I remember Big Lil and the other women of Hessle Road who challenged the establishment to get better safety on trawlers(some didn't even have a radio operator) very well. At that time, in the late 60s, I was a teacher who worked down Hessle Road, Hull. Hessle Road was the heart of the fishing community.
Often a trawler went to sea in Icelandic waters for 3 weeks, and then the crew came home for two weeks off. On one particular occasion, a girl in my class Susan ******, aged 10, told me that her Dad was coming back from a trip that weekend, and she was getting ready to see him again. Unfortunately she never saw her dad again, as he was one of those missing on the St Romanus, the first of the three trawlers to sink, almost certainly due to ice accumulating on the deck and rigging during that terrible January/February. It was these three sinkings which led to Lilly Bilocca and a group of other women from Hessle Road challenging the ship owners on their abysmal safety record, and it was because of the stand and the publicity it made at the time, that the government brought in new measures which were so sorely needed in the fishing industry.
Sad to say, of course, is that later the Hull fishing industry was much reduced by the Icelandic cod wars in the 1970s.
