How Britain Worked Page 8
DOWN TO THE DOCKS
Sitting on the banks of the River Medway in Kent, Chatham Dockyard was once the most advanced shipbuilding facility in the world. In over 400 years, it supplied the Royal Navy with 500 warships. In its heyday, the dockyard and its various buildings covered an area of over 400 acres with 10,000 men working on the site. While the dockyard itself closed in 1984, 84 acres of the original site is now run as a tourist attraction. Many of the historic buildings, meanwhile, are still in everyday use. One of these, The Ropery, is where the ropes for HMS Victory were made and they are still making rope the same way today.
It was in The Ropery that they explained to me about the ‘rope’ phrases that we all hear in everyday conversation. These lads were real enthusiasts and they certainly weren’t scared of a bit of hard graft. When I rolled up with the film crew in tow, they were already at work and we were told to get a move on because they had plenty of rope to make that day! The Master Rope Maker, Fred Cordier (Cordier is a proper ropemaker’s name – cord being rope – and shows that his family has a historical connection with ropemaking), had a team of four men working with him, making rope to order. He explained the whole process, starting with the Manila fibres.
Men have been making rope for around 28,000 years, although Fred was keen to point out that he’s only been doing it for the last fifty years or so. Fred’s prehistoric predecessors, having started using vines and creepers, soon saw how those wound around each other to make stronger ‘ropes’. They copied that using fibrous strips from the stems of tall plants or grasses, twisting them together to make ropes. That, essentially, is what we are still doing to make rope today.
The Manila fibres come from the abaca plant, which is actually a kind of banana. Who’d have thought we’d be making rope from bananas? The abaca plant is commonly grown in the Philippines and those of you who can remember your geography from school will spot straight away that the fibres are named after the capital of the Philippines. The same fibres are pulped to make paper – hence Manila envelopes. I learned a lot here before I even got my hands on a bit of rope...
The fibres were imported into Chatham and were worked on site to make yarn. They had to be combed to separate and straighten them, were lubricated with whale oil to make them easier to work with and sometimes treated with preservatives before they were spun into yarn. At one time, spinning a length of yarn would have been a job for two or more men: one with the long Manila fibres wrapped round his body, walking backwards away from a spinning wheel that was being wound by hand by his mate. But by the 1860s (still well before Fred’s time!) spinning machines took some of the heavy labour out of this task.
Once the fibres were spun, the yarn went off to the yarn house where it was soaked in tar to help prevent it from rotting. This didn’t always happen with Manila as it was more naturally resistant to rotting than other rope-making fibres such as hemp, jute, sisal or flax. Manila could instead be treated with oils and preservatives prior to spinning which made the rope more flexible. Once it was dry and ready for rope making, the yarn finally made it into The Ropery building.
Rope has been made on site here since 1618, although the current ropery building dates from 1791. When it was built, it was the largest brick building in the world and it’s still one of the longest. You don’t really get a proper idea of its size from the outside, mainly because you can’t actually see it all. Once you’re inside, though, you can immediately see that it’s a heck of a place. The first thing that you notice is the smell of hemp in the air. It’s that dry, sort of musty, smell, like an old potato sack. Despite the fact that there’s a window in the wall every few feet on both sides of the building and that there are electric strip lights hanging from the huge oak beams, it’s still pretty gloomy inside. Once your eyes get used to the lack of light, you can see how the building stretches off into the distance. There are no steel beams or crossmembers holding this place together. It’s all bricks and wood.
That, of course, means that there’s a strong fire hazard here. If it looks dimly lit today, it would have been so much worse before electric light because they couldn’t have candles or naked flames in the building. The dust from the hemp fibres would hang in the air and if some of it caught light, could cause a chain reaction that would send an explosion ripping through the building. The previous ropery on this site did, in fact, burn down. And they had a small fire in the existing building, too. Part of the floor had to be replaced and, this being a dockyard, they used whatever came to hand for repairs. The story goes that HMS Victory was being refitted at the time and surplus flooring from Nelson’s cabin was used to repair The Ropery’s fire damage. We saw for ourselves the patch of floor where the wood is different from the floorboards in the rest of the building.
So why is The Ropery such a long building? The answer is that the standard length for a British naval rope was 1,000 feet (305m) and you need a long building to wind ropes of that sort of length. The ropewalk, which is where the strands and ropes are laid for twisting, is 1,135 feet long (346m). Fred’s lads travel the length of the ropewalk on bikes to save their legs – one reckons he’s got up to 35mph in there!
TIME TO SPIN A YARN
Fred was keen to show me how the rope is laid. He needed to get on with our rope because they had another order to work on that day – there’s no slacking in The Ropery! Fred showed me how the yarn comes to them wound on bobbins, or cops. These are mounted on a bobbin bank frame from which several yarns can be fed through the register, which looks a bit like a kitchen colander, and stops the yarns from getting tangled, to the forming machine. One of the machines we used there was the Maudsley Forming Machine, originally built in 1811.
Six or more yarns are attached to a hook on the forming machine. When the clutch is engaged – which they do by pulling a rope that runs the length of the building – a generator housed miles away at the other end of The Ropery kicks in. It supplies the power, via ropes and pulleys, that spins the hooks on the forming machine, twisting the yarns into strands. There were three such strands being twisted on the forming machine that I guided up the ropewalk. If the yarn on a bobbin runs out, yarn from a fresh bobbin on the bank can be fed into the register and is then drawn through to be incorporated into the relevant strand. Once the yarns are running through the register, they are travelling at quite a pace and spinning with a fair force. Fred carries a large, very sharp knife in a sheath at his side and explained that, when he first started as a ropemaker, all of the men used such knives. They used them, as Fred does, for cutting rope but Fred also said that, as a youngster, the older men warned him that if he got a finger tangled in yarn or strands that were passing through their machinery, he should cut his own finger off rather than end up with his whole hand or arm being ripped off. There was a battered old tobacco tin on a shelf in part of the rope works and Fred asked what was in it. He was told to leave it well alone. Naturally, as soon as the older men turned their backs, he had a look inside. It was full of dried-out old fingers!
Once the three strands have been twisted, drawn out along the length of the ropewalk and now looking like thin ropes, they are then twisted together to make a rope. When the winding machine is twisting the rope, the power from the electric motor – it was once a steam engine, of course – is used to do the winding. But because winding the three strands together means that they will end up as a rope that is only two-thirds the length of the strands, the forming machine is dragged down the ropewalk. There’s definitely a lot of powerful forces at work here. I was standing on that machine as it moved along and it bore my weight quite easily. In fact, in order to maintain tension in the rope, the machine was dragging a selection of weights along behind it as well.
The power that goes into it, however, is not the key to how the rope stays together. If you tried twisting a few strands of thread or string together, they would unravel as soon as you let the ends go: the threads would want to return to their original shape. The secret to making rope is to twist the
yarn in one direction, the strands in the opposite direction to the yarn and the rope in the opposite direction to the strands. That way the different parts of the rope are fighting against each other to unwind in different directions and end up holding together instead.
Our finished rope was coiled and bagged up ready for delivery by the time we were ready to leave The Ropery. Before we left, we tested a section of the rope to check its breaking strain. The rope was laid out on the bed of a hydraulic ‘rack’ and wedged in place, the wedges gripping the rope tighter as the hydraulics stretched it tight. Then stretched it some more, and kept on going until the rope snapped. It didn’t go all at once, but when the first strand snapped, with a noise like a gunshot, it was time to shut down the machine. Our rope was clearly strong enough for our needs.
TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER
So what, exactly, did we want it for? Well, our rope was a three-strand laid rope, also known as a hawser-laid rope. You use a hawser aboard a ship, and the one we had in mind was an old trawler from Brixham in Devon. Brixham lies opposite Torquay on the southern side of Torbay and for many years it was the most important fishing port in the region, known as the ‘mother of deep sea fisheries’. Limestone was mined in the hills around Brixham but the two main industries in the area have always traditionally been farming and fishing. The area at the top of the hill where the farmers lived was called Cowtown and the area around the harbour where the fishermen lived was called Fishtown. I like it when people keep things nice and simple like that. For a time, the area was also important for the red ochre mineral that was mined here. This had long been recognised as helping to preserve sails. It was boiled in huge cauldrons of seawater along with tallow, tar and oak bark and painted onto the sails while the mixture was still hot. The sails were then hung up to dry, the canvases having turned a sunset red colour. This was the inspiration for the old song ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, which sounds a lot more romantic than ‘Red Ochre Preserved Canvas in the Sunset’. Red ochre was also used to make paint that was used for rustproofing, the paint having been in invented in Brixham around 1845 and the paint works remaining in operation there until 1961.
It is, however, the fishing fleet that we are interested in. That’s where one of the two primary ingredients for fish ’n’ chips comes from, after all. I lent a hand with a few restoration jobs on a Brixham trawler called Leader. She is one of only six Brixham sailing trawlers still in existence, when at one time the largest fishing fleet in Britain sailed from the port. Launched in 1892, Leader is one of the biggest trawlers of her kind at around a hundred feet long and nineteen feet wide. Leader fished around the coast of Britain until 1907, when she was sold to new owners in Scandinavia. She remained as a working boat there until the 1960s, at which time she was used by the Swedish Cruising Club as a sail training vessel. In 1985, she found a new home on the west coast of Scotland, where she was used for holiday cruises, until she came back to Devon in 1996.
Brixham trawlers like Leader were fast and agile. Their two masts gave them the option of using up to eight sails, meaning that they could ‘change gear’ quickly, speeding up or slowing down as required. Leader was built at the AW Gibbs boatyard in Galmpton on the River Dart but was destined for the east coast, where William Robbens of Lowestoft had taken out a mortgage to cover the £1,100 cost of buying the boat. The records show that Robbens employed a skipper and mate who were paid a share of the profits. The first hand was on seventeen shillings a week, which was paid to his wife while he was at sea; the second hand earned thirteen shillings, to be paid to himself; and the boy was on ten shillings, paid to his mother.
Given the impact that steam power was having in industry and on the railways by the late nineteenth century, it might seem a bit odd that they were still building wooden sailing trawlers for the fishing business. Steam ships did exist, with their great advantage being that they didn’t rely on the wind, but they also had to have specialist crew members – an engineer to run the steam engine and a skipper who knew how to handle a steam-powered boat. A steamboat also cost around three times as much to buy as a trawler like Leader, and these traditional sailing boats continued to be built well into the 1920s.
In the 1890s, while Leader was heading off to start her life in Lowestoft, there were 300 trawlers in Brixham harbour. Most of these were owned by families who made their livelihood from the boats. It was far from being an easy way to make a living. The romantic image of ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ didn’t really reflect the dangers involved in putting to sea: it was once estimated that a deck hand working on a trawler was three times more likely to die than a miner at the coalface. A skipper or his mate, because they worked longer hours than the rest of the crew, were at even greater risk – they were twenty times more likely to die than a man working in any other industry. Between 1879 and 1882, 235 of Grimsby’s 4,000 fishermen were killed.
It was easy enough for accidents to happen when men were handling wet, slippery, heavy equipment on a heaving deck. If the weather turned really nasty when they were too far from port to run for safety, there were even more hazards to be faced. Ice forming in the rigging (a problem in the far north) had to be hacked away, to avoid making the boat top heavy and causing it to capsize. Even close to home, things could go disastrously wrong. Brixham’s rocks, for example, have claimed countless victims over the years. In January 1866, a storm in the area forced many ships out to sea. Those struggling to find their way back in the dark couldn’t pick out Brixham harbour, as the beacon that was usually lit on the breakwater had been swept away. The women of the town, so the story goes, grabbed anything they thought would burn well, including furniture and bedding from their homes. They piled it all up on the quayside to make a huge bonfire in the hope that their men would spot it and be able to head for safety. Despite their efforts, the coastline the next morning was littered with wreckage from fifty ships that were destroyed, with over a hundred men having lost their lives.
Those at sea didn’t have much to help them if the ship went down and they ended up in the water. You might never have been on a boat or ship at sea and run through a lifeboat drill, pulling on a lifejacket, but you will probably have seen the cabin crew on an aircraft demonstrating how to use the life-vest that inflates when you hit the water, and has a light and whistle attached. Trawlermen working on boats like Leader had nothing like that, even though most fishermen didn’t know how to swim. The lifejackets that were available in the nineteenth century were bulky affairs with cork floats attached. They were awkward to work in and, even if they had such things aboard, the men would choose not to wear them. They knew that if they were lost overboard they had practically no chance of being picked up. A lifejacket might keep them afloat, but not alive: in the North Sea in winter, for example, they could expect to survive for only four minutes before falling victim to hypothermia.
While working on board, the trawlermen had some very effective traditional protective clothing. Oilskins, capes or coats made from sail canvas soaked in linseed oil helped to keep out rain and seawater, while their ganseys kept them warm as well as dry. Ganseys were jumpers knitted to patterns that had been around since the sixteenth century and originated on the Channel Island of Guernsey. They were heavy and closely knitted to help them repel water, tight around the neck and cuffs to keep out the wind and short in the sleeve to stop them getting caught up in the gear aboard ship. The complex patterns were knitted from memory and passed down from mother to daughter as they made ganseys for successive generations of their family’s fishermen (although men also knitted). They represented ropes, anchors and herringbones that were familiar to everyone in the fishing communities. Slightly different patterns would be used in different areas, and you could tell where a fisherman came from by the pattern on his gansey. Some families had their own patterns and might even incorporate the fisherman’s initials in the design. If nothing else, it helped to identify his body if he was washed up on shore.
It’s little wonder that sailors and
fishermen have always been such a superstitious lot. I’m not one for strange superstitions myself, although I know that a lot of motorcycle racers have their own little rituals that they go through before a race, from putting their socks on in the right order to praying in the loo. These fishermen, though, really take the biscuit. Some wouldn’t sail if they passed a nun, a rook or a cat on the way to the docks. If they saw a rat coming ashore from their boat (and most boats had the odd rat or two) they wouldn’t sail in case the rat was leaving a ship it knew was going to sink. They didn’t like to whistle in case they whistled up a gale. Some simply wouldn’t set sail on a Friday. Knives and forks could never be crossed on the galley table. The list is pretty much endless.
It was bad luck to have a woman aboard your ship. Women still played a vital part in the fishing industry, though, scouring the coastline to collect mussels or limpets to use as bait if the men were line fishing, and gutting and cleaning the catch when it was landed. They also worked on building the boats and mending the nets. If it was a family-owned boat, the captain’s wife would be the business manager, taking care of all the paperwork while her husband was out at sea.
Women weren’t allowed aboard ship, but boys were. Apprentices as young as eleven were taken on, first as cooks, then as deck hands, and these youngsters had to be tough. Not only did they have to put up with the cramped conditions and hard work aboard a trawler, but they also had to put up with the other regular crewmen. These would most likely be rough types at the best of times and very unpleasant when they had a drink inside them. Drink? When they were out at sea? Most definitely. Sensible captains might insist on a sober crew but, more often than not, hard drinking went hand in hand with being a trawlerman. Even when they were out in the fishing grounds of the North Sea, on a trip that might take them away from home for eight weeks, they needn’t have worried too much about running short of booze and ‘baccy’. ‘Bumboats’, also known as ‘coopers’, would accompany the fishing fleet. They weren’t there for the fishing. They were there for the fisherman. They sold everything from rum, whisky and tobacco to coffee, tea and saucy playing cards. Crews paid cash, traded part of their catch or, if they were really desperate, they might hand over some of their own boat’s gear, hoping that they could get away with telling the boss when they got back that it had been lost overboard. There were times when a couple of apprentices were left in charge of the trawler while the crew boarded the bumboat to make merry. There were also occasions when apprentices were beaten so badly by other crew members that they died and the murderers simply dropped the bodies over the side, listing the apprentices as ‘lost overboard’.