Tag Archives: Port of Whitby

Honouring Whitby’s first female skipper Dora Walker

She was the first woman to fly as a passenger on a plane, and 11th in Britain to drive a car. When her brothers went to war, she followed to the frontline. And when she was told she needed sea air, she defied tradition to become the North East’s first female skipper, sailing the seas with a pistol on her hip and an Army issue tin hat. More than three decades after her death, Whitby Civic Society is to remember skipper Dora Walker, author and museum curator, with a blue plaque to honour her remarkable feats. >click to read< 08:26

Whitby’s trawlermen urge the government to stand firm in the ongoing Brexit fishing rights negotiations

Richard Brewer has fished out of Whitby for decades. In the last 22 years he has had his son by his side, also called Richard. During those years both say they have seen the destruction of the British fishing industry, which they now want back. Indeed Richard Jr. said “when I was at school this harbour had more than 20 trawlers, now there’s only one… ours. That can’t be right.” His father has always felt that the fishing industry was “sold down the river” when Britain first entered the EU and he blames the European quota system for ruining the sector. Video, >click to read< 14:52

Fishermen ‘betrayed’ after Brexit talks on policy end in stalemate

Richard Brewer is a fifth-generation fisherman who has worked on the seas for more than 40 years. Today his trawler, the White Heather VI, is the last fishing boat left in the now eerily quiet Whitby harbour on the Yorkshire coast. “We used to be a big white fish port, it was a hive of activity, you could have come down here just six or seven years ago and you could barely move for all the forklift trucks shifting fish. Now you’ve just got a few lobster pots,” says 64-year-old Brewer. Britain’s fishing industry had been struggling to survive, and its last hope, according to most of the nation’s fishermen, was Brexit. >click to read<14:49