Maurice Labistour
Maurice's father came to Hull from Mauritius to study which is where the family's connection with Africa originates. His family have a long history as seafarers. Maurice's father was on the seas during WWI and they both became Master Mariners in their time. Maurice describes his time as a sailor with great fondness, giving personal accounts of working in different African countries and being unfortunate enough to be in Nigeria at the flash point that descended into the Biafran War of 1967. He also describes how the decline of Hull's fishing industry has changed the economic and cultural climate in the city.
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transcription: maurice labistour
Interview with Maurice Labistour
Interviewer: Jerome Whittingham
Date: 23 November 2016
JW: Well it’s lovely to meet you. Thank you for coming in.
ML: Yeah well
JW: Thank you for taking part. What we normally like to do to begin the interview and podcast is to ask you to introduce yourself to the people
ML: Yes, so I’m Maurice Leon Labistour. I was born in Hull in nineteen…, 1932. At 6 years of age I was evacuated and came home and eventually I went to sea and I finished off like my father, I finished off as a Master Mariner.
JW: Seafaring family. OK. Tell me something then about your connection to Africa.
ML: A couple of ways. My father, my father was from Mauritius. And originally came from Mauritius in Port Louis – we’re not sure what year he came over here to, but I’ve got some of the dates of when he came over – he came over ostensively to study and I think he studied over in Cambridge. And – eventually came to Hull and did most of his tickets in Hull so I presumed during the war years he was actually, he was at sea you know sort of the 1914 -18 war he was at sea...
JW: Can I take you back though…
ML: Yeah, take me back, yes
JW: I know very little about Mauritius so what can you tell us?
ML: Well Mauritius is a small island. It’s – near the Seychelles, it’s in the Indian Ocean, it’s just off the horn of Africa. It was originally a French colony – because it was, it was established by the French and that’s why my father is, is the name is Labistour it originated from France – A lot of the – a lot of the indigenous population did - mix with the – because it’s a highway between India and the continent, the main continent, dows and thing were coming through there so there was – quiet often a mixed race within the – within the island and we think that we’re probably a slight bit of a mixed race. Because it was a very, very well established – French family. It was the De Rochfort , De Rochfort family they were from the Labistours. A lot of them went to Africa. They moved from Mauritius to, a lot, some went to – to Lorenco Marks. My brother was at sea he went to Lorenco Marks and met up with a family in Lorenco Marks. He actually found one of the families, they had the same names as him; Louis Labistour. Further down towards South Africa Natal, one of the Labistour there was Governor General of Natal. They have a coat of arms the De Rochfort Labistours. We have met some of the Labistours over in Canada. I use to think that we were sort of the tail end of the Labistours and that there were no more but it transpired that there are others scattered about all over the place.
JW: A family that’s always travelled.
ML: Yes a travelling family so there’s and as I say my father came across - ostensively to study and from there I believe that he met my mother in Cambridge but he came to Hull, did all his tickets in Hull, became a Master Mariner while he was in Hull but a lot of his time was spent at sea so he was only home from time to time. December 1932, just before Christmas my brother was on, my father was on a barge called the George, it was during the – during the recession years there were no jobs at sea so he took a job on a barge, as a mate on the barge, had a collision on the Humber. He lost his life. Nine months later I was born so I never know nothing about my father but there were six of us in the family so my father left six, six children for my mother to bring up.
I’ve spent time in Africa because in the 50s I went to sea when I was a 15 year old. For two years I was trading the west coast of Africa which I was telling Gifty, so I’d been along the coast there. I’d been in Nigeria. I’d been in Ghana along the Ghana, Ghanaian coast and seen where all the Elmina Castle and the other castles where they’d incarcerated the slaves – that’s where they more or less sent them from, you know the, from the from Ghana itself. That was the main trading post for the Africans coming out, out of Africa.
JW: If your family perhaps originally came from France and the moved to Mauritius, do you think your family were involved in the slave trade themselves?
ML: No, I don’t think so because we’re talking about Mauritius which is far, far removed from the slave trade. It was on the, as I say, it was on the route between India and – the horn of Africa because the island was almost displaced between the two so all of the slave trade was on the West African coast from Freetown down through Ghana. I’m not sure about Nigeria, I don’t know whether Nigeria was involve in the – in the slave trade but certainly Ghana and the Ivory Coast is the main place of bringing the slaves in from places like I suppose Chad, Niger. I think that was probably where the, the main slave trade was operating from.
JW: You’ve been to Mauritius yourself?
ML: No but the family has. My daughter went there several years ago and we tried to trace the family back but unfortunately in Mauritius they’d had a fire in one of the main, in the main archiving places and they lost a lot of the records so the records going back to my father we’ve lost but my wife, my sister went there, I beg your pardon, my daughter went there to try and find out about , and they went around a place called Pamplemousse – round the cemetery in Pamplemousse looking to see if they could find any graves. She couldn’t find anything for a while and then Graham her husband said, “What about this?” and there was a great big mausoleum and right there at the bottom was Labistour at the bottom so she established that they had been buried in Pamplemousse itself.
JW: Yeah so you’re not entirely sure how many generations in back the family…
ML: No. There is another. There is another chap called Laval. My brother went to Mauritius and he was introduced to part of the family there. But he never really established where the routes exactly were. What we thing the situation was was that because Mauritius is – basically plantations and there was a lot of – of people coming over from India to work the fields, we think that one of the Labistours actually had an affair with one of the workers and was forced to sort of marry otherwise he would have been excommunicated. We think that’s how our roots came down but unfortunately as I say the files in the archives have gone but Laval, he comes from that same area and he was sort of establish a little bit but we haven’t really, really talked to him about the full details of that but a lot of them as I say from Mauritius moved over to the mainland. Why I don’t know but other than establish themselves in Lorenka Marks and again became maritime because one of them was a pilot I think and one of them worked in the harbours so we are basically – maritime at that particular section.
JW: So you’ve travelled particularly at that section of Africa pretty extensively?
ML: I’ve been, yes, I’ve been up and down the west coast but I’ve never touched the east coast like my brother has.
JW: Can we talk generally about African character and the people you’ve met then?
ML: Well. In the 50’s. In the ‘50s I believed that Nigeria was the, was the blueprint for the rest of Africa when we had El Hadji Tafawa Balewa was there. Because we were trading in the West coast of Africa and we were bringing back palm kernel, ground nuts, timber. Everything there was being grown. It was, it was a very very, very very fertile sort of country. You could put a pineapple stalk in the ground and it would grow. And – we were there during the ‘60’s. I was working then with the Nigerian Ports Authority. After I’d finished training in the early days, I went to work in Nigerian Ports Authority as a ports officer that was in the early 60’s and El Hadji Tafawa Balewa was still, was still there as the leader of Nigeria. I was out with a buoy vessel and we got a radio – we listened to the radio and we’d heard that there’d been a coup in Nigeria and what had happened was that El Hadji Tafawa Balewa had been murdered and he was a northerner a Hausa from the northern tribe. And also the … Igbo or the Sadon of Socatu they called him, the religious leader of the north. And that was a coup by the eastern, the Igbos from the east right. And that kind of caused a problem in the country because they figured that, there were too many Hausas within the government and they wanted more of the easterners into the government and as a result of that, I don’t know if you know about this, there was a pogrom of the Easterners in the north, do you know about that?
JW: No but I’m learning
ML: Right, there was a pogrom of the Easterners in the North. And what was happening the easterners, the Igbos are in fact the businessmen of Nigeria. The Hausas and the northern tribes are the warriors as you can believe, they’re from the north and as I say El Hadji Tafawa Balewa, well El Hji, you get the name El Hadji because if you’re a Muslim and you go off to Mecca, you’re allowed on what’s known as the Hadj, you do three Hadjis and you become an El Hadji. So there was a pogrim of the easterners and tens of thousands of the easterners were being killed. And I was in Port Harcourt when the, when the information started to trickle back down from the north because those that were coming back and had survived were telling stories about all the killings that had been in the north and I went to work one morning, on a Monday morning and I’d only had 15 minutes to drive to the dockyard and on the way I counted something like 15 bodies on the side of the road.
There was now, there was now a slaughter going on with the Hausas within the eastern region and that started the Biafran war. And I don’t know if you know about the Biafran war but the Ojukwu took over the eastern region and as I say then, the war started then and then General Gowon , then the war had started and the – the easterners wanted to break away from the, form the African nation of Biafra. And of course General Gowon and the Lagos administration wouldn’t allow that. So we had to get out of the eastern region. I came back from - , I came back from Port Harcourt and, I came back from Port Harcourt to Lagos and that’s when the war really started.
Following that, still there was a lot of trade going on but following that of course oil came to Nigeria and with the advent of oil I did another trip there and I came back to the Midwest and I became Harbour Master of the Ports. But because of the oil, everything finished. The whole place dropped. Palm kernel production stopped, ground nut production stopped. There was still a bit of timbre coming in out of there but in the Midwest where I was and on the Gowon estate, there was no, there were nobody there. All the – all the ex-pats had left because they didn’t want to know about palm kernels now they wanted the oil. They thought we had sufficient and as a result of that Nigeria just sort of fell in on itself.
And you know what Nigeria is now. You got all the problems of Boko Haram in the north because there is basically very, very little in the north. You’re basically running off into the Sahara desert. And all the oils is in the southern regions, down in the Delta. And so now it’s no longer the, it’s no longer the blueprint for the rest of Africa whereas as I said in 1952 I was, at the time when I was working in Nigeria I could have gone back there quite happily but for the Biafran war and the way everything was deteriorating and were fighting amongst themselves. Now it started to become tribal. And - ex-patriots were leaving from the Dutch, the French they were all leaving and it became, it became a loss and I was disappointed that that was what happened to Nigeria.
JW: Did the advent of the oil industry and exporting oil. Did that add power and status to the Africans that you were dealing with?
ML: No it didn’t all it did was to, all it did was to add corruption in the higher places because nothing filtered down to the man in the street, the ordinary workers. The only people that were benefiting were the, those in power.
JW: Your view of world politics how do you look at that in a sort of a more micro aspect? How would you look at say the politics and the ethnicity of Hull now and how it’s changed over the period that you’ve know it?
ML: The way the, the way Hull has changed, the only way that Hull has changed in the way I look at it is that – the fishing industry went and the only other thing is that the, it would probably be around 80, 82, 83 at that time I was home, I was working as a lecturer at the Nautical College. And when I went to sea the ships were usually manned by about 30-40 men and that was a small ship something like 1000 to 1200 tons. Around about ‘84ish, vessels started to change we got these big – container ships in and other ships, these big large tankers. They no longer needed the men on the ships to do what we use to do because you were gone on the ship for maybe, I was away for 2 years on one occasion. We no longer needed to do the maintenance on the ship. The maintenance was done by the riggers and the other people when you came into dock so as a result of that, you’ve now got a 300,000 ton ship and you’ve got 12 men from 40 men from a ship which is 5 times bigger than what I was in, you’ve suddenly come down to something like 150 men, you’ve suddenly got something like 11 or 12 men. And as a result when I was in the college I was there for 10 years and I eventually had to leave because of the fact there was no longer the number of seamen going through the, going through the system. The impact on the docks here and the impact on Hull was that ships that were trading on the docks here, the ships were actually full if ships and there was always a complete turnover of seamen and that was down on the Posterngate so seamen, down opposite, opposite the infirmary, that area at the back there down near Linear Street and all around there were all seamen. Lascars, Malays, all the seamen that were manning these ships. You couldn’t get – full British ships, crews, so there were all these ethnics coming in from India, from China, from Nigeria, from from Jamaica, from the Arab countries. Because when I went to sea I went to sea as a deckboy. I was in the cabin with a lad called Willy Sweeting, he was a Bahamas boy. We had two Poles on the ship. We had Salu Arab he was from the Hadhramaut or the Yemen. We had Asivi Anthony he was from Jamaica, he was from Trinidad. We had Essa he was an Egyptian. There were four donkeymen all of those were from the Arab nations; Egyptian, 3 Arabs the rest of the crew, I think five deck crew were all Malays. So that’s how you get the mix. That has gone.
You don’t get the mix of nations because of the ports because the ships have gone and that’s the main difference and the other differences of course is that with the result of the EU, if I may say the EU and the fishing quotas and that ships, trawlers can no longer go out and to fish their own their own waters and bring the fish in, the docks collapsed. At St Andrew’s dock and the William Wright dock no longer sustained the trawlers, the trawlers went and if you take the number of trawlers and ships going out from there again you’re looking at hundreds and hundreds of fishermen gone. They were, they were, they were indigenous most of the crews on the trawlers were indigenous - because they were going up into frozen waters so that was a loss. So …
JW: Are you talking about just an economic loss or is there a cultural loss too?
ML: There was a cultural loss. A big cultural loss because - when I was – When a ship came into, when a ship came into Hull, as I said they use to be running in from West Africa. Cargo use to be going, like the ground nuts, peanuts, palm kernel were all going up to sustain places like Benningers up the river you know there were Benningers which was– oil and the BOC and British Oil at Katemmills. All of that cargo was going there. There were all the barge traffic. I mean when they use to, barges were going up, probably about 30 to 40 barges were going up and down the river so again the loss of men. That’s tells the tale of how the city’s changed. And the only way to sustain it now is by eastern Europeans coming in to fill gaps.
But when crews were in, just think about the number of sailors that were in the ports. I mean you’re not talking about 5 or 6 you’re talking about 100s. Places like Hedon Road where they use to be the Sportsmen, Blue Heaven, the Royal, the Old English Gentlemen, the one down the Earl de Grey. The Earl de Grey, that use to be where the lady’s of the night use to hang out. The Punch Bowl. These are all full of sailors of all nationalities and they all mixed and mingled and mingled with the people of the town as well and as I say the city was sustained by all these people by buying and selling you know coming in and buying things. So the stores like the British Home Stores is gone and all these other stores. Now I’ve just walked around the town. I just can’t believe the number of places that have closed. It’s, it’s. It does grieve me.
Interviewer: Jerome Whittingham
Date: 23 November 2016
JW: Well it’s lovely to meet you. Thank you for coming in.
ML: Yeah well
JW: Thank you for taking part. What we normally like to do to begin the interview and podcast is to ask you to introduce yourself to the people
ML: Yes, so I’m Maurice Leon Labistour. I was born in Hull in nineteen…, 1932. At 6 years of age I was evacuated and came home and eventually I went to sea and I finished off like my father, I finished off as a Master Mariner.
JW: Seafaring family. OK. Tell me something then about your connection to Africa.
ML: A couple of ways. My father, my father was from Mauritius. And originally came from Mauritius in Port Louis – we’re not sure what year he came over here to, but I’ve got some of the dates of when he came over – he came over ostensively to study and I think he studied over in Cambridge. And – eventually came to Hull and did most of his tickets in Hull so I presumed during the war years he was actually, he was at sea you know sort of the 1914 -18 war he was at sea...
JW: Can I take you back though…
ML: Yeah, take me back, yes
JW: I know very little about Mauritius so what can you tell us?
ML: Well Mauritius is a small island. It’s – near the Seychelles, it’s in the Indian Ocean, it’s just off the horn of Africa. It was originally a French colony – because it was, it was established by the French and that’s why my father is, is the name is Labistour it originated from France – A lot of the – a lot of the indigenous population did - mix with the – because it’s a highway between India and the continent, the main continent, dows and thing were coming through there so there was – quiet often a mixed race within the – within the island and we think that we’re probably a slight bit of a mixed race. Because it was a very, very well established – French family. It was the De Rochfort , De Rochfort family they were from the Labistours. A lot of them went to Africa. They moved from Mauritius to, a lot, some went to – to Lorenco Marks. My brother was at sea he went to Lorenco Marks and met up with a family in Lorenco Marks. He actually found one of the families, they had the same names as him; Louis Labistour. Further down towards South Africa Natal, one of the Labistour there was Governor General of Natal. They have a coat of arms the De Rochfort Labistours. We have met some of the Labistours over in Canada. I use to think that we were sort of the tail end of the Labistours and that there were no more but it transpired that there are others scattered about all over the place.
JW: A family that’s always travelled.
ML: Yes a travelling family so there’s and as I say my father came across - ostensively to study and from there I believe that he met my mother in Cambridge but he came to Hull, did all his tickets in Hull, became a Master Mariner while he was in Hull but a lot of his time was spent at sea so he was only home from time to time. December 1932, just before Christmas my brother was on, my father was on a barge called the George, it was during the – during the recession years there were no jobs at sea so he took a job on a barge, as a mate on the barge, had a collision on the Humber. He lost his life. Nine months later I was born so I never know nothing about my father but there were six of us in the family so my father left six, six children for my mother to bring up.
I’ve spent time in Africa because in the 50s I went to sea when I was a 15 year old. For two years I was trading the west coast of Africa which I was telling Gifty, so I’d been along the coast there. I’d been in Nigeria. I’d been in Ghana along the Ghana, Ghanaian coast and seen where all the Elmina Castle and the other castles where they’d incarcerated the slaves – that’s where they more or less sent them from, you know the, from the from Ghana itself. That was the main trading post for the Africans coming out, out of Africa.
JW: If your family perhaps originally came from France and the moved to Mauritius, do you think your family were involved in the slave trade themselves?
ML: No, I don’t think so because we’re talking about Mauritius which is far, far removed from the slave trade. It was on the, as I say, it was on the route between India and – the horn of Africa because the island was almost displaced between the two so all of the slave trade was on the West African coast from Freetown down through Ghana. I’m not sure about Nigeria, I don’t know whether Nigeria was involve in the – in the slave trade but certainly Ghana and the Ivory Coast is the main place of bringing the slaves in from places like I suppose Chad, Niger. I think that was probably where the, the main slave trade was operating from.
JW: You’ve been to Mauritius yourself?
ML: No but the family has. My daughter went there several years ago and we tried to trace the family back but unfortunately in Mauritius they’d had a fire in one of the main, in the main archiving places and they lost a lot of the records so the records going back to my father we’ve lost but my wife, my sister went there, I beg your pardon, my daughter went there to try and find out about , and they went around a place called Pamplemousse – round the cemetery in Pamplemousse looking to see if they could find any graves. She couldn’t find anything for a while and then Graham her husband said, “What about this?” and there was a great big mausoleum and right there at the bottom was Labistour at the bottom so she established that they had been buried in Pamplemousse itself.
JW: Yeah so you’re not entirely sure how many generations in back the family…
ML: No. There is another. There is another chap called Laval. My brother went to Mauritius and he was introduced to part of the family there. But he never really established where the routes exactly were. What we thing the situation was was that because Mauritius is – basically plantations and there was a lot of – of people coming over from India to work the fields, we think that one of the Labistours actually had an affair with one of the workers and was forced to sort of marry otherwise he would have been excommunicated. We think that’s how our roots came down but unfortunately as I say the files in the archives have gone but Laval, he comes from that same area and he was sort of establish a little bit but we haven’t really, really talked to him about the full details of that but a lot of them as I say from Mauritius moved over to the mainland. Why I don’t know but other than establish themselves in Lorenka Marks and again became maritime because one of them was a pilot I think and one of them worked in the harbours so we are basically – maritime at that particular section.
JW: So you’ve travelled particularly at that section of Africa pretty extensively?
ML: I’ve been, yes, I’ve been up and down the west coast but I’ve never touched the east coast like my brother has.
JW: Can we talk generally about African character and the people you’ve met then?
ML: Well. In the 50’s. In the ‘50s I believed that Nigeria was the, was the blueprint for the rest of Africa when we had El Hadji Tafawa Balewa was there. Because we were trading in the West coast of Africa and we were bringing back palm kernel, ground nuts, timber. Everything there was being grown. It was, it was a very very, very very fertile sort of country. You could put a pineapple stalk in the ground and it would grow. And – we were there during the ‘60’s. I was working then with the Nigerian Ports Authority. After I’d finished training in the early days, I went to work in Nigerian Ports Authority as a ports officer that was in the early 60’s and El Hadji Tafawa Balewa was still, was still there as the leader of Nigeria. I was out with a buoy vessel and we got a radio – we listened to the radio and we’d heard that there’d been a coup in Nigeria and what had happened was that El Hadji Tafawa Balewa had been murdered and he was a northerner a Hausa from the northern tribe. And also the … Igbo or the Sadon of Socatu they called him, the religious leader of the north. And that was a coup by the eastern, the Igbos from the east right. And that kind of caused a problem in the country because they figured that, there were too many Hausas within the government and they wanted more of the easterners into the government and as a result of that, I don’t know if you know about this, there was a pogrom of the Easterners in the north, do you know about that?
JW: No but I’m learning
ML: Right, there was a pogrom of the Easterners in the North. And what was happening the easterners, the Igbos are in fact the businessmen of Nigeria. The Hausas and the northern tribes are the warriors as you can believe, they’re from the north and as I say El Hadji Tafawa Balewa, well El Hji, you get the name El Hadji because if you’re a Muslim and you go off to Mecca, you’re allowed on what’s known as the Hadj, you do three Hadjis and you become an El Hadji. So there was a pogrim of the easterners and tens of thousands of the easterners were being killed. And I was in Port Harcourt when the, when the information started to trickle back down from the north because those that were coming back and had survived were telling stories about all the killings that had been in the north and I went to work one morning, on a Monday morning and I’d only had 15 minutes to drive to the dockyard and on the way I counted something like 15 bodies on the side of the road.
There was now, there was now a slaughter going on with the Hausas within the eastern region and that started the Biafran war. And I don’t know if you know about the Biafran war but the Ojukwu took over the eastern region and as I say then, the war started then and then General Gowon , then the war had started and the – the easterners wanted to break away from the, form the African nation of Biafra. And of course General Gowon and the Lagos administration wouldn’t allow that. So we had to get out of the eastern region. I came back from - , I came back from Port Harcourt and, I came back from Port Harcourt to Lagos and that’s when the war really started.
Following that, still there was a lot of trade going on but following that of course oil came to Nigeria and with the advent of oil I did another trip there and I came back to the Midwest and I became Harbour Master of the Ports. But because of the oil, everything finished. The whole place dropped. Palm kernel production stopped, ground nut production stopped. There was still a bit of timbre coming in out of there but in the Midwest where I was and on the Gowon estate, there was no, there were nobody there. All the – all the ex-pats had left because they didn’t want to know about palm kernels now they wanted the oil. They thought we had sufficient and as a result of that Nigeria just sort of fell in on itself.
And you know what Nigeria is now. You got all the problems of Boko Haram in the north because there is basically very, very little in the north. You’re basically running off into the Sahara desert. And all the oils is in the southern regions, down in the Delta. And so now it’s no longer the, it’s no longer the blueprint for the rest of Africa whereas as I said in 1952 I was, at the time when I was working in Nigeria I could have gone back there quite happily but for the Biafran war and the way everything was deteriorating and were fighting amongst themselves. Now it started to become tribal. And - ex-patriots were leaving from the Dutch, the French they were all leaving and it became, it became a loss and I was disappointed that that was what happened to Nigeria.
JW: Did the advent of the oil industry and exporting oil. Did that add power and status to the Africans that you were dealing with?
ML: No it didn’t all it did was to, all it did was to add corruption in the higher places because nothing filtered down to the man in the street, the ordinary workers. The only people that were benefiting were the, those in power.
JW: Your view of world politics how do you look at that in a sort of a more micro aspect? How would you look at say the politics and the ethnicity of Hull now and how it’s changed over the period that you’ve know it?
ML: The way the, the way Hull has changed, the only way that Hull has changed in the way I look at it is that – the fishing industry went and the only other thing is that the, it would probably be around 80, 82, 83 at that time I was home, I was working as a lecturer at the Nautical College. And when I went to sea the ships were usually manned by about 30-40 men and that was a small ship something like 1000 to 1200 tons. Around about ‘84ish, vessels started to change we got these big – container ships in and other ships, these big large tankers. They no longer needed the men on the ships to do what we use to do because you were gone on the ship for maybe, I was away for 2 years on one occasion. We no longer needed to do the maintenance on the ship. The maintenance was done by the riggers and the other people when you came into dock so as a result of that, you’ve now got a 300,000 ton ship and you’ve got 12 men from 40 men from a ship which is 5 times bigger than what I was in, you’ve suddenly come down to something like 150 men, you’ve suddenly got something like 11 or 12 men. And as a result when I was in the college I was there for 10 years and I eventually had to leave because of the fact there was no longer the number of seamen going through the, going through the system. The impact on the docks here and the impact on Hull was that ships that were trading on the docks here, the ships were actually full if ships and there was always a complete turnover of seamen and that was down on the Posterngate so seamen, down opposite, opposite the infirmary, that area at the back there down near Linear Street and all around there were all seamen. Lascars, Malays, all the seamen that were manning these ships. You couldn’t get – full British ships, crews, so there were all these ethnics coming in from India, from China, from Nigeria, from from Jamaica, from the Arab countries. Because when I went to sea I went to sea as a deckboy. I was in the cabin with a lad called Willy Sweeting, he was a Bahamas boy. We had two Poles on the ship. We had Salu Arab he was from the Hadhramaut or the Yemen. We had Asivi Anthony he was from Jamaica, he was from Trinidad. We had Essa he was an Egyptian. There were four donkeymen all of those were from the Arab nations; Egyptian, 3 Arabs the rest of the crew, I think five deck crew were all Malays. So that’s how you get the mix. That has gone.
You don’t get the mix of nations because of the ports because the ships have gone and that’s the main difference and the other differences of course is that with the result of the EU, if I may say the EU and the fishing quotas and that ships, trawlers can no longer go out and to fish their own their own waters and bring the fish in, the docks collapsed. At St Andrew’s dock and the William Wright dock no longer sustained the trawlers, the trawlers went and if you take the number of trawlers and ships going out from there again you’re looking at hundreds and hundreds of fishermen gone. They were, they were, they were indigenous most of the crews on the trawlers were indigenous - because they were going up into frozen waters so that was a loss. So …
JW: Are you talking about just an economic loss or is there a cultural loss too?
ML: There was a cultural loss. A big cultural loss because - when I was – When a ship came into, when a ship came into Hull, as I said they use to be running in from West Africa. Cargo use to be going, like the ground nuts, peanuts, palm kernel were all going up to sustain places like Benningers up the river you know there were Benningers which was– oil and the BOC and British Oil at Katemmills. All of that cargo was going there. There were all the barge traffic. I mean when they use to, barges were going up, probably about 30 to 40 barges were going up and down the river so again the loss of men. That’s tells the tale of how the city’s changed. And the only way to sustain it now is by eastern Europeans coming in to fill gaps.
But when crews were in, just think about the number of sailors that were in the ports. I mean you’re not talking about 5 or 6 you’re talking about 100s. Places like Hedon Road where they use to be the Sportsmen, Blue Heaven, the Royal, the Old English Gentlemen, the one down the Earl de Grey. The Earl de Grey, that use to be where the lady’s of the night use to hang out. The Punch Bowl. These are all full of sailors of all nationalities and they all mixed and mingled and mingled with the people of the town as well and as I say the city was sustained by all these people by buying and selling you know coming in and buying things. So the stores like the British Home Stores is gone and all these other stores. Now I’ve just walked around the town. I just can’t believe the number of places that have closed. It’s, it’s. It does grieve me.