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HomeGo to main siteEvents / other sitesTales of Hull & ERBook ReviewsFictionShort storiesNon-fictionPoetryAuthor - Annie WilkinsonAuthor - Avril Field-TaylorAuthor - Bruce EssarAuthor - Clive AshmanAuthor - Danny BirchAuthor - Daphne GlazerAuthor - David BrettAuthor - Dorothea DesforgesAuthor - Karen WolfeAuthor / explorer - Karl BushbyAuthor - Leslie WilkieAuthor - Linda AcasterAuthor - Nick QuantrillAuthor - Paul GenneyAuthor - Penny GrubbAuthor - Peter JonesAuthor - Richard SutherlandAuthor - Robert AdamsAuthor - Robert EdricAuthor - Simon KerrAuthor - Steven HallAuthor - Stuart AkenAuthor - Tim RouxAuthor - Tricia WalkerAuthor - Valerie WoodAuthor - Winifred HoltbyPoet - Andrew MarvelPoet - Andrew MotionPoet - Carol CoiffatPoet - Chris DawberPoet - Christopher ReidPoet - Cliff ForshawPoet - Daithidh MacEochaidhPoet - David WheatleyPoet - Frank RedpathPoet - Holly RoachPoet - Ian ParksPoet - Nick BoldockPoet - Pete MorganPoet - Peter ArdernPoet - Peter KnaggsPoet - Philip LarkinPoet - Stevie SmithPoet - TF GriffinPoet -Tony FlynnChildren's booksSports writingContact us
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We would like to publish here your stories about Hull
& the East Riding.
What we are looking for are short stories describing your experiences of living in the area. If you have anything you would be willing to send us, please contact us at info@a63revisited.com .
Triple Trawler Fiction
By the
1960s, there was still a significant deep sea trawler fleet fishing out of Hull but only three literary figures had as yet
been associated with the city: Andrew Marvell, a seventeenth century politician and poet, Winifred Holtby, author of ‘South Riding’, and Stevie Smith, a poet and novelist whose most famous line is “not waving but drowning.” That final quotation could have been
used as an epitaph for the whole of the Hull fishing industry. Stevie Smith herself left Hull at the age of three.
Some fifty years later, the situation is somewhat reversed: there may be one or two trawlers still knocking around in a dock somewhere, but none of them are trawling, whereas there are northward of sixty published authors, poets and dramatists who are proud to live, or to have lived, in the Hull & East Riding region.
Not that
the rise of Hull as a busy literary port has much to do with the decline of its fishing industry. That started with the arrival,
as the Librarian of Hull University, of one of Britain’s most famous poets, Philip Larkin.
Strangely,
few of this bumper crop of new writers have even mentioned Hull’s century-long history as the UK’s leading fishing
port even when writing about the city. The custodianship of that particular flame has been almost exclusively left in the
capable hands of local historian Alec Gill and of non-fiction writers such as Rupert Creed who wrote ‘Turning
The Tide’ (see below) about the 1968 Triple Trawler Disaster.
As everyone born in Hull before that date will know, in the space of three weeks in January / February 1968 three Hull trawlers - the St. Romanus, the Kingston Peridot and the Ross Cleveland - went down, killing 58 men. There was only one survivor, Harry Eddom the mate of the Ross Cleveland, who was fortunate to be clearing the superstructure of ice dressed in full waterproof gear when the boat sank, and therefore found himself in the open air ready to leap into a life boat rather than trapped on the inside.
Now, suddenly (as you might say), forty years after that tragedy, three fictional novels featuring heavily Hull’s fishing past are being published by local writers within nine months of each other.
The first
chronologically is Leslie Wilkie’s ‘Pallister’s Phoenix’ (June 2009) which is about a deck hand who survived the loss of the fictional Hull
trawler, the Phoenix, with the help of four shipmates who lent him their clothes on the life raft. The rest of the crew perished.
Many years later, Ron Pallister wins the lottery and sets about tracking down his old shipmates to reward them for saving
his life. The story is therefore about the sinking of the Phoenix and the devastation of the Hull fishing industry as a whole,
and about how ex-trawlermen typically kept body and soul together when their world had disappeared.
The second
is Tim Roux’s ‘Missio’ (December 2009) where a boy called Stevie has to come to terms with the death of his trawlerman father
on the Gaul in 1974. As purportedly his grandfather had gone down with the Lorella in 1955 and his great-grandfather had drowned
with the Axinite in 1925, he faces a triple trawler disaster all of his own. His closure is to marry the granddaughter of
Hull’s leading trawler owner via a spot of magic.
The third
comes from leading Hull crime writer Nick Quantrill with the launch of his latest private detective tale ‘Broken Dreams’ in March 2010, a jaw-cracking yarn that
surveys the decline of the Hessle Road trawling community and pounds those very streets as PI Joe Geraghty searches for a
lost woman and the murderer of a local businessman’s wife.
As Leslie’s
book features the Rayner’s pub on the Hessle Road and Tim Roux's has a scene in The Alexandra Hotel, it may
even be time to raise a literary glass to those good old, bad old days.
"The Big Fish" : DEEP-SEA TRAWLER - JACK NELSON BRAVES THE WAVES FOR A LIVING
By Russ Litten
He had only intended to go for a piss, but
now Jack Nelson was spread-eagled on the deck of the St Arcadius, smashed under the steering quadrant by a heavy wave of water
that had crashed over the side, his barely-shaved 15-year-old face inches away from being chewed off by grinding gears and
heavy machinery. He weighed up his rather limited options. Shouting for help was no good; the rain was battering the ship
like machine-gun fire, the wind was shrieking like a demented banshee and besides, every time he opened his mouth to scream,
it was flooded with salt water ......
Click here to download rest of story
"Mrs. Biggs"
(early 1920s) by Jean Hewtson (née Petch) - 1915-2007 Like everyone else in our street (we lived at 160 Coltman Street), my mother had a maid and a washerwoman ..... Click here to download rest of story
"Out
of the Chrysalis"
I tell in detail what life was like from a child's point of view, to grow up in Hull, East Yorkshire, during and after the Second World War. I recall highlights of daily living taking in evacuation at the age of five years, air raids, rationing, lack of light, as well as games, celebrations and Hull Fair etc. I also give frank details of my prolonged battle with and eventual victory over Agoraphobia, Anxiety and Panic Attacks which plagued me for almost 50years during two traumatic marriages and the rearing of six children. Lastly, I tell of my experiences on the road to eventually becoming a well known Medium, working in many Spiritualist churches in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The book flows effortlessly, and often humorously, always drawing the reader on to the next chapter. Although experiencing many adverse conditions, the story is a journey of hopeful enjoyment bringing triumph over fear, showing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel'.
Dorothea Desforges was born on Hessle Road in Hull,
but was evacuated at the tender age of six to live with relatives in Canada during World War II. Her aunt Vi and uncle
Alan went out from Sproatley in Holderness as some of the early Canadian pioneers and managed to farm the inhospitable
land of Saskatchewan on the prairies. It was there that Dorothea arrived in the summer of 1940 with an abundance of
mosquitoes and temperatures of 30+ degrees. By the age of 8 she was proficient in killing, plucking and gutting chickens
and in skinning wolves for their pelts. The few short years experience in that country later caused her to write her
first book '1940-45, the In-between Years' followed by 'Beyond the Brave' a story of the Canadian pioneers.
Returning to Hull after the war led to jobs in such diverse situations as a greyhound stadium, a telephone exchange, market
research and a travel agency, eventually owning her own Agency and travelling widely.
"Just a Girl"
Just a Girl, Lily Wilson was an average twenty three year old living the high life with shopping sprees, credit cards, partying and plenty of bad choices. working, single and a full time dreamer but no one could have imagined the whirl wind that was about to crash in to her world and turn it upside down, the stranger that was about to burst her bubble of fantasy and drop her with a great big bang in to reality and the emotions that she was going to be faced with when she had nothing else left at all. Lily's life changed the minute she fell asleep one drizzly Wednesday afternoon at her mothers house in early April and after just one dream about the perfect stranger her journey began and she was never given the chance to look back.
"Pennies by the Sea"
Written by
a leading authority on the coastal amusement and tourism industry, this authoritative and comprehensively researched book
explores how an enterprising family, the Browns, turned Joyland (now The Forum) from a small amusement arcade in a former
seafront shop into a palace of fun that is now widely known across Yorkshire and beyond. It also explores life in this most
extraordinary of worlds, based on interviews with people who worked at Joyland and other arcades in Bridlington from the 1930s
to the present day.
"Turning the Tide"
The story of the 1968 trawler tragedy, when 3 Hull trawlers sank in 3 weeks with the loss of 58 lives, and the subsequent women's campaign for safety. Based on interviews with over 80 men and women who were part of this tragic episode, on transcipts of ship's telegrams, and official reports, the book is a unique insight into the lives and deaths of trawlermen before the industry changed beyond recognition after the Cod Wars.
"The Bridlington Lifeboat"
BRIDLINGTON, just south of Flamborough Head, is
in a critical position on the ancient and very busy north-south coastal sea route. There was frequent need to save the lives
of mariners at the mercy of the ferocious North Sea storms that swept the coast of East Yorkshire and, in 1805, the men of
Bridlington Quay established a Lifeboat at the port. This fascinating new book pilots the reader through two centuries of
transformation from a wooden rowing boat, launched by horses and manpower, to the fast hi-tech vessel of today. Its well-researched
narrative records the men who formed the crews, vividly describing their many acts of courage - indeed heroism, and volunteered
to risk their own lives to save the lives of others. Some nineteen years before the R.N.L.I. was founded, the independent
Bridlington boat was saving lives from storm and shipwreck. Later, as part of the R.N.L.I., Bridlington provided crews for
four Lifeboats at the same time. It is, indeed, one of the oldest Lifeboat stations, anywhere in the world, that has provided
a continuous service of saving life. This book will be warmly welcomed far beyond Bridlington ...and the revenue from every
copy purchased will directly contribute to the work of the R. N.L.I.
"Tales from the East Riding" This fascinating collection of tales of the East
Riding contains local myths, true crimes, surprising incidents and biographies of the area's famous sons. The stories
cover an area from York down to Hull and include such tales as: "Stand and Deliver", "The Molescroft Murder",
"When the Blitz Came to Beverley", "Roman East Yorkshire", "Gone to Blazes", "The Beverley
Workhouse", and many more. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of the region, and also awaken
memories of a bygone time for those who worked or lived here.
"More Tales from the East Riding"
Yorkshire's old East Riding has had a rich and varied past, and Martin Limon's second collection of historical stories is filled with more of the remarkable people, places and events that have made it that way. This volume contains stories of the East Riding's most famous residents of the past, including William Wilberforce and Amy Johnson, alongside some forgotten aspects of the region's past - including the crime that shocked eighteenth-century Long Riston and health care in the area before the arrival of the NHS. Meticulously researched by Martin Limon, who writes for local publications such as the "East Riding Gazette", "Down Your Way" and "Yorkshire Ridings Magazine", this book features many of his most popular articles to date, as well as others which have never before been seen in print.
To Farm is to Live: An Autobiographical Account of Farming
in the East Riding of Yorkshire from the 1920s to the 1990s by Norman Eric Kirkwood.
Boyle a Quart of Cream: The Housekeeping Book of Almary
Greame of Sewerby House, Bridlington, 1756-1812
"Life in Regency Bridlington"
"Port, Resort and Market Town: A History of
Bridlington"
"Etton - A Village of the
East Riding"
The village of Etton lies at the foot of the southern border of the Yorkshire Wolds, about 5 miles north-west of the historic town of Beverley. The village has changed remarkably little over the past few hundred years. The book covers the activities of the Knight's Templars and the excavation of their site; the Etton land charters from 1170 - 1482; the history of St. Mary's Church and the parish registers; notable buildings, including the Rectory, High Hall and Low Hall; the Holderness Hunt at Etton; and the village school and education, as well as people who have been prominent in the life of the village. The text is supplemented by approx. 50 photos, some in colour.
"Welton Sketchbook"
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