IT is often said nowadays that there is no major port between Hull and Sunderland.

That’s as may be. But there are plenty of smaller fishing ports. Staithes, Runswick, Robin Hood’s Bay, Flamborough, Bridlington, Filey, Scarborough, Whitby: just to read these names, or say them out loud, is to smell the salt tang of the sea.

In Memories Of The Yorkshire Fishing Industry, Lancashire-born journalist and author Ron Freethy combines the first-hand memories of people he has spoken to with historical research and old photographs to record that way of life for posterity.

In the great days of the Yorkshire fishing industry, there were large fleets of commercial fishing vessels along the Yorkshire coastline, and almost every village or inlet made at least a part of its living from what Mr Freethy calls the “harvest of the sea”.

The heyday of the Yorkshire fishing industry came between the 1840s and the 1960s. But there are still plenty of people around who remember a way of way of life that is rapidly vanishing.

Ironically, it was while working as the resident naturalist on guided tours of the Outer Hebrides that Mr Freethy came across one of his more informative sources, Jenny Cockburn. She had a fund of memories of the herring trade. The herring fleet, he explains in the book, differed from all the other fishing fleets because it followed the migratory herring, moving from port to port as it did so.

“My grandma often told me of the Herring Girls who, she said, were lasses from the English ports who followed the fishing fleets,” Jenny told him.

“They came from places such as Scarborough and Hull in search of adventure. Although they worked hard, many managed to find husbands. The girls were lodged in organised digs ruled over by morally aware landladies. The lasses were given a modest signing-on fee, rail fare and travelling-box labels, but had to provide their own clothes and a sharp knife.”

The girls worked hard, Jenny said – a normal day was from 6am to 6pm. “And their language, according to my grandma, would even shock the men. But they had a fantastic sense of humour.”

In Robin Hood’s Bay, Mr Freethy met Kevin Barrand, who was, at the time, the tourism officer for a large stretch of the North Yorkshire coast. As the pair walked down the steep steps to the harbour, Mr Barrand told him about an interesting sideline that many locals once relied upon … smuggling.

“Just look how close together the cottages are and how each is perched on a solid shelf of rock,” he said.

“We know that it was possible to walk through one house into another and go from top to bottom of the bay without using the road. It is no wonder that smuggling was rife here in the 18th century.”

Another tradition recorded in Mr Freethy’s book – this one strictly legal – was the knitting of “ganzies”, or patterned pullovers.

Margaret Wilkins, the then-curator of the Filey Museum, told Mr Freethy: “Every fishing village had its own knitted pattern and this helped identification in the sad times when the drowned body of a fisherman was picked up on a remote beach months after he had perished…”

It was a potent reminder that this was a way of life which was not only hard, but perilous too.

• Memories Of The Yorkshire Fishing Industry by Ron Freethy is published by Countryside books priced £9.95.