The Longshoreman: A Life at the Water's Edge

A Life at the Water's Edge

Richard Shelton

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843541622
• eBook ISBN: 9781782395058
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

'When I first urged Richard Shelton to write his naturalist's memoir, I never expected him to produce a classic. But he has.' Redmond O'Hanlon, author of Trawler Fish have been a lifelong obsession for Richard Shelton. As a boy in the 1940s, he was fascinated by what he found in the streams near his Buckinghamshire home. But it was the sea and the creatures living in it and by it which were to become his passion. The Longshoreman follows the author from stream to river, from pond to lake and loch, from shore to deep sea, on a journey from childhood to an adulthood spent in boats in conditions fair and foul. Along the way, this wonderful book introduces us to strange characters and the intimate habits of lobsters; it also explains what it's like to be a lantern fish; how some fish commute between the surface and the darkest depths, when the laws of physics say they should be crushed to death; and the fate of the wild salmon, that heroic fish whose future is now imperilled by its farmed relatives. A keen fisherman and wildfowler, and an authority on marine life, Shelton has deeply held views on our relationship with the natural world, and Britain's with the seas which surround her.

CONTENTS

A Word of Explanation

The Longshoreman

Select Reading List

Picture Credits

A WORD OF EXPLANATION

It is given to few to spend a working life pursuing a childhood passion to its limits. That I was able to do so as a fishery scientist and wildfowler has been the greatest of privileges. When my friend, the travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon, suggested that I compile a sort of memoir of my life at the water’s edge, I readily agreed. It would be a way of giving thanks for my good fortune and acknowledging the great debt I owe to the many fishermen and longshoremen I met along the way.

The result is not a complete account, still less is it a book about fishery science. Rather, it is the story of how a small boy’s interest in the natural world, steam locomotives and old guns was given free rein by a benign Providence. So far as possible, I have set down the selected personal experiences which form the bulk of the book in the order in which they happened. To these passages I have added what I hope is just enough historical and explanatory material to make sense of a more than usually varied career.

Where I refer to particular freshwater and marine fish and shellfish, I do so using their commonly accepted names with occasional nods in the direction of the vivid, if less polite, ones sometimes given to them by fishermen. To avoid confusion, I have also tried in every case to supply the Latin names of individual species. Unlike vernacular names, these scientific ones normally appear as two words. The first name, which always begins with a capital letter, defines the ‘genus’ to which a certain organism belongs. The second, or ‘specific’ name, which is not dignified by a capital, assigns it to an individual ‘species’. It is a universal convention that both Latin names are printed in italics, but that the name of the naturalist who originally described the creature appears afterwards in Roman script.

Over the years, the names of many organisms have been changed by successive taxonomists, so the inclusion of the authority who originally gave a particular fish or shellfish its specific name also has to be shown to avoid ambiguity. In a further twist, which is the despair of editors and typesetters the world over, the authority’s name is shown without brackets if both the generic and specific names are those of his original description. If, as commonly happens, the beast has since been ascribed to a different genus, the authority’s name is shown within brackets. With the single exception of Carl Linné or Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented the system of binominal nomenclature, the names of authorities are shown in full. Linnaeus named so many organisms that his name is normally abbreviated to ‘L.’ and I have followed this convention.

One of the lessons a new author learns when writing a book is just how much of a team effort it all is. I have never had the slightest interest in typewriters or computers and, had I not had such a charmingly patient wife to interpret my scrawl, the book would never even have been started. I have also been fortunate in the editorial skills of my publishers, especially those of Angus MacKinnon, who even found time to make a splendid pencil sketch of the light cruiser HMS Birmingham. To him, to his colleague Clara Farmer and the many others whose countless personal kindnesses made the book possible, I say a very big thank you.

RS, September 2003

THE LONGSHOREMAN

‘Only a miller’s thumb’ – my brother Peter fishing in the River Chess

FISHY BUSINESS

The Chess is a chalk stream, one of several in south-east England that help to sweeten the waters of the lower Thames. It rises in the Chilterns in about half a dozen little brooks and winter bournes, fed by springs that bubble out of the ground like liquid crystal. The largest of these brooks flowed close to a sawmill, no doubt long since closed, below which the infant Chess opened out into a long pool shallow enough for small boys to fish in without drowning.

My brother Peter and I are standing by the pool as our mother maintains a watchful eye. Below the surface hang the grey-brown forms of the ‘banny-stickles’ or three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus L., jerking forward when they see us and then hanging again, maintaining position with their quivering pectoral fins. Here and there we see the gaudy magnificence of a ‘cock fiery’ or mature male three-spined stickleback. He is turquoise above and brightest scarlet below, and he is fanning his nest in which several females have been chivvied into depositing their eggs.

Peter and I are carrying home-made nets and we make many clumsy attempts to catch the tiddlers from the bank. How easy it looks, the fish almost stationary before the plunging net. Back the net comes and we search its folds, finding nothing but a little sand and a couple of toe-biters, the freshwater amphipods often, wrongly, called freshwater shrimps. Eventually, my brother is rewarded by the flapping silver of a tiny fish and pops it proudly into the jam jar to which my mother has tied a carrying handle of string. I do not have an immediate tantrum but instead step into the water in the hope of achieving success of my own by confronting the quarry in its element.

My elder son, John, fishing in the Kinnesburn, St Andrews

There’s a sudden chill as water which has not long sprung from its cool fastness in the chalk enters my left wellington. I say nothing for fear of bringing the expedition to a premature end and stand stock-still as a trickle into my right boot gathers strength. Slightly raising my eyes to look towards the deeper water in front, I see a seemingly transparent grey ghost gliding into view. It pauses briefly but, before I have time to get over my wonder, it spots me and, magically, it is no longer there.

For some reason, known only to the mercurial mind of a little boy, I tell no one. In fact, I have seen my first trout, Salmo trutta L., and in due course I will learn the secret of its transparency. Like those of most mid-water and surface-living fishes, the scales of trout are faced with silvery crystals of guanine, and it was the biophysicist Eric Denton who first demonstrated that the crystals are arranged in rows which, when parallel with the sun’s rays, act as mirrors. By reflecting their surroundings, they give an illusion of transparency and thereby hide the fish.

It proves impossible, however, to hide the fact that I have filled both boots with the icy water. I am still fishless and, to avoid a scene from her spoilt elder son, my mother, revealing a skill which astonishes me, deftly catches some tiddlers and pops them into my jar. Boots are emptied and the jars, along with their precious contents, are taken home and put on the sill of the kitchen window. The little fish are admired until it is time for bed. Sadly, though, there is only so much oxygen in the jars and by morning all the fish are dead. But they have already exerted a powerful fascination on both Peter and me. More must be found, and quickly.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING

It is a highland Sabbath and a hesitant sun dapples the gravel around the porch of the tiny kirk. A few cars have already arrived and, along the road, little groups sharpen their pace as time for morning service approaches. For many, youth is a distant memory but children’s voices can still be heard under the oaks. Here in the Perthshire hills, the pop culture of the towns has yet to dull the minds of the young folk and the embers of older values still glow brightly in the hearts of the young mothers from ‘up the glen’. The minister arrives, a slim, white-haired figure, elegant in black, dark eyes shining out of a face that still has the power to enchant. A reassuring glance here, a kindly word there – she is among her people and any that ‘swithered’ about turning out today are thankful that their better selves have prevailed.

The wee kirk started life as a mission hall. The simplicity remains – rows of pews, a pulpit, a lectern and a communion table raised up on a low stage, are all that distinguish it from a garage or a ‘tatty’ (potato) shed. It’s different today, though, because over the communion table is draped a full-size blue ensign, in the top left the brilliant complexity of the Union flag, and in the centre of the blue ‘fly’, the bright oak leaves and crown of the Scottish Fishery Protection and Research Flotilla.

It is Sea Sunday, a time when congregations across Great Britain and Northern Ireland remember that, however far from the sea we may live, we are an island people. The Articles of War, first articulated in the seventeenth century, begin with the words: ‘It is upon the Navy, under the good providence of God, that the welfare and safety of this kingdom do chiefly depend’. In her Call to Prayer, the Reverend enchantress commends all seafarers to the care and protection of Almighty God.

Long extempore prayers are part of the Presbyterian tradition. At their longest and most discursive, they test the concentration, if not of the Deity, then certainly that of the most earnest of His worshippers. But this morning no one grudges the seamen of the Royal Navy, the Merchant Service, the Fishing Fleet and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution their separate mentions. The first hymn, ‘Will your anchor hold’, a favourite of the fishing communities of the Costa Granite (the Moray coast in north-east Scotland) and the ‘regimental march’ of the Boys’ Brigade, thunders out, an involuntary descant supplied by the loud, sharp and quavering voice of an elderly lady to my right, ample of bosom but stout of corset. As we sit down, a voice whispers in my ear, ‘Are you nervous?’With an uncertain shake of the head, I make my way to the lectern. As the only working seafarer in the parish, I have been asked to read the Old and New Testament lessons. Despite my rare appearance in the pew, the enchantress has indulged my request to read both of them in the incomparable English of the King James Version. Making my way up to the lectern, I look for reassurance at the blue ensign now draped on the communion table and ‘won’ many years before with the connivance of a sympathetic Marine Superintendent who looked the other way at just the right time.

The blue ensign flown by Scottish Fishery Protection and Research Vessels

‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’: the familiar words of Psalm 107 bounce back off wall and window-pane alike, and in my nervousness the reflected tone sounds to me like that of a stern and aged headmaster. Back to the pew, more hymns and prayers, a sufficient break to recover in time to struggle through the Gospel account of the stilling of the storm. A thoughtful sermon from the enchantress follows, delivered in the soft cadences of her Aberdeenshire calf country (old Scots for where she was brought up). The final hymn, ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’, favourite of ships’ companies throughout the Englishspeaking world, nearly breaks me, so often have I heard it sung by my fishermen shipmates, but I reach the end without recourse to my handkerchief.

How had I, born far to the south in Aylesbury, the county town of Buckinghamshire and as far from the sea as any town in England, found myself representing the seafaring community in a village kirk in rural Perthshire? It is a long story, and it is not only about the sea.

LUCKY BONES

I was born in the mid-summer of 1942. Tobruk had fallen and Alamein was still in the future. My father had joined the Local Defence Volunteers (later to become the Home Guard) immediately they were formed but, as an older married man, had yet to be called up. He was shortly to join the Royal Air Force. As a professional photographer in civilian life, he served as a photographic specialist with Coastal Command. For a time he was based at RAF North Coates in Lincolnshire and, with my mother and me, was billeted at a farm near the aerodrome. First memories are as much a product of brain development as of external events. Thus, I have no recollection of the enormous explosion which accompanied the collision of two fully bombed-up Lancasters near the farm. It must have been some bang because the blast brought the ceiling down in the bedroom containing my cot, from which my mother had removed me moments before. I do, however, remember a yellow tanker lorry which used to visit the farm and a steamroller which worked on the local roads and no doubt also on runway repairs.

Shortly afterwards, my father was posted to the Middle East and my mother and I went to stay with her parents in Aylesbury. Here my early interest in steam propulsion was reinforced by the fact that my grandparents’ house overlooked the Aylesbury to Cheddington line, the world’s oldest branch line and whose documents of Royal Assent carry the cipher of HM King William IV. Light passenger traffic and some goods were handled during the war by archaic and feeble-looking four-coupled tank engines with very tall chimneys. I dare say they were more capable than they looked to a little boy. The apple of my eye was a magnificent eight-coupled goods locomotive, built originally for the London and North Western Railway, and often to be seen sizzling quietly from my grandparents’ newly decorated front room. ‘One two THREE, four, one two THREE, four’ barked fiercely from its chimney as it took hold of its squealing trucks in the curiously named Dropshort siding opposite the house. I had been given some wax crayons by an honorary aunt and it was not long before a large representation of the engine adorned one cream-distempered wall, a result I had achieved by standing on the sofa. My maternal grandmother was a saint and I was never aware of her disapproval.

Not long afterwards, my uncle, who was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, caught meningitis. He had joined the Territorial Army before the war and was called up at once. He was attached to a Territorial battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, a collection of East End reprobates whose fearsome reputation for fighting with one another and with the men of other units had earned them the informal title of the Hackney Gurkhas. Thanks to a new drug developed by May & Baker, my uncle’s life was saved but he was declared no longer fit for overseas service. As a result, he was able to come home often enough to play a big part in my early upbringing. My interest, and that of my cousin Stuart, in steam locomotives found a new expression in the lovely wooden toy engines he built for us. Further reinforcement came from a superb double-page illustration of express engines in a volume of the Children’s Encyclopaedia which had originally been bought for my mother and her younger sister. The engines were resplendent in the gleaming liveries of the independent railway companies that pre-dated the amalgamations following the First World War. My particular favourite was a North Eastern Railway Pacific in the light green of that fine old company.

Thinking back, I often wonder if my interest in natural history had its first flowering in this early obsession, one I have never entirely lost, with a form of propulsion which creates such a convincing expression of a living and breathing organism. As it was, my real biological observations were concentrated on the enormous bumblebees and brightly coloured butterflies that often visited my grandparents’ back garden to enjoy the golden-yellow flowers of the monkey musk and the tall blue lupins.

VE-Day came and my cousin and I were given tall paper hats with Union flag motifs together with small Union Jacks with which, despite the outbreak of peace elsewhere in Europe, we duelled whenever our respective pushchairs drew in range of one another. My father’s service with the RAF extended into 1946, by which time his travels had taken him to Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon and Kenya. One day when he arrived home, enormous in his blue greatcoat, I was playing with a small fishing rod, attempting to hook a metal fish out of an enamel bowl. ‘I’m fishing’ were my words of greeting and his face beamed.

As my younger brother Peter and I gained in understanding, so we pestered our father more and more for stories of his time abroad. He had brought many souvenirs back from Africa: soapstone carvings of fish and elephants from the Nile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents