The last herring drifters: Whitby's fishing fleet in photographs, 1880–1930
16 June 2026
Our photographic archive holds over two hundred images of Whitby's fishing fleet between 1880 and 1930 — glass plates, postcards and family snapshots, most donated by descendants of the men and women in them. This summer we've been cataloguing the collection, and a selection now hangs in the museum's back room.
What the photographs show
The scale is the first shock. In the great herring years, Whitby's harbour hosted not just the local cobles but hundreds of visiting drifters — Scottish boats following the shoals south, Cornish luggers coming north. Several plates from the 1900s show the upper harbour so dense with masts that the water is barely visible. The town's population swelled with them: Scots fisher lassies gutting and packing on the quayside, coopers, salters, carters.
The second shock is how much of the work belonged to women. Plate after plate shows the gutting crews — three women to a team, working knife-speed against the clock, herring packed in salt tiers in barrels stamped for Hamburg and Danzig. Whitby herring fed half of Europe.
The boats themselves
The local boat was the coble — flat-bottomed, high-bowed, launched off the beach, descended (the boatbuilders always insisted) from Viking lines. The visiting drifters were bigger: first sail, then from about 1905 steam, their funnels adding smoke to every harbour panorama. One 1913 photograph in the collection shows both eras in one frame — a sailing coble crossing the bow of a steam drifter, old and new Whitby passing in the harbour mouth.
Why it ended
Overfishing, the Great War's requisitions, and the collapse of the European export markets did for the herring trade within a generation. By 1930 the great autumn fishery was finished. The photographs are, in many cases, the only record of boats whose names survive nowhere else — which is exactly why we keep them.
The exhibition, The Last Drifters, is free to visit at the museum on Church Street. If your family holds fleet photographs — however creased, however small — we can scan them in twenty minutes while you wait, and the originals never leave your hands.