of Hull experienced the full weight of this justice as we will see shortly.

Apprenticeship and Youth Labor

Before turning to the prosecutions of the fisherlads we should first consider the role of youth labor generally and apprenticeship more specifically in the Industrial Revolution. Jane Humphries argues that child labor remains an underemphasized facet of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English economic development. Far from just being an important factor in the early advancement of textile factories “it contributed actively to the developing divisions of labour and organizational readjustments that sustained traditional units of production and maintained their competitiveness” (2010, 366).16 There was, she finds, an upsurge in child labor in the 1780–1850 period and it was a mainstay in a wide variety of industries.

One form of child labor was apprenticeship, a specific legal form of unfree labor, which mostly remains in the shadows in studies of nineteenth-century English capitalist development. Though K. D. M. Snell has termed the debate over the decline of apprenticeship as one of the most “chaotic” in English social history, many economic historians offer a Whiggish view of the institution, suggesting that it was largely a relic of an early economic system (Snell 1985, 230). The neoclassical economist Clark Nardinelli, for example, straightforwardly asserts that “the industrial revolution ended apprenticeship. The early factory masters employed an apprentice workforce because no other was available. Free children, however, rapidly replaced apprentices in the textile industries in the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, as modern industry replaced handicraft industry, the institution of apprenticeship began to disappear throughout the economy” (1988, 259). With a few exceptions (such as Humphries) child labor in general, and pauper apprenticeship in particular, are seen as artifacts of the early nineteenth century, a phenomenon caused by a need for industrial labor and eventually obviated by technological advances.17 As Snell observes, the traditional system of apprenticeship was unmoored from its institutional roots to craft, parish, and family, and mutated into a number of skill-training variants. To the extent that apprenticeship extended into the latter part of the nineteenth century, it has been depicted as a self-enforcing system by which youths (largely though not entirely males) were able to gain entrance into a trade in exchange for service (Snell 1996, 315–17; see also Humphries 2003).

Certainly with the textile industries, mining, many workshop industries, and agricultural labor increasingly regulated by parliamentary acts, the use of apprentice and youth labor became more problematic. However, during the mid-Victorian period there was a substantial increase in the number of male children under fifteen employed in navigation, dockwork, and on the railways. Moreover, as some historians note, despite the ill-repute of pauper apprenticeships, they remained a potentially important means for parishes to reduce their fiscal burdens. The case of the fishing industry illustrates how youth labor in general, and a degraded form of apprenticeship in particular, could still be vital to the process of industrial expansion. This was particularly the case when apprentice labor could be disciplined and controlled through the law.

The Case of the Hull Trawling Industry

The fishing trade was a relatively recent development in Hull’s economic history, a product of the discovery of extensive fishing grounds in the deep waters off the Yorkshire coast in the 1830s and 1840s and the extension of the railroads. The industry developed rapidly in Hull, Grimsby, and other ports in the 1860s, at first through the migration of trawler owners from other regions of the country. In the early 1850s there were only a few dozen fishing trawlers (or “smacks” as they were generally called) in Hull; by 1863 they numbered about 270 and by 1873 there were some 330 smacks. Between 1864 and 1874 the number of trawler voyages had increased 86 percent to 4,785 (Brown and McLaren 1969, 225). The Hull and Eastern Counties Herald reported that in 1867 the industry employed some 1,500 hands (Jan. 3, 1867). Where in the early 1850s smacks were recording about 8,000 baskets caught annually, by the mid-1860s this had risen to around 170,000 baskets. By the early 1870s their catch was annually worth about £400,000 (Dec. 28, 1865, Dec. 27, 1866, Nov. 13, 1873). Hull was in keen competition throughout the period with nearby Grimsby on the southern tip of the Humber, and by the early 1870s the latter port had outstripped Hull both in terms of smacks (360) and men and boys employed in the trade (3,300) (Feb. 23, 1871).

A new fully equipped smack sold for at least £1,000, though used trawlers were perhaps half to two-thirds that price. The self-made masters of Hull’s fishing trade often heavily mortgaged their vessels, working off the payments with each catch. The proportion of fixed to variable capital was actually higher in fishing than cotton manufacturing and from the start many ship owners found themselves in highly leveraged positions.18 Newspaper accounts for the period point to at least fifteen smack owners filing for bankruptcy.19

It is difficult to reconstruct the finances of these smack owners, but a rough indication can be gleaned from the Registry of Ships for the port of Hull during the period. All smacks were registered with the port, which also held a record of their financing (including their mortgages) and sale.20 Reconstructing the record of Thomas Halfyard, the smack owner responsible for the most convictions of fishing apprentices during the period (see table 5.3), shows a dynamic web of financial entanglements. Between 1860 and 1875 Halfyard was involved in eighteen sales of smacks and underwrote twenty-three mortgages for these and other vessels. On the other side of the ledger he took out thirteen mortgages himself, about two-thirds of them from a London fish factor. Overall, Halfyard appears to have maintained a positive balance sheet of several hundred pounds over much of the period between his own mortgage payments and the income from his borrowers. However, in the early 1870s, with a series of mortgage payments due on vessels, the balance might have tipped the other way. Halfyard’s mortgages for vessels he purchased were generally £4–500, at 5 percent while those he underwrote when selling vessels were generally in the £6–700 range. His loans were usually paid back within a three-year time span, though those of his buyers were often over four to five years. It is not possible to determine the percentage of his total income that Halfyard generally received through the selling and underwriting of his older smacks.

The ship registers do suggest a very active market in smacks and one in which larger fleet owners were cogs in a chain of a growing port fleet. They depict a trade in which credit sources were largely internal, with loans mostly provided by smack owners selling vessels or by fish merchants.21 The sheer volume of this trade, which increases over the course of the period, hints at a growing speculative market with the expansion of the industry. However, exactly how much capital was represented by a port’s fleet in this period is open to question. A Grimsby smack owner, testifying before the Commissioners of Sea Fisheries in 1866, noted that because of highly speculative loans £300,000 invested in smacks had only procured about £100,000 worth of vessels.22 A major Hull smack owner, Alfred Ansell, reported in 1869 that 242 Hull smacks were worth about £149,000.23

The rate of return on investment is also unclear. William Markchow, a Hull smack owner testifying in 1866, claimed that 5 percent could be achieved with careful management. In a latter report the Inspectors for the Commissioners suggested that for the trade as a whole a smack could net £70–80 a year, though testifying before a parliamentary committee in the early 1880s a Grimsby smack owner maintained that his average profit rate over the previous five years was at best 2 percent.24 While rates of return might vary, however, mortgage payments were a constant. Many smack owners depended on regular runs to stay afloat.

As a contemporary commercial review noted, “There is little romance with the history of this trade” (Trade and Commerce [1878], 133). The work was considered some of the least desirable in the port and, despite its rapid growth, smack owners had difficulties recruiting reliable crews. These crews were small, labor-intensive units, consisting of only five, including the skipper. Between solo voyages in the winter generally lasting one and a half to three weeks, to fleet voyages of thirty or more smacks in the spring and summer going from eight to as many as fifteen weeks, smacks were at sea at least forty weeks a year regardless of the weather. The crew was housed in a single small cabin in often miserable conditions, and remained in their work clothes throughout the voyage in order to respond quickly to orders. The cabins themselves were frequently flooded, and hands complained of inadequate maintenance of the vessels. Such small vessels were not subject to port regulation or inspection. A full day at work frequently involved at least two trawls, one during the day and one at night, which in bad weather could take two to three hours, and left little time for anything besides navigation, maintenance, meals, and sleep. The historian John Rule quotes one observer of the trade describing the routine at sea as “suffering—monotonous ceaseless suffering” (1976, 385). Moreover, given the small size of the boats and periodic transference of boxed catch by small boats to cutters for shipping, the work was extremely dangerous, ten times more so than mining.25 From 1876 to 1882, for example, 304 men and boys sailing on Grimsby fishing smacks perished (Robinson 1996, 56).26 In 1867 alone nationally 188 fishing smacks were lost at sea and 2,325 suffered wreck or casualty (Hull and Easter Counties Herald, Oct. 1, 1868).

Adult crew members, generally the skipper, the second, and sometimes the third hands, received shares of the gross from the catch (net of deductions for provisions), with the smack owner receiving the remainder. This assured their interests were aligned with the smack owner. However, casual adult labor for the lower positions was considered too unreliable, and smack owners generally could not compete with the shipping industry’s going wages for able seamen. Needing a cheap and secure labor force to fill out the crews, smack owners turned to the apprenticeship system.27 As Rule comments, “The smackowners solved the problem of labour supply in a way which strikingly recalls the methods of the factory masters of the early Industrial Revolution: they relied on poor-law apprentices.”28 Apprenticeship in merchant shipping had been common in the first half of the century until the passage of the Merchant Shipping Act in 1850, which made it significantly less attractive and viable (Burton 1999a). While there was an institutional history on which the trawling industry could pattern itself, apprenticeship for fisherlads assumed a different form and substance.

By the 1860s there were two forms of apprenticeship, indoor and outdoor. The former group was housed with their master (generally a lesser smack owner), who in addition to room and board was responsible for all other basic provisions such as clothing for both sea and shore. Outdoor apprentices received wages of 7–16 shillings per week in lieu of having their room and board provided. Typically they were bound to fleet owners, though indoor apprentices after the age of seventeen or eighteen might request a change to this status. Apprentices of either type were the fourth hands and cooks (and sometimes served the position of third hand as well). The former was responsible for watch, handling the smack in good weather, steering the small boat, taking soundings, gutting fish, and other tasks. The apprentice cook was the lowest hand and newest member who assisted the fourth hand, cleaned the deck, performed basic maintenance, and coiled the warp net when it was retrieved. Under the apprenticeship system smack owners were not obliged to pay their apprentices any wages, but it was customary that they were to receive a portion of the stockerbait, or money received at port for the sale of inferior fish. While not required, a modest amount of weekly pocket money was also traditional, especially for older apprentices.29

As a labor source they were frequently as capable as a grown man, though training did take several years and the return on the initial sunk investment was largely during the second half of the apprentice’s term. Binding a young person (generally male) into service apprenticeship systems in the nineteenth century was never free labor, and the trawling industry was no exception. Estimates vary, but at least half of all apprentices were bound by their parents and were generally locals. However, as the trade rapidly expanded in the 1870s it increasingly came to rely on poor law unions, reformatories, and other institutions as a labor source, and was indiscriminate in its recruitment. The lack of experience at sea made many such apprentices only a liability to themselves once at sea.30 Pamela Horn suggests that pauper apprentices were more valued because they were more easily subject to coercion. The historian of the industry, Robb Robinson, observes that “many apprentices were treated by the smackowners as their personal property.”31

With some hyperbole a contemporary London paper pronounced the apprentice system in the trawling industry as “a system of slavery as infamous as any system of slavery every devised” (Horn 1996, 187).32 Complaints about maltreatment by crew members were common, and many fisherlads preferred to commit crimes or refuse to obey orders so that they would be sent to jail rather than to sea. Increasingly many absconded completely or ran away as the smacks embarked.33 Those disposed toward the industry argued that charges of cruelty were often inventions of apprentices to break their binding, and that troublesome and confrontational fisherlads often drove the crew to administer tough discipline. “I quite believe,” noted Baldwyn Fleming in his report on the Grimsby pauper apprentices, “that many punishments which look serious when the subject of magisterial investigation have been inflicted with a rough and ready hand—perhaps with undue severity—but with no thought or intention of malicious cruelty.” And he maintained that all the apprentices he interviewed stated that they “were fully aware that if ill-treated they would have no difficulty in obtaining redress.”34 Hull apprentices frequently claimed abuse as a reason for absconding.

On occasion an adult hand would be prosecuted by an apprentice for abuse as an assault, since the more severe cases generally involved beatings (often with a rope and termed “rope-ending”). During the years reported here there were at least a dozen such prosecutions, all involving assaults of some form.35 Most commonly these adult hands were ordered to find sureties of £20–100 to keep the peace, though sometimes they were released on their own recognizance. In two cases fines of 20–50s were exacted, the latter for a stabbing and pitching overboard of a fisherlad by a captain. The most severe punishment was meted out to a smack hand who hit an apprentice over the head with a poker, cut a piece of flesh out of his arm with a belt, rubbing saltpeter in the wound and eventually throwing the boy into the sea. Apologizing and admitting drunkenness, he was given two months at hard labor, a sentence that as we shall see was commonly administered to the fishing apprentices themselves for absconding. When a smack owner fired a skipper or other adult hand for mistreating an apprentice, the abuser was readily hired by another owner given the constant need for experienced labor.36

In addition to the rough conditions and often poor treatment, older apprentices, such as Charles Taylor with whose case I started this book, came to resent their comparatively paltry compensation. Smack hands and able seamen who were often not much older earned substantially more. During the back years of their terms, when they became most valuable to their masters, apprentices fully realized the extent of their exploitation. Absconding was seen by many apprentices as a means of rectifying this injustice as well as escaping their demeaning circumstances. As the number of apprentices increased, so too did the problems of keeping them compliant and bound for their full service. One smack owner reported that a deserting apprentice could cost him £30–50 a week in replacement wages and lost revenue, a considerable sum for a small capitalist.37

While smack owners may not have been able to compete with the shipbuilders and shipping fleet owners in terms of wealth or prominence, they were not without political voice. Their industry was recognized as central to the town, and from their stronghold in the South Myton ward they sent some of the more prominent of their peers to represent them on the borough council.38 To maintain this system of cheap labor, it is not surprising that smack owners felt comfortable in turning to the borough court, particularly given their economic contributions to the town and a bench headed by stipendiary Travis.

An analysis of all labor cases before the court from 1864 to 1875, and of the fishing trade cases in particular, reveals the extent to which the latter industry relied on the court as a means of labor control. To start, a review of summary prosecutions for the period across a variety of offenses shows that, in general, beyond assault or drunkenness, the working people of Hull were as or more likely to be convicted summarily of a violation of master and servant law as of any other single criminal offense most often connected with their class. As table 5.4 shows, proportionately master and servant convictions for these years hovered between 4 and 7 percent of the town court’s total summary convictions, which was between two and three times higher than the national percentage.

Table 5.5 shows the percentage of cases all master and servant prosecutions that involved disorderly apprentices, and the percentage of these cases in turn that were of fisherlads. The numbers are bluntly telling. Virtually all prosecutions during these years were of disorderly apprentices and roughly three-quarters were of fisherlads, despite the fact that they constituted no more than 1 percent of the entire male laboring population of Hull. Moreover, assuming a contemporary estimate that there were about 750 apprentices in the later 1870s, at least 20 percent of this group was caught up in the criminal justice system for almost all of these years.39 Given the rapid expansion of the trade in the 1870s, this percentage during 1864–74 is probably significantly higher.

Tables 5.6 (below) and 5.2 (above) can be used to compare the sentences meted out to the fisherlads and to adult seamen prosecuted under the Merchant Shipping Act, which had comparable if not more severe sentences for deserters. Once again the numbers are striking. First, the sheer number of fishing apprentices’ cases is always larger, despite the fact that their representation in the maritime labor force was vastly smaller. Second, the percentage of prison sentences shows a clear imbalance. At an 82 percent average rate of incarceration the fishing apprentices were fully twice as likely to be sent to prison as seamen for similar offenses such as disobeying orders or absconding.

Tables 5.6 and 5.7 show respectively the distribution of sentences received by fisherlads and the distribution of jail sentences. With the most common sentences being twenty-one, thirty, and seventy days in prison with hard labor, convictions were highly punitive. Interestingly, notations in the minute books indicate that around 20–30 percent of these fisherlads were released to their masters prior to the completion of their sentences; and during one hearing Travis complained that “the only fault he had with some masters was that they were too anxious to take their boys out of prison before the expiration of their punishment” (Hull and Easter Counties Herald, March 6, 1873).

The data suggest that through both the apprenticeship and criminal justice systems smack owners fashioned a labor control regime for a portion of their labor supply that could not be maintained through a free labor market. On the one hand they needed a supply of inexpensive labor to be able to insure that their net return from each voyage allowed them to work off mortgage payments and expenses and make a profit. On the other hand this labor pool was young, often bound against their will, and became more valuable as a source of profit the greater their experience at sea. Therefore smack owners were reluctant to part with apprentices, and indeed the records show very few such annulments of indentures.

The answer was to use the criminal justice system as both a means of threat and coercion—a disciplinary tool that could be used repeatedly and reliably against obstreperous apprentices—and also as a holding pen for this labor supply.40 Long sentences insured that apprentices could not flee in between voyages. The extent to which smack owners were granted the early release of their charges also indicates that the punishment itself was secondary to secure access to this labor supply.

In Travis and the borough court the smack owners found sympathetic ears. Seen through the linked lens of bourgeois order and respectability and a belief in the “impartial” application of the law, the waywardness of the fisherlads represented a serious problem, particularly given their often pauper origins. The concern of smack owners was expressed by Alfred Ansell in 1869 at a meeting of the South Myton Reform Association—the biggest borough ward and the one with the largest concentration of smack owners—in which he noted that steps had been taken to “improve the moral condition of the fishermen,” and that the decline in the number of apprentice prosecutions from the previous year was a signal of their success (Hull and Easter Counties Herald, Nov. 25, 1869).

These paternalistic actions were best exemplified by the room and school inaugurated for fishing apprentices at the Fish Street Chapel in the latter 1860s. Characteristic for the times, the school provided regular Sunday Bible study classes, and by 1875 it claimed to have had 1,300–1,400 participants in them. Its reading room was open several nights a week, it made available saving accounts, and had an annual tea that drew between 100–200 fisherlads each April. Some of the largest smack owners were involved in its governance, including Ansell, its secretary, who was also one of the main prosecutors of apprentices during this period. The school mirrored the larger concern of smack owners and town elite for fishermen in general, which was reflected in their founding and maintenance of a Fishermen’s Institute. The institute was similar to the mechanics’ institutes of the times, and sought to provide spiritual and intellectual outreach and sustenance to the growing legions of adult fishermen.41 Given the continued resistance among many fisherlads, it seems doubtful that these institutions had the salutary impact that Ansell and others desired and imagined.

Less systematic evidence from the nearby port of Grimsby, where the trade grew even more rapidly (eventually dwarfing Hull) suggests a similar pattern. Fleming’s 1873 report into the status of apprentices in that town records that for the previous administrative year (May 1, 1872–April 30, 1873) there were 251 total cases involving fishing apprentices, 208 for absconding, 33 for disobeying orders, and the remainder for other offenses.42 Ten percent of the prosecutions represented repeat offenses. Sixty-two percent of the hearings resulted in convictions, a somewhat lower rate than in Hull, and the most common sentences were for two and three weeks’ imprisonment. In Grimsby magistrates relied on the Merchant Shipping Act for prosecution, which the Hull magistrates turned to after the repeal of the Master and Servant Act in 1875. It is not clear why the latter justices chose a different legal foundation or exactly why, after the reformation of the Merchant Shipping Act in 1880, they interpreted its sections in a way that stopped them for using it for further prosecutions while their Grimsby counterparts continued to do so.43

It is apparent from the data that employers in the trawling industry were the only Hull capitalists to employ the law systematically as a means of labor control. As table 5.3 (above) shows, nineteen of the top twenty prosecutors were smack owners.44 The remaining prosecutions of apprentices are from a wide variety of industries, with no one trade representing a significant percentage of the total.

These data give credence to the argument that the practice was employed by smack owners as a means of controlling their labor supply and the labor process, and satisfying their requirements for cheap labor to stay afloat. As Fleming himself noted in his report on the Grimsby apprentices, “For its ensuing continuance and development, it is absolutely necessary that the lads should be obtained as apprentices to the trade.”45 Many smack owners were heavily mortgaged. They faced a growing but also increasingly competitive trade, not only among their peers in Hull, but also from the trawlers of nearby Grimsby, Whitby, Scarborough, and other ports in the South as well. Moreover, it is probable that an increasing proportion of their labor force was also the least enthusiastic, that is, poor law union boys who were indentured to relinquish their home parishes of a burden. A number of these apprentices were shipped considerable distances, including from London parishes. As Boswell suggests, many were physically unprepared for the rigors of the sea (1973, 58).

Legal action became a lynchpin to keep this system of exploitation in motion. The Master and Servant Act, coupled with apprenticeship binding, insured that smack owners had unmitigated power over this portion of their labor supply. The borough court and police provided a ready enforcement mechanism for this power. Drawing on the authority of the criminal justice system, smack owners were not only able to create a potent disciplinary system, but they were also able to securely house recalcitrant labor at the expense of the borough until needed for use. This was certainly not a system of slavery, but in its darker dimensions there were some disconcerting parallels.

By 1880 the industry in Hull alone employed some 1,200 apprentices, and there was probably a larger number in Grimsby.46 There were by then 420 smacks with some £500,000 invested in Hull’s trade (Bellamy 1971, 49). In 1876 Hull magistrates sent 216 fisherlads to prison, probably under the Merchant Shipping Act (Robinson 1996, 60). However, changes in the act and the passage of the Payment of Wages Act in 1880 led to the abandonment of apprentice labor in Hull, though in Grimsby and perhaps other fishing ports the practices waned more slowly. This was in part because of variations in the local labor supply. As an 1894 parliamentary report noted, “if there had been at Grimsby the same supply of weekly hands as there is at Hull and Lowestoft it is probable that the apprentice system would have died out as it has done in other ports” (Chance 1985, 281). Perhaps this is why the Hull magistrates interpreted a critical section in the Merchant Shipping Act regarding willful disobedience as applying to on-board behavior only, while their Grimsby counterparts understood it to mean desertion as well.47 Such was the nature of the local legal institutions. As a result apprentices in Grimsby continued to abscond in substantial numbers, and many fled to Hull where there labor was finally and fully freely contractual.48 As the beam size for the trawl grew, increasing the efficiency of the labor, casual labor replaced apprentices in most other ports. Youth labor became less vital and smack owners relied on a larger transient labor pool. More important, by the 1880s the Yorkshire fleets were beginning to lose a competitive battle with a burgeoning Scottish industry, and the trade experienced a slow decline (Robinson 1987, 83–99).

Conclusion

Reflecting on the industry, Robinson remarks, “It remains ironic that a trade which benefited so much from laissez faire on the high seas should have relied so heavily and for so long on such a tied and ragged labor force” (1996, 65). However, given the economics of the trade, the necessity of finding a ready supply of cheap labor for continual production, and the character of local judicial institutions, it perhaps seems less ironic. For a rapidly growing industry with an increasing need for workers to fill unskilled, low-paying, and undesirable jobs, urban parishes were all too willing to relieve themselves of unwanted pauper charges in the formed of apprenticed labor. Indeed, even after considerable unwanted public and parliamentary scrutiny in 1882, after two publicized brutal deaths of fisherlads by the hands of their skippers, the trawling industry continued to rely heavily on apprentice labor as a mainstay (Rule 1976, 395).49

As the fishing industry grew rapidly in the 1860s, trawler owners pragmatically responded to their circumstances by depending heavily on poor law unions and the local court to both provide them with requisite labor and to discipline this workforce. For a quarter of a century a labor control regime, increasingly dependent on child pauper apprentices, was embedded in these institutions and provided and controlled an essentially captive source of labor. The indenture system was a labor contract that assured a steady supply of unfree labor to an industry otherwise unable to recruit and retain enough workers willing to brave harsh conditions for little remuneration. Trawler owners, facing the need to have their vessels at sea almost all year to repay mortgages and get an adequate return on their investments, depended on apprentice labor for their fourth and fifth hands. Second and third hands were in essence partners in this scheme, since they received a percentage of catch rather than a set wage.

Many fisherlads, as we have seen, were unwilling participants in these ventures. Most were ill prepared for seafaring, though they became more valued labor as they gained experience. Beyond the taxing conditions of North Sea fishing, many were also subject to sometimes brutal despotism aboard ship that was more severe than a free labor market would support. While the fishing industry created a façade of paternalism with its school and periodic social events, it seems doubtful that for most fisherlads any of these efforts mitigated the stark realities of their lives. They regularly rebelled and fled in significant numbers, and trawler owners relied on the stipendiary magistrates and the local courts for control. The local justice system was not only a mainstay for discipline, it provided a means of physically containing fisherlads until they were required for another sea voyage. Stipendiary Travis and the borough magistrates were willing participants in the process. In many respects they were suspicious of and hostile to labor resistance, and in the case of the fisherlads more specifically often viewed them as ungrateful and ill-disciplined youth in need of correction. Coupled with their perceived responsibility to uphold “impartially” all labor contracts, the magistrates were a critical means for insuring discipline.

This labor control regime remained in place into the 1880s. As steam trawlers rapidly overtook their venerable sailing counterparts, the economics of the industry changed quickly. The capital requirements necessary to acquire and maintain larger steam vessels led to a consolidation of the industry into a significantly smaller group of owners. Longer voyages further afield from the traditional North Sea fishing grounds changed the nature of the trade as well (Brown and McLaren 1969, 254–55). However, it is also possible that changes in the law abetted this transformation. With the new Merchant Seamen Act in 1880, arresting and holding apprentices became much more difficult. Robb Robinson reports that by 1882 the number of apprentices fulfilling their indentures dropped by 75 percent. The apprenticeship system quickly declined and trawler owners replaced it with “weekly-paid hands over whom they had less immediate control” (1987, 64). The economics of the trade rapidly changed, but so too did the labor control regime that trawler owners had depended on for several decades.