The Headscarf Revolutionaries: Lillian Bilocca and the Hull Triple-Trawler Disaster

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Over the decades, my newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail, had covered all too many such stories from the city’s Hessle Road fishing community. Earlier this month, the special memorial garden to honour those lost at sea found its permanent home on St Andrew's Quay. Huge wildfires affect diverse eco-systems and flooding threatens a huge portion of the world’s population.

There were more than 600 women there, and among those speaking was the then local union firebrand John Prescott. That day, the Hull Daily Mail reported: “The wives, led by 39-year-old Lillian Bilocca, were laughed off at first by many in the fishing industry. A calm evening fast turned into a stormy night; the fishing vessel lost all 20 crewmates to the briny sea.Dr Lavery should be congratulated for telling their story in such a gripping way and his achievement in securing the interests of the production company is to be celebrated.

I was not surprised to find out the Brian Lavery has training in both journalism and creative writing. She was the last of Hull's headscarf revolutionaries, the four brave women who led the campaign to make trawling safer and who are credited with saving countless fishermen's lives. The tk_lr is a referral cookie set by the JetPack plugin on sites using WooCommerce, which analyzes referrer behaviour for Jetpack.With the collar turned up against the sleet, I felt like quite the ace reporter – the sort Damon Runyon wrote about. Book sections slim down, top-name authors share the few reviews between them, and the true marketing becomes readers word of mouth. I decided right then to change my PhD proposal, make an appointment with the professor and tell him the story of Lily.

It was shortly after my first ‘death knock’- the awful description given by reporters to describe going to a bereaved person’s home. The trawler owners had known of the probable loss since 13 January but had delayed raising the alarm for a whole ten days. The women's campaign was one of the biggest and most successful civil action campaigns of the 20th century. It is not simply a Hull story, though it is a must for any Hullite, it is a story that is inspiring to all and Brian Lavery tells it in such a captivating and spell-binding manner it is firm five stars from me. A barrage of vicious hate mail, often from those she’d done most to help, was sent to her home and to the press.Marge Proops ran a feature on ‘The Real Big Lil’ in the Daily Mirror, and even the Daily Mail carried a supportive front page lead. Rather than accepting the changes, the spokesman from the Trawler Owners Association accused the women of being subject to mass hysteria and sticking their nose into business women couldn’t understand. Yvonne Blenkinsop, right, and Lillian Bilocca speaking to the press about their protests after the fishing industry in Hull is hit by tragedy with the sinking of trawlers in February 1968. Now that a film and TV production company has bought the rights to the book by Dr Brian Lavery, the determination of those ordinary women from Hull is set to make it to the big screen.

The local Transport and General Workers’ Union arranged a meeting in London between the women and minister of agriculture Fred Peart and minister of state at the board of trade JPW Mallalieu.With fellow activists Christine Jenson, Mary Denness and Yvonne Blenkinsop, they became known as “ The Headscarf Revolutionaries”, the name coming from the fashionable headscarfs the women wore. Bought after listening to Reg Meuross's 12 songs about the Hessle fishing community and their losses. The Headscarf Revolutionaries is about a local tragedy which sparked a campaign which had national implications. They were also met with hostility closer to home, from within the deeply patriarchal fishing community. In December 2013 he wrote and presented Courage and Effect for BBC Radio 4 on their Four Thought series, drawn from the subject matter of this book.