Over the past two weeks I have watched nine of the ten programmes following the lives of those living and working from the Fish Town of Brixham in Devon. This is a wonderful documentary series, brilliantly photographed with a poetic script and where participants come across as hardworking normal individuals who also like to play hard when opportunity arises. My only criticism is that it filmed during spring and summer and to have provided a more balanced view the film should have covered wintry condition if this was part of the first programme which I missed.
I have been to Brixham during stays at a hotel on the cliffs above around the corner and may have first visited on an earlier holiday when staying at a motor lodge a little way inland. Because my visits to the West Country took place in the late sixties and the mid seventies I did not keep the documentation and paper memorabilia in scrapbooks as I have for holidays abroad or visits to Scotland and Wales and where I know their present location I do have some records somewhere yet to be processed so my memories are visual. Interestingly for me it was the early visits to Cornwall, to the small fishing village of Mousehole, to Hayle Towans and St Ives that I remember most.
Brixham is a small community where the overwhelming majority of residents, fewer than 20000, are connected to the fishing industry and the holiday trade, mostly day trippers from the resorts of Torbay of Paignton Sands and the Torquay Riviera. The town is very picturesque with the colourful facades of the housing as they sharply rise on all sides with everything centring on the Fish quay with its £20 million turnover a year which means that an average of over £50000 of fish is traded every day, and along the harbour quayside where it was said from memory that there are eight of the fifteen fish providing restaurants in the town.
At fish quay there are separate markets held over the 24 hour all year round operation covering small quantities caught by inshore fishing, those who work on day boats and those going deeper and away for a week at time? Some of the eighty strong fishing fleet have contracts such as supplying whelks and sprats by the tonnage.
Each episode is divided between the lives of those who work those who under the fishing, do the trading and those who sell fish to eat in restaurants or to take home from he mongers. The series also features life of a 70 year old who runs a pub single handed a little way up the hill and away from the tourist throng and the separate quayside drinking haunts of the Masters and the crews. She serves no food even to the few who stay on a bed and one bathroom basis over night, back by before 12 midnight lock up and no women into the three twin bedded rooms and one single for any jiggy jiggy..
Apart from the first programme which I missed the series opens with one of the deep sea vessels, the Barentzee where its owner and master takes on a 17 year old who has been out of work for a year since early discharge from the Royal Navy after drunken misbehaviour. We follow his trial voyage in which he is quickly sick but survives it out, works hard and becomes a valued working member of the team earning £500 a week. He is in a relationship with a nineteen year who is pregnant by him and rejects advice from the master that the life is such to make ongoing relationships difficult. The master explained that he had three women in his life with his present partner providing the longest relationship. He had missed the greater part of the lives of his two children by his first marriage. He makes the point that one has to weigh up the financial benefits against the loss of family life.
It is easier to an extent for the wives raised in seafaring families to cope with the way of life although the small Philippine group of sailors who had left their homes, in one instance leaving a wife and three children because they could earn sufficient to provide a better life and save for the future, found the separation an ongoing challenge.
It is evident that from the series in general that if sea going is in the blood and many of the owners and crew covered are part of generations of seafarers, the danger, the long hours of hard work, the separations from families is acceptable. The life is hard although some fishing is harder than others. Take for example the whelk pots which are lifted by hand, one every 30 seconds. Similarly the scallop collectors which have quartets of what look like chains over each side lowered to the sea floor and then dredged over the beds, raised by machine and cleared sometimes catch fish which the crew use for their meals.
Each craft tends to specialise with one deep sea fishing, hunting shoals of sprats through the use of sonar catching 14 tons in one netting comprising a large number of separate bulging “pockets” or the one boat struggling to profit from crabs and lobsters. The knowledge of the individual fishing grounds is handed from generation to generation.
Life on board is claustrophobic so building a reliable team who get on with other is a prerequisite for a successful business. Sleeping cabins are small enclosed shelves and the galley small but the men appear to eat well and regularly because of the shift system with in one three man craft, two people on and one getting a two hour sleep between shifts. Understandably the main space is given over to the catch, sometime stored in boxes with ice, sometime such as crabs and lobsters held in tanks. The quantity of bait is also considerable and this is part of the operating costs.
There is an annual cycle of doing things so in August the vessels are laid up for repairs and refits, including repainting with one skipper explaining that with an income of between six and seven thousand a week the two week lay off means a considerable loss in addition to the repair refit costs especially when the continuation of a sea worthiness certificate is in issue. However there is opportunity to spend time with the family and one episodes features a crew get together with their families.
Another opportunity for families and friends to get involved in the trawler race week. A 17 mile circular race around Torbay involving over a third of the fleet. The boats are repainted and decked with bunting and some of the larger craft have over 100 guests on board with makeshift toilet facilities, crates of drink and party food. There is one large Dutch vessel that comes over annually but where the conditions of racing means that there has to be a Brixham skipped for the event in this instance the retired father of another participant.
Another week designed to also attract visitors is the race of heritage sailing ships and we follow the work of one family who acquired a derelict 90 year old craft where they had over years put their profits into a rebuild, hopefully in time for the year’s race. The daughter, whose mother had hated Brixham and the sea, worked in a quayside popular pub used by the crew. She trained as a yachts woman and appeared to spend all her free time working on the boat while father and brother were at sea. Plans went awry when a mast arrived and had to be planed down in order to fit the prepared socket, with viewers then sharing the emotion when this worked and the vessel was launched for its race participation, with the son returning early with the fishing boat to accompany the vessel on its final stages. The plan of the father is to use the sailing ship as a charter business when he retires in partnership with daughter as a family business.
While the impression gained is that the fisher folk are able to maintain a thriving and profitable business, the lives of those who use the fish locally to earn their living appears to becoming increasingly competitive and the series follows the three levels of cooked fish provision. The busiest in the season is a small cabin on the quayside with tables and where at the height of season there is the owner and four others. Working to supply demand. She provides shell fish reporting that she never knows what will sell from cockles, whelks and scallops to prawn cocktails and crab sandwiches. She is part of an extended family one that runs the quayside Inn and another provides sandwiches. At the end of the series one daughter arranges a monster family get together to mark wedding anniversary and which is clearly a moving event to all concerned with daughter explaining that he had a wonderful childhood and family life and this was her way of giving thanks, adding that without a good family life there was nothing.
A different kind but equally close family life is that of the owner of Rio’s fish and chip parlour providing traditional meals with mushy peas, two slices of bread and a pot of tea for prices which struck me as very reasonable, with concessions for parties and the over sixties. Rio was in his late thirties when he met on a blind date and married his wife then in her early twenties and through the series the couple provided a welcome antidote to all the seriousness with their saucy banter about their relationship and lifestyle. It is very much a family affair as in one programme their two primary school age children were officially helping out in the restaurant and earning pocket money while in another the couple get on their three wheel motor bike after putting on their leathers and go to Paignton to give away leaflets advertising their restaurant and a 10% discount rate.
In contrast again is the upmarket restaurant if an Italian fish quay Trader whose wife runs the venture and where on opening it is booked out so he provides a free glass of champagne. He buys nearly five kilos of prepared monkfish for £47 which he then sells as a curry with portions as a £18 a plate special. Prior to this his main business is buy as provider for posh nosh London restaurants and we followed delivery to one of these and the delight of two diners who were sampling their £40 a plate chunk of freshly caught fish.
In another programme we followed the enthusiasm of a chef who had gone the other way having made his money in London had come to Torbay where he is now runs four restaurants including one in Brixham and where on most days he goes to work on his single handed yacht. He has great enthusiasm for the crab and had launched week long festival the food being eaten on community trestle tables Mediterranean party style. These up market providers are being threatened by a London entrepreneur who had managed to gain planning permission of a new out of character two level top of the range bar and eating house from fish with cocktails to a Sushi Bar. Apart from general horror at the look of the premises the locals ridicule the creation of a Sushi bar in Brixton despite that Sushi is another way to eat fish). The owner of the latest up market establishment was not phased saying they would be looking to go there on their night off and one can understand the rationale behind this development of the Town whose fish restaurants had relied on taking as much money as they could during season to enable them to live during the non existent visitor winters. It is then that the wealth citizens of the great neighbourhood might well view a drive for a good meal along the coast in an attractive port devoid of the common herd a worthwhile activity provide for an year round trade.
The problem which the programme posed is what happens to a seaman who cannot continue to go to sea? One man with back and knee problems advised that he would potentially cripple himself if he continued, opened a toyshop but which he had to close and sell off stock with a half price sale with the rest on E Bay rather than go bankrupt and lose his home. The shop was next door to where a former shipmate who had also set up in business as a fishmonger, a much wiser move, especially as he had the banter, flirting with his female customers of all ages and promoting a naked calendar of local fisherman personalities in order to raise the cash for a quayside memorial for all those who had perished at sea from the community in the past.
This brings me back to the 70 year old owner of the hillside Inn originally bought for her son who then went and joined the armed forces. She clearly struggled to make a financial go and when the series ended she had placed the Inn or the market after consulting a local fortune teller. She contributed to memorial by doing a parachute sky dive. There was also the cab driver whose tummy could not take fish in a town with 15 fish restaurants with eight along the quayside. The problem that the town faced is that apart from coming for a fish meal and walking around the short quayside the town was limited in what it offered. The one attraction is a full scale replica of the Golden Hind complete with gift shop which was also put on the market for someone to develop. I think it was the owner who also acted as the the tour guide for evening walks on ghosts around the town complete with a mourning top and tails and his actress part as a mourning and sinister looking widow. His tour ends at the hillside pub as darkness descended. It is from here that the owner has her one packed night of the year when the quaysiders come up to view the fireworks across the harbour.
Not to be forgotten is the harbour master patrol boat in summer politely telling one moored craft they were in the marked lane for water skiing, a couple in a dinghy that they needed to be careful with the wind which could blow them to sea faster that they could paddle back to shore and the party of revellers who had became rowdy and where there was risk of falling overboard. Similarly for the trawler race the health and safety decision by vote is that the competitive throwing of heavy objects between craft although should stop but they could still try water filled balloons even though it was impossible to reach other boats during the race.
But my last memory will of the sun rises and the sunsets and the shots of town leaving and approaching the harbour. I want to return.
I have been to Brixham during stays at a hotel on the cliffs above around the corner and may have first visited on an earlier holiday when staying at a motor lodge a little way inland. Because my visits to the West Country took place in the late sixties and the mid seventies I did not keep the documentation and paper memorabilia in scrapbooks as I have for holidays abroad or visits to Scotland and Wales and where I know their present location I do have some records somewhere yet to be processed so my memories are visual. Interestingly for me it was the early visits to Cornwall, to the small fishing village of Mousehole, to Hayle Towans and St Ives that I remember most.
Brixham is a small community where the overwhelming majority of residents, fewer than 20000, are connected to the fishing industry and the holiday trade, mostly day trippers from the resorts of Torbay of Paignton Sands and the Torquay Riviera. The town is very picturesque with the colourful facades of the housing as they sharply rise on all sides with everything centring on the Fish quay with its £20 million turnover a year which means that an average of over £50000 of fish is traded every day, and along the harbour quayside where it was said from memory that there are eight of the fifteen fish providing restaurants in the town.
At fish quay there are separate markets held over the 24 hour all year round operation covering small quantities caught by inshore fishing, those who work on day boats and those going deeper and away for a week at time? Some of the eighty strong fishing fleet have contracts such as supplying whelks and sprats by the tonnage.
Each episode is divided between the lives of those who work those who under the fishing, do the trading and those who sell fish to eat in restaurants or to take home from he mongers. The series also features life of a 70 year old who runs a pub single handed a little way up the hill and away from the tourist throng and the separate quayside drinking haunts of the Masters and the crews. She serves no food even to the few who stay on a bed and one bathroom basis over night, back by before 12 midnight lock up and no women into the three twin bedded rooms and one single for any jiggy jiggy..
Apart from the first programme which I missed the series opens with one of the deep sea vessels, the Barentzee where its owner and master takes on a 17 year old who has been out of work for a year since early discharge from the Royal Navy after drunken misbehaviour. We follow his trial voyage in which he is quickly sick but survives it out, works hard and becomes a valued working member of the team earning £500 a week. He is in a relationship with a nineteen year who is pregnant by him and rejects advice from the master that the life is such to make ongoing relationships difficult. The master explained that he had three women in his life with his present partner providing the longest relationship. He had missed the greater part of the lives of his two children by his first marriage. He makes the point that one has to weigh up the financial benefits against the loss of family life.
It is easier to an extent for the wives raised in seafaring families to cope with the way of life although the small Philippine group of sailors who had left their homes, in one instance leaving a wife and three children because they could earn sufficient to provide a better life and save for the future, found the separation an ongoing challenge.
It is evident that from the series in general that if sea going is in the blood and many of the owners and crew covered are part of generations of seafarers, the danger, the long hours of hard work, the separations from families is acceptable. The life is hard although some fishing is harder than others. Take for example the whelk pots which are lifted by hand, one every 30 seconds. Similarly the scallop collectors which have quartets of what look like chains over each side lowered to the sea floor and then dredged over the beds, raised by machine and cleared sometimes catch fish which the crew use for their meals.
Each craft tends to specialise with one deep sea fishing, hunting shoals of sprats through the use of sonar catching 14 tons in one netting comprising a large number of separate bulging “pockets” or the one boat struggling to profit from crabs and lobsters. The knowledge of the individual fishing grounds is handed from generation to generation.
Life on board is claustrophobic so building a reliable team who get on with other is a prerequisite for a successful business. Sleeping cabins are small enclosed shelves and the galley small but the men appear to eat well and regularly because of the shift system with in one three man craft, two people on and one getting a two hour sleep between shifts. Understandably the main space is given over to the catch, sometime stored in boxes with ice, sometime such as crabs and lobsters held in tanks. The quantity of bait is also considerable and this is part of the operating costs.
There is an annual cycle of doing things so in August the vessels are laid up for repairs and refits, including repainting with one skipper explaining that with an income of between six and seven thousand a week the two week lay off means a considerable loss in addition to the repair refit costs especially when the continuation of a sea worthiness certificate is in issue. However there is opportunity to spend time with the family and one episodes features a crew get together with their families.
Another opportunity for families and friends to get involved in the trawler race week. A 17 mile circular race around Torbay involving over a third of the fleet. The boats are repainted and decked with bunting and some of the larger craft have over 100 guests on board with makeshift toilet facilities, crates of drink and party food. There is one large Dutch vessel that comes over annually but where the conditions of racing means that there has to be a Brixham skipped for the event in this instance the retired father of another participant.
Another week designed to also attract visitors is the race of heritage sailing ships and we follow the work of one family who acquired a derelict 90 year old craft where they had over years put their profits into a rebuild, hopefully in time for the year’s race. The daughter, whose mother had hated Brixham and the sea, worked in a quayside popular pub used by the crew. She trained as a yachts woman and appeared to spend all her free time working on the boat while father and brother were at sea. Plans went awry when a mast arrived and had to be planed down in order to fit the prepared socket, with viewers then sharing the emotion when this worked and the vessel was launched for its race participation, with the son returning early with the fishing boat to accompany the vessel on its final stages. The plan of the father is to use the sailing ship as a charter business when he retires in partnership with daughter as a family business.
While the impression gained is that the fisher folk are able to maintain a thriving and profitable business, the lives of those who use the fish locally to earn their living appears to becoming increasingly competitive and the series follows the three levels of cooked fish provision. The busiest in the season is a small cabin on the quayside with tables and where at the height of season there is the owner and four others. Working to supply demand. She provides shell fish reporting that she never knows what will sell from cockles, whelks and scallops to prawn cocktails and crab sandwiches. She is part of an extended family one that runs the quayside Inn and another provides sandwiches. At the end of the series one daughter arranges a monster family get together to mark wedding anniversary and which is clearly a moving event to all concerned with daughter explaining that he had a wonderful childhood and family life and this was her way of giving thanks, adding that without a good family life there was nothing.
A different kind but equally close family life is that of the owner of Rio’s fish and chip parlour providing traditional meals with mushy peas, two slices of bread and a pot of tea for prices which struck me as very reasonable, with concessions for parties and the over sixties. Rio was in his late thirties when he met on a blind date and married his wife then in her early twenties and through the series the couple provided a welcome antidote to all the seriousness with their saucy banter about their relationship and lifestyle. It is very much a family affair as in one programme their two primary school age children were officially helping out in the restaurant and earning pocket money while in another the couple get on their three wheel motor bike after putting on their leathers and go to Paignton to give away leaflets advertising their restaurant and a 10% discount rate.
In contrast again is the upmarket restaurant if an Italian fish quay Trader whose wife runs the venture and where on opening it is booked out so he provides a free glass of champagne. He buys nearly five kilos of prepared monkfish for £47 which he then sells as a curry with portions as a £18 a plate special. Prior to this his main business is buy as provider for posh nosh London restaurants and we followed delivery to one of these and the delight of two diners who were sampling their £40 a plate chunk of freshly caught fish.
In another programme we followed the enthusiasm of a chef who had gone the other way having made his money in London had come to Torbay where he is now runs four restaurants including one in Brixham and where on most days he goes to work on his single handed yacht. He has great enthusiasm for the crab and had launched week long festival the food being eaten on community trestle tables Mediterranean party style. These up market providers are being threatened by a London entrepreneur who had managed to gain planning permission of a new out of character two level top of the range bar and eating house from fish with cocktails to a Sushi Bar. Apart from general horror at the look of the premises the locals ridicule the creation of a Sushi bar in Brixton despite that Sushi is another way to eat fish). The owner of the latest up market establishment was not phased saying they would be looking to go there on their night off and one can understand the rationale behind this development of the Town whose fish restaurants had relied on taking as much money as they could during season to enable them to live during the non existent visitor winters. It is then that the wealth citizens of the great neighbourhood might well view a drive for a good meal along the coast in an attractive port devoid of the common herd a worthwhile activity provide for an year round trade.
The problem which the programme posed is what happens to a seaman who cannot continue to go to sea? One man with back and knee problems advised that he would potentially cripple himself if he continued, opened a toyshop but which he had to close and sell off stock with a half price sale with the rest on E Bay rather than go bankrupt and lose his home. The shop was next door to where a former shipmate who had also set up in business as a fishmonger, a much wiser move, especially as he had the banter, flirting with his female customers of all ages and promoting a naked calendar of local fisherman personalities in order to raise the cash for a quayside memorial for all those who had perished at sea from the community in the past.
This brings me back to the 70 year old owner of the hillside Inn originally bought for her son who then went and joined the armed forces. She clearly struggled to make a financial go and when the series ended she had placed the Inn or the market after consulting a local fortune teller. She contributed to memorial by doing a parachute sky dive. There was also the cab driver whose tummy could not take fish in a town with 15 fish restaurants with eight along the quayside. The problem that the town faced is that apart from coming for a fish meal and walking around the short quayside the town was limited in what it offered. The one attraction is a full scale replica of the Golden Hind complete with gift shop which was also put on the market for someone to develop. I think it was the owner who also acted as the the tour guide for evening walks on ghosts around the town complete with a mourning top and tails and his actress part as a mourning and sinister looking widow. His tour ends at the hillside pub as darkness descended. It is from here that the owner has her one packed night of the year when the quaysiders come up to view the fireworks across the harbour.
Not to be forgotten is the harbour master patrol boat in summer politely telling one moored craft they were in the marked lane for water skiing, a couple in a dinghy that they needed to be careful with the wind which could blow them to sea faster that they could paddle back to shore and the party of revellers who had became rowdy and where there was risk of falling overboard. Similarly for the trawler race the health and safety decision by vote is that the competitive throwing of heavy objects between craft although should stop but they could still try water filled balloons even though it was impossible to reach other boats during the race.
But my last memory will of the sun rises and the sunsets and the shots of town leaving and approaching the harbour. I want to return.
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