John May 1952
UP THE WAVENEY TO BECCLES
A talk with the last of the wherry skippers
THE NIGHT the sea married with the lake between Oulton Broad and Lowestoft, the water turned phosphorescent. They had cut the land barrier to extend Lowestoft's harbour. DogÂfish from the bay feasted off helpless perch, bream, roach and dace paralysed by the salt. Only one freshwater fish had its revenge before it died: a twenty-pound pike that swallowed a herring.
Somewhere along the shores of this Lake Lothing was the wherry Albion, the craft I was seeking. We could not take the Sea Heron through the lock from Oulton Broad to find her because Broads hire craft are forbidden the sea; their high freeboard, shallow draught and lack of ballast make them suitable only for river navigation. I had to look for the Albion by land, and was eager to see her.
"Yes, I am an old wherryman." We had met repeatedly men who said this with pride. Often they were not so old as all that. They were always ready to talk of the hundreds of sailing barges that once ploughed along every Broadland waterway winter and summer, supplying the needs of the towns and villages, and keeping the channels clear of weeds and mud by their passage.
"If you have a chance," they said, "go and talk to Jack Cates on the Albion."
Wherries no longer drive over the bleak expanse of Breydon Water in a January gale with cargoes of timber, hay or coal.
But the old trading wherry was a graceful vessel, long and shallow, that converted easily into a pleasure craft. This, with the exception of the Albion, is how it survives. It had an enormous mast, supporting a single enormous sail. The sail was black, but the top of the mast was often a brilliant green or vermilion, with a two-feet band of burnished brass beneath. Moving with sedate deceptive speed in the distance, as if through a sea of meadow grass and wild flowers, the wherry gave picturesque life to Norfolk's flat landscape, and its memory is greatly loved.
Normally the skipper had a companion-his wife, another man or a boy. They were afloat all the year and often, sailed all night as well as all day. Wind was not something to be wasted when it blew in the right direction; a head wind or a calm could mean hours laboriously pushing the wherry along with the quant pole. But a wherry could sail very close to the wind, and if the airs were light the skipper laced a "bonnet" extension to the foot of his sail so that not a puff was wasted.
I knew these things as gossip and history; I wanted to hear more at first hand. The ironworks to the left of the Lowestoft road were building a new trawler which was perched on stocks high above a little creek. Men on precarious platforms looked like flies against her huge rust-coloured hull. They made a deafening machine-gun clatter riveting her plates. It seemed hardly the place for history.
But I swung over the low railings and there, moored to a wharf only a few yards away, was the old wherry. The tide was out, she sat low with her bottom on the mud, and I had to step down to come aboard. Instead of a modern sea-going craft of iron, like the trawler, this was a wooden trading ship of the river, built at Oulton half -a-century before. And instead of the trawler's high freeboard, she had a sheerline that swept so low in the waist that when she sailed the water would ripple along her deck amidships and run out again through the scuppers.
