Three

The Morecambe Bay Cockling Disaster

To be honest, it was an effort to drive down to Morecambe on a freezing cold February evening. Although I had thermals on and a windproof coat, after just 10 minutes on the beach I felt as if I’d had enough. Already my fingers were turning numb. I tried to warm them up holding my hands out towards the glowing coals of a brazier, but if I moved even a step or two away, the cold was there again, unconquerable. A group of musicians were playing beside a sculptural boat, its hold packed with a stash of planking and gash wood. How they managed to make their fingers work, or blow enough warm breath into their brass instruments, was beyond me. In canvas shelters steam rose from underneath trays of hot food along with the aroma of Chinese cooking. For such a bitterly cold evening, the number of people marking the 10th anniversary of the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster was impressive.

Away from the main hubbub, a line of ceramic forms snaked along the beach towards the utter dark of the bay. The distance the installation covered must have been 50 metres, and it stopped just short of where the tide washed itself quietly away into the night. The forms seemed to glow, lit only by guttering fire-cans set in the sand at their sides. Sometimes people stopped and crouched down to look more closely at the images and words printed on the surfaces.

I walked the length of the installation myself and squatted down to look more closely. I saw the face of a Chinese girl, the image of snowdrops and Chinese script. Someone had placed a bunch of fresh tulips on the surface of one of them, and printed on another the unmistakeable X-ray image of a truck.

I read the names and statements printed on the side of each one:

‘They are threatened by a strong incoming tide’

‘She was widowed with a son aged 14 and a daughter aged 9’

‘He had a red bag with him containing items for good luck’

‘They were identified by good luck charms, watches, wallets, photos and jewellery’

‘His father identified a wallet, red bag and yellow cloth with Chinese writing on it’

‘Tell my family to pray for me. I am dying’

‘In a rich world he was invisible. He became visible only by dying’

With the sand now wet underneath my boots, I reached the final piece. I considered the raw cold that the Chinese cockle pickers would have experienced, they way it gets into your bones and there’s nothing you can do to stop it until a warm place is reached again. But of course, there was no warm place for the 24, just the incoming tide, and no one to guide them safely off the sands.

I looked out and wondered what it must have been like, working inside the void of uncompromising, utter dark where the only means of orientation, and the thing that in all probability led to their unnecessary deaths, were the lights of the villages and towns of the coastal communities around the bay. I thought of their hands and the degree of cold they experienced whilst shovelling the surface of the mud. With their workplace lit only by the headlights of their van and a 4x4, I thought of their aching backs after loading pile after pile of cockles into bags. I found it unimaginable.

* * *

As I walked back up the line I met my friend, the ceramic artist Vicky Eden, who had made the installation as her personal response to the tragedy. Together we watched people following the line of sculptures down to the wet sand and back again. Then, with the bonfire boat set alight, we stood in its billowing heat eating Chinese food. A choir sang, silhouetted against the light of the fire and I recognised a reporter from the local TV.

Vicky and I talked about the importance of remembering the Chinese victims, and about why it mattered. It was good to see people looking at that substantial piece of work. When I first heard that Morecambe’s community music foundation, More Music, was making plans for an evening of remembrance for the 10th anniversary, I got in touch with their director, Pete Moser, a friend from Ulverston days, and told him of Vicky’s installation. The memorial evening was good news to Vicky and me; we’d been having conversations around the idea that there was the distinct lack of an appropriate memorial on the coast, something tangible and significant. We were thinking then of the idea of the possible commissioning of a new piece of sculpture, but then More Music’s memorial event was organised and that felt right. It gave the opportunity for Vicky’s work to be shown once more. Although she made the installation in 2004, this felt like the right situation for it to be brought out again into the light, or into the dark.

A week or so before the memorial event we met in a café on Morecambe’s prom, Pete, Vicky and me and some of the team of artists and performers that Pete had recruited. As we drank our coffee, Vicky told us about the night of the disaster.

‘I hadn’t been able to get to sleep that night and came downstairs to make a hot drink. I turned on the TV and there was the rescue going on and I heard the helicopters coming, flying low over the house. It was a terrible feeling knowing that someone was in difficulties on the bay, but then much worse when we found out there were significant numbers of people.’

And there’s a problem. It seems impossible to verify exactly how many people died that night. Newspaper reports said there had been 23; I heard the number 24 both from other parts of the press and from fishermen involved in bringing in the bodies. I asked the coroner’s office. Their reply: 19. The fundraisers, who arranged to clear the families’ debts, reported 23 individuals. The chaotic scenes being played out on the bay before and during the disaster appear to have been mirrored by an inconclusive number of dead.

Vicky’s installation, ‘February 5th 2004’, is a series of 23 red earthenware ovoids, each one a footprint of a different place on the bay. The surface of each piece is a cast of the ripples and depressions of the sands from all the places she visited. She added screen-prints to the ceramics on the themes of migration, loss and modern slavery. She asked the Taiwanese artist Chun-Chao Chiu to add the victims’ names in Chinese script. She talks about the installation as a pathway from the coastal communities here to the families in China who lost their loved ones. A film has been made about the work and shown at international ceramic conventions. Vicky was brought up in Morecambe and had family who were once involved in the local fishing industry, so her sense of connection runs deep. She recalls family trips to the beach as a child, of jumping on the sands until they turned to jelly, and the ever-present warnings not to go too far out.

* * *

I too remembered the news breaking. I knew about the cockling gangs fishing the bay – it was hard not to know about them. On any trip to the Morecambe area when the tide was out, you’d see gangs digging on the sands; cockling had become an industrial operation on an unprecedented scale. The indigenous, small scale and sustainable cockling families were forced to stand back and watch their livelihoods being dug out of existence. Even allowing for all this, I had no idea that workers were being sent out onto the sands in darkness. That was madness.

In the aftermath of the disaster, information and recrimination flew backwards and forwards with the frequency of the tides. Local people – amongst them the fishermen and sand-pilots, who act as guides across the treacherous sands – had been warning of an impending disaster for years. The free-for-all on the sands turned into internecine warfare where gangmasters from the UK were accused of setting fire to bags of cockles collected by the Chinese, and the already disempowered migrant workers were reduced to tears. Adding to that incendiary situation, the Chinese gangs were selling bags of cockles for the rock-bottom price of £5 or £6 a bag. But the demand for shellfish from Spain and France was insatiable; it kept an army of workers going wherever and however they could get at the food.

In the previous year a local fisherman, Harold Benson, rescued a group of around 55 Chinese from the incoming tide. In the background the regulators apparently struggled to come up with a workable solution. In December 2003, just eight weeks before the disaster, the cockle permit scheme was introduced that included a safety training course. In the event it seemed far too little, and far too late. In addition the gangmaster licensing laws were out of date and unwieldy. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to guess which year it was amended. That’s right, 2004.

Harold Benson was called in by the coastguard to help with the rescue. In the event all he was able to do was help to bring in the bodies when dawn came. It was reported that he was so traumatised by the events that he’s never been onto the bay since. He had known though, that there was a safe way off the sands even in the dark. ‘Even when the tide hit them, had they had anybody with them, like me, who knows the area, there was still a safe route off the cockle bed... They could have walked to safety.’ It seems that, in their panic, the workers had headed straight for the lights of the shore and walked into the deepening channel of the River Keer.

I talked to Alan Sledmore, who led walks across the bay from Hest Bank for many years, and Stephen Clarke, one of a dying breed of fishermen who still fished from nets placed out on the sands, and who also ran the walks with Alan.

‘There were hundreds of people out there and they were taking everything. The cockle beds were decimated. I doubt they’ll ever fully re-open,’ Alan told me.

‘In sustainable cockling, only the mature cockles were taken by a few local fishing families and oystercatchers. The only thing that fed on the spat (seed cockles) were the bottom-feeding fish – flukes and plaice. For hundreds of years local fishermen used a “jumbo”, a kind of rocking cradle that brought the cockles to the surface. They riddled them and all the immature cockles fell back into the sands. It was the sustainable way to do it. It made it all workable. In comparison, this was a travesty. No one was protecting the cockle beds. Now they’re decimated. You used to be able to say, “There’s plenty more fish in the sea.” But not here, not now.’

I talked to Jack Manning, of Flookburgh, who fished the bay for decades. He told me of the ‘terrible cold’ he remembered getting into his hands when cockling. He showed me film from the 1950s and ’60s, cockling and shrimping with horses and carts, the horses wading into the channel and pulling the load of cart and nets, and the water so deep their noses continually dipped the surface. His son and 17-year-old grandson went to help the rescue. Together they brought in six bodies before it was light. ‘That was a terrible thing for a young man to see.’

What had been a very public human disaster also became an environmental one, though not one that reached the wider public consciousness, or that was followed by the media. The indigenous industry that had involved and sustained a few local families had come to an abrupt end.

Stephen Clarke’s fishing nets are three-quarters of a mile out, by Priest Skeer, which is a raised area of glacial moraine close to where the Chinese had been working on the night of the 4th of February. After the disaster the local coastguard wanted him to phone in and let them know each time he planned to go out and again when he came back in.

‘I just couldn’t get in the habit of it,’ he said.

I could understand the coastguard’s unease, though there’s a world of difference between local fishermen with a lifetime’s experience and exploited foreign workers who had been instructed to carry on digging after dark, while back onshore their gangmasters waited in the warm for two sets of headlights that never came.

During our meeting, Stephen’s phone had rung – his fishing mate. The men had a brief conversation and then Stephen asked a question. ‘While you’re on, do you know if anyone’s cockling on the bay at all these days? No? No, I didn’t think so. That’s what I thought.’

Stephen’s mate confirmed that there are no cockle beds left on Morecambe Bay. Later on I’d phoned the Fisheries to ask about the state of the Morecambe Bay cockle beds. They told me that there are naturally occurring fluctuations in cockle beds, that they hadn’t been seen on the Ribble, further down the coast, for 20 years but now there are dense quantities. They told me that the law states that a riddle has to be used, that there are enforcement officers checking up, and also that cockle picking cannot be only a local occupation ever again. ‘That’s just not the way the world works these days.’

In a couple of ironic twists of fate, Stephen had found two unsettling pieces of evidence from the cockling disaster, though there were years between the finds. He told me the story of coming upon what he’d thought was a set of false teeth stuck fast in the sands. He began to dig, and very quickly realised very that he’d found a human skull.

‘It was small, and the teeth were very good. Not like our Western teeth. I thought straightaway it must be the skull of the missing woman. I found it on a cross-bay walk. We had to be discreet about how we got it out and back to land. We managed though, and later on it was identified as the missing woman.’ Liu Quin Ying perished along with her husband, Yu Hua Xu. Their son, Zhou, was orphaned at the age of 13. The body of Dong Xin Wu has never been found.

‘Someone said to me that we should have left it there. We should have called out the police or the coastguard. But you can’t do that on the bay. By the next day it would have been buried and lost again.

‘Most of the bodies were found the next morning, almost all of them on or close to the skeer – that’s where they’d been working. If they’d asked one of us local fishermen, we’d have said to look for the other bodies in the channels. They would have been covered over in the space of a couple of tides.’

And then, just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the disaster, a second grim reminder was returned by the sands. A scattering of bright red stringbags filled with cockles had re-surfaced beside the skeer. I remembered the photo and the story in the local newspaper.

‘You couldn’t make it up, could you?’ Stephen said. ‘No one wanted to touch them; seemed too much like bad luck.’

It would be mistakenly easy to think we’d learned our lessons. The beds here in Morecambe Bay might be closed, but migrant workers are still digging cockles in extreme places. In 2011, seven years after the Morecambe Bay disaster, a cockling gang were rescued from sandbanks out at sea. They’d been taken out in inflatable dinghies towed by a small fibreglass boat to dig cockles from sandbanks, surrounded by the sea.

* * *

Since the cockling tragedy, Pete, the founder of More Music, has been travelling out to Hong Kong and China, forging links with musicians, performers and communities and bringing Chinese artists and musicians to the UK for collaborative work and performances. A community opera evolved, The Long Walk, performed in Liverpool, Gateshead, Morecambe and Hong Kong. A couple of weeks after the memorial evening I drove down to talk to Pete about his visits to Fujian province, where most of the Chinese migrant workers originated. Driving along the prom road, the bay was about as full as it could get, and sludgy brown waves sloshed against the sea-walls and breakwater pier.

‘The places they came from weren’t villages,’ he said. ‘That’s an idea put out by the media. Fuzhou is bigger than Preston; it’s an industrial-sized city.’

There were pictures of gaunt, brand new and monolithic apartment blocks in the city of Fuzhou, built to swallow excess profits from China’s booming business economy. None of them had ever been lived in – there was simply no demand. A disused holiday resort reminded me of Middleton Sands, once a top destination just down the coast from Morecambe.

Then the image of a vast tidal area, Fuqing Bay, and cockle beds at the edge of the bay with areas divided up and roped off, each site an excavated mud basin with men bent over digging out cockles. The images were astonishing because there were intrinsic similarities to Morecambe Bay. I hadn’t anticipated a tidal estuary and cockling industry and it seemed good to see this; at least some of the victims of the Morecambe Bay disaster might have been familiar with the work that took them out onto the bay, the work that ultimately took their lives.

We talked about the aspirations of people who paid, and continue to pay, to travel from China to the West.

‘The press gave the idea that these were poor people, those without hope. But that wasn’t the case at all,’ Pete said. ‘To be able to take those kinds of loans out, whether from money-lenders or family members or elsewhere, and to pay a fixer to take you across the world, that was very much a middle-class thing to do; they saw it as a step up. The truly poor couldn’t begin to access loans like that or even think of moving up the social ladder.

‘When I was there, I was travelling with artists and musicians. They were perplexed about why I would want to raise the issue of the Morecambe Bay tragedy. In Fujian province people either hadn’t heard about the tragedy or didn’t get why it mattered; in China large-scale industrial accidents happen all the time.

‘In many ways, the economy of China is still pre-Industrial Revolution; life is cheap. If 24 people died in the UK, they might say, so what? For me this was a hard thing to hear. We have such a completely different way of looking at the world.’

Pete put the Morecambe Bay disaster into a 21st-century context.

‘This was the UK’s largest single industrial accident in decades. In China, people hardly batted an eyelid.’

* * *

The Morecambe Bay Victims fund was initially set up by the film-maker Nick Broomfield. His film, Ghosts, graphically illustrates the life of trafficked migrant workers and, in particular, the story of the Morecambe Bay victims. The freelance writer Hsiao-Hung Pai and the businessman David Tang were also involved in the fundraising efforts that ultimately enabled 22 of the families in China to clear their debts. In 2010 a fundraising walk of 60 miles from Morecambe to Liverpool took place. All the debts were cleared, with the exception of one victim who came from a remote region, and whose family could not be traced.

Three children were orphaned by the disaster. One of the boys went to university in Fujian, and another boy stayed in his home town and found work on construction sites. The orphaned girl went on to study and work in Japan. A further two boys who lost their father were sent to study in Japan, with their remaining family borrowing heavily again to send them, after their original debts were paid off.

* * *

Almost a year after the memorial event I went to the bay again with Vicky. She wanted us to go early so that the job she had in mind could be carried out discreetly. It was still dark as I arrived at her house. We went on to Bolton-le-Sands and set off walking as the day began finding its colour. The previous day had been torrential – rain all day long, barely ever becoming light. But now the sky was finding another kind of weather, and we set off walking across the jigsaw puzzle of saltmarsh. Forwards and sideways we went to find a way around the deepest, widest pools, then negotiated our way over the jumble of torn edges of the marsh, where great clods of the stuff were breaking down into silt, and finally we stepped out onto the sands.

It was firm underfoot. A meniscus of water remained from the ebbing tide and the light was good. Over Morecambe, vast columns of white towers broke free from a mass of blue-grey cloud-mountains. Around the edges of the bay the landscape and hills receded into pale, ethereal distances; the Furness hills, Humphrey Head, Whitbarrow, Arnside Knott. The big sky was growing lilac-blue and over the bay itself, barely a cloud. Looking down at our feet, the same blue, travelling with us.

Vicky hoped to find a shallow channel. She’d been sinking the clay footprints two at a time. What else to do with them? To me it seemed entirely right: giving back to the bay something of what it had taken, but something also that it had given. We carried a piece each. Mine was a cast of the sands and embedded in the ripples was a scattering of small cockle shells and the footprints of wading birds foraging. It was a beautiful piece. Beauty and poignancy combined; that all those deaths should have come from the business of picking these tiny, primitive, shelled creatures. I’d written a poem in the aftermath of the tragedy. In it I talked about following a line of bird prints through a shallow channel of water to a place where the bird had clearly taken flight. About how the birds are adapted, comfortable and equipped to be in that environment, and how those others had not been able to take wing, their footprints coming to a similarly abrupt end.

Moss had begun to form in the depressions of the cast and a handful of beech leaves had dried onto its surface. I was carrying, literally, a piece of the bay and it was about to be returned. Vicky hefted a different piece upon which she had screen-printed the front page of The Guardian: ‘Trapped by the tide and sinking sands in night of growing horror’ – one of the earliest reports of the tragedy. Around the ceramic rim ran the headline ‘They were Victims of the Sands and the Snakeheads’.

I noticed a low island maybe half a mile offshore; distances were hard to judge. It was a piece of land so shallow that it was barely there. Priest Skeer, close to where the Chinese had been digging cockles on the night of the disaster. I pointed it out to Vicky.

‘I didn’t know that’s where it is,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s good in a way. It feels like I’ve been sinking them in the right place.’

‘And look,’ I said, ‘there’s the sand bank.’ I pointed, tracing a dark line of sand that ran due north from the skeer, and from where the Chinese might just have been able to reach land again.

After a couple of minutes we reached what we thought might be a channel. We’d seen it glowing distantly, a linear stretch of water that followed a curving trajectory towards the south. But arriving there we saw that it was just a slightly deeper skin of water. I wondered if it might have been the line of an old channel. Given the volume of rains we’d been having over the turn of the year, it was entirely possible.

We set the two pieces down in the water. Against the reflected blue of the sky the ceramic forms looked red, earthen, of the land. We looked at them, took photographs and Vicky said, ‘I’m pleased there’s no sign of the others.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘they would’ve gone with just one or two tides.’

We turned to walk back to the shore, the two forms beside each other, the only intrusions in all that flat space. Above our heads curlew and gulls drifted on thermals in the electric blue air.