The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple-Trawler Disaster

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Their rebellion was in response to a triple tragedy that devastated Hull’s fishing community in three weeks at the start of 1968: in separate incidents, three trawlers were lost at sea and 58 fishermen died. His first book, The Headscarf Revolutionaries (Barbican Press, 2015) – now optioned by a major television production company – derived from a funded PhD at that university, where he taught creative nonfiction. As a depiction of human courage and the triumph of willpower, the extraordinary story of the disaster’s one survivor holds its own with Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void or any survival epic. They marched on the docks, and picketed and stormed fishing industry company offices when bosses refused to meet them.

She married Carmelo [Charlie] Bilocca (1902–1981), a Maltese sailor who worked with the Hull-based Ellerman-Wilson Line, and later as a trawlerman. I recently moved to Hull in east Yorkshire, and one of the most famous episodes of protest in the city’s history took place in 1968. On the day the book was launched in 2015, four plaques were unveiled by the Lord Mayor in Hull Maritime Museum to commemorate their campaign. Their demands included a change in the law to make it essential that every ship has a radio operator, an independent signalling system and regular communication with the mainland.

The proposal from Hull City Council and the Hull Bullnose Heritage Group was favoured by local residents after engagement between all three parties.

She was granted a meeting with Wilson: subsequently, government ministers granted all of their requests. Brian W Lavery spent 25 years in various senior roles in journalism before undertaking a first-class joint honours degree (English and Creative Writing) and a doctorate in creative writing at Hull. But weeks of only Icelandic trawlers landing fish in Hull during the bad-weather ban led to poison-pen letters being sent to Lillian and her co-fighters.

The Kingston Peridot was subsequently lost – probably on the night of 26/27 January – in icy winds and was reported as probably lost with all 20 hands on 30 January.

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. The book makes real the last days of the trawlermen, the terrible conditions they worked in, and the dramatic and energetic struggle of Lillian Bilocca for better conditions. A barrage of vicious hate mail, often from those she’d done most to help, was sent to her home and to the press. In the few weeks that I’d been freelance, pals from my previous job had played a few practical jokes on me.Quickly, Big Lil and her comrades were invited to London to present their ‘fishermen’s charter’ to the Fisheries Minister. But with the British media gripped by the story of the missing trawlers, the Headscarf Revolutionaries made it a national issue.

For some women in Hull, this was a tragedy that could have been avoided with better equipment and more stringent safety checks on the trawler ships, and better training for inexperienced crew members. 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.

She was one of the “Headscarf Revolutionaries”, the working-class Hull women who led the campaign for safety on the Trawlers and to save lives at sea.