NORWICH AND DISTRICT INDUSTRIES 103 
share system, as is the custom, to take less money into their homes than 
if they had been unemployed and on public relief. 
What are the causes of this débacle, and why do men continue to fish ? 
The latter question is easy to answer. For men living in wide areas 
of Norfolk and Suffolk, even in spots far remote from the sea, herring 
fishing is a traditional calling with an element of chance which adds a 
spice to sea life. For an answer to the earlier question we must turn 
to those problems of international relationships which have increased in 
number as the World War has receded into the past. ‘ As we fought we 
knew we were killing our best customers,’ remarked once a prominent 
curer who fought with the 51st Division. 
The herring trade has always under modern conditions depended 
on export for 80 to go per cent. of its output. Thus when the Revolution 
altered the face of Russia, and a policy of autarchy made its appeal to a 
new Germany, our two best customers became almost as uncertain as 
the movements of the herring themselves. 
There was a day not long before the War when a flag was hoisted in 
a Yarmouth curing yard to denote that the tale of herrings cured by one 
firm alone had passed the 100,000-barrel mark. In 1934, 1,440 women 
workers, working for 66 curers at Yarmouth, only mustered 190,000 
barrels of pickled herrings; and these could only be marketed with 
difficulty. 
Until the late ’nineties sailing craft chiefly plied the herring fishery. 
Then an increasing continental demand brought steam as an auxiliary 
to increased herring production—the first steam drifter made its appear- 
ance about the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. "The Klondyke 
‘gold rush’ of 1898 gave a name to a new trade in fresh herrings to 
Germany, and a more profitable undertaking to many than the search 
for elusive gold. Thence onward to the outbreak of war the East Anglian 
herring fishery never looked back. Steam became no longer auxiliary, 
nets became larger and more numerous, fresh areas for fishing operations 
were opened up. Fishermen who had finished their corn harvest ashore 
before putting out after the autumn herring now became all-year fishers. 
The Shetland Isles, Orkneys, Hebrides and Ireland were opened up. 
The developing fishery moved faster than the law. As late as 1906 the 
Board of Trade discovered that whereas their regulations required sailing 
trawlers, which fished only some 70 miles from home, to carry certificated 
masters, steam drifters were comfortably completing the circuit of the 
British Isles, in charge of men who, because they were herring fishers, 
carried no certificates at all. 
With the War development ceased, the greater part of the herring 
fleet, complete with crews, trained in all but naval discipline, hoisted 
their White Ensigns, to be exchanged a few years later for Red Ensigns, 
in a new world in which the call for herrings had largely passed. 
Each autumn during the war-period the East Anglian fishery was 
carried on despite the ever imminent threat of naval operations. The 
fishing units were chiefly old drifters rejected for Admiralty service, 
the men for the most part too old, too young, or discharged from 
H.M. Forces. The scarcity of foodstuffs took herrings to values 
