The model

In 1856 the specially built dock for landing fish was opened in Grimsby, where trawling had started two years previously.  

The UK fishing industry developed by leaps and bounds during the next two decades.  There was held in 1883, the first International Fisheries Exhibition. Speaking on that occasion, Britain's foremost professor of biology, T. H. Huxley said:

"I believe that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea-fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the numbers of fish."

Only  two years later, in 1885, the Dalhousie Committee was set up in the United Kingdom to investigate the alleged depletion of fish stocks by the trawl net and the beam trawl.  Unable to give an answer through lack of adequate information the Committee recommended ' That a sum of money should be g ranted annually to set up an authority responsible for the collection of statistics and the conduct of scientific work'.  Since then the following questions have been addressed by all governments with an economic interest in marine fisheries:

What quantities of fish is being caught?

Where are the fish being caught?

When are the fish being caught?

How are the fish being caught?

In those days when ideas of the potential of European waters was based on ever rising catches from trawling and lining with sailing vessels, this statement was probably true enough, but with the advent of steam-trawling, and with the enormous growth in the volume of fishing that followed, coupled with a great increase in the destructiveness of fishing gear, conditions were altogether changed, and apprehensions that led to the Dalhousie enquiry still rumbled below the surface of the prosperous fishing communities like Grimsby.  These anxieties would not go away and since then the statistics and science have clearly shown that the industrial fishing operations of mankind have seriously depleted the stocks of fishes in the sea.

Many authors have described this great international asset as the 'harvest of the sea,' but it must be remembered that the harvest gathered by the fisherman is one that he has never sown, and that, although he may take large quantities of fish from the sea, he does nothing towards increasing or conserving the supply. As has often been pointed out (but as often unheeded), the present generation is the trustee for future generations in the matter of preserving our species of fish and of maintaining a reasonable supply of fish for food, and it is, therefore, of great importance that this problem should constantly receive the attention science.  However, the problem is now seen as the failure of political will to apply these findings before irreparable damage is done to the stocks  This global delemma is sharply focused upon Great Grimsby, where today, the cultural ecology of its extinct deep-sea fishing industry is enshrined in its National Fisheries Museum.