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A GROUP of more than 30 Icelanders travelled to Grimsby at the weekend to pay tribute to a local trawler crew who rescued their fishermen relatives more than 50 years ago.
It was on April 11th 1954 that the Grimsby trawler Hull City was fishing off Iceland when the crew spotted a rubber dinghy adrift in rough seas. On closer examination they found that eight men were huddled together in the bitter cold. They pulled on board and took them into port.
The Icelanders were from a trawler called the Gladur based in the Westmann Islands which had sunk some 24 hours earlier after she was overwhelmed by the heavy seas often found around Iceland. They had drifted for more than 90 miles and some of the men had given up any prospect of being rescued.
They have all since died, but one of the relatives has spent the last couple of years trying to trace any surviving members of the Hull City's crew. He contacted Atlantic Fresh, the main importer of Icelandic fish into the Humber, which in turn got in touch with the Fishermen's Mission.
By a stroke of good fortune Atlantic Fresh and the Mission managed to find that there is still one surviving member of the Hull City crew - 82-year-old James Findlater, living in the nearby seaside town of Cleethorpes.
The ship was owned by Consolidated Fisheries of Grimsby which called its ships after well known league football clubs ( Arsenal, Everton, Crystal Palace etc) . Two were named in honour of the local league teams, Grimsby Town and Hull City.
Mr Findlater told Fishupdate that he still remembers the incident quite clearly. "I was only in my twenties at the time. We saw this dinghy bobbing around in the water and went to have a look. There were the fishermen all sat together, so we pulled them on board, gave them a tot of rum and some warm clothes before taking them into port. They were very grateful for what we did."
He added: "It is a good job they were in a rubber dinghy rather than a wooden lifeboat. The sea was that rough the boat would have smashed into the side of our trawler and some of them would have been lost." Mr Findlater, who spent most of his working life at sea, said he was quite surprised when he heard that people in Iceland were trying to find him. "To us it was all in a day's work."
On Saturday, the 24 relatives of the Gladur crew attended a special thanksgiving service in Grimsby Minster, conducted almost entirely in Icelandic, and presented the Port Missioner Tony Jewitt with medal of honour for Mr Findlater and a special plaque to mark the rescue which will be hung in the fishermen's chapel.
At the service was Thordhur Gudjonsson, whose brother Leifer was skipper of the Gladur. "The fishermen of Grimsby gave us some very good news that day and we are very grateful to them."
Orn Jonsson, a director of Atlantic Fresh, said: "We were glad to have been able to help make this reunion possible. There has always been a strong bond between the fishermen of Iceland and the fishermen of Grimsby and this strengthens that relationship. What we witnessed at the weekend was a piece of history."
The rescue was the first time Icelandic fishermen had used a rubber dinghy to escape. Since then the lives of more than 1,200 Icelandic fishermen have been saved by rubber dinghies of one type or another.
The Hull City's skipper John Searby was so impressed with its flexibility that he brought it back to Grimsby and suggested it should be used on all UK fishing vessels. The issue was then taken up by Jack Croft-Baker, president of the British Trawlers Federation and within a year or two they became standard issue.
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