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| Fishing for smelt at Whornes Place, c.1910. The Halling Lime and Cement (Trechman and Weekes) works is on the left, with the Wickham Cement Works (Martin Earles) at Strood in the centre background. Tingey's chalk wharf at Wouldham is on the right. |
Once upon a time a six-mile stretch of the River Medway, from the old
The smelt (Osmerus eperlanus) is a small fish, seldom longer than about 25 cm. Their backs are an attractive olive green in colour, blending into an iridescent band on their sides fading to a silver belly. Related to salmon, smelts are ravenous predators of anything smaller than they are, their large jaws being equipped with long, needle-like teeth. Like other fish related to the salmon family, smelts leave the sea in autumn and gradually make their way up the estuaries to spawn on gravel banks in spring.
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| Cucumber Smelt (Osmerus eperlanus) |
Sometimes called the “Cucumber Smelt” (or Sparling), the fish gives off a distinctive odour similar to that of a fresh-cut cucumber. Pleasant to the consumer though that might have been, the odour soon became cloying to the hard-working fisherman on the good days when there were thousands of smelts to be packed into boxes for transport and sale.
The fish were a gourmet dish in Victorian and Edwardian times and Medway smelts were held in particularly high esteem. In the early part of the last century, one mysterious buyer used to turn up on the river bank year after year to buy boxes of smelts straight from the boats: rumour had it that he was buying for the Royal table.
The smelt fisherman worked out of small open boats called dobles. Dobles (the name possibly an abbreviation of “double-ender”) were typically around six meters long, with a beam in excess of two meters. They were heavily-built, consisting of oak or elm planking an inch or more thick, fixed over stout sawn ribs and providing the weight needed to draw the drag nets that were used for fishing.
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| A doble at Whornes Place, c.1900, crewed by Harry Hill and his son Roland. |
Amidships, the dobles had a characteristic feature – the “wet well”. This was a pyramidal-shaped compartment fitted across the boat with holes drilled through the boat’s bottom, to allow the water to circulate in the well and keep the catch fresh. These wells also aided the stability of the boat, strengthened the hull and also (because of the sloping sides) provided valuable stowage space for ropes, nets and other small equipment.
Although the dobles were rigged with masts and sails, these were taken down and the boats usually rowed when fishing the Medway smelt runs, called “shoots”.
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| The River Medway in 1910, with some smelt shoot locations indicated. |
Unlike many fish, smelts moved from place to place quite unpredictably. A favourite spot may produce only a few fish on one day and yet thousands on another. The Wadhams brothers recalled one night at “Parsons Gate” at Halling during World War One when the river “boiled with fish” as they hauled their net in. Over 7,000 fish were netted in that one haul.
It was traditional knowledge that in places upriver of Wouldham, smelts could only be caught at night (with the exception of Halling Hole). Kettle-shaped oil lamps (“pot flares”) were used to provide light for night fishing. It must have been an eerie sight to look out across the river on a misty night and see the smelt fishermen working.
At Wouldham and Whorne’s Place, smelt could be taken day and night. Local knowledge was crucial to success and the names and locations of the “shoots” were passed down by word of mouth from father to son and from master to apprentice. Some of the names (such as “Found Out” and "Scunch") are quite intriguing and their origins are lost in time.
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| The sailing bawley Jubilee at Cuxton, c.1900. On the left is owner John Hill, with his three sons Ernest, Charles and Harry and some visitors. |
At the height of the season in spring, the fishermen would group themselves into temporary partnerships of six or more. Slightly larger sailing boats, called bawleys (normally used for deeper water fishing, oyster-catching and shrimping – the name coming from the shrimp boilers many of bawleys were fitted with) were sailed upriver with two or three dobles in tow, the bawleys acting as houseboats for the fishing teams while the dobles did the actual netting of the fish.
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| Landing a smelt dragnet, Whornes Place c.1910... |
The technique of dragnetting involved a skilful partnership of two men, one in the doble and the other working the net from the shore. The nets could be as long as 35 fathoms (65m) and about 3 fathoms deep. They must have required great skill, strength and dexterity to handle. The shore man kept track of the boat, walking along the shore and working the net around in a loop as it was fed out from the boat, so that it was in the right position to trap the fish. The rower then turned the boat in and ran it up on to shore and helped his partner pull up the net. The catch was tipped into the doble’s wet well, or straight into baskets if they were to be sold locally.
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| Harry and Blake Hill, emptying smelts into a basket, Whornes Place, c.1900 |
In a good season, a fisherman could earn up to £40 a week, earnings that would have equalled by few other trades at the time. Of course, there were bad seasons as well.
In the early part of the season, demand for smelt could push the price up to 30 shillings (£1.50) per 100, but average prices were 10 to 14 shillings per 100, dropping as low as two shillings per 100 in a glut. Sales to local people were around a shilling for 25 fish of less than prime size, but most of the smelt were boxed up and sent to Billingsgate by rail, the transport costs being borne by the fishermen.
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| Smelt fishing, Halling, c.1910 |
Smelts were fished heavily from the mid 1860s onwards, no doubt thanks to the railway giving access to London markets, although there was an absence of smelt in the 1880s that was blamed on pollution from the numerous cement works along the Medway at the time. The 1930s were also lean years and after 1945, the smelt stopped coming altogether.
Various reasons for the loss of the smelts have been put forward, but the most likely is simply that of over-fishing. Netting was permitted during the spawning season because the flavour of the fish was said to be at its best when the fish were laden with spawn or milt, but heavy fishing when the fish were at their most vulnerable proved not to be sustainable. Like many other mass spawning species, the smelt’s breeding strategy is to lay an enormous number of eggs at once, to overwhelm the predation of the eggs and hatchlings. It is also possible that the fish themselves need the stimulus to breed provided by the presence of thousands of other fish at spawning time. Either way, once the numbers fall below a certain level, the population collapses and takes a long time to recover.
And so a way of life that lasted for a hundred years faded away, probably never to return…
Reference:
pp12-22, The Bawleymen: Fishermen and Dredgermen of the River Medway by Derek Coombe (published by Pennant Books in 1979, ISBN 0 9506413 0 8)
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