The Mourne fleet
Submarines and silver darlings
30 th May 1918, the tide is falling, dusk is turning to night. Silvery herring rise to the surface in a shimmering shoal. Close by, something larger and duller is submerged, silently watching and waiting...
....It’s fine with a light breeze, good weather for herring for the boats of Kilkeel, Annalong and Portavogie, County Down. Sparkling Wave is the first to reach the fishing grounds, at around 5pm; Jane Gordon not long after. Honey Bee, Cyprus and St Mary arrive soon too, followed by Never Can Tell, Marianne McCrum, Glad Tidings and Seabird. Moss Rose arrives at some point; Lloyd arrives last. Mary Joseph hasn't joined them this time, hoping for a good catch somewhere further away [1] .
Mary Joseph, built in 1877 by William Paynter, Kilkeel (Courtesy of National Museums NI)
By 8.30pm the fishermen have shot their nets. The sequence of events that follows is unclear but Never Can Tell, owned by Isabella Cousins since the death of her husband in a port-based accident [2] , is the first to be sunk by UB 64. The crew are ordered to the submarine’s stern and watch as a bomb (later described by cook boy Tommy Doonan as ‘the size of a nice three quarter turnip’ [3] ), is placed in the hold. St Mary is next, sunk in the same manner. The others are sunk in turn, each watching the unfolding drama. Only Moss Rose is spared, to take crew with no small boat back to shore [4] . Initially thought lost with all hands, Mary Joseph returns home some days later to much jubilation [5] .
The Waterford Standard, 5 June 1918 (British Library Collection). This report suggests confusion surrounding the sinking, the later report from Ballynahinch it mentions is probably describing the same incident. Even today, some sources still state that Mary Joseph was lost along with the others
The positions of the fishing boats when they were sunk, according to reports in The National Archive document ADM 137/1517. Glad Tidings and Seabird reported their position only as 'the fishing grounds off Ardglass'. The red star is the position currently given for the wrecks in the UKHO (UK Hydrographic Office) dataset; the dark grey dots are other UKHO wrecks and obstructions
If we could visit the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) we’d find documents for the boats, their crew, and even their catches. We might find more on Isabella Cousins: it's rare a fishing boat was owned by a woman so that would be a story to tell [6, 7] . And as the story of the 30th May has been told before, turnip sized bombs and all, we'll follow the herring instead, to see where their silvery ripples take us…
...Atlantic herring have been fished commercially around Ireland since the 13 th century and by the 15-16 th century the area off Mourne, County Down was a primary fishing ground. Though some had already questioned the theory, in the early 20 th century it was still widely believed that herring lived under North Pole ice, migrating south in spring to spawn then returning home in autumn. It’s now understood that herring live in smaller regional populations including two in the Irish Sea: the Manx, and the Mourne [8, 9] .
Detail from an undated lithograph (Wellcome Collection)
In May 1918, as Never Can Tell and the other boats head out, the Mourne herring are gathering for summer feeding. They’re forming a glittering shoal: the weather has been calm and settled for the last few days, just as they prefer it. As dusk falls they rise closer to the surface, working together to chase and catch copepods, tiny relatives of shrimps and crabs. In turn they're pursued, not just by fishing nets, but by seabirds and seals, and other marine predators [10, 11, 12] .
By the end of the summer, however, they’ve failed to gather in any abundance and the following winter they barely gather at all. Their numbers have been declining since 1915, and even then they were far from the masses that shoaled in 1910. In 1919 and 1920 they return again by 1921 they're far, far fewer. In fact it's a terrible year, the worst since human records began [14] .
Detail from the 1921 Report on the Sea and Inland Fisheries of Ireland (Dept. of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland). Much fascinating material has been made available online by Ireland's Marine Institute/Foras Na Mara, see further reading below.
Throughout history, herring populations have experienced dramatic “boom and bust” cycles, driven by a mix of environmental factors, biological factors and overfishing. Climate change has added new complexity: global ocean surface water temperature has risen approximately 1.3°C over the past century, with an impact on the growth, reproduction, and distribution of Atlantic Herring. Increasingly common short-term and localised events such as heatwaves and storms are likely to further disrupt marine ecosystems, particularly in shallower waters such as the Irish Sea [15, 16, 17] .
Just as herring populations fluctuate, so do the numbers of people fishing for them. Following another herring collapse in the Irish Sea in the 1970s, fishing quotas and restrictions were introduced. The labour-intensive and seasonal fishing traditionally carried out by the Mourne Fleet all but died out by the 1990s, though a brief revival in the 2010s meant Mourne skiffs could be seen bobbing out to sea again, shooting their nets at dusk, just as Glad Tidings, Sparkling Wave and other boats had [18] .
Quiet day at Kilkeel Harbour (Alan Reid, 1965)
Due to their small size, and the manner of their sinking the Mourne Fleet wrecks are unlikely ever to be identified: even though we tried, using the same method we used for SS Maja . Like the wreck of SV Tommi their remains will now be habitats for marine species; maybe even descendants of the herring that escaped the nets on 30th May 1918. Even if we can’t find Sparkling Wave, Jane Gordon, Honey Bee, Cyprus, St Mary, Never Can Tell, Marianne McCrum, Glad Tidings or Seabird, however, we can at least think through them, on the wider relationships that exist between herrings, humans, and the sea.
References
[1] The National Archives ADM 137/1516 [2] Isabella Cousins story [3] Doreen McBride. 2020. German U-Boat sinks Kilkeel Fishing Fleet, April [sic] 1918 [...] . Journal of the Federation of Local History Societies (Open Access) [4] The National Archives ADM 137/1516 [5] History of Ballykinlar Camp Facebook post , January 14, 2022 [6] Public Record Office of Northern Ireland ( PRoNI ) [7] Rosalind Davies. 2001. Ships of County Down [8] M. Sinclair. 2009. Herring and ICES: a historical sketch of a few ideas and their linkages. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1652 – 1661 (Open Access) [9] Patrick Hayes. 2021. History of the Irish Herring [10] Meteorological Office London. 1918. Daily Weather reports 1st January to 30th June [11] Patrick Hayes. 2021. History of the Irish Herring [12] AFBINI. N.d. Fact sheet: Herring (Clupea harengus) [13] Talk Sea Fishing. 2021. How to catch herring [14] Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland. Reports on the Sea and Inland Fisheries of Ireland for 1918 and 1921 . Dublin: The Stationery Office [15] Trochta, J.T., Branch, T.A., Shelton, A.O., Hay, D.E. 2020. The highs and lows of herring: A meta-analysis of patterns and factors in herring collapse and recovery . Fish and Fisheries 21:639–662 (Open Access) [16] Fox, C.J., Marshall, C., Stiasny, M.H. & Trifonova, N. 2023. Climate Change Impacts on Fish of Relevance to the UK and Ireland. MCCIP Science Review 2023 [17] Wright, P.J., Pinnegar, J.K. and Fox, C. (2020) Impacts of climate change on fish, relevant to the coastal & marine environment around the UK. MCCIP Science Review 2020 [18] David Linkie. 2020. Unique Mourne herring skiff industry . Fishing News 17 September
Further reading
Foras Na Mara/Marine Institute Interactive Marine Archive Herripedia , a herring encyclopeadia Mary Joseph , National Museums NI Matt Maginnis. 2017. Mourne Men & the U-Boats, 1914-1918
