The Tracing Paper

John Davies was sorting the morning’s catch in the yard outside his boiling house. The sun high in the sky, John had been up since 4am, managing a difficult morning of crew and van problems. But he was happy to talk about his trade as he carefully checked each crab, all the while chatting with passers-by, overseeing the boiling and cleaning operations and taking note of orders for the shop and other customers.

Crab fishing

John goes out most mornings before dawn to empty around a third of the seven or eight hundred pots that he works. Both he and his father now use catamarans rather than the traditional clinker-built boats, simply because they’re faster. They are also replacing the old-fashioned hooped pots with a more modern square type.

The newer pots have the same funnelled entrances that the crabs find easy to enter but difficult to leave, but an extra inner chamber from which they’re even less likely to escape. The pots are tied together in lines – “shanks” – and marked by buoys. The shanks had once to be hauled in by hand but are now lifted mechanically. Each pot is emptied of its crabs and re-baited with white fish.

A lot of sorting is done at sea, as only a fifth of the crabs are large enough to land. The numerous juveniles are thrown back into the sea alive, to grow on. With virtually no wastage, this is one of the most sustainable ways of fishing – one reason why crab stocks seem to be holding up better than those of white fish and other shellfish.

Another reason, John speculates, is that the decline in other fish stocks means fewer predators for the very young, vulnerable, crabs. In twenty years of fishing, this is the best start to the season that he’s seen.

The great skill of the crab fisher lies in managing his pots well, knowing where to place them and how frequently each needs checking. With the onset of the new season, usually in March, the crabs are found close to the shore, almost up to the low-tide mark. This year, the warmer water brought them in by mid February.

The peak season lasts through to the autumn, with a lull in July and August when the crabs are breeding and shedding their shells. By going several miles out to the deeper waters near the shipping lanes, John is able to keep fishing all through the winter. In high summer, when the crabs aren’t so abundant, he’ll also catch lobsters, baiting the pots appropriately.

Work on land

Once landed, there is important work to be done to ensure crabs in top condition for eating. The crabs are sorted again and some discarded or sent to the factory for processing. If the weather forecast is bad, some will be kept alive for up to four days to ensure a fresh supply. The others are immediately washed, soaked and boiled on site. Boiled for 25 minutes, they are washed again and ready for sale.

A lot of John’s catch is sold through the family shop, where Julie prides herself on offering the best crabs possible, both dressed and in the shell, and always freshly boiled that morning. The dressing is done beautifully, with a perfect balance of the sweet white meat and richer, more flavoursome brown.

The peculiarity of Cromer

Cromer crabs are smaller than those from other parts of the country, but far sweeter and meatier. Like other British crabs they belong to the species Cancer pagurus and no one seems quite sure what makes them different. The seabed is important, being a combination of sand, chalk and flint, with no mud to taint the crabmeat. Crabs here are also slower growing, moulting only once a year and so fuller in their shells.

It is refreshing to find a seaside town in Britain where the local catch is revered. All too often, the menus of fishing towns are devoid of everything but endless intensively farmed salmon, trucked hundreds of miles. The people of Cromer fully appreciate the value of their superb crab and there’s plenty to be found amid the colourful rock and oily chips.

The Davies’ fish shop is a temple to fine seafood – with excellent King’s Lynn shrimps and wet fish from Lowestoft as well – and there are numerous stalls and counters with ranks of freshly boiled and dressed crabs all over the town. With crab, freshness is vital, and you can’t beat the sweet, plump crabs of the morning catch in Cromer.

On grey winter days, Cromer is as bleak as any remote North Sea town, stuck between the low, leaden sky and the brown, threatening sea. Wind and waves blow in from the north, a constant reminder that there is nothing but ice and water between here and the pole. “Going to the edge”, an East Anglian expression for visiting the coast, is never more appropriate. The fragility of the land is tangible and one thinks of how Shipden, a village just north of where Cromer stands today, vanished into the sea in the 14th century. At the end of the pier, the lifeboat house occupies a lonely, storm-battered position.

In summer, when the sun shines, the town is transformed. On hot days the streets are awash with chips and candyfloss; a procession of families armed with colourful buckets and windbreaks wends its way from cliff-top to beach. In 1816 the town was commended in Jane Austen’s Emma; “Perry was a week at Cromer once, and he holds it to be the best of all the sea-bathing places”. But it was over 50 years later, with the arrival of the railway, that the town boomed as a fashionable resort and sprouted neo-gothic hotels atop the cliffs.

The Devil’s Throat

Daniel Defoe visited in 1722, before bathing was fashionable, and the sea simply a two-faced menace to shipping and source of food. He was particularly taken up with the terrible events of 1692, when 200 empty coal ships set out from Yarmouth on a fair wind. A fierce storm blew up as they reached Cromer Bay, otherwise known as The Devil’s Throat. Some were able to turn back or reach the relative safety of the Lynn Deeps, but over 140 were blown onto the shore and wrecked. Along with laden colliers heading south and a few corn ships from Wells and Lynn, Defoe reckoned over 200 ships and 1000 lives were lost in “that one miserable night”.

Defoe recounts this tale and says of Cromer, “I know nothing it is famous for (besides it’s being thus the terror of the sailors) except good lobsters, which are taken from that coast in great numbers”. Cromer has thankfully never witnessed another tragedy on the scale of that night, but is still known both for her treacherous seas and excellent crustaceans, these days more often crabs than lobsters.

For the past 200 years, when ships have come into trouble in the Devil’s Throat, the town’s lifeboat has been on hand to save lives. The volunteers that man the lifeboat are those who know the sea best – fishermen who earn their livings from crab, but who more than repay their debt to the sea by going out in the worst conditions to rescue the its victims. Both are callings that often pass from father to son; an intimate understanding of both the bounty and danger of the sea flows in their blood. The Davies are perhaps the most prominent sea-faring family and once provided almost the entire crew of the lifeboat. After eight generations, they’re still manning the lifeboat and bringing in crab.

Henry Blogg and the lifeboat men of Cromer

Most revered of all lifeboat men was Henry Blogg, coxswain from 1902 to 1947, and Davies in all but name. He is said once to have driven his lifeboat over the deck of the sinking barge Sepoy, allowing the crew to leap from the rigging to safety. On another occasion he and his crew rowed three hours against the wind to reach the Greek steamer, Pyrin. On return to shore they learnt that another ship was going down and, unable to launch, the crew waded out with arms linked to rescue the survivors. In these changeable seas, lives have often been lost within yards of the shore.

Blogg was followed as coxswain by his stepson, Henry “Shrimp” Davies; Shrimp, in turn, by his cousin, Richard Davies. Richard still fishes for crab, along with his son, John, who first went out in a crab boat aged three and is now second coxswain on the lifeboat. Otherwise a hard-working fisherman, he is up most days before dawn to check his pots. John’s mother, Julie, runs the excellent family fish shop on Garden St, where crabs, of course, have pride of place.

In the 1970s, Sally Festing – compiling her record of the North Norfolk fishing communities, Fishermen – tracked down Shrimp Davies as he hired out deckchairs on the beach, another traditional occupation of the fishermen. He told her how little crab fishing had changed through the decades, besides a decline in catches and fishermen. There were once more than 50 crab boats working from the east beach at Cromer; today there are just a handful laid up by the old lifeboat slipway. Almost 30 years on, there is still little change and, encouragingly, the decline seems to have turned around.

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