‘To save the industry from complete ruin’: Crisis and response in British fishing 1945-1951

Fishing is a small, complex and fragmented industry, which arguably exerts political significance disproportionate to its size. This article traces the prolonged period of depression which affected British deep-sea fishing between the wars, and then a more virulent crisis which erupted in the post-war years. It explores how the industry proved unable to respond effectively, requiring intervention from government which followed a similar pattern to that elsewhere in the economy, albeit tailored to the industry’s peculiar circumstances and idiosyncratic nature

'The want of sufficient men': Labour recruitment and training in the British North Sea fisheries, 1850-1950

Between 1815 and 1950 the British fishing industry underwent fundamental and far-reaching changes. The industry expanded rapidly in the half-century prior to the First World War, before entering a period of stagnation thereafter. The technology of fishing was transformed by the spread of trawling, and the application of steam, and later motor power to the catching sector. All of this was driven by an expansion of demand for fish, consequent upon improvements in overland transport, which saw distribution and marketing arrangements transformed. This had major implications for labour in the industry. Fishermen became more numerous, and in many cases more specialised, as technological development introduced specialists such as the engineer and wireless operator into fishing vessels' crews. The period also saw the rise of tied labour in the industry, in the form of thousands of teenaged apprentices brought in to man the North Sea trawling fleets, before apprenticeship declined in favour of more informal training arrangements. The impact of all of this was highly uneven. Some sectors of the industry were rapidly transformed, whereas others developed more slowly. The rapid growth and evolution of trawling promoted the widespread use of apprenticeship, for example, whereas concomitant developments in the herring fisheries had no such ramifications. This article seeks to provide an overview of labour recruitment and training in the British fisheries between 1815 and 1950, highlighting the scale and scope of the most important developments, and setting the best known facet of the subject, the apprenticeship system, in context

'These peaceable times are the devil': Royal Navy officers in the post-war slump, 1815-1825

© The Author(s) 2014. During the Napoleonic War, the Royal Navy grew to an unprecedented size, but with the return of peace it dispensed with the services of an also unprecedented 124,000 men. By 1818, around 90% of commissioned officers were unemployed and on half pay. Drawing on the papers of navy agent Robert Brine, as well as Admiralty and Parliamentary sources, this paper sets out the scale of the unemployment problem among commissioned officers and the effects it had upon them, and surveys the options available to erstwhile sea officers and the strategies the deployed to make a living amid the post-war slump

Apprenticed labour in the English fishing industry, 1850-1914

This thesis assesses the role of apprenticed labour in the growth and development of the English fishing industry between 1850 and 1914. Although apprenticeship is a well-known facet of the fisheries, writing on the subject has focused largely on the port of Grimsby, and on the abuses of the system that were widely publicised in the 1880s and 1890s. This study provides a national perspective, examining the institution of apprenticeship as a means of labour recruitment, training and control, and comparing apprenticeship in the fishing industry with the merchant shipping industry - where, despite the undoubted importance of apprenticed labour, very little research on the subject exists - and land-based industries, where apprenticeship offered similar advantages of training and control. It applies theories of apprenticeship developed with reference to industry ashore to explain the transformation of a classically paternalistic apprenticeship system into a means of recruiting, controlling and exploiting a large number of cheap labourers. A wide range of primary sources are used, including the Board of Trade archive and registers of apprentices, fishing vessel crew agreements, numerous Parliamentary enquiries and reports on the fishing industry and contemporary writings.Apprenticeship was an established facet of the fishing industry in the ports of Devon, the Thames and Essex. Migrants from these ports established apprenticeship in places such as Hull, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth between the 1850s and 1870s. However, rapid growth in some of these new ports, especially on the Humber, led to a concentration of cheap labour. The resultant social problems gained the system a bad reputation and resulted in legislation to bring the system under control, which also increased the costs. However, by this time demographic shifts leading to greater availability of casual labour and technological change were beginning to undermine apprenticeship, which had all but died out by 1914

Defining Successful Aging: A Tangible or Elusive Concept?

Purpose of the Study: Everyone wants to age successfully; however, the definition and criteria of successful aging remain vague for laypersons, researchers, and policymakers in spite of decades of research on the topic. This paper highlights work of scholars who made significant theoretical contributions to the topic. Design and Methods: A thorough review and evaluation of the literature on successful aging was undertaken. Results: Our review includes early gerontological definitions of successful aging and related concepts. Historical perspectives reach back to philosophical and religious texts, and more recent approaches have focused on both process- and outcome-oriented models of successful aging. We elaborate on Baltes and Baltes’ theory of selective optimization with compensation [Baltes, P. B., & Baltes, M. M. (1990a). Psychological perspectives on successful aging: The model of selective optimization with compensation. In P. B. Baltes & M. M. Baltes (Eds.), Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral sciences (pp. 1–34). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press], Kahana and Kahana’s preventive and corrective proactivity model [Kahana, E., & Kahana, B. (1996). Conceptual and empirical advances in understanding aging well through proactive adaptation. In V. Bengtson (Ed.), Adulthood and aging: Research on continuities and discontinuities (pp. 18–40). New York: Springer], and Rowe and Kahn’s model of successful aging [Rowe, J. W., & Kahn, R. L. (1998). Successful aging. New York: Pantheon Books], outlining their commonalities and differences. Additional views on successful aging emphasize subjective versus objective perceptions of successful aging and relate successful aging to studies on healthy and exceptional longevity. Implications: Additional theoretical work is needed to better understand successful aging, including the way it can encompass disability and death and dying. The extent of rapid social and technological change influencing views on successful aging also deserves more consideration

Quasi-hereditary twisted category algebras

We give a sufficient criterion for when a twisted finite category algebra over a field is quasi-hereditary, in terms of the partially ordered set of L-classes in the morphism set of the category. We show that this is a common generalisation of a long list of results in the context of EI-categories, regular monoids, Brauer algebras, Temperley–Lieb algebras, partition algebras