Good morning, Swansea!

In 1931, a full-page ad in the South Wales Daily Post made a bold claim - Swansea, it declared, was home to the largest fishing fleet in the world.

Swansea’s docks were packed with Trawlers named after Welsh castles, a workforce of thousands, and a direct rail line carrying thousands of tons of Atlantic fish to market - but it wouldn’t last.

This week, we tell the story of how Swansea's fishing fleet rose to world-beating heights, and how it completely disappeared within a generation.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

P.S. Know someone else who’d enjoy the Scoop? Please forward this email to them and ask them to subscribe here 🙂

Swansea's deep-sea fishing industry didn't really exist until 1889, when a fish-landing wharf, market and ice factory were built on the east bank of the River Tawe - where the Sail Bridge and The River House restaurant are today.

An early attempt to build a proper trawler company in 1901 collapsed within five years. But in 1904, everything changed when the Castle Steam Trawler Company transferred its entire operation from Milford Haven to Swansea, building a brand new fish market and facilities in the South Dock Basin - now Swansea Marina. Then in 1919, the big players arrived.

Consolidated Fisheries Ltd - already a giant of the industry, based in Grimsby - established a full Swansea base at the South Dock Basin, complete with dry docks, engineering shops and ships' stores. They brought their fleet with them. And they named every vessel after a Welsh castle or beach:

Swansea Castle, Clyne Castle Caswell, Tenby Castle. Caerphilly Castle, Mewslade, Barry Castle. Conway Castle. Radnor Castle, and more.

Within a decade, Swansea had transformed from a town with no serious fishing industry to one of the most important ports in Britain. The South Dock Basin was given over entirely to trawlers - there was a fish market, a curing house, and even a direct railway line to distribute the catch across the country overnight.

By 1928, the fleet was landing more than 15,000 tons of fish a year.

By 1931, Consolidated Fisheries were confident enough to take out a full page in the South Wales Daily Post encouraging readers to buy fish for Good Friday, and boasting:

"The largest Fishing Fleet in the World - with Shore Bases at Swansea, Grimsby and Lowestoft."

The ad is a time capsule that reads like a love letter to industrial ambition - trawlers heading "out on the broad Atlantic, in the eye of the setting sun," skippers equipped with the very latest wireless technology, receiving weather forecasts and fishing intelligence from the shore base in real time. In 1931, that was genuinely cutting edge.

"The modern trawler skipper does not drop his gear overboard and hopefully - but blindly - trawl mysterious depths," it declares. "Wireless now gives him weather forecasts… his shore base gives him the latest fishing information."

The vessels fished grounds as far as the coast of Africa, and carried enough coal to power a working range of thousands of miles. Each trawler left port loaded with ice, so the catch could be packed and preserved the moment it came out of the water.

The South Dock had a direct rail connection to the London Midland Scottish Railway main line at St Thomas. Catch landed at Swansea in the early hours would be loaded into barrels, put on a train through Hereford and Hay-on-Wye, and be on a fishmonger's slab in the Midlands by morning. Atlantic hake, caught off the coast of Africa, on your breakfast table overnight. The logistics were extraordinary.

And supporting it - the dry docks, the fish market, the curing houses, the engineering shops, the ice house - thousands of Swansea people employed in a single industry.

The South Dock in its heyday had fourteen pubs and hotels within walking distance too, including the Gloucester Hotel, the Hotel de Paris, the Thames Tunnel, and the Arches.

The trawlers that survived the war came home to find the industry had changed around them. Fish landings at Swansea fell from 15,000 tons annually in 1930 to under 4,000 tons by 1952 - a collapse driven by years of disrupted fishing, an ageing fleet, and competition from larger modern ports.

Consolidated Fisheries, the company that had planted their flag in Swansea in 1919 and built it into something remarkable, closed their South Dock operations in 1957 and went home to Grimsby. By 1970 the amount of fish landing at Swansea had fallen to under 300 tons a year.

In a single generation, one of the world's great fishing ports had reduced itself to almost nothing.

The South Dock, which had once been given over entirely to trawlers, closed to all shipping in 1971. The last scraps of Swansea's fishing industry limped across to a market shed on the Prince of Wales Dock - on the eastern side of the Tawe, where the Premier Inn and Beefeater are today - where it quietly faded out of existence.

The shed was eventually demolished in 1997, and with it went the last working trace of what had once been a world-beating industry.

As mentioned, the ice house is now home to restaurants, and by 1982, after sitting derelict for nearly a decade, the council had transformed the South Dock into Swansea Marina. The lock gates that once let Castle trawlers in and out of the dock are long gone, replaced by the sector gates that leisure boats use today.

The Marina you walk around today is the actual dock where the Castle trawlers berthed. The hydraulic pump house that powered the dock machinery is now the Pump House pub, and half of the original swing bridge that once let the fleet in and out is still sitting on the quayside right outside it.

Next time you’re walking the Marina with coffee in hand, you’re standing where one of the largest fishing fleets in the world once set sail - and where it vanished within a lifetime.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

Got a Swansea story you want to share? Reply to this email and let us know!

✅ Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up

📧 Want to advertise your business to our audience of over 9,000 newsletter subscribers and 70,000+ on social media? Reply to this e-mail and we’ll be in touch!