The Vanishing Fisher-Farmer Life of the Isles of Scilly
Last week I was on the Isles of Scilly meeting food and drink producers - and I will put an article onto this site in the next day or two all about that journey of discovery. But I thought I’d also add this article which I wrote when visiting Scilly many years ago…
The famous low tide pop-up picnic between Trescon and Bryher
Surf and Turf the West Country Way
It’s difficult to be hungry where sea meets land, especially here in the West Country where fertile soils produce crops in a climate that is heated by the warm, fish-rich waters of the Gulf Stream.
Some restaurants would sum it up with the American phrase “surf ‘n’ turf” - then probably serve you fat prawns from Thailand and even fatter steaks from cattle raised in factory farms.
In the West Country the traditional surf ‘n’ turf diet was a good deal more modest - and arguably a great deal more delicious. For centuries it was one that was enjoyed by thousands of coastal folk living along the peninsula’s coasts, but nowhere was this reliance on both sea and soil more prevalent than in the Isles of Scilly.
A Conversation with a Scillonian Fisher-Farmer
The other day I visited a retired farmer-fisherman on the islands planning to talk about a ghost ship (which you can read about in the panel), but it was 73 year old Brian Jenkins’ recollections of the changes in island lifestyles that made me realise he was describing an existence that has now almost entirely disappeared.
Brian Jenkins
Seasonal Living by the Tides
The beauty of the farmer-fisher lifestyle was that it dovetailed wonderfully with the seasons. In the balmy days of summer you fished for the abundant species that arrive in warm weather. Autumn storms would blow this occupation asunder, but would also hurl tons of seaweed up onto the beaches. This was a first class fertiliser and so the farmer-fisher folk would beach their boats and help spread Nature’s free gift on the salty fields. Winter was for field dressing and planting - and the very early spring they enjoy in those isles was for harvesting…
Narcissi and New Potatoes: Scilly’s Traditional Crops
In the end, it was early scented narcissi that earned the Scillonian fisher-farmer his main living – along with a few fields set aside for what were some of the most delicious early potatoes ever grown.
Crayfish, Tide-Crooks and Lost Techniques
But it was the long lost fishing techniques that Brian described which fascinated me. Take the islanders’ love for the giant crayfish of times gone by. I, alas, have never seen –let alone tasted - such a beast in all the 32 years I’ve been visiting the archipelago…
“Back in my younger days there were crayfish. Big spiky fellas – much bigger than the average lobster. Three pounds in weight,” says Brian, who nowadays has retired to the main island of St Mary’s.
Brian Jenkins in St Marys 2008
“Where have they gone? We caught them. Sadly, we wiped them out,” he adds, with all the honesty of someone who is not in the least bit ashamed of the fact, but proud to have been a part of such a hard working industry.
I’d also heard – but never seen – of the use of a long, hooked, stick called a tide-crook, which was widely used among the islands for catching lobster at extremely low tides.
“Yes, I’ve used one,” said Brian, not overly enamoured with the tool. “If you get one or two, you are lucky. My father - going back to the 1920s - he had seven in one day, and that’s the most I’ve heard of in Scilly.
“You’ve got to know the holes – there’s a good one I know near Rushy Bay (on the southern point of Bryher). I came out of the Forces in ‘55 and I had four the first winter I was home out of that same hole. And it’s usually a good-sized cock lobster.
Fishing boat on Bryher
“I had one that was nine pounds and I know of two others who had nine pounders. It (the tide crook) was, say, six feet (long) and on the end it had a turned hook. Underneath (the shallow water) there would be a hollow in the rocks and if Mr Lobster was in there you’d feel him. Sometimes it will come out on the hook. You just disturb it – ‘tease’ it would be a better word - and draw ‘un out and pick ‘un up. You got to know how to pick it up and, yes, you’ve got to be careful of your toes.
Shellfish and Seaweed: Forgotten Bounty
“Other shellfish? Cockles, yes, and we used to get scallops - but you won’t get them inshore now because we fished them all. At one time you could pick them up, but we’ve out-fished everything.
Bryher beach
Eelgrass and the Decline of Marine Biodiversity
“Another thing that’s changed is that, in my father’s time, there was sedge, or eel grass, that used to be between Bryher and Tresco,” recalls Brian. “Anything between four and five feet tall, it was - and it formed muddy banks. That was marvellous stuff to shelter any small fish - prawns for instance - and wrasse and conger and in among it there was plaice and other things.
“They would live in that – but to the best of my knowledge there was a virus that went through it (the eel grass) right throughout the world. Now there’s only a few wispy bits left on Scilly.
Spear Fishing and the ‘Smolt’ Days
“In Augustus Smith’s time (the man who began the regeneration of Tresco in the 19th century) the islanders were having very hard times back then,” says Brian, outlining how Smith had described early fishing techniques within the isles. “He called them the ‘spear fishermen of Scilly’ – they fished, not with a hook, but with a spear 10 or 12 feet long.
“You’d go out on what the old men would call a ‘smolt’ - a calm when there’s no wind on water - and they would look down and spear plaice and even some turbot which went about in pairs as a rule. They had five days of ‘smolt’ at one time – I can’t tell you exactly what year, 1820 perhaps - and they were pretty hard up for food at that time. And they had five days and they caught nearly 10,000 flatfish in those five days.”
Prawning on the Shoreline
Prawning was another shoreline pursuit - one that Brian still practices today. “Not for Dublin Bay prawns - inshore prawns,” he tells me with some enthusiasm. “Shrimps have a spike over each eye - the prawns we catch only have one.
Hesp prawning in Scilly
“With a net on a stick you walk along - you push it in front of you,” he explained when I asked how he caught the prawns. “The later in the year, the bigger they are. Then the ground seas come in October time and they move out to deep water. It (prawning) is an old Scillonian thing - and they are indeed delicious. Alfie Trenear - the undertaker chap - him and I have done a lot of it. A lot. And I should think the most we have come home with is anything up between 12 and 14 gallon.
The Grey Mullet Catches of the Sixties
“I started grey mullet fishing (inside the inter-island shallows) after I left the Forces and we did that for a few years. Still do in fact… In the Sixties we had some big catches - up to two-and-a-quarter ton. That was the biggest and the number of fish was 1,650. That was between Bryher and Tresco.
“Next week we shall start again,” Brian told me. “And now we consider 200 or 250 fish to be a nice catch.”
From Flowers to Tourism: Changing Times on Bryher
I asked Brian, who is one of the last remaining old fashioned fisher-farmers left in the isles, to describe his average year half a century ago. “In my time the flower season would start, say, a month before Christmas. That would go on through to Easter - then you’d start fishing and have your potatoes out.
“Market gardening – that’s the big difference compared to today. There were 13 viable smallholdings (on Bryher) – but that’s all gone. Finished. Nearly everybody up there now is involved in tourism.
“There were quite a few of the smaller smallholdings had dropped out when I started work in 1950. Home with my father, I was. Some fishing - some market gardening. We ought to have been called crofters because that’s what we were more than anything else.
Today’s overgrown fields on St Martins
“I suppose air travel worldwide changed it, because you could fly in flowers from Kenya or Australia or Israel or anywhere else faster than you could get them from here.
“And also the land was worn out,” sighed Brian. “Very, very tired from one crop (flowers). There was nothing else we could rotate with that was profitable.
Hand-Built Fields and the Value of Seaweed
“Potatoes? Only in small pockets. You need a sheltered field pointing south with drainage. You’ve seen the ‘green fences’ around (on Bryher) - I grew most of them with my father. Before that it was wide, open, spaces.
Seine netting for Scillonian sprats
“Some of that my father had ‘broke’ from the downs - between 1890 and 1910 by a man called Tom Christopher. He may have been from Cornwall – he was paid £1 a week and his keep for six 12-hour days. Breaking it all by hand. He would start from gorse or whatever it happened to be, take the stones out and make up the (stone) hedges. And lot of those have never broken down from that day to this.
“We had very limited acreage and any amount of people have asked me over the years - there was always someone saying: ‘Why don’t you grow strawberries or whatever?’
“Narcissi were far more profitable than anything to do with a few veggies,” shrugs Brian. “We’d have a small amount of early potatoes - they’d occasionally pay quite well. We’d have maybe a week or fortnight’s work out of that. And I grew iris flowers – that was a very quick crop that would be about the middle of April-May. They would be a good profitable crop for, say, a couple of weeks and we’d do better out of those than all the veggies we’d ever seen.
“Seaweed? Yes indeed. The best fertiliser that has ever gone on the land. I think when I finished I had eight acres – say five – and maybe you’d have empty acre each year and I’d put a 150 loads - a ton to a load – on that field. I don’t know of any crop or plant that dislikes seaweed.”
Enroute to the inter-island pop-up picnic
A Lost Way of Life Remembered
Nowadays very few people harvest the seaweed, or anything else much for that matter on Scilly save for the famous scented narcissi. The lifestyle of the crofters or fisher-farmers is but a memory enjoyed only by a handful of older men and women in the isles. Like the last wisps of eel grass in the Sound, they harbour the final vestiges of another world.
