Tag Archives: Monty Python

When The Boat Comes In — Fish-Slapping — Bruges Fishermen and Charles II — I’m From Guernsey; You From Guernsey? What Brexit?

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

This folk song from Northumbria was the theme to a wonderful British series on Masterpiece Theatre when I was a lad. “When The Boat Comes In” was about labor and class struggles in the 1920s, in the gritty Tyneside industrial fishing ports of Northeast England. Oddly enough we all got addicted to the series! Owen Brannigan serves the song up raw but with relish, and smeared with sour cream.

UPDATE 3: 12/23/2020 Even NPR is catching the scent on the breeze — what do the French think about all this? https://www.npr.org/2020/12/23/948851039/brexit-french-fishermen-worry-what-a-trade-deal-may-mean-for-them

UPDATE 2 12/2220: https://news.yahoo.com/world-closes-borders-britain-coronavirus-122239526.html Not only are the fish ‘n’ chips in the fryer — the whole damn island is sizzling away as well, in a smoking-hot rosbif-fondue. This season’s chaos was ENTIRELY CONCOCTED by Her Majesty’s Government. None of this — e.g., total civilizational panic and collapse — ever had to happen. Amid all this, I read somewhere that Boris may have given in on the fish issue! More anon…

Eleven days until Brexit, but there’s no deal yet. With mutant Covid-19 panicking Britain, and Christmas Week already begun, and BoJo’s general fecklessness, Britannia is in choppy waters and it looks like she has neither a pirate nor a pilot at the helm — only a clown — and the ship of state is drifting awfully close to the breakers over fishing rights.

“Fishing rights!!? How long is this piddling to go on??”

— John Adams, exasperated by the feckless Continental Congress in the musical 1776

Oh, Mr. Adams, this piddling can go on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years! Update: I wrote this post this morning, and this afternoon the BBC turns up with the most fascinating article on a Channel fisheries dispute you’re ever likely to read: It seems Charles II gave away fishing rights to the town of Bruges, which were claimed by a Flemish fisherman in 1963! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55190259

It’s not just Scotland and Ireland that are discomfited by the fishery fail of Brexit. The whole perimeter of the UK is a traditional fishery!

And hegemony of the seas — particularly control of her coastline — has been a core element of British identity for centuries. It will be hard for Bojo to back down on this now, since it stupidly wasn’t handled properly to begin with a year or two ago. [Salty digression: check out my Royal Navy bookshelf:]

Consider the Channel Islands, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, halfway between France and Britain. Since the Norman Conquest, these islands have a long and fascinating history of being claimed by, and protected by, and disputed by, while not ever being really part of, either realm. This includes the Islands’ separation from the rest of mainland Britain during the English Civil War, when practically all of the mainland was in Parliamentary hands, while the Channel Islands, almost alone, held out for King Charles. (The colony of New Jersey was awarded by Charles II in recompense for that loyalty.) Contrariwise, in WWII, the the rest of Britain held out, while Channel Islands were taken and held by Nazi invaders. (Nazi-held British territory! Complete with a death-camp on Sark.)The article below details Guernsey’s hard place, and the Gordian Knot of contradictory interests that BoJo looks set to just chop in pieces rather than negotiate. The Guernsey fishery epitomizes the absurdity of the countries of the English Channel reverting, in the 21st Century, back to being a bunch of stubborn, warring little mercantilist territories, all at odds with and in competition with one another. That’ll kill any fishery fast.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-55072907

My roommate in Edinburgh, Jeremy, invited me and Chaim to spend one of our holidays at his family’s house in St. Peterport, the capital of Guernsey. It is a delightful island, warmer than Britain, with its own distinctive Anglo-French maritime culture, and wealthy from an influx of English tax exiles. (Because it is part of the British Crown; but not part of Britain; so they don’t pay income tax; or something like that.) As an incentive to read the article, I take this excuse to post snapshots from Guernsey, 1985.





The eponymous beeves on their home turf

What a fantastic guy, Jeremy Mattinson…an artist and musician. Sensitive and funny and intelligent, he taught me much. We both drank and smoke, which in those days you had to tick off on your forms to be assigned a room. So I’m grateful I got to share that tiny freezing room over the Pend in Milne’s Court with him. Can you imagine they let students smoke in a 1690’s tenement?

Jeremy hard at studying art. Remember when that meant sitting at a desk, with a PEN (…and coffee and cigarettes…)

Anyway, he and his lovely parents took us to the village of St. Andrew, where in 1914 a spontaneous divine possessory passion called a monk to build The Little Chapel…it’s quite stunning, and quite a story:

The chapel was originally built by Brother Déodat in March 1914 (measuring 9 feet long by 4.5 feet wide). After taking criticism from other brothers, Déodat demolished the chapel. He finished a second chapel in July 1914 (measuring 9 feet by 6 feet). However, when the Bishop of Portsmouth visited in 1923, he could not fit through the door, so Déodat again demolished it. The third and current version of the chapel started soon after the last demolition, and measures 16 feet by 9 feet. Déodat went to France in 1939 and died there, never having seen his chapel finished. In 1977, a committee was established to restore the chapel, and today it falls under the care of Blanchelande College.

— Quoth Wikipedia