A SENSE of near-panic set Peter Frank about the task of chronicling the Yorkshire fishing community. Born in Whitby in 1934, he went on to become a professor at Essex University. In the Seventies he returned to his home town, and realised how much it had changed.

A centuries-old way of life was on the brink of being lost forever. After attending a talk by George Ewart Evans, one of the pioneers of oral history, Mr Frank knew what he had to do.

"I realised also on that visit to Whitby that personalities who in one's childhood had seemed to be everlasting were no longer there," he writes in the preface to his book, Yorkshire Fisherfolk.

"In panic almost, I bought a tape-recorder and began a frantic attempt to record as much information as possible."

After a disastrous first interview, he began to systematically record the memories of some remarkable men and women.

Among them were Tommy White, the last surviving Whitby fisherman to have sailed in a herring plosher (a bigger version of the coble), and James Cole, who recalled fishing in a Staithes yawl in the 1880s alongside his father and grandfather.

To this research, Peter added hours spent in libraries, museums and record offices, plus conversations in pubs and clubs and his own seagoing trips.

The result is Yorkshire Fisherfolk: a book which is scholarly and accessible, a vivid portrait of an all-but-lost community. It is packed with superbly evocative pictures showing life as it really was before tourism and candy floss. Chapters on the economic history of the coastal communities and the geography which shaped so many lives are followed by an in-depth look at the tough existence of the fisherfolk.

Before the internal combustion engine was adapted for use in fishing boats, human strength was the only means of conquering the seas. That meant life on the sea in the early years last century was much the same as it was in Elizabethan times, as this recollection by John William Story underlines.

"I was once in a coble with old Mr Murfield - he was a Sailors' Home man - and we were at sea, coming home from Robin Hood's Bay," he said.

"And the steamers what's going ti north, we could just see the mast tops and the funnels; we couldn't see the hulls.

"We were in a small coble. We landed in Joe's Nab... Black Nab's its proper name, on the chart... It was all wind, nor'west wind, gale: it was a gale.

"The lifeboat was coming after us, the rowing boat was coming through the Rock. We were trying to get Nor'ard of the Nab, but she wouldn't steer: the mast kept jumping out of step.

"Every time we went to steer the mast jumped out, and we were afraid of it going through the side and putting us in the water. So we lowered the sail and backed up into Saltwick Hole stern first."

Fishermen endured lean times and enjoyed feast times, and the latter were burned into the memory. But the largest catches meant the hardest work, as becomes clear from James Cole's recollection of a herring catch.

"One year in a plosher, the Venus, we landed 110 cran in five nights' fishing. Three men: me and my father and my Uncle Tom.

"We always did very well - I was fortunate, I dropped in with two lucky fellas. But it was hard go for three men, five nights. When we reckoned on t'Saturday night (we allus reckoned on t'Saturday, you know), we had £50, and then there was the expenses to come off after that.

"It would be about 1907... and we got £13 apiece, which was talked about. It was a lot of money."

The men were not the only ones to have it tough, of course. "Wives and daughters of fishermen brought up children, cooked, cleaned, washed and, more often than not, bore the chief burden of responsibility for seeing that the money spun out until another share-out came along," writes Mr Frank.

Jane Harland died ten months after the birth of her tenth child, aged 46. The next youngest was three, the eldest, Maud, 21. She described the start of a typical day.

""I've seen my father go out about two o'clock of a morning. We had no gas fires nor nothing of that.

"He used to light the fire on... and then he used to go down to the pier to find out the state of the sea, and then he used to come back, and I used to many a time, oh! I used to think, I wish t'cobles wouldn't get off today...

"And he used to shout upstairs, 'Come on! Come on down, tea's ready, we're going off'. We had to come down.

"Get mi tea and then, as soon as they went off, we used to bring the mussels in and we used to start - my auntie used to help me a lot.

"And sometimes the mussels were all froze, you know. You got bad fingers with them."

It wasn't easy making ends meet in a time before the welfare state. "There was no dole," said Laurence Murfield.

"At the back end - mostly September, after we'd been salmoning in the summer time - we used to go tatie picking.

"On your knees, and as he ploughed 'em up, you were picking taties into a bucket, and then after you got so far up t'row you'd empty taties into a bucket, and then after you got so far up t'row you'd empty them into a sack.

"And you were all day bent like that. You used to get 1s 9d from eight o'clock till five o'clock; but you used to get at ten o'clock a meal which was more than you ever got at home."

As with all communities bound together by hardship, the residents of Yorkshire fishing ports had a special and unbreakable spirit.

But that, too, is weakening as the fishing industry declines.

Yorkshire Fisherfolk by Peter Frank is published by Phillimore & Co, price £17.99

Updated: 10:17 Monday, October 21, 2002