Cyril Haearn wrote:The utility cyclist wrote:pwa wrote:1989 was about the time I spent a year working as a postie in Bolton. The sorting office was big with lots of employees, but I was one of only two or three who came to work by bike. Cycling to work was not common.
Hull is and was fairly flat. Easier for cycling than most northern towns. Maybe that is part of why cycling to work was popular there. But why a decline since? Does it coincide with the loss of the fishing industry?
It's more than fairly flat, it's positively pancake flat, literally aside from the flyovers over the railway lines and the golf course at Sutton which rises a monumental 36 feet above sea level on one of the holes (Officially called East Mount)
Th flatness and the compactness of the city, industrial works where never that far away and lower car ownership/generally due to lower incomes.
Fishing industry was pretty much done before this survey, my old man was a deep sea fisherman from the mid 60s through to the very early 80s,..
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I took a guided tour on the Arctic Corsair, very good, huge blocks of frozen fish were stored in the hold. The guide had worked on a trawler
'Was the money good?' I asked
'Yes, very good!' he said
Under further questioning he admitted he had only done one voyage, then got work as a brickie
Was the money good? Were jobs on trawlers sought after?
The money was pretty decent AFAIK, young lads would risk their lives to go out but then some were never destined to be scholarly but they'd come back with a wedge in their pockets they probably wouldn't get elsewhere without having to train/get experience for several years beforehand. Obviously as you went up the ladder the more you earned, I'm not entirely sure how the wages related to the catch in the latter days as they were all massive ships by the time I became aware of the fishing industry in the mid 70s and the big bosses/owners were certainly raking it in. H&S wasn't just a lottery it was blatantly ignored until a certain lady and her daughter got involved and forced the government to act after a spate of deaths. Even then the police were stopping her from trying to stop ships leaving that weren't lawfully allowed to leave due to H&S breaches. There was a programme about it recently on the BBC, Hull's Headscarf Heroes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r8jvr
Giving it a go once wasn't unusual, it was extremely hard work, very harsh conditions and some just didn't want to do it, there were also down times and people might probably pick up something else to do in-between, certainly a lot of money was pished away in beer and other salubrious exploits, some were canny with their money and did alright by their families, some were literally stony broke because they couldn't handle the money and their spending.