Yvonne Blenkinsop, who has died aged 83, was one of four charismatic fishermen’s wives who transformed the safety of UK trawlers in 1968 with a barnstorming campaign. Their grief and outrage after the loss of three Hull ships and 58 crew in less than a month struck a nerve in public opinion, winning reforms that management and politicians had fenced over for years.
The Vietnam war was driven off newspaper front pages as the women and their supporters woke Britain up to the cost in human lives of the cosy national favourite, fish and chips. Labour’s future deputy leader, John Prescott, then a young seamen’s union official, helped them make a giant wood-and-cardboard cod on wheels, smeared with blood-red paint to drive the message home.
A fish filleter, Lillian “Big Lil” Bilocca, was the frontwoman for the quartet; Mary Denness was a clever and determined skipper’s wife; and Christine Smallbone, later Jensen, was a formidable committee woman and a match for the then prime minister, Harold Wilson. Blenkinsop was equally can-do – she wrote down 27 crucial safety measures soon after hearing of the first sinking, on 11 January 1968, when the St Romanus went down in a North Sea storm with all 20 crew members.
She also brought a little stardust and lot of know-how to the campaign from her work as a cabaret singer, Yvonne the Golden Girl with the Golden Voice. It was her sound system the women used when they held a packed meeting near Hull docks before storming the trawler company offices, picketing the quays and raising 10,000 signatures on a Fisherman’s Charter that they took to London and a welcome from respectful crowds.
Meanwhile, the Kingston Peridot had sunk near Iceland on 27 January, probably overwhelmed by iced-up rigging, and the Ross Cleveland capsized on 4 February in hurricane-force winds and blizzards as she sought shelter in an Icelandic fjord. Other ships tried to help in vain and two more trawlers sank nearby, one Icelandic, whose crew all died.The last message from the Ross Cleveland’s skipper Phil Gay, Smallbone’s older brother, read: “I am going over. We are laying over. Help me. I am going over. Give my love and the crew’s love to the wives and families.”
These sledgehammer blows to the tight community of fishing families on Hessle Road in Hull shook a long-standing fatalism about the toll of the sea, but the women still faced resentment locally from those who thought that they were endangering jobs. Bilocca kept a file of poison-pen letters and was sacked and blacklisted. Blenkinsop was punched in the face at the height of the campaign when she took her husband out to a local restaurant to celebrate his birthday.
Undeterred, they worked as a team, never fell out and knew they had won after six weeks when the Golden Voice asked JPW Mallalieu, minister of state at the Board of Trade: “Are you going to do something for us, petal?” and he said yes. Measures including radio operators on all ships, extra crew training, better safety equipment, more accurate weather forecasting and a mother ship with hospital facilities for each fishing fleet were agreed after two hours, and 88 improvements became law.
The women’s skill lay in seeing that the government had countless duties and concerns, but fishing safety had to be made No 1 for as long as it took to drive the reforms through. The miners, whose industry was much less dangerous in terms of lives lost, had shown the way, but the campaigners also had ingrained experience from juggling duties at home.
Blenkinsop was 30 at the time, with four children; she had taken charge of five siblings at the age of 16 when her father, a trawlerman, had a fatal heart attack at sea, beyond medical help. Her mother later collapsed from nervous exhaustion that had its origins in the Hull blitz. Multi-tasking was second-nature to Blenkinsop and she combined her family life with her work in cabaret, where her cheerful candour was as potent as her voice and looks.
She was born, as Yvonne Marie Horsfield, and brought up in Hessle Road and, like the other women, played her part in less dramatic campaigns to improve road safety and local living conditions. After the heady drama of the “headscarf revolutionaries”, as the women were called in the media (although Blenkinsop’s pile of golden hair defied any scarf), she kept in touch with the fishing industry and safety issues, as well as a growing family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was consulted by the Marconi company when radio operating was standardised after the campaign.
She enjoyed the increasing interest in the campaigners’ shared story over the years and the diligent work in making it more widely known by the campaigner Ian Cuthbert and author Brian W Lavery, and the playwright and actor Maxine Peake (whose play The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca was staged at the Hull Guildhall in 2017).
Blenkinsop experienced ill health in her later years, but went in person with all her trademark cheerfulness to a grand ceremony in 2018 when she became the third woman in 130 years to be given the freedom of the city of Hull. She was equally chuffed to switch on the city’s Christmas lights.
Her husband, John Blenkinsop, died in 2004. She is survived by her children, Yvette, Brian, Colette and Jonmarie, 10 grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
• Yvonne Blenkinsop, fishing safety campaigner, born 19 May 1938; died 24 April 2022
• This article was amended on 6 May 2022. A previous version described Ian Cuthbert as an author, and referred to Brian W Lavery, author of The Headscarf Revolutionaries, as Brian Lavery.
