‘It’s going to finish the village’: how Morecambe Bay’s tragedy changed cocklepickers’ lives for ever
On the outskirts of the fishing village of Flookburgh, Cumbria, a prohibition notice is stapled to a large metal gate across the entrance to the sands: “Beach closed to cockle fishing.” It is an offence to remove cockles until April 2024 and any person caught doing so risks a fine of up to £10,000.
Michael Wilson jumps out of his white van to unhook the gate and then drives past a handful of shrimping trailers to the edge of Morecambe Bay, the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats and sands in the country, at 120 sq miles.
“This is the cockling way out,” he says, pointing across the sands to Heysham nuclear power station, six miles south. “If we were going now, we’d have gone at first light, to avoid the tide.”
Driving a tractor to the cockle beds across the sands – “the long way” to avoid its notorious channels and gullies – can take an hour, he adds.
The main Morecambe Bay cockle bed, at Flookburgh, has been closed by the North Western Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (Ifca) for a number of years after multiple surveys showed low biomass of sized cockles. The latest survey in 2023 showed a high percentage of undersized and a low percentage of sized, or adult, animals. Ifca hopes to open it later this year, if the cockles mature.
The dynamic nature of Morecambe’s broad, shallow bay, with its shifting channels, quicksands and tides that can roar over the beach at speeds of up to nine knots, makes it a treacherous place, even for experienced fishers such as Wilson, 51, who learned the trade as a child from his father.
Flookburgh fishers, who have gathered cockles, mussels, shrimps and other seafood by hand for generations, keep in their heads “an interactive map” of tides, weather and moving channels.
Twenty years ago, on 5 February 2004, 23 Chinese migrants drowned in the bay, off Hest Bank, after the water engulfed them as they picked cockles in the dark during a high spring tide.
Aged between 18 and 45, the victims, some of whom had only been in the UK a few months and did not speak English, had been lured to the UK from poor provinces in China and exploited by gangmasters, later jailed after being convicted of manslaughter.
The tragedy shocked the nation and exposed the dark side of a “wild west” cockle industry in Britain. Tough regulations followed, including the establishment of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, to prevent labour exploitation, which later became the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority.
On Sunday, those who died will be remembered at an event to be marked with music and the lighting of lanterns at Morecambe’s West End beach.
But as late as 2009, according to Gary Parsons, the station officer at Flookburgh’s Bay Search and Rescue, it was still a free for all. When the beds opened that year, 800 to 900 people descended, from all over the UK and abroad, driving tractors, trailers and even cars miles along the sands for the harvest.
The trade is now tightly controlled by Ifca, which replaced the old seafish authorities. It runs a permit system, monitors the bay and closes it, in consultation with a committee – which includes fishers – when the cockles are undersized or their numbers are low.
While local fishers see the need for regulation to prevent tragedies such as the one that happened 20 years ago, and welcome the end of the wild west years, they say the restrictions are working against them. They warn that because their children and grandchildren are not given priority when seeking a coveted cockle licence, the rules are in danger of wiping out a fishing heritage that dates back generations.
“The majority of fishermen in Flookburgh are over 50,” says Wilson, whose father John, 76, used to help him until he broke his hip. “Many can’t go out any more.”
Of the elders of several fishing families in the village, one aged 67 has had a triple heart bypass, another has had cancer and another a bad back. All have sons, grandsons, nephews or cousins who are keen to take over. “But there’s no young lads because they can’t get permits,” Wilson says.
Wilson’s son Jake is 15 and has applied for a cockling permit, but he could be in for a long wait. There is a waiting list of 200-odd people and only about 10 licences are granted each year. Wilson is one of two “guides to the sands”, a prestigious honorary position that dates back to Henry VIII, when guides led travellers along a safe route across the sands.
He believes local fishers can run a sustainable fishery themselves, without bed closures. “They talk about protecting the birds here,” he says. “But it’s the fishermen who will be extinct.”
The bay, a protected conservation area, and its estuaries, sites of special scientific interest, provide important feeding and nesting habitat for migratory bird species, including ringed plovers, oystercatchers and terns. A 2023 survey by Ifca found the number of undersized cockles was the highest in six years and the number of adult-sized was the lowest, so the bay has remained closed. It is hoped it will reopen in the summer.
Few local people make their living entirely from fishing, particularly when the cockle beds, which represent 60-70% of their income, are closed. Many are mechanics, plumbers or joiners and work the beds when they are in season.
The legal cockle trade in north-west England was worth about £7-8m, according to the Shellfish Association of Great Britain. Last year, it dropped to about £90,000 but it is predicted to go up to £2-3m if Morecambe Bay opens again.
A few doors down from Wilson’s house in Flookburgh, Ian McClure and his wife are in their outhouse potting shrimps.
“I’m virtually blind because of a disease in my eye and I have just had a triple heart bypass,” says McClure, who can no longer work the beds. His son,
Tony, who also works as a carpenter, has a cockling licence but McClure cannot pass his own licence to his grandson.
“It’s a young man’s game. I would love to pass it on to my grandson but I can’t. It’s going to finish the village.”
A maximum of 150 permit holders, covering not just Morecambe but cockle and mussel beds all over the north-west, are allowed on the bay. Many don’t live in the region and some are EU nationals who no longer live in the UK.
Parsons says that, since the introduction of the permit system, Bay Search and Rescue gets very few fishing-related callouts.
“The bulk of our callouts are visitors to the area who get cut off or people getting stuck in quicksand,” says Parsons. “The fishing authority have done a great job of policing the area. They are very visual and that reduces the risk to my team.”
But Parsons, who was the hovercraft pilot for the rescue team on that February night in 2004, supports the local fishers in their quest to get priority for their families to follow them into the trade. “From a safety point of view, they know the sands well, they are out every day. “
“I have a very clear memory of what went on that night,” he recalls. “It was gone 10 o’clock, a very clear night and it was freezing. It was the first time I suffered hypothermia. Imagine what those people went through. They didn’t stand a chance.”
Stephen Manning, 69, who can trace his fishing heritage back through seven generations of his family, was also in the bay that fateful night. He got a call from the coastguard at 4am to help in the rescue.
“I rang other fishermen,” says Manning. “Some went to Arnside, some to Grange. But there was little we could do.”
He and his son, Tim, then 18, raced to the bay with their tractor and a searchlight and found one of the bodies.
“We’d been there the night before,” says Manning. “There was a large dip and the tide flooded into the dip and came around the back of them. They didn’t know what to do.”
At the inquest of the deaths, Manning was called to give evidence about the nature of the bay. “It is a living entity, with gullies and channels and dykes, hundreds of them, all moving. You are watching all the time, you have an interactive map in your head.
“You have to know what to do to run to safety, and that’s not necessarily the direction of the shore,” he says.
Manning, who used to export live cockles to France until EU rules after Brexit made it more difficult and less profitable, is semi-retired. His son and two nephews have permits, and he says he will “die happy” knowing they will continue the tradition. “It’s in their DNA.” A member of the Ifca committee, he is seeking to change the permit system to ensure other fishing families get priority.
Raymond Porter, 59, of Ulverston, whose grandfather bought him his first cockle tractor at 19 and is the guide to the sands for the Leven estuary, had to give up his cockling permit after he became a single dad and had to wait years on the list before getting it back. He is frustrated that he cannot supplement what little income he earns from shrimping, which is in decline, with cockles, because of the closure.
“When you are shrimping, you see cockle beds we would have worked in the past. We don’t need Ifca telling us when and where we can go. They’re killing the industry.”
Mark Taylor, the chief executive officer of North Western Ifca, has sympathy with the local fishers. “You can’t argue with the principle that local people should get priority,” he says. “But we have had legal advice that they can’t apply positive discrimination. It’s very difficult to reverse engineer this.”
Ifca and its committee, made up of fishers, conservationists and academics, are considering other measures, including cutting the waiting list, by excluding those who no longer want a permit and introducing a “use it or lose it” scheme. They are also looking into allowing retiring fishers to nominate a family member.
“The upside of regulation is we don’t have gangmasters sending people into a situation where they lose their lives,” says Taylor. “The flipside of preventing a free for all, is that some people are denied access. This is still the biggest mussel bed and some of the biggest cockle beds in Europe. Why were gangmasters bringing people halfway round the world? It’s because there was a big demand for cockles and that demand needs to be managed.”