Hull remembers worst fishing disaster

HULL is this week remembering the 50th anniversary of the port\’s worst fishing loss of life since the end of the war.
Half a century ago 58 trawlermen from the city died when three trawlers sank in less than a month during the winter of 1968. They were overcome by a combination of ice and storms.
This week wreaths were laid during a civic ceremony at the Anchor memorial which commemorates the triple tragedy and has now been moved to a new site.
The three vessels, two of which were fishing off Iceland at the time, were the St Romanus, the Kingston Peridot and the Ross Cleveland.
They disappeared between January 11 and February 5 that year. Only one man, Harry Eddom, mate of the Ross Cleveland, survived. Miraculously he managed somehow to get into a liferaft with two others, but they later died from exposure.
Even more poignant was the last message from the Ross Cleveland\’s skipper, Phil Gay, who radioed: ‘I am going over, we are laying over, please help me.’  His final words were ‘give my love and the crew\’s love to the wives and families’.
The tragedy sparked a huge debate over trawler safety, or more correctly the absence of it. The wives of Hull fishermen braved abuse and physical threats at the time  when they marched through the city and then took their protest to Prime Minister Harold Wilson in Downing Street.
They were led by a feisty campaigner known as Lilian Bilocca or Big Lil as she was dubbed by the press.  
Despite strong resistance from the vessel owners, who objected to some of the proposals on cost, she and three others from Hull, Christine Jensen, Mary Denness and Yvonne Blenkinsop, successfully managed to secure a number of safety measures including the stationing of a mother ship off Iceland.
Their exploits were  marked in a special BBC documentary earlier this week. An estimated 11,000 fishermen from Hull and Grimsby perished during the 20th century – and the figure does not include victims of war.