[BITList] For those in peril on the sea.

[John Feltham]

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Bilocca  [née Marshall],  Lillian  [Lil]  (1929-1988), trawler safety campaigner, was born in a 'two-up, two-down' at 7 Welton Terrace, Wassand Street, Hull, Yorkshire, in the city's Hessle Road fishing community, on 26 May 1929, the eldest of four daughters of Ernest Marshall, a trawlerman and formerly a Royal Navy engineer, and his wife, Harriet, nee Chapman. Her education at the Daltry Street junior school, Hull, ended aged fourteen and she became a cod skinner at a local fish processing firm. Like her peers she went from being a seafarer's daughter to a seafarer's wife and later a seafarer's mother. She had two children-Ernest (b. 1946) and Virginia (b. 1950)-with Carmelo [Charlie] Bilocca (1902-1981), a Maltese merchant sailor with the Hull-based Ellerman-Wilson Line, who settled in the city and later worked as a trawlerman. The family lived in a terraced house in Coltman Street, Hull.

My brother Mike and I used to walk down Coltman Street to the Hessle Road Baths [indoor swimming pool] when we were young lads in the late 1940s.  John f.

Early in 1968 Lillian Bilocca became a household name as the impromptu leader of a 'wives' army' fighting for better safety at sea following the Hull triple trawler disaster. Within a month, fifty-eight men from three Hull trawlers lost their lives in ferocious north Atlantic seas. The St Romanus sank with all twenty hands off the Norwegian coast on 11 January 1968, followed by the Kingston Peridot with twenty hands off Iceland on 26 January, and the Ross Cleveland, also off Iceland, in hurricane-force winds and blizzards, on 4 February, when one man (the mate, Harry Eddom) out of the crew of nineteen survived the sinking. The St Romanus had no radio operator yet this was not illegal. There were no lifelines or adequate safety rails. Any protective or safety clothing was to be bought by the men. Few did this. The Standard Mortality Rate for UK fishermen was seventeen times that of the ordinary worker and more than five times that of the next most dangerous job-coal mining. Trawling was still governed by the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, under which men could be fined or even jailed for missing work.

After the St Romanus and the Kingston Peridot had been declared lost and before the fate of the Ross Cleveland was known, Bilocca and others formed the Hessle Road women's committee and gathered thousands of signatures demanding better safety. Her friend Christine Smallbone organized a meeting at a local community hall on 2 February, attended by more than 300 women. In her fish worker's headscarf and apron, Bilocca addressed the women: 'Right lasses, we're here to talk about what we are going to do after the losses of these trawlers. I don't want any of you effin' and blindin'. The press and TV are here' (private information; Hull Daily Mail, 3 Feb 1968; Russell, 30). Not mollified by a union official's announcement that ministers in Harold Wilson's Labour government would meet a deputation of them in London the following week, Bilocca led the 'headscarf army' in a march on the owners' offices to demand better safety measures. The owners of the lost trawlers refused to meet them. On 3 February Bilocca and a small group of women tried to stop the St Keverne leaving dock. Under the erroneous impression that no radio operator was present, she attempted to board it. Photos of the 17 stone housewife struggling with police made headlines.

On 5 February one of the largest trawler owners met Bilocca and the other leaders of the trawlermen's wives, Mary Denness, Yvonne Blenkinsop, and Christine Smallbone, and reached agreement on a programme of safety measures. Later that day, news of the loss of the Ross Cleveland, skippered by Smallbone's brother, reached Hull. Bilocca's son, Ernie, was a deckhand under the Hull skipper Len Whur, of the Kingston Andalusite, who saw the Ross Cleveland go down. Grief-stricken, Christine Smallbone remained in Hull as Bilocca, Denness, and Blenkinsop went to London on 6 February to meet Fred Peart, the minister of agriculture, and J. P. W. Mallalieu, minister of state at the Board of Trade. The women presented a petition with 10,000 signatures and the fishermen's charter of safety demands drawn up by the Hessle Road women's committee. Bilocca had told the press she would march on Downing Street or even 'that Harold Wilson's private house' if she was ignored (Hull Daily Mail, 6 Feb 1968; private information). An immediate result was a ban on fishing off north-west Iceland until the weather improved.

Dubbed Big Lil, Bilocca was lionized and patronized in equal measure as a modern Boudicca and music-hall stereotype 'northern battleaxe'. She received poison pen letters and death threats as men were laid off during the fishing ban, while Icelandic trawlers continued to land fish in Hull. She was accused of putting jobs at risk and 'interfering in something she knew nowt about'  (Hull Daily Mail, 13 Feb 1968). Her popularity fell rapidly following a TV appearance on the Eamonn Andrews Show broadcast on 11 February 1968. During banter with the show's host she was asked what fishermen did when not at sea. She quipped in her broad accent: 'The married ones come home and take out their wives, then go to the pubs. The single 'uns go wi' their tarts'  (private information, M. Denness). In Hessle Road, 'tart' simply meant girlfriend, but her use of the otherwise derogatory term created an audible gasp in the television studio. She was dropped from the women's committee. On 19 February she lost her job with a firm of Wassand Street fish merchants, not having reported for work for three weeks during her campaign. The trawler owners thought her a dangerous nuisance and some of her peers thought she was 'showing up' their community. Many of the men thought the women had made their point and 'should get back to being wives'  (private information, M. Denness).

The 'headscarf protestors' had nevertheless succeeded in capturing the public imagination and shaming the industry and the government into immediate action. Over the following weeks the government forced owners to launch an interim 'control ship' to operate off Iceland. A committee of inquiry into trawler safety, chaired by Admiral Sir Deric Holland-Martin, was appointed on 5 March 1968. It issued an interim report in August 1968 and final report and recommendations in July 1969. All the demands of the fishermen's charter were enacted, many before the inquiry, the remainder soon after.

Bilocca took two years to find work, and had various menial jobs for the remainder of her life. Her final job was working in the cloakroom of a Hull nightclub. After Charlie Bilocca's death she moved to the Thornton estate, Hull, and on 24 May 1985 she married Anthony Colby Ashton (b. 1944), paint sprayer. They lived at Sledmere Grove, Hull. She died from peritoneal cancer, at the Hull Royal Infirmary, on 3 August 1988. In 1990 Hull city council placed a plaque on the site of the old Victoria Hall, inscribed: 'In recognition of the contributions to the fishing industry by the women of Hessle Road, led by Lillian Bilocca, who successfully campaigned for better safety measures following the loss of three Hull trawlers in 1968.'

Brian W. Lavery 

Sources  Hull History Centre, Hull Daily Mail archive + The Times (3 Feb 1968); (6 Feb 1968); (7 Feb 1968); (9 Feb 1968); (20 Feb 1968); (24 July 1969); (8 Aug 1988) + The Guardian (13 Sept 1988) + M. Proops, 'The real Big Lil', Daily Mirror (8 Feb 1968) + R. Creed, Turning the tide (1998) + A. Gill, Superstitions: folk magic in Hull's fishing community (1993) + A. Gill, Good old Hessle Road (1990) + Final report of the committee into the inquiry into trawler safety, cmnd. 3773, HMSO (1969) + S. Russell, Dark winter: the story of the Hull triple trawler disaster (1997) + J. Tunstall, Fishermen: the sociology of an extreme occupation, repr. 1969 (1962) + personal knowledge (2013) + private information (2013) [Ernie Bilocca, son; S. Russell, assistant news editor, Hull Daily Mail, 1968-70; Lord Prescott; A. Gill; M. Denness; T. Wade, widow of Skipper Philip Gay of the Ross Cleveland] + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Likenesses  photograph, c.1968, priv. coll. [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Times (3 Feb 1968) · photograph, repro. in The Times (7 Feb 1968) · photograph, repro. in Daily Mirror (8 Feb 1968) · photograph, repro. in Daily Mirror (20 Feb 1968)




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