The great thing about giving talks is that you learn so much from the audience. At the Greenwich Historical Society recently, where I was talking about highwaymen and footpads in eighteenth-century London, I learnt that the Brockley Jack pub used to be a base for highwaymen, when it was called the Castle. Now it’s much more civilised and is linked to a studio theatre brockleyjack.co.uk.
Later, at the Blaydes Maritime Centre at the University of Hull, a member of the audience told me what it was like to go out on a trawler as a young boy. Apparently, for a guinea (well, a pound and a shilling), schoolboys could go out to the fishing grounds as a ‘work experience’ to see if they would like the life. Trawlermen took five days to get to the grounds, spent ten days fishing, then took five days to get back to port. They stayed at home three days - often on the piss - and then took off again. The person I spoke to said it was terrifying on the boat - the men were all drunk and the seas quite high. He never became a trawlerman.
Hull Maritime Museum has nothing about trawler women - though locals still remember that it was women who ran households. But it does explain how hard and dangerous fishing voyages were.
Blaydes House - now a centre for maritime research - was the home of the Blaydes family of shipbuilders. mhsc@hull.ac.uk The Blaydes built Captain Bligh’s Bounty in 1784 and were surely very wealthy. The house, which dates from the 1740s or so, has amazing panelling and a wonderful staircase. It’s been ‘braced’ so is no longer sinking into the thick clay along the River Hull - or at least, not so fast.