Memories of the Cornish Fishing Industry

Around the wild and windswept Cornish coast fishing has been a way of life for centuries. Sons have followed fathers and grandfathers in the family boats, setting out from ports such as Polperro, Mevagissey, Mousehole, Newlyn, St Ives, Port Isaac and Looe to brave the stormy Atlantic Ocean to earn their living. Those who fished these waters faced, and still face, potential danger every time they put to sea. Brian Bowdler, a fisherman and member of the lifeboat crew at Looe says, ‘There’s no two days the same when we go to sea. If anything goes wrong, we tend to have a laugh about it. There‘s humour in any hard job, else it would be undoable’. His father, Lionel remembered, ‘We had a wartime mine that we towed up, which we had to bring in to shallow waters for the Navy to blow up. That was quite interesting Brian had to sit on it all the way in, to stop it from rolling around.’ Before the memories are lost forever, author Sheila Bird has taken the time to talk to the local people who made their living from the sea. Using first-hand accounts and a fascinating collection of photographs, she tells the story of the fishermen of Cornwall: the conditions, the work, the people and the humour.