Part 29

I had spent most of my mornings for some days on the quay, watching the fish-market there with much interest. It goes on nearly all the forenoon on the pavement, just above that part of the harbour-wall to which the herring-boats run when they come in from their night’s work on the Dogger Bank. A simple, hand-to-mouth kind of business, the auction; but well adapted, at any rate, to clear the boats, and get their daily contents to market in the quickest and cheapest way. As soon as a boat comes to the quay, one of the crew (generally numbering five men, or four men and a boy) comes on shore with a basket half-full of herrings, and turns them out on the pavement. The fish-broker who acts for that boat comes up, looks at the sample, and makes an offer for the ship’s take by “the lash” or ten thousand. If this is accepted, the unloading begins at once; but if not, as is oftenest the case, the take is put up to auction. The broker rings a bell, which soon brings round him the seven or eight other brokers like himself, and other buyers (if any) who are within hearing. Up goes the first last of ten thousand at once, and no time is lost or talk thrown away. In very few minutes the whole is sold, and a cart or lorry from the railway is standing by to carry off the barrels in which the herrings are packed then and there. Now, on the previous day I had heard the prices ranging from £7: 10s. to £8 for “the last,” and had not remarked that only some six boats of the whole fleet had come back from the fishing-grounds, and that none of these had made anything like a big catch. Consequently, I came down prepared to hear something like the same prices ruling, and to see most of the crews drawing at least from £15 to £20 for their night’s work.

Well, in a long life I don’t remember ever to have been more hopelessly wrong or unpleasantly surprised. I could see at once that all was not right by the faces of the men and women in the small groups scattered about the market, which now drew together as the broker’s bell rang for the sale of the herrings, which lay, a lovely, gleaming mass, at least three feet deep in the uncovered hold of the _Mary Jane_, as she rocked gently on the harbour swell, some twenty feet down below us. I could scarcely believe my ears as I heard the bids slowly rising by 5 s. at a time till they reached 30s. the last, and there stopped dead. The hammer fell, and the whole catch of the _Mary Jane_ passed to the purchaser in about two minutes at that figure. The next boat, and next but one, did no better. Broker after broker knocked his client’s catch down at 30s. Once only I heard an advance on that figure, and this was by private contract. The handsome Hercules, in long leather boots and blue jersey, who represented one of the Whitby boats, appealed in my hearing to the broker, who relented with no very good grace, and agreed to give £2 per last of ten thousand of the catch of Hercules’s boat.

It was a depressing sight, I must own, even in the bright sunshine of this most picturesque of English harbours, and Sam Weller’s earnest inquiry to his master, “Ain’t somebody to be wopped for this?” rose vividly in my mind as the fittest comment on the whole business. Just then a tug which had been getting up steam was ready to leave the harbour, and two Hartlepool smacks, whose freights of herrings were still unsold, hitched on, to be towed out to sea and then run home, in the hope of finding a better market in the Durham port. An old salt stood next me, whose fishing days were well over, and who had just taken a good bite of the blackest kind of pigtail to comfort himself. I looked inquiringly at him as the tug steamed out between the two lighthouses, with the smacks in tow; but he shook his head sorrowfully. “Well, but they can’t do worse than here,” I remonstrated; “herrings maybe scarcer in the colliery district.” He jerked his head towards the little group of brokers and buyers,--“They’d know the prices at Hartlepool in five minutes,” he said. This telegraphing was to his mind the worst thing that had happened for fishermen in his time. “Did prices often go up and down like this?” I asked. “Yes,” and worse than this. He had known them as low as 15s. and as high as £15 within a few days. No, he couldn’t see what was “to odds it” much for the better. Last time he was across at Liverpool he had stopped at a big fish-shop where he saw barrels standing which he recognised. “What’s the price of those herrings?” he asked. “Eight for 6d.” the man answered. “So I told him I saw they was from Whitby, and that he got them at Whitby for 6d. a hundred.”

Whitby and the Herring Trade, 31st August 1888.

I had got thus far last night, and posted down again early this morning to the market, which has a sombre kind of attraction for me. Only two boats in, with light catches of from one and a half to two lasts each. The first sold at £5: 5s., which price the second boat refused. Theirs were a first-rate lot, and they shouldn’t go under £6, for which they were holding out when I had to leave, and there seemed to be a general belief that they would get it. This was puzzle enough for any man, to see under his own eyes the same fish sold on three consecutive summer days for £7:10s., £1:10s., and £5:5s.!--a sort of thing no fellow can understand. To add to my bewilderment, I learnt that at Great Grimsby yesterday (the £1:10s. day here) the last had sold for upwards of £15! So that my old salt’s view as to the telegraph doesn’t quite hold water, and the two smacks which shook the water off their bows and sailed for Hartlepool, may have made a good day’s work of it, after all. Indeed, a sailor on the quay declared that they had sold at £5, so that, after paying £2 apiece for the tug, which had towed them all the way, they still got £3 a last, or double the price they would have realised at Whitby. “So it comes to this, that the more fish you catch, the less pay you get,” I said to my informant. “Yes,” he seemed to think that was mostly the case, adding that to his mind it was the railways that made all the money out of fish--

Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes.

It is an old story enough, but scarcely less true or sad in 1888 than when most of the world’s hardest work was done by slaves. However there are, happily, signs in the air that, here in England at any rate, we are waking up to the truth, that if we can find no better way of organising industry than competition run mad, we are going to have real bad times. Royal Commissions on the sweating system; Toynbee Hall interventions in great strikes; co-operative effort springing up all over the country, and finding its most zealous and devoted advocates at least as much amongst those who don’t work with their hands as those who do,--all go to prove that the reign of king _laissez faire_, with his golden rule of “cash payment the sole _nexus_ between man and man,” is over. Indeed, our danger may soon be from too much meddling with and mothering industry. Nevertheless, no one can spend a few hours on the quay here in the herring season and not long for some one--scholar, philanthropist, political economist (new style), co-operator--to come along and teach these fine fellows to read their sphinx riddle. It would not be, surely, such a difficult task as it looks at first sight. There is no need to begin with the vast herring-fishing industry, with its distant markets at Billingsgate, Liverpool, and Manchester. The reform might begin at once on a modest scale. Beside the herrings, one sees every morning other fish lying on the quay--skate, cod, ling, whiting, rock-salmon--brought in by the smaller and less venturesome boats by dozens, not by lasts of ten thousand. Take the cod as the most valuable of these fish. I saw four fine cod-fish sold by auction yesterday on the quay for 5s. 3d. Within a few hundred yards, and all over the town, cod was selling at the shops at 6d. the pound. Surely a very moderate amount of organising ability would enable those who catch these fish to get the retail prices prevailing on the same day in the home market, and then the experience gained might assist materially in the solution of the larger problem.

Meantime, besides the almost unique interest and beauty of its surroundings,--the steep cliffs, on which the quaint old red-roofed houses, with their wooden balconies, are piled in most picturesque and unaccountable groups; the grand old abbey ruin looking down from the highest point; the swing-bridge between the two harbours, and the estuary beyond, running up into a fine amphitheatre of green meadow and dark wood, dotted with village churches and old windmills, and backed by the high moors,--there is a joyous side to Whitby harbour, even on days when the market goes most against the Dogger Bank fishermen. If the fathers have too often to eat sour grapes, their children’s teeth are not set on edge,--such merry, well-fed, bare-footed urchins of both sexes I never remember to have seen elsewhere. They swarm, out of school hours, along the quays; skim up and down the water-worn harbour-walls wherever there is a rope hanging; run over the herring boats lying side by side, as soon as the freights are cleared; and toboggan down the boat slides at the gangways, dragging themselves along on their stomachs when these are not slippery enough for the usual method of descent. There seems, too, to be a large supply of old rickety tubs kept for their special use; for all day long you see two or three of them scrambling into one of these, and sculling about the harbour, no man hindering or apparently noticing them. Finer training for their future life would be hard to find, and one cannot help doubting as one sees their straight toes, as handy almost as fingers in their climbing feats, whether the last word has been spoken as to clothing the human foot, at any rate up to the age of ten or twelve. It is not often, I think, that one comes on early surroundings and heroes entirely suited to each other; but Whitby’s hero--patron saint I had nearly called him--could have found no such suitable place to have been raised in all the world round. James Cook was born in a neighbouring village, but first apprenticed on board a Whitby collier, and to the last days of his life retained a most loving remembrance of the old town. Every one of his famous ships, the _Endeavour_, the _Resolution_, and the _Discovery_, were built at Whitby. The house, of his master, Mr. Walker, with whom he lived during his apprenticeship as a sailor lad, and to whom most of his letters were written after he had mapped the Quebec reaches of the St. Lawrence under the fire of the French guns, and was a gold-medallist of the Royal Society and the most famous of eighteenth century navigators, is still fondly pointed out in a narrow street running down to the inner harbour.

Sunday by the Sea, Whitby, 7th September 1888.

We saw something of the industrial life of Whitby last week. The spiritual is quite as interesting, and certainly, so far as my observation goes, has a character of its own, distinct from that of any other of our popular seaside resorts. It may be the presence of so large a seagoing element; at any rate, unless appearances are quite misleading, there is an earnest and deep though quiet religious impulse working amongst the harbour-folk and townspeople, not without its influence in the new quarter which has grown on to the old town, and with its casino and large cricket and lawn tennis grounds, is becoming a popular--though, happily, not a fashionable--summer resort. This is, of course, most apparent on Sundays, on which the absence of anything like the annoyances, both religious and secular, which spoil the day of rest at so many health-resorts, is very noteworthy. Not that Whitby is without its open-air services. On the contrary, they are at least as frequent as elsewhere, on quays, shore, cliffs; but after watching them with some care I do not remember anything fanatical or startling, or in the bad taste of coarse familiarity with mysteries which so often revolts one in street and field preaching elsewhere. One of these I had never seen the like of before, and am inclined to think it may interest your readers. On my first Sunday afternoon I was watching a crowded service on the quay, at the foot of the West Cliff, from above. As it ended, and began to disperse, a man in sailor’s Sunday suit of thick blue cloth severed himself from the crowd, and came leisurely up the stone steps, with a Bible and hymn-book in his hand. At the top of the steps is a public grass-plot, some thirty by twenty yards in size, the only part of the sea-front which has escaped enclosure on this cliff. Round it are some fifteen or sixteen benches, very popular with those who will not pay to go into the casino enclosure. They were all occupied by people chatting, smoking, courting, looking at the view, when the newcomer walked into the middle of the plot, took off his fur-trimmed sailor’s cap, opened his Bible, and looked round. He was good to look at, with his strong, weather-beaten, bronzed features, short-cropped, grizzled hair, and kindly blue eye, part-owner and best man in one of the Penzance boats, I heard. On looking at him, passages in the lives of Drake and Hawkins, and Wesley and Whitfield, and Charles Kingsley’s loving enthusiasm for the Cornish sailor-folk, became clearer to me. Not a soul noticed him or moved from their seats, and the talking, smoking, courting went on just as though he were not there, standing alone on the grass, Bible in hand. I quite expected to see him shut his book and depart. Not a bit of it. Clearly he had come up there to deliver his testimony. That was his business; whether any one chose to listen to it or not, was theirs. So he read out two or three verses from the Epistle to the Romans, and began to preach. His subject was Paul’s conversion, which he described almost entirely in St. Luke’s and the Apostle’s own words, which he quoted without referring to his Bible, and then urged roughly, but with an earnestness which made his speech really eloquent, that the same chance was open to every one. He himself had heard the call thirty years ago, and had been happy ever since. He had been in peril of death again and again since then, had seen boats founder with all hands, but had no fear, nor need any man have, by sea or land, who would just hear and follow that call. Then he stopped, wiped his brow, and looked round. The sitters had all become silent, but not a soul of them moved or spoke. I was standing, with one or two others, behind the high rails of the enclosure, or I think we should have gone and stood by him as he gave out a hymn; but we knew neither words nor tune, so were helpless. He sang it through by himself, made a short prayer “that the word that day might not have been spoken in vain,” and then put on his cap, and went down the steps into the crowd below. One voice from the benches said “Thank you!” as he left the plot.

The next service I came across was a strange contrast. Under the cliff, in front of the Union Jack planted in the sands, was a large gathering, composed mostly of children sitting in rows, with mothers and nurses interspersed, and a number of men and women standing round the circle. As I came up, I was handed a leaflet of hymns, which explained that it was a gathering of the “Children’s Special Service Mission,” which has its head-quarters, it seems, in London, and is presided over by Mr. Stuart, the vicar of St. James’s, Holloway. The service was conducted by a young man not in orders, with a strong choir to help him. He, too, did his preaching earnestly and well; and though it seemed to me above the younger children’s heads, who for the most part made sand-castles or mud-pies furtively, was evidently listened to sympathetically by the elder part of the audience who stood round. But if the teaching scarcely touched the children, they all left their mud-pies and enjoyed the singing. The Mission, I was told, holds these services on the sands through the seaside season, at all the chief resorts on the coast. The leaders and organisers are mostly young men and women, and all, I believe, volunteers. A noteworthy sign of our time the Mission seemed to me, and I was glad to hear that it is countenanced, if not actively supported, by the resident Church clergy.

If we turn from the volunteer to the regular side of Church work, Whitby still has an almost unique attraction for the student of the religious movement in England. The late Dean Stanley, who loved every phase of the historical development of the life of the National Church, and mourned over the thoroughness of recent restorations, which, as he thought, threaten the entire disappearance of the surroundings and forms of the worship of the Georgian era, would have thanked God and taken courage if he could have visited Whitby Parish Church in 1888, for church and service are a perfect survival. The wave of Victorian ecclesiastical reform, without destroying anything, seems to have gently removed all that was really objectionable, and breathed new life into the dry bones of Georgian worship. I am not sure that I should say “everything objectionable,” for probably the vast majority of even truly Catholic church-goers would not agree as to the big shield with the national arms which hangs over the centre of the chancel arch, dividing the two tables of the Ten Commandments. I am prepared to admit that this particular lion and unicorn are not good specimens of discreet beasts of their respective kinds. But even as they stand they are national symbols, and no reminder that Church and nation are still one can be spared nowadays; and they are not half so grotesqile as most of the gurgoyles you will see in the noblest Gothic cathedrals. And then they vividly remind my generation of the days when they first toddled to church in the family procession. The church itself is a gem, though with no orthodox architectural beauty, for it retains traces of the handiwork of thirty generations in its walls, pillars, galleries, and stunted square tower,--from the round arches (there are still two, though the best, a fine Norman window, has been bricked up) of its earliest builders in the twelfth, to the white-washed walls and ceilings and square-paned windows of eighteenth century churchwardens. I should think the three-decker (I am obliged to use the profane name, having forgotten the correct one), the clerk’s desk, reading-desk, and pulpit rising one above the other in front of the chancel, must be unique, the last of its race. The clerk has, indeed, retired into the choir; but the rector still reads the prayers and lessons admirably from his desk, and ascends the pulpit, where he is on a level with the faculty pew of the squire, and the low galleries, to deliver his excellent short discourses. Long may he and his successors do so. One is only inclined to regret that he does not take off his surplice in the reading-desk, and ascend to preach in his black gown. Curious it is to remember that less than thirty years ago Bryan King and others excited riots in many parishes by preaching in the surplice. The pews on the floor are all high oaken boxes with doors, though the great majority of them are now free. The visitor in broadcloth is put into one of the larger ones, lined with venerable baize, once green. These are somewhat narrow parallelograms with seats round the three sides, so that it requires caution in kneeling to avoid collision with your opposite neighbour. And the body of the church being nearly square by reason of the addition of side aisles at different periods, and the “three-decker” well out on the floor, the pews have been planned so that they all face towards it, and consequently all the congregation can see each other. This is supposed to be a drawback to worship; probably is--must be, where people have been always used to looking all one way. That it really hinders a hearty service, no one would maintain who has attended one in Whitby Parish Church. It was quite full, when I was there, of a congregation largely composed of men, and the majority of these sailors and other working folk. Let any reader who still goes to church make a point of ascending the 190 stone steps which lead up to it from the old town, and looking at the matter with his own eyes, if ever he should be within reach. The rector is a sort of successor to the old abbots of St. Hilda, with ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the whole town, wherein are five or six churches worked by curates, all in the modern style, seats facing eastward, no three-deckers, surpliced choirs, and chanted psalms, and canticles. Indeed, in one place of worship, those who have a taste for gabbled prayers, bowings and posturings, lighted candles, and the rest of the most modern ritual, can find it, but in a proprietary chapel not under the jurisdiction of the rector.

Singing-Matches in Wessex, 28th September 1888.