Pilchard, tin and tourists: the shifting foundations of Cornish cultures and economies
By Charlie Standen, Third year History
Historically, the fishing industry has proved an economic bulwark to the Cornish economy. Though not as lucrative as tin mining, fishing (especially for pilchard) provided a great many jobs in coastal areas such as Newlyn and St Ives. The heyday of this industry lasted from the mid-eighteenth century up until the mid-nineteenth. Much pilchard, of which sardine is a variety, was smoked and sold to Italy: an avid consumer of this high-quality product. The advent of new innovations however, most obviously the motorboat, disfavoured small boat fishing and demanded a streamlining of labour which caused the local industry to wane. The growing competition from pilchard canneries in British Colombia and the disdain of Cornish fishermen at the prospect of modernising, only served to make the decline sharper.
Government initiatives, such as small loan schemes, helped to keep fishing villages afloat into the early-twentieth century. With growing concerns over the prospect of war, fisherman were supported for they provided both a secure domestic food source and an able hand should the Navy have to call on them. Yet this period was short-lived. Competition from abroad became dominant and fishermen left Cornish villages such as Mevagissey en masse. At a similar time, the tin mining industry also slowed to a halt, with mines closing across the county. In 1998, outside the newly closed South Crofty mine, a graffiti artist poignantly displayed the lyrics of the popular Cornish folk song:
Cornish lads are fishermen,
Cornish lads are miners too,
But when the fish and tin are gone,
What are the Cornish boys to do?
The answer was of course tourism. Tourists, or ‘emmets’ as the less hospitable locals refer to them, are now the backbone of the Cornish economy. Kim Conchie, CEO of Cornwall’s Chamber of Commerce, stated in 2021 that this seasonal industry comprised a third of the county’s GDP. The industry is by no means new. Invalids has long found the climate favourable and the Napoleonic Wars brought on a spike in domestic holidaying attracting a plethora of newcomers into Cornwall.
Furthermore, with the railway reaching Cornwall by 1859, the crowds grew and grew as health and bathing resorts cropped up in Perranporth, Bude, Porthleven and other scenic areas along the coastline. Famous writers and artists such as John Betjeman and Daphne du Maurier moved to Cornwall and hailed its beauty which inspired another strain of cultural tourism. Nowadays, second homes and Airbnb residences are a prominent feature of Cornish property market and seasonal hospitality jobs are to be found everywhere.
Although Cornwall’s economic landscape has changed, its attachment to fishing has not. Take the Newlyn School of Art which through the twentieth century immortalised the noble work of the fishermen in works such as Walter Langley’s Between the Tides. Moreover, the Falmouth Oyster Festival or Newlyn Fish Festival are still popular local events. For the Cornish, fishing is profoundly romantic. The fisherman is immortalised as the embodiment of a masculinity better ascribed to the nineteenth century: frugal, hardy, principled, and ultimately self-sacrificing. The work of the fisherman is physically and mentally taxing and its end is to keep locale’s belly full. There is something noble in this that plays, even now, on our latent Christian sentiment and our nostalgia regarding these once tightknit communities.
Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film, Bait, focuses on this relationship between the economic and the cultural in Cornwall. It depicts two brothers of a fishing family who have had to sell their family home in order to ward off bankruptcy. Martin remains a fisherman, even when he is without a boat and has to revert to the basic and inefficient method of onshore seine fishing, essentially putting a net on the beach and trapping fish under it, and resents the growing influence of the tourists and second homeowners. His brother Steven lacks Martin’s obstinacy and uses their father’s boat to take tourists on days out along the coast. Martin is the romantic, Steven the practical. Martin stands in the face of the inevitable. He refuses to change, he lives off of nothing, he resents all that is ‘posh’ and rues the ‘modernising’ changes made to his own house by the second homeowners and refers to their nautical-chic décor as resembling a ‘bleddy sex dungeon’.
His resistance is founded upon tradition. The act of fishing itself is a confrontation with the changes that surround him. Starting up the boat in the morning affronts the holidaymaker who wants to lie in. Parking his car by the harbour spoils the views of the terraced holiday homes. His steadfastness in opposing change renders his life near impossible but he persists through the inspiration he takes from his family’s fishing tradition and his affection for the community he grew up in; in his eyes, the real community. Thus, the film aptly demonstrates the power of tradition in aiding local resistance in the face of socioeconomic change.