He was knocked unconscious, and was pulled into the boat’s liferaft by 18-year-old deckie John Barry Rogers as it fell from the sinking vessel. It’s not necessarily wrong, but there are lots of commas in places where I wouldn’t put them, which I found distracting. Lavery describes a very British rebellion, with that curiously British hostility towards political thinking.

Whether describing how the ventilation cowls on trawlers had to be coated with grease as weather protection, or the exact process of cod skinning, Lavery transports us to an unforgiving world of hard labour and macho conservatism. The day after the loss of the third trawler, with the help of John Prescott and the massive media coverage this disaster was getting (this knocked the Vietnam War off the front pages), they took their campaign to Westminster and met the minister for agriculture and fisheries and over night those four local women have become legends in Hull forever. She started with a petition and this journey takes her Headscarf Revolutionaries right to the doors of Parliament.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. With overwhelming support from residents within the flats, the three housing blocks will honour the courageous women who never gave up their battle to make the fishing industry safer for fishermen in Hull and all over the country. In December 2013 he wrote and presented Courage and Effect for BBC Radio 4 on their Four Thought series, drawn from the subject matter of this book.

When the sinking of the Ross Cleveland, skippered by 41-year-old Phil Gay, was announced, the bosses, who had earlier snubbed the women, now wanted to meet. He reveals that despite the grief and devastation at the catastrophic loss of so many fathers, brothers and sons, there was an extraordinary spirit of resilience amongst the young wives and mothers. But in the 1970s the Hull fishing industry fell into rapid decline with the Cod Wars and sadly the old fishing industry disappeared. It shares 1968 with Made in Dagenham, and the ruthless spirit of women determined to change industry. Their campaign captured the public imagination and shamed bosses and government into immediate action.The women's campaign was one of the biggest and most successful civil action campaigns of the 20th century. Listen to Brian tell something of the story, with a particular take on what the tale says about journalism, on his BBC Radio Four Thought piece.

I am the son of a former Hull fisherman and was a PC working a Hessle Road beat at the time of the loss of these boats (and others) and met Big Lil. Peart and Mallalieu were told by prime minister Wilson, who was in America, that the women were to be helped as much as possible. But out of necessity there had grown strong social networks of solidarity amongst the women whose husbands, sons and fathers were out on the trawlers, and this existing culture within the community allowed many women to be quickly galvanised into action when a set of tragedies unfolded in January and February 1968. Rather than being organised into the National Union of Seamen like the cargo and passenger ships in the port, the trawlermen were in the TGWU, which did not want to push measures that might reduce the share of the catch that crew members got. Most of the men in my family worked as trawler men and I grew up in the Hessle Road fishing community until going away to Plymouth to join the Royal Navy as my father Barry did not want me to go on trawlers and always said it was a life not fit for a dog.These are minor issues in what is otherwise an excellent book, and I guess it isn’t Lavery’s fault that I am quite pedantic when it comes to grammar and style; I blame it on all the undergraduate marking I do. For me, their true legacy is the innumerable people here today who might not have been but for their campaign. But it was a powerful action from the heart that caught the imagination of the world and shamed an industry and a government into action. Bilocca received death threats from some of the trawler owners and telegrams telling her not to interfere in men's work.