The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple-Trawler Disaster

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Today, the phrase I coined for my book title, the Headscarf Revolutionaries, has become shorthand for these brave campaigners. On the day the book was launched in 2015, four plaques were unveiled by the Lord Mayor in Hull Maritime Museum to commemorate their campaign. Like most in the Hull fishing community she hailed from the tight-knit community of Hessle Road. Surrounded by heartache and loss, she decided enough was enough. Organising meetings with trawlermen, their families and local politicians and unions – she started a movement. This was the first of three tragedies to strike the Hull fishing industry in the coming weeks. The Kingston Peridot and the Ross Cleveland would soon follow in the disastrous footsteps of the previous tragedy. The front cover of the Hull Daily Mail on 5 February, 1968, the day the loss of the third trawler, the Ross Cleveland, was confirmed. Their other conditions involved ensuring that all trawlers in the UK were fully equipt with necessary safety equipment and that safety ships would be sent to monitor conditions and be a ship's first port of call should one ever be in trouble.

Blenkinsop later accompanied Hull’s three Labour MPs to Parliament to mark the 50th anniversary of the campaign. She was met by Jeremy Corbyn — and former Labour deputy prime minister and Hull East MP John Prescott, who had fought alongside her in 1968.The St Romanus sank with all hands on January 11 1968 and then on January 26 the Kingston Peridot suffered the same fate. Everything the women asked for was granted by ministers following the Westminster meeting. Eighty-eight new safety measures were introduced with startling rapidity.

Analysing the events Lavery describes, one might reach two reasonable but contradictory conclusions. Pessimistically, one might note – as John Prescott accepted once in power – that capitalism can’t be reformed. More optimistically, one might add that direct action gets the goods – in a few weeks a few women won changes that for their sector were at least as significant as the concessions earned a few months later by millions of French workers who rendered the state helpless and momentarily forced the government to abdicate. The heroic story of these women in the face of tragedy highlights the fact that change comes from the populace.Lillian told reporters she would march on Downing Street or ‘that Harold Wilson’s private house’ if she was ignored. Peart and Mallalieu were told by prime minister Wilson, who was in America, that the women were to be helped as much as possible.