The book of Dutteronomy

Like his father and his grandfather before him, Gary ‘Boy Dutter drags nets from a trawler to scoop flatfish — he is the last of his kind in Southwold

- RICHARD NEGUS

When you have a pint in the Harbour Inn or visit the lifeboat museum in Southwold, take a look at the grainy old Edwardian photographs that decorate the walls. Groups of hardbitten men, all whiskers and oilskins, stare back at you. A good quarter of those, who sat for a day-tripper to snap their portrait, are members of my family — now all a long time dead.

Our familial clumsy ears are hidden by sou’westers, or stick out from under nautical caps. They are fishermen and lifeboat crew, shoemakers and carpenters. They boast eccentric nicknames and dogs of uncertain breeding skulk at their feet. They are invariably pictured in front of one of the fishermen’s huts that once cluttered the beach. Old fowling-pieces can be seen leaning against the tarred walls of these shacks, where their owners would sit mending nets and yarning.

Passion

Those men lived by the coast and earned their living from it. When the North Sea was too rough to risk in their little open boats, they shot geese and duck on the marshes or the river Blyth. No market gunners these, only pot fillers. This place has been my family’s home town for generations; my parents still live there. It is this seawater in my veins that I blame for my passion for wildfowling.

Southwold was once a town of the sea rather than a ‘seaside town’. Fishing was its lifeblood. Two world wars, changing consumer tastes, shrinking fishery exclusion zones and bureaucracy succeeded in nigh destroying the once-booming industry here. A dedicated number of hardy souls still fish the shallow everchanging waters of Sole Bay, named after the delicately flavoured flatfish that favour these muddy seas.