Living Silver 



owners of ships were often the same men as the wholesalers. They 

 often had interests in ship's chandlers as well. They owned the 

 transport that carried fish to the retailers in the south. And, as 

 often as not, they had an interest in these retail shops. Or a large 

 company would move in, buy out a few wholesalers, open a can- 

 ning or a deep-freeze factory, set up a string of fishmongers 

 throughout the country, and then proceed to stabilise both quality 

 and prices at a level suited to the magnitude of their investment. 



Jan never grew to understand the details of this high finance. 

 He only knew that one small wholesaler after another went bank- 

 rupt under the strain, when the shops of his regular customers, 

 in Liverpool or Billingsgate, were bought up by one or another of 

 the big companies who then transferred their newly acquired ac- 

 counts to their own subsidiaries in Aberdeen. It was easy for these 

 men, skilled in the fish trade as they were, to find employment 

 with the firms that had superseded them : but they were a dour 

 proud lot and most of them preferred to clear out of the country 

 to Australia or South Africa. 



So too did many of the best fishermen, particularly skippers 

 who, in the cut-throat competition of those days, were unable to 

 find a command. They left a gap behind them, a gap that the 

 Government was trying to fill with such recruits as Jan himself: 

 but the gap remained. Indeed, the continual departures of trained 

 seamen were tending to increase it in spite of all efforts. This is 

 not to say that there was a labour shortage, in the ordinary sense 

 of the term. There was plenty of labour, of a kind. There were 

 more than enough skippers to command a fleet of twice the size of 

 the one then registered in Aberdeen. But there was a great short- 

 age of trained deckies, of men with a fisherman's instincts and ex- 

 perience who were willing to put out in these steam-powered 

 slums and work eighteen hours a day on a cold deck in return for 

 five pounds ten a week and twelve shillings bonus for every £ioo's 

 worth of fish landed. Instead of fishermen, the owners were being 

 driven to employ whatever labour they could find, even if it meant 

 searching the prisons and advancing money to pay small fines ; and 



54 



