A HISTORY of WHITBY
by Dr ANDREW WHITE

Phillimore & Co Ltd, published September 2004
Hardback, 210 pp, price £16.99

Reviewed by Michael Nunn

A noted local author describes his Yorkshire roots, as well as ‘snows, yackers, cat-built barks, ploshers, luggers, and cobles'.

Dr Andrew White and his work need no introduction to readers in these parts from me. Once an undergraduate and latterly Head of the City's Museums for almost twenty years, he has contributed much of wide interest to local history over the years.

But, like my partner and I, he too is a Yorkshireman. Before moving to Lancaster we had lived in Scarborough for some six years, another sea port and holiday resort some twenty miles south of Whitby – a place we loved to visit, particularly for a day trip on the veteran pleasure boats which make the trip during the summer months.

It was thus interesting to read a history of a town we knew, and White's work offers a fine survey of some fascinating aspects of Whitby's highly unusual and distinctive history. As well as examining the development of town, its omnipresent Abbey and the trade of the sea port, White looks at some of the less obvious parts that history doesn't often reach.

And these are the bits that fascinated me.

An uncommonly-set gem
So let's start with the physical layout. The present town lies around (at the bottom of and up the sides of) a deep geological fault through which the River Esk flows into the North Sea through a north-facing harbour which was once much wider than it is now. The settlement grew by reclaiming land from the river on both sides and development spread up the steep valley sides and onto the top of the cliffs, with the Abbey and the bizarre Parish Church on the east side, and the later Georgian developments on the West Cliff.

Late growth into township
Of its pre-Domesday origins, little is known of Whitby apart from the early religious community and the Vikings. The small, separate settlements under the lee of the monastery/abbey also probably lived and worked in its service. This was a similar situation to that here in Lancaster, save that the small township served and relied on the Roman garrison in the Castle which towered above it.

Later, there was little recorded development in the area we now call Whitby until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After that relatively late and modest start, Whitby first grew significantly into an identifiable and prosperous township during the eighteenth century – not least due to the strategic position of Whitby's natural, safe and sheltered harbour – one of the few on the Yorkshire coast twixt Tees and Humber.

The sea trade
Whitby harbour, though safe and calm once inside, is not easily approached, and many vessels over the centuries have floundered in the attempt. The first records of a bridge across the harbour, linking the east and west sides of the port, cliffs and the community, date from 1327.

This natural sanctuary has been particularly useful to the coal trade – and of benefit to Whitby's economy. Before the coming of the canals with the Industrial Revolution (Whitby never had a canal – where would they put it?) and the advent of the railways after 1830, nearly all the country's coal was carried by sea. In Whitby's case, thousands of tons will have passed the port en route from the northern fields inland from Newcastle and Teesside, and south to London.

By 1702 – 1704 Whitby was "the third in order of all collier-owning ports in England.' Broadly parallel with this came the town's pre-eminence for shipbuilding from around 1650. Alongside that, many general Whitby merchants made serious fortunes as entrepreneurs, exporters and, inevitably, exploiters.

In 1792-3, Whitby was the second largest shipbuilder in England with over 11,000 tons constructed, which White thinks "quite extraordinary, considering that Whitby had so few natural advantages [except hard, Northern graft!] and had a much smaller population than its main rivals (12,215 in 1821).'

Daniel Defoe said in 1724 that Whitby "build very good ships for the coal trade, and many of them too, which makes the town very rich.' Whitby could build anything; penal ships for the colonies, fishing boats of all shapes and sizes, privateers (for early global corporate raiders) and ships specially-strengthened for the whale trade, which finally ceased in Whitby as Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.

The shipbuilding operations dried up as the nineteenth century passed, particularly with the new, larger and state-of-the-art metal-hulled ships. Whitby simply could not compete as there was no local or easy supply of iron, and the bridge over the river between the port and the shipyards, like the available land round the river basin, was just not big enough.

That industry is best recalled today in the name of another ‘local lad made good', Capt James Cook and his Antipodean exploits in HMS Endeavour of 1764. Cook, his adventures and his vessels are well documented elsewhere.

Whitby fish
Whitby's fishing industry has also been a significant source of wealth and work and well-being. The town contributed to the herring trade, and also sent its own well-constructed vessels further afield, even to Arctic waters, to tap expanding markets.

The town obviously built its own fishing boats. With their own distinctive and particular shapes, sizes and names, White discusses and illustrates some of the brigs, snows, yackers, cat-built barks, ploshers, luggers, and cobles, though a specialist maritime or dialect dictionary might help the lay reader.

An unusual town inevitably does unusual things …
Whitby, then, is not an ordinary town in so many ways. Andrew White discusses many aspects of the town's history that may seem unusual to anyone who does not know the area. Here are some of the distinctive aspects of Whitby's past which White illustrates so well:

Click here or scroll on down the page to see some more of Andrew Whites' Whitby oddities.

The first woman manager?
White explains that St Hilda (c614 - 680), the Abbess of Whitby's first monastery, called Streanaeshalch, presided over a community of both sexes of religious, and was a "Princess of the Northumbrian royal house.' She was also an efficient administrator and diplomat: she reconciled the then opposing Celtic and Roman factions within the Christian church, and chaired the Synod of Whitby in AD 664 which settled the date of Easter. No glass ceilings then – but there were no glass windows either …

The source of English Poetry
Living during Hilda's abbacy, Caedmon (fl c670) was the first recorded English poet and, some have argued, the country's first dialect writer too since there are early manuscript versions in both the Northumbrian and West Saxon dialects. Perhaps an early English example of the multilingual ‘Rosetta Stone'?

Whitby stone: a solid and durable export
Plentiful local resources of stone were useful in Whitby's fine Georgian and Victorian buildings – and the port's piers, quays and harbour. The "lower deltaic' sandstone came from "Aislaby, three miles to the south-west. The quarry here no longer functions but in its day its product were sent by sea from Whitby to build Margate and Ramsgate Piers, the foundations of London and Waterloo Bridges, Covent Garden Market and London Docks …'

Whitby Whaling
In his chapter on the town's "Lost Industries,' he describes the town's alum trade, ironstone extraction and processing and the jet industry. Whitby was also a significant participant in the Greenland whaling industry, which flourished between around 1750 and the start of Queen Victoria's reign in 1837. This was a dangerous and, in the view of many today, an unsavoury pursuit. It has been well documented and glamorised since Melville's Moby Dick appeared in 1851, but White describes the day-to-day realities of the industry, and they were far from glamorous or savoury.

Click here or scroll on down the page to see some more of Andrew Whites' Whitby oddities.

In all, this is a wonderful book. Factual, certainly – but it is more than that. White has a rare skill as a writer, to envelop the reader into the world he is describing, by a fascinating layering of narrative, diversion and anecdote; it is almost as if one were watching a film, or hearing a bardic voice (I wonder if he has lost his Yorkshire accent?).

From Whitby to Lancaster – and on to Morecambe?
But back to the review, and to Lancaster. This book shows no diminution of White's ability to educate his readers, and at the same time captivate and entertain them. He is showing no signs of stopping writing, thankfully. I would love to see him produce a similar history of Morecambe and Heysham.

It will be a very, very different story from that of Whitby, and I cannot think of anyone else I would rather see do it.

Copyright © 15 January 2005 Michael Nunn

A History of Whitby is available in Waterstones and other local booksellers (please support them!), or from the publisher's website for £15.29

The town's weekly newspaper is The Whitby Gazette

Some links to Whitbys' recent extreme weather:
In pictures: Foam covers town's streets, from the BBC, 29 January 2003:
"Streets around the harbour in the North Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby were covered in what looked like whipped cream on Wednesday. The foam-like substance was brought in on waves as the town's harbour was battered by high seas and freezing conditions.'

Parts of the town were recently (January 2005) under two feet of water as a result of the storms, freak tides and heavy rainfall across the country. A news item, with a picture, from The Whitby Gazette.

FURTHER WHITBY ODDITIES

Whitby words
Like the recent companion volume to this book, Bill Mitchell's Bowland and Pendle Hill (read my review of that here), White also has a keen ear for local dialect and terminology. To many ears, this sound more like ‘Geordie' than Yorkshire, and the local vocabulary is also distinctive. Here are a few examples, some from my own researches:

ninty – a lobster
dogegr – a small crab
spuggy – a sparrow
clamming – starving, as in very hungry
t'kin cough – whooping cough
waft – a legendary ‘doppelganger', or double

The seventeenth-century text of the local Lyke Wake Dirge (in dialect) can be seen on:
http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/
http://www.bartleby.com/101/381.html

White also describes some of the distinctive folklore and traditions of the town.

Whitby food
Another topic which is near to my heart, and which this book mentions in several places, is food – especially local food.

White thinks Whitby seems to have had a market from the Middle Ages. Certainly much dairy and other foodstuffs were grown, caught, reared and made locally. "Whitby was, in 1638, the largest shipper of butter to London with 6,566 firkins.' (a firkin, when it is not a trendy pub sign, is quarter of a barrel of beer, 9 gallons, and also 56 lbs of butter). Now there are still some decent food purveyors and shops where locally-made cheeses (try the Cothersdale) and other delicacies can be tasted.

Perhaps best known today are Whitby Kippers, and at least one traditional nineteenth-century smoke house still functions and sells the dry-cured fish today. Jack Fortunes' is profiled here.

One of the best bakers and confectioners in the North of England, with its own tea rooms, is Bothams. They make their own local specialities including tea breads, brack, and plum bread, and White points out that "Only at shops such as Bothams can you still find Japs, Turks, Ethels, Russian Slice and Ceylons …'

Traditionally in Whitby, shellfish was neither eaten nor sold, merely used for bait, White claims. What a waste! Most ‘Whitby scampi' available these days has never been anywhere near the town, although the present writer has enjoyed the local crab and lobster.

Whitby bombed
The bomb attacks and Blitzes on Britain during World War II are well known and widely documented. What is not so well known is that the North-East coast of England suffered bombardment by the Germans in 1914 at the start of World War I. As well as Whitby, which took some direct hits, Hartlepool and Scarborough were other targets.

Whitby falls into the sea
The coastline around Whitby, as along much of the Yorkshire coast, has receded dramatically over the years, since at least as far back as mediaeval times. The now-lost village of Ravenspur, north of Spurn Point near Hull, is mentioned in Shakespeare's King Richard II as the site where Bolingbroke, the future Prince Hal/Henry IV landed in 1399.

In Whitby, parts of the East cliff have continued to fall into the sea within living memory; many graves from the Abbey have been lost, along with other archaeological evidence about the religious and other settlements on the top of the cliff.

Whitby futures?
Whitby has similar problems to other seaside resorts which have seen a decline in the traditional holiday trade. White does not ignore this situation, and notes "the areas devoted to amusements in Whitby have been growing.' As well as "funfairs and coin-operated machines' (how restrained!), he finds "something more insidious' in the "shops selling gifts, sweets, etc intended solely for tourists …'

He rightly despises these and similar solely-seasonal "fripperies', but one cannot be sure whether he feels the same about the added tourism (and a Goth festival!) that the ‘Dracula heritage' has brought, or about the well-established Whitby Regatta and the Folk Festival.

He would rather allow Whitby to speak for itself:
"What [Whitby] has to offer is a solid and lasting charm, great character and a sense of rich history.'

And that is exactly what comes across very clearly indeed from this excellent book.