For some women in Hull, this was a tragedy that could have been avoided with better equipment and more stringent safety checks on the trawler ships, and better training for inexperienced crew members. The proposal from Hull City Council and the Hull Bullnose Heritage Group was favoured by local residents after engagement between all three parties. I decided right then to change my PhD proposal, make an appointment with the professor and tell him the story of Lily. The film tells the epic story of the Hull fishermen who did the most dangerous job in Britain and their wives whose protest ensured such a disaster never happened again. News of the loss of the Ross Cleveland reached Hull as Lillian and two others waited on the dockside for the owners.

In the few weeks that I’d been freelance, pals from my previous job had played a few practical jokes on me. Brian W Lavery’s book The Headscarf Revolutionaries and its prequel The Luckiest Thirteen are available from: barbicanpress. Analysing the events Lavery describes, one might reach two reasonable but contradictory conclusions. I am from Hull and even though the city has changed a lot in the last 50 years this book draws a very clear picture in my mind of how it was when I was very young.Peart and Mallalieu were told by prime minister Wilson, who was in America, that the women were to be helped as much as possible. They saw their colleague Chrissie Smallbone, the sister of skipper Phil Gay, being comforted by a clergyman. Lil Bilocca's story has also been told in Amnesty International's 2014 book Not Just Wilberforce: Champions of Human Rights in Hull and East Yorkshire and a 2015 book The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple-Trawler Disaster by Brian W. It seeks to deepen understandings of the past, cast light on the present and agitate for change in the world we live in now. You can find articles by Helen in, among others, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Times, the i newspaper, The Observer, Big Issue North, The Yorkshire Post, and The Spectator.

How many people need to suffer from the ecological disaster before somebody like Lillian Bilocca stands up? Brian runs a community media project in Hull, where he has lived with his wife Kathryn for more than 30 years.They were also met with hostility closer to home, from within the deeply patriarchal fishing community. This model, and the hostility of the skippers and owners, had kept unionisation weak on the Hull fish dock. Combining rare archive and emotional testimony - including that of Yvonne Blenkinsop, the last surviving leader of the women - those who lived through the tragedy and fought for change tell their incredible stories for the first time. Bought after listening to Reg Meuross's 12 songs about the Hessle fishing community and their losses.