Whitstable oysters through the ages have had their periods of plenty and scarcity, but the whelk is a hardier sea creature and has often kept the wolf from the door when there was no dole and only soup kitchens for penniless fishermen and their families.
My own father returned to Whitstable in the late 1880’s, after ten years trawling the North Sea in a sailing smack from Ramsgate, when he bought a sailing cutter of 40 feet, with his eldest brother to trawl the edges of the numerous sands in the estuary for Dover soles from Easter to late autumn.
In the remaining months they dredged the Kentish Flats for whelks and the odd oyster and sometimes loaded with starfish and mussels for manure for farmers.
About 1900 a small fleet of lugsail boats from Sherringham, Norfolk, sailed into Whitstable to stay and catch whelks in pots on the Kentish Flats. Their surnames – Cox, West, Green, Johnson, Bishop and Able – are still among us.
They are peaceful men, but this method of laying strings of pots across the tide often caused entanglement with the dredges of the Dredgermen, who would have to cut themselves clear.
Their method was to bait their pots with red herring, useless fish, and fish trimmings bought often from our large fishing ports. They would return home and come back again to empty the whelks into their boats, rebait and lay the pots again in a different area.
Before they came whelks were either dredged or caught on bunches of common crabs bunched with a long needle and line, tied on long lines, twelve feet or more apart, and rowed along by two men whilst a third carefully pulled up each bunch and shook of the clinging whelks into the boat.
Although I have never caught whelks solely for a living I have seen many thousand bushels landed by the whelkers.
I have noticed that a superior kind of whelk, known to us as the red whelk, which could usually be found in a clay soil area east of the outer end of Herne Bay pier, has become extinct since pot catching came into favour.
It seems a pity someone had not become interested in their preservation. They seemed to have a superior taste.
R. D. Dale
80 Nelson Road
Whitstable
