Trawling through my photo archives (pun accidental), I came upon this very early opus, dated September 1966. The back of the print shows it to be my 25th photograph. To put that into context, I ended up clicking the film camera shutter on almost 100,000 occasions between 1965 and 2015, while I have recorded some 40,000 iPhone images in less than five years. This effort was taken with a Kodak Bantam camera that used VP828 film, offering just eight exposures per film.
The scene is the North Wall on Grimsby Fish Docks, with GY321 Thuringia among the trawlers lined up there.
It is only today that I have delved into the Thuringia’s story. She was one of a Royal Navy order for nine Military Trawlers to fulfil minesweeping and anti-submarine duties. Constructed at the Cook Welton & Gemmell shipyard in Beverley (where vessels were launched sideways into the River Hull), she was commissioned as HMS Home Guard in 1944.
She was sold into civilian use in 1946, being acquired by Grimsby trawler owners Hellyer’s, taking the name of a previous Thuringia that was mined in May 1940.
The records suggest that the Thuringia’s distant water voyages were over at the time of my photograph. As a steam trawler, she was outmoded and uneconomical compared with her motor counterparts. She was reported as scrapped later in 1966.
I much regret not taking more photos of Grimsby’s key industry. I would not return to the North Wall until 1981, by which time Grimsby’s entire distant water trawler fleet was awaiting scrapping, as per the terms that ended the Cod Wars of the 1970s and Iceland’s extension of its territorial waters.
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