But the incredible story from 1968, the uprising that changed maritime law forever, the amazing courage and leadership of Lillian Bilocca and the tragedy of how her own community was to turn against her, coupled with the amazing tale of Harry Eddom, stuck with me.

In the passenger seat of the Mini Metro driven by a snapper 40 years my senior my nerves were assuaged – in part. It’s difficult to imagine the hardships faced by ill-equipped men working 18-hour shifts hacking ice from ropes in force 12 gales on a night so cold it literally prevented speech. From then on she was lionised and patronised in equal measure by the media – like a cross between Boudicca and Nora Batty. The constant tutting and intakes of breath should have told me that perhaps my story was overwritten. Documentary which marks the 50th anniversary of the triple trawler tragedy during January and February of 1968, in which 58 men died.

There were more than 600 women there, and among those speaking was the then local union firebrand John Prescott. Their perseverance and passion changed the landscape of trawling forever, and cemented their status as working class heroes both in Hull and throughout the nation. She was one of the “Headscarf Revolutionaries”, the working-class Hull women who led the campaign for safety on the Trawlers and to save lives at sea. Their rebellion was in response to a triple tragedy that devastated Hull’s fishing community in three weeks at the start of 1968: in separate incidents, three trawlers were lost at sea and 58 fishermen died.

A Northern lass, born and bred in Manchester, Helen has been back in her home town for 13 years after working in London for The Times and a number of other national newspapers. When the TGWU formed a ‘wives association’, which had a carefully restricted role, Lil was pointedly excluded. After gathering a 10,000-signature petition, known as the Fishermen’s Charter, Yvonne, Lillian, Mary and Christine marched down to Parliament. She lost her job with a Wassand Street fish merchant in 1968 for having taken three weeks off, without leave, for the campaign.

Chrissie Smallbone became Chrissie Jensen MBE, the award given for a lifetime’s work in trawler safety, as the first woman in the British Fishermen’s Association. Somehow, the trawler owners had managed to gain exemption from almost all maritime safety and manning legislation passed in the twentieth century, and the accommodation and messing arrangements on-board were shameful.