Abstract
After outlining the ways in which the parameters of the sub-discipline of maritime history changed during the 1980s and 1990s, the article focuses on why maritime history is a significant field of enquiry. Case studies of the Wilson Line, and the career of trawler skipper William Oliver, both based in Hull, exemplify the extraordinary and extreme extents to which human interaction with the marine environment – the essence of maritime history – can shape the lives of individuals and the societies in which they live.
Perceiving the seawards past
It was on a Saturday morning in October 1985, in the Amory Building at the University of Exeter, that I first met Lewis R. (Skip) Fischer. Just three weeks earlier I had started work as Research Fellow on the ‘New Maritime History of Devon’ project, an appointment that proved pivotal in my career development, not least because it entailed working with established scholars in an investigation that represented an important step forward in Exeter’s maritime interests. I was delighted, and rather flattered, that Skip had arranged to see me during one of his many whistle-stop visits to the UK. During our two-hour conversation I – like countless others – found him to be enthusiastic, insightful, extremely knowledgeable and challenging, a truly inspirational character who was, and remained, instrumental in the growth of the sub-discipline of maritime history. One of the many issues Skip and I discussed that morning was the topic of this Forum: ‘what is maritime history?’ This was particularly important for me, a junior member of a research team charged with defining, then researching and writing, a new maritime history of an English county that over the centuries had engaged in all manner of sea-reliant activities – trade, shipping and piracy, naval personnel, operations and supply, navigation, fisheries and seaside tourism. Establishing the bounds of maritime history was also high on Skip’s agenda as his plans to launch what became the International Journal of Maritime History were formulating at that point. I took great heart from Skip’s incisive thoughts on the issue, especially his insistence that the traditional division between naval and merchant shipping history was ahistorical and counter-productive, and his conviction that maritime history was essentially cross-disciplinary – a field of enquiry that cut across, and formed a dimension of, the broader schools of economic, socio-cultural, political and technological history. In agreeing that a broad approach was favourable, I recall that Skip did not share my enthusiasm for the inclusion of seaside recreation as a facet of maritime history, which perhaps reflected the interests of our respective home bases, Newfoundland and Devon, in that particular activity.
We did concur, however, in believing that an economic perspective on the maritime past was the most compelling and persuasive. This was a view shared by many other maritime specialists in the 1980s, many of whom had trained as economic historians in the 1960s and 1970s. At the core of this economic perspective is the notion that maritime history concerns the utilisation, or exploitation, by human societies of the sea, which is treated as an essentially passive resource. This was implicit in a highly influential article published by Frank Broeze in 1989. 1 Seeking to define maritime history as part of an effort to bring it more into the mainstream of historical enquiry, Broeze contended that its broad subject area should be considered in six divisions, each determined by the function it performed for humankind; that is, transport, war, resource extraction, recreation, discovery and cultural meaning. Variations on this schema have since been deployed by maritime historians in designing their research agendas and, more particularly, in structuring teaching modules that examine a range of maritime activities under headings such as ‘Society and the Sea’. I have taken this approach in designing courses on Britain’s maritime interests, the primary aim of which is to enhance students’ knowledge and understanding of how, why and to what extent Britons have used the sea for purposes of transport, power projection, resource extraction and recreation.
With economic explanations of the past becoming less favoured by historians as the twentieth century progressed, the inference that humankind uses the sea in a simple one-sided relationship has tended to give way to more sophisticated approaches. In particular, an increasing focus on the role of the natural environment in the historical process means that studying the active use of the sea by people has to some degree been superseded by analyses of the interactive relationship of the sea and society. In other words, as well as offering a useful resource, the natural characteristics of the marine environment have become increasingly recognised as exerting a strong influence on human societal development. Such a shift in emphasis instils an important interdisciplinary element into maritime history, which, in turn, provides an anthropogenic explanatory variable to the researches undertaken by marine scientists into the dynamic evolution of contemporary marine environments and ecosystems. Maritime history therefore has the potential to develop into a much more important field of enquiry than seemed likely when Skip and I first met in October 1985.
Realising this potential has not been easy for the reasons put forward by Skip and others in the ‘Blue Hole’ roundtable discussion in 2015. 2 But at least the conversation has now gone beyond ‘what is maritime history?’ to embrace ‘why maritime history?’, which is a question that can be answered in various ways. Numbers, big numbers – of which Skip was very fond – can be brought into the fray. Accordingly, the physical attributes of the marine environment infer the significance of our subject area. For example, seas and oceans cover 70% of the surface of the planet we call ‘Earth’, with the ‘High Seas’ beyond the coastal shelves of continents accounting for 50% of the world’s surface. While over 90% of the Earth’s biomass lives in marine environments, seas and oceans generate approximately 70% of the oxygen breathed by humankind. Some 40% of the people inhabiting the globe reside within 60 km of the land-sea interface known as the coast, whereas over 90% of everything traded by human societies is carried over seas between seaports in vessels manufactured and navigated for that purpose.
Such impressive figures point to the principal ways in which human societies interact with the resources of the seas and oceans in a relationship that stretches back to the beginning of human history. Over time, societies have adapted to the dynamics of the marine environment in their efforts to use the sea’s surface to transport goods and people to near and distant shores in their quest to trade, explore and wage war. They have become aware of the rich potential of the sea’s depths through their endeavours to harvest fish and other forms of marine life, and to extract oil and gas from the ocean floor. They have learned how to adapt the coast for the loading, discharge and construction of sea-going vessels, and grown to appreciate the benefits of the ‘natural’ coastal environment as a place for recreation, recuperation and retirement. And they have reflected on the profundity of their interaction with the seas and oceans in countless cultural and literary works, many of which point to another reason why maritime history appeals – because the sea permeates deeply into peoples’ lives. As the great Norwegian author, Alexander Kielland, explained in 1880: Nothing is so boundless as the sea, nothing is so patient. On its broad back it carries, like a good-natured elephant, The tiny manikins which tread the earth; And in its vast cool depths it has space for all the world’s mortal woes.
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Extraordinary and extreme interactions with the sea
The richness of the primary sources relating to the life and work of countless tiny manikins further elucidates why maritime history can deliver a fresh, distinctive and endlessly fascinating perspective on the historical process. Two short, instructive examples will suffice to demonstrate the scale, archival wealth and human interest of the maritime past. Both are drawn from Hull, which, by Kielland’s time, had grown into a thriving industrial city, its prosperity based to a large extent on its profitable relationship with the sea. This relationship configured the city, with its town docks dominating the city centre, and its major deep-water trading dock – Alexandra Dock – to the east, and its fisheries dock – St Andrew’s Dock – to the west. Also of great significance were Hull’s railway connections with the industrial heartlands of West Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands. In essence, Hull’s location in relation to the sea and to the inland cities of industrial England presented opportunities for the city’s manikins to profit from both the broad back and the vast cool depths of the sea. 4 They did this during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in ways that can be described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘extreme’.
The utilisation of the surface of the sea by the vessels of the Hull shipping firm of Thos Wilson Sons & Co Ltd – often known as The Wilson Line – was extraordinary. 5 The chairman of this exceptional enterprise from 1869 until his death in 1907 was Charles Henry Wilson. He was described in obituaries as a typical Yorkshireman – shrewd, bluff and kind-hearted. He was known as a quiet, modest soul, so it was perhaps a little out of character when he claimed in 1903 that ‘my family has created a business unique in the world’s history’. This ‘business unique’ had developed in a conventional commercial fashion. It was founded by Charles’s father, Thomas, who engaged initially in the iron ore trade with Sweden. But in the early 1850s, like many of his Hull contemporaries, Wilson moved into steam shipping. Steam-powered vessels operated to and fro across the broad back of the North Sea. By 1869, 64% of Hull’s shipping was steam-driven, compared with a national figure of just 16%. The Wilson Line was essentially a family firm. In 1891, for instance, the company’s capital of £2m was divided amongst seven members of the Wilson family – Charles, his brother Arthur, their mother, wives and eldest sons. Between 1840 and 1916, the firm was managed by three generations of Wilsons: Thomas, then Charles and Arthur, and then their sons and nephews from 1909 to 1916, when it was sold to John Reeves Ellerman.
The Wilson Line was a Hull firm. It was based firmly and squarely in Hull, where it monopolised shipowning and had a major stake in Hull’s docks, railways, shipbuilding and fisheries, as well as in local politics and society. It assumed and maintained its extraordinary local power through the following means:
aggression: Wilsons were adept at reducing prices to drive competitors out of markets, sometimes charging nil freight rates for short periods to secure a competitive advantage;
acquisition: the Wilson Line bought up a range of firms in Hull’s maritime sector as opportunity offered, thereby establishing a virtual monopoly in the port’s shipping, shipbuilding and marine engineering industries, as well as accumulating significant interests in the local railways, docks and trawl fisheries;
agreement: the Wilsons were not averse to reaching agreements with allies and rivals alike, and in one notable instance, they persuaded DFDS to stay out of Hull if the Wilson Line stayed out of Copenhagen.
The scale and scope of this extraordinary family firm’s business was remarkable. Managed for over 40 years by two brothers, the Wilson Line owned over 60% of the tonnage registered in Hull in 1901, and operated over 100 steamers, aggregating 112,000 tons in 1903. The focus of the firm’s business was the North Sea, its liner services connecting Hull with all the major ports in Scandinavia and the Baltic. It also ran lines across the Atlantic to New York and Boston, services to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian sub-continent, and coastal routes to London, Newcastle and Liverpool. A notable trade was the carriage of migrants from Russia and Scandinavia, which entailed the shipment of large numbers of passengers across the North Sea to Hull aboard Wilson steamers. After a short break, the travellers alighted third-class rail carriages for the journey to Liverpool, where they shipped aboard transatlantic liners bound for New York and a new life in North America. By 1912, according to The Times, Thos Wilson Sons & Co Ltd was the largest privately-owned shipowning concern in the world.
In deploying their steamers in the buoyant shipping markets of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Wilsons generated extraordinary profits. Not all of their gains were re-invested in the firm, and the Wilson brothers were able to afford the luxuries of late Victorian and Edwardian high society. Charles had property in the south of France, as well as a fine house in Grosvenor Square and an impressive estate at Warter, near York. Arthur lived nearer Hull in Tranby Croft, an elegant country abode. And all of this derived from the extraordinarily productive interaction of one family with the broad back of the good-natured elephant that connected industrial Britain and the wider world through the port of Hull.
The ‘extreme’ side to Hull’s interaction with the marine environment related to the ‘vast cool depths’ of the North Sea and North Atlantic. Here, there developed an occupation – distant-water trawling – that in 1962 was famously described as ‘extreme’ by Jeremy Tunstall: that is, extremely dangerous, undertaken in extreme climates, extremely hard work, and with extremely high and extremely low earnings. 6 Hull’s interests in trawling focused initially on the North Sea, but this efficient, destructive mode of fishing contributed significantly to the depletion of once abundant stocks of cod and plaice. Such overfishing encouraged fishermen from Hull, Grimsby and other British ports to adopt steam vessels for deployment in distant waters off Iceland, Faroes, Norway and Russia. 7 The extremities of this business were exemplified by the long career of Skipper William Oliver. 8 He was one of many skippers in Hull’s distant-water trawl fishery, but he stood out amongst the crowd because he kept a series of signal logs and diaries, most of which have survived. He was an extreme diarist. Skipper Oliver’s diaries provide clear insights into his family life. He was born in 1884 and lived in Hull for 74 years. He was married for over 50 years to a woman he only refers to as ‘wife’ in the diaries. The couple brought up 10 children, though the offspring, like their mother, are rarely named in the diaries, Skipper Oliver preferring to allude to taking ‘all’, ‘some’ or ‘one’ of the children on visits to Hull Fair, Scarborough or the cinema.
The diaries are unequivocal as to his job – he was a trawler skipper. William Oliver was born to trawl. He was the son of a skipper, and took his first voyage at the age of 13 in a North Sea sailing smack. He soon moved to steam trawling in more distant waters, as he, like many others, realised that better catches were to be had beyond the vast cool depths of the North Sea. Oliver was a skipper for 32 years, from 1907 to 1939, with a four-year break minesweeping in Malta during the First World War. After he left the sea he became Secretary of the Trawler Officers Guild, while four of his five sons became skippers. His diaries indicate the extremities of his life – occasionally staying indoors all day, but more normally living a very busy life at sea, or in Hull.
Skipper Oliver’s diaries contain an entry for every day in an 18-year period from 1921 to 1939, a total of 6,210 days. Breaking this time down into three elements – travelling to and from work, fishing, time ashore – we can clearly see the significance of the sea and this extreme occupation in the life of this one man, and presumably the lives of his wife and their 10 children. Quite simply, William Oliver spent three-quarters of his working life on the waters of the North Sea and North Atlantic in a quest to generate income and profits through the catch, transport and sale of fish to British consumers who relished high-protein, cheap food.
This quest entailed extreme effort at sea. In 1932, for instance, Skipper Oliver completed 15 voyages in the Waveflower, 14 to Iceland and one to the White Sea. Crossing the North Sea on each voyage, this amounted to 291 days at sea and 75 days ashore; in sum, he spent 80% of that year aboard the Waveflower. And the intensity of effort did not let up when he was ashore, for Skipper Oliver’s diaries reveal that much of his time in Hull was devoted to his job, for extreme effort was also required in port. In 1922, for instance, Skipper Oliver was ashore for only 79 days, often for between 24 and 48 hours as his vessel came in, was discharged, fitted out and despatched to the fishing grounds in an extremely rapid ‘turn round’. And during these short ‘pit stops’ he needed to go down to the Dock to check the catch and prepare for the next voyage.
However, as Tunstall stated in 1962, earnings could be high – and Skipper Oliver appears to have been a high earner. Between 1920 and 1939, he completed 271 voyages at a rate of more than one per month. His vessels returned over 225,000 kits of cod, which generated £271,276, an average of just over £1,000 per voyage. William Oliver’s share of this total enabled his wife and children to move from the trawlermen’s district around Hessle Road to more salubrious areas like the Boulevard, where Hull’s skippers congregated, Anlaby, Hessle and Sutton. His wife had a car for most of this long period, and when he was home, the couple dined out, went to the cinema and had an annual holiday away from home. Perhaps not as extraordinary as the lifestyle that the Wilsons could afford, but in terms of the average standard of living of the era, the Olivers were extremely comfortable.
Utilising the broad back, and plundering the vast cool depths, of the seas and oceans arguably generated lasting legacies for Hull and the manikins who live there. The Wilsons had allegedly ‘made’ modern Hull by the early twentieth century, while in 1959 the pastor at William Oliver’s funeral paid tribute to the skippers in attendance, noting that the ‘deceased and they and their kind laid the foundations of a truly great industry, for which Hull is still celebrated’. The extent to which these legacies were ‘extraordinary’ or ‘extreme’ – the extent to which the human interaction with the seas and oceans has influenced the historical process – is open to interpretation, as Alexander Kielland inferred in 1880: It is not true that the sea is faithless, for it has never promised anything. Without claim, without obligation, free, pure and genuine beats its mighty heart, the last true sound in an ailing world. And while the manikins strain their eyes over it, the sea sings its old song. Many understand it scarce at all, but never two understand it in the same manner.
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Open, stimulating and perennially profound, this is the type of question that Skip Fischer challenged maritime historians to address, which, in turn, explains why we should study maritime history.