In the winter of 1968, after three trawler tragedies claimed 58 fishermen’s lives during three storm-lashed weeks, a group of women took to Hull docks in grief and outrage.
Among the leaders of the protest was Yvonne Blenkinsop, a striking 27-year-old cabaret singer whose trawlerman father had perished at sea four years earlier. Like everyone else in Hull, she’d had enough of fathers, husbands and sons being sacrificed for trawler companies’ profits.
“I’d been awake for nights writing down a list of how to improve the safety on the ships,” Yvonne, the last surviving ‘ Headscarf Revolutionary ’ told me in 2017. “The sea always takes its own, but you can do your best to make people safe.”
