The Yorkshire Evening Post Thursday 23rd July 1925
A TALE AT THE
JOURNEY’S END
THE STORMS OF ROBIN
HOOD’S BAY
When the famous
outlaw who gave his name to Robin Hood’s Bay was roaming in the picturesque spot
near Whitby, the Storms must have been carrying on their trade as fishers of the
sea. For Storm is a name that has been known in Robin Hood’s Bay for centuries.
The only native fishermen there now bear that name, and Captain Jacob
Storm, local historian, poet, wood carver, artist, and pedigree hunter, at 88 is
one of the village’s oldest inhabitants.
“Why do I hunt
pedigrees?” said Captain Storm. “Why, because it fascinates me, and the more you
get into it the more you want to get on. I want to know what the folk I sprang
from were like, and so for years I have been investigating records and parish
records in Robin Hood’s Bay and up and down the country, and so far I have
traced the Storms back to 1300. There I found one of my ancestors was taking a
deer from Pickering Forest. After a
time the justices called on him to appear before them, but I suppose he thought
it would be a hanging matter, so he didn’t turn up. His father, therefore had to
pay the piper - but he paid with
his money and not with his neck.
Now it has taken
some years to supply the table from then until now, but you will find the Storms
associated with the sea and with fish down the centuries.
Historians seem to have given Robin Hood’s Bay little consideration as a
fishing town though in the sixteenth century it was described by one as a
‘fishing townlet of twenty bots with a dok or boom a mile long’, and in 1631 the
inhabitants successfully petitioned the county authorities for help to repair
the road which hindered the fishing
‘ the whole country being prejudiced thereby’.
In the parish
registers of 1686 and 1690 among
those lost at sea were four Storms, and direct evidence is furnished that they
had large fishing boats. I have heard my father talking of fishing in later days
when the fish was carried by pannier-men to Thornton Dale, Pickering and York,
and when carts came into vogue a spare horse
was taken to help them up Saltersgate Brow”.
HOW THE WOMEN
WORKED
“All the unsold
fish was cleaned and dried in the sun and all but skate was sold to northern
seaports for ship use, and the fish livers were converted into oil for domestic
uses. The womenfolk did most of the shore work, such as gathering bait, baiting
lines, and spreading nets and sails in the fields, and were noted for their
cleanly habits and stately gait which much exercise and the carriage of burdens
on their heads gave them.
But when the
railway came it was the beginning of the end of our fishing. Now the native
fishermen are represented vy a family of Storms who combine crab and lobster
catching with lifeboat work, and the inhabitants often have to be contented with
fish imported form Whitby, Scarborough or elsewhere.”
Captain Storm puts
the decline of fishing at the bay
down to the mercantile marine in which the ambitious had a better outlook; to
the extension of the railway system and to the change of weather conditions .