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        Pot Luck

        A 1960s snapshot of local family fishermen in the East Yorkshire port of Bridlington

        Amateur film 1962 8 mins Silent

        From the collection of:

        Logo for Yorkshire Film Archive

        Overview

        In the early β€˜60s, Bridlington’s fishing community was thriving – the town was one of four main ports on the Yorkshire coast – with keel boats heading out to trawl beyond the bay for herring, crabs and lobsters. Although the vessel featured here bears the romantic name β€˜Wayside Flower’, life on-board was certainly not a bed of roses: hard graft combined with the trials of a rocky, hostile and inhospitable coast meant that this was not a career choice for the faint-hearted.

        The crew of the β€˜Wayside Flower’ are dressed in a style traditional to generations of fishermen: caps, serge trousers, smocks and a thick woollen jumper known as a gansey. Often knitted by the fisherman’s mother, wife or sweetheart, each gansey had a unique pattern specific to a town, village, or family. Again, this may sound romantic, but the more practical (and darker) reason was for identification of bodies washed up on shore in the event of a shipwreck. Although rarely worn by fishermen nowadays, the gansey has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity on the East Coast; in 2015 a bronze sculpture of a young woman knitting a gansey was unveiled on Bridlington’s North Pier as a reminder of the town’s maritime past.