It’s those magnificent men in their bathing machines
WHO would have thought that a book about a treacherous expanse of freezing, grey- green water, feared by mariners through the centuries, could turn out to be such a delight?
Yet when Tom Blass first mentioned his intention to write a biography of the North Sea to an acquaintance familiar with the subject, he was bluntly informed: ‘It is impossible. There is so much. You will drown in it.’
Undaunted, Blass dived in and his endless curiosity and keen eye for the telling detail, allied to some fine writing, takes readers on a bracing voyage that combines history — a masterly introductory chapter summarises the North Sea’s enduring strategic and military importance — with sociology, anthropology and an ample measure of fun.
A journalist who has studied law and politics, Blass begins his journey aboard the MV Longstone, a lineal descendant of John Masefield’s dirty British coaster, that is bound for Gothenburg, Sweden, with a cargo of car parts and cat food.
As the ship approaches the coast of Skagerrak, he obligingly provides the correct pronunciation: ‘Skayraack, like the rasping of a crow.’
Heading for the islands of Heligoland (once British territory until bizarrely swapped with Germany for Zanzibar) his thoughts turn to Erskine Childers’s ripping spy yarn, The Riddle Of The Sands.
Set largely in the fog-shrouded waters of the North Sea’s Frisian Islands, it was credited with alerting the British government to the threat of a German naval invasion during the early 1900s.
Ever informative, Blass provides Childers’s last words after his involvement in the murky politics of the Irish Civil War ended before a firing squad: ‘take a step or two forward lads, it’ll be easier that way.’
On a more cheerful note, the book charts the birth of the seaside holiday, which Blass dates back to a point in the mid-18th century when the windswept beaches of the North Sea became an alluring destination, with the invention of the bathing machine creating exciting opportunities for voyeurs, the fairer sex very much included.
A scandalised observer in Ramsgate, Kent, reported that hundreds of females were paying unhealthy attention to men frolicking in the icy water ‘just as they came into the world’.
Lobbing in another of his arresting factoids, Blass writes that there are now more swimming pools per head in the Shetlands than anywhere else in Europe (indoors and heated, presumably).
A large and colourful cast of characters marches through the book, from Hull’s hard- drinking, freespending fishermen and their sparky ladies — among them Betty, ‘As trim as a stoat and fond of her fags’ — to underwater bomb disposal experts, thriving pub owners, binocular- wielding twitchers and a taciturn Humber lifeboat coxswain known as Spanish Dave.
Pressed by Blass for tales of peril and heroism in the roiling seas off Spurn Point, Dave prefers to mention the rescue of a chap trying to reach the Netherlands in a rubber dinghy, navigating with the aid of a road map, and the time he saved a dachshund that had been washed overboard. Then there’ s the resoundingly named Captain Pilgrim Lockwood, whose net trawled up what looked like a bit of scrap metal but turned out to be a harpoon from the Mesolithic Period when mammoths roamed what was once dry land.
AMONG much prime marginalia in Blass’s zig-zagging narrative, we learn of the wildly incongruous pairing of the unlovely North Sea port of Ostend, in Belgium, and the late, great Marvin Gaye, who was persuaded by a local impresario to spend time there ‘in retreat from the curse of women, drugs and unpaid taxes’.
His masterpiece, Sexual Healing, was recorded in a nearby studio, and Gaye was filmed playing darts (inexpertly) with a bunch of jolly Flemish fishermen. Eventually he headed back to the U.S., where his father shot him dead during a row.
Blass also pays proper respect to James Ensor, the noted symbolist painter who was born and bred in Ostend, though wisely, perhaps, he does not attempt to decipher the message of one of the artist’s more peculiar works: Skeletons Fighting Over A Pickled Herring.