The Vanishing Fisher-Farmer Life of the Isles of Scilly

This is an article I wrote when visiting Scilly many years ago…

Surf and Turf the West Country Way

It’s difficult to be hungry where sea meets land, especially here in the West Country where fertile soils produce crops in a climate that is heated by the warm, fish-rich waters of the Gulf Stream.

Some restaurants would sum it up with the American phrase “surf ‘n’ turf” - then probably serve you fat prawns from Thailand and even fatter steaks from cattle raised in factory farms.

In the West Country the traditional surf ‘n’ turf diet was a good deal more modest - and arguably a great deal more delicious. For centuries it was one that was enjoyed by thousands of coastal folk living along the peninsula’s coasts, but nowhere was this reliance on both sea and soil more prevalent than in the Isles of Scilly.

A Conversation with a Scillonian Fisher-Farmer

The other day I visited a retired farmer-fisherman on the islands planning to talk about a ghost ship (which you can read about in the panel), but it was Brian Jenkins’ recollections of the changes in island lifestyles that made me realise he was describing an existence that has now almost entirely disappeared.

Brian Jenkins

Seasonal Living by the Tides

The beauty of the farmer-fisher lifestyle was that it dovetailed wonderfully with the seasons. In the balmy days of summer you fished for the abundant species that arrive in warm weather. Autumn storms would blow this occupation asunder, but would also hurl tons of seaweed up onto the beaches. This was a first class fertiliser and so the farmer-fisher folk would beach their boats and help spread Nature’s free gift on the salty fields. Winter was for field dressing and planting - and the very early spring they enjoy in those isles was for harvesting…

Narcissi and New Potatoes: Scilly’s Traditional Crops

In the end, it was early scented narcissi that earned the Scillonian fisher-farmer his main living – along with a few fields set aside for what were some of the most delicious early potatoes ever grown.

IF YOU ENJOY THIS POST CHECK OUT BEST WALKS IN THE ISLES OF SCILLY HERE

Crayfish, Tide-Crooks and Lost Techniques

But it was the long lost fishing techniques that Brian described which fascinated me. Take the islanders’ love for the giant crayfish of times gone by. I, alas, have never seen –let alone tasted - such a beast in all the 32 years I’ve been visiting the archipelago…

“Back in my younger days there were crayfish. Big spiky fellas – much bigger than the average lobster. Three pounds in weight,” says Brian, who nowadays has retired to the main island of St Mary’s.

“Where have they gone? We caught them. Sadly, we wiped them out,” he adds, with all the honesty of someone who is not in the least bit ashamed of the fact, but proud to have been a part of such a hard working industry.

I’d also heard – but never seen – of the use of a long, hooked, stick called a tide-crook, which was widely used among the islands for catching lobster at extremely low tides.

“Yes, I’ve used one,” said Brian, not overly enamoured with the tool. “If you get one or two, you are lucky. My father - going back to the 1920s - he had seven in one day, and that’s the most I’ve heard of in Scilly.

“You’ve got to know the holes – there’s a good one I know near Rushy Bay (on the southern point of Bryher). I came out of the Forces in ‘55 and I had four the first winter I was home out of that same hole. And it’s usually a good-sized cock lobster.

“I had one that was nine pounds and I know of two others who had nine pounders. It (the tide crook) was, say, six feet (long) and on the end it had a turned hook. Underneath (the shallow water) there would be a hollow in the rocks and if Mr Lobster was in there you’d feel him. Sometimes it will come out on the hook. You just disturb it – ‘tease’ it would be a better word - and draw ‘un out and pick ‘un up. You got to know how to pick it up and, yes, you’ve got to be careful of your toes.

Bryher in evening light

Shellfish and Seaweed: Forgotten Bounty

“Other shellfish? Cockles, yes, and we used to get scallops - but you won’t get them inshore now because we fished them all. At one time you could pick them up, but we’ve out-fished everything.

Eelgrass and the Decline of Marine Biodiversity

“Another thing that’s changed is that, in my father’s time, there was sedge, or eel grass, that used to be between Bryher and Tresco,” recalls Brian. “Anything between four and five feet tall, it was - and it formed muddy banks. That was marvellous stuff to shelter any small fish - prawns for instance - and wrasse and conger and in among it there was plaice and other things.

“They would live in that – but to the best of my knowledge there was a virus that went through it (the eel grass) right throughout the world. Now there’s only a few wispy bits left on Scilly.

Spear Fishing and the ‘Smolt’ Days

“In Augustus Smith’s time (the man who began the regeneration of Tresco in the 19th century) the islanders were having very hard times back then,” says Brian, outlining how Smith had described early fishing techniques within the isles. “He called them the ‘spear fishermen of Scilly’ – they fished, not with a hook, but with a spear 10 or 12 feet long.

“You’d go out on what the old men would call a ‘smolt’ - a calm when there’s no wind on water - and they would look down and spear plaice and even some turbot which went about in pairs as a rule. They had five days of ‘smolt’ at one time – I can’t tell you exactly what year, 1820 perhaps - and they were pretty hard up for food at that time. And they had five days and they caught nearly 10,000 flatfish in those five days.”

Prawning on the Shoreline

Prawning was another shoreline pursuit - one that Brian still practices today. “Not for Dublin Bay prawns - inshore prawns,” he tells me with some enthusiasm. “Shrimps have a spike over each eye - the prawns we catch only have one.

“With a net on a stick you walk along - you push it in front of you,” he explained when I asked how he caught the prawns. “The later in the year, the bigger they are. Then the ground seas come in October time and they move out to deep water. It (prawning) is an old Scillonian thing - and they are indeed delicious. Alfie Trenear - the undertaker chap - him and I have done a lot of it. A lot. And I should think the most we have come home with is anything up between 12 and 14 gallon.

The Grey Mullet Catches of the Sixties

“I started grey mullet fishing (inside the inter-island shallows) after I left the Forces and we did that for a few years. Still do in fact… In the Sixties we had some big catches - up to two-and-a-quarter ton. That was the biggest and the number of fish was 1,650. That was between Bryher and Tresco.

“Next week we shall start again,” Brian told me. “And now we consider 200 or 250 fish to be a nice catch.”

From Flowers to Tourism: Changing Times on Bryher

I asked Brian, who is one of the last remaining old fashioned fisher-farmers left in the isles, to describe his average year half a century ago. “In my time the flower season would start, say, a month before Christmas. That would go on through to Easter - then you’d start fishing and have your potatoes out.

“Market gardening – that’s the big difference compared to today. There were 13 viable smallholdings (on Bryher) – but that’s all gone. Finished. Nearly everybody up there now is involved in tourism.

“There were quite a few of the smaller smallholdings had dropped out when I started work in 1950. Home with my father, I was. Some fishing - some market gardening. We ought to have been called crofters because that’s what we were more than anything else.

“I suppose air travel worldwide changed it, because you could fly in flowers from Kenya or Australia or Israel or anywhere else faster than you could get them from here.

“And also the land was worn out,” sighed Brian. “Very, very tired from one crop (flowers). There was nothing else we could rotate with that was profitable.

Hand-Built Fields and the Value of Seaweed

“Potatoes? Only in small pockets. You need a sheltered field pointing south with drainage. You’ve seen the ‘green fences’ around (on Bryher) - I grew most of them with my father. Before that it was wide, open, spaces.

“Some of that my father had ‘broke’ from the downs - between 1890 and 1910 by a man called Tom Christopher. He may have been from Cornwall – he was paid £1 a week and his keep for six 12-hour days. Breaking it all by hand. He would start from gorse or whatever it happened to be, take the stones out and make up the (stone) hedges. And lot of those have never broken down from that day to this.

“We had very limited acreage and any amount of people have asked me over the years - there was always someone saying: ‘Why don’t you grow strawberries or whatever?’

“Narcissi were far more profitable than anything to do with a few veggies,” shrugs Brian. “We’d have a small amount of early potatoes - they’d occasionally pay quite well. We’d have maybe a week or fortnight’s work out of that. And I grew iris flowers – that was a very quick crop that would be about the middle of April-May. They would be a good profitable crop for, say, a couple of weeks and we’d do better out of those than all the veggies we’d ever seen.

“Seaweed? Yes indeed. The best fertiliser that has ever gone on the land. I think when I finished I had eight acres – say five – and maybe you’d have empty acre each year and I’d put a 150 loads - a ton to a load – on that field. I don’t know of any crop or plant that dislikes seaweed.”

A Lost Way of Life Remembered

Nowadays very few people harvest the seaweed, or anything else much for that matter on Scilly save for the famous scented narcissi. The lifestyle of the crofters or fisher-farmers is but a memory enjoyed only by a handful of older men and women in the isles. Like the last wisps of eel grass in the Sound, they harbour the final vestiges of another world.

Could the Fisher-Farmer Lifestyle Return?

It would be easy to dismiss the old fisher-farmer way of life as another quaint chapter in Britain's rural history, destined to sit alongside horse-drawn ploughs, village blacksmiths and steam threshing engines. Times change, after all. Nobody expects islanders to go back to collecting seaweed in wooden carts or rowing out to check lobster pots before breakfast.

Or do they?

Listening to Brian Jenkins, I couldn't help wondering whether the old Scillonian way of life might have something to teach us after all. Long before anyone had coined fashionable expressions such as "sustainability", "organic farming" or "low food miles", island families were already living them without giving it a second thought.

Nothing was wasted. Seaweed became fertiliser. Fish that couldn't be sold found their way onto the family table. Gardens produced vegetables for the kitchen and flowers for the mainland markets. If something broke, it was mended rather than replaced. There were no celebrity chefs urging people to eat with the seasons because there simply wasn't any alternative.

Today, many of those ideas are back in fashion. Farmers are rediscovering natural fertilisers. Shoppers are seeking out locally grown food. Restaurants proudly announce the name of the fisherman who landed today's catch, while visitors happily pay extra for produce that has travelled a few hundred yards instead of a few thousand miles.

Of course, nobody imagines that the Isles of Scilly will ever return to the days when almost every family combined fishing with farming. Tourism has become the islands' economic lifeblood and few young people could make a living from such a hard and uncertain existence. Brian himself would probably smile at the idea.

Yet, in quieter ways, perhaps the tradition is already returning. Small producers are flourishing. Fresh seafood remains at the heart of island menus. Honesty stalls brim with vegetables, eggs and homemade preserves. Vineyards, flower growers, artisan distillers and family-run farms are proving that there is still room for people who work with the land and sea rather than against them.

Perhaps that is the real legacy of the fisher-farmers. Not that we should try to recreate their lives exactly, but that we should remember the values that shaped them: self-reliance, resourcefulness and a profound respect for the seasons.

As I left Bryher, I found myself thinking that while the old way of life may never fully return, its spirit never really disappeared. You can still catch glimpses of it in a lobster pot hauled ashore, a bunch of scented narcissi, or a handful of seaweed drying on a granite wall. If you know where to look, the past is still quietly going about its business.

The annual Christmas tree is delivered to the folk of Bryher

FAQ

What was a fisher-farmer in the Isles of Scilly?

A fisher-farmer combined fishing with small-scale farming, adapting work to the seasons. Summer was spent catching fish and shellfish, while winter focused on growing flowers, potatoes and vegetables, often using seaweed as a natural fertiliser.

Why did the fisher-farmer lifestyle disappear?

Cheaper imported flowers, changes in farming, tourism becoming the islands' main industry and the decline of traditional fishing all contributed to the disappearance of this way of life.

Why was seaweed so important?

Storm-cast seaweed was collected from beaches and spread on fields as a rich organic fertiliser. It helped produce famous early potatoes and scented narcissi while improving the naturally sandy soils.

What crops were traditionally grown in the Isles of Scilly?

The islands became famous for early narcissi, daffodils and exceptionally early potatoes, made possible by the Gulf Stream's mild climate and generations of careful cultivation.

What happened to the eelgrass around the Isles of Scilly?

Extensive eelgrass beds once sheltered fish, prawns and other marine life. Disease and environmental change caused major declines, affecting local marine ecosystems and traditional fisheries.

Can you still see traditional fishing in the Isles of Scilly?

Yes. Inshore fishing remains an important industry, although today's fisheries are carefully managed for sustainability and only a handful of people still remember the old fisher-farmer way of life.