Living Silver 



portant of these was transport. Naturally, it had little effect on 

 the internal relativity of catches landed at any single port, but, 

 more than anything else, it determined the prosperity of ports and 

 gave rise to intense rivalries betvs^een them. The greatest of 

 British consumer markets w^ere located in the south, particularly 

 about London w^here the fish trade was centred in Billingsgate. 

 Manchester, too, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Bristol, they 

 all lay far to the south of Aberdeen, and many of them were much 

 closer to ports like Hull, Grimsby, and Fleetwood, ports that sup- 

 ported fleets more modern and better equipped than that of 

 Aberdeen. As he grew older in the fish industry, Jan came to 

 understand that as much as seven tenths of the price of fish go into 

 various forms of transport. There is the journey of the ship to the 

 grounds and the journey back again, perhaps five thousand miles 

 in all. And then the fish are landed. They lie static on the con- 

 crete deck - but only for a few hours . They are merely preparing 

 for another journey, shorter but still expensive, and a port within 

 easy reach of Billingsgate, like Grimsby or Lowestoft, stands at a 

 great advantage over places like Aberdeen where a journey of close 

 on six hundred miles separates the fish in the hold of a trawler 

 from the greatest concentration of the British people. 



Jan was far from being the first person to note this difficult ano- 

 maly. Aberdeen owners and, more especially, wholesalers had 

 been vociferous in drawing it to the attention of Edinburgh and 

 Whitehall. They had succeeded in securing certain privileges 

 from British Railways but they were far from satisfied. Many of 

 them, indeed, preferred to transport their goods on private lorries 

 rather than incur the heavy expenditure of the train journey south. 

 It was only by their reputation for bringing in fresh fish, prime 

 from the North Sea, fish much fresher than any that came from the 

 distant waters of Bear Island or Greenland, that the merchants of 

 the north had been able, by charging prices proportionate to the 

 quality of their goods, to compete with their English counter- 

 parts. 



But transport, though it had nothing to do with either the 



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