The Shoals of Herring

The BBC Radio Ballads were groundbreaking documentaries produced by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker in the late 1950s and broadcast on the BBC Home Service. They were masterpieces of radio, weaving the voices of rarely-heard communities with songs written from and about the recorded experiences of the interviewees. The third programme in the radio series, Singing the Fishing features the men and women of the herring fishing fleets of East Anglia and Northeast Scotland. It was based on 250 tapes of conversation with fishermen and their families, a wealth of material described by Parker as "all but overwhelming". MacColl and Seeger hit paydirt with the discovery of Sam Larner, an 80-year old ex-fisherman from Norfolk who was also a singer with a large repertoire of country songs,