Shorelines

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Inspired by the work of George Ewart Evans who came to Southwold to give a series of W.E.A. Lectures in 1976, I began to tape record those who remembered when fishing was conducted from the beach in open rowing and sailing boats, a practice which ended after the First World War. Since fishing is recorded here in the Domesday Book, I was listening to the last voices of a tradition that spanned a millennium. These are unique voices recalling a way of life now completely lost. In addition, I added imaginary voices of my own, those of the drowned, the longshoremen’s shadow-life. The result is a book which through the extraordinary accounts I was told, vividly reclaims this way of life and those who lived it.

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Robert Jellicoe

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Shorelines was nominated for the 2023 New Angle Prize for Literature 

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"Jellicoe has written a fabulous book - rich and strange - that recovers the lives and voices of an almost-forgotten community, the longshore fishermen of Southwold. Part oral history, part-ethnography, part-dream vision, Shorelines floats (like its subjects) between forms and forces. At its heart is an urge to honour these men and their families, and to bring forgotten stories to the surface again. Daring, tender and fasci-nating, this is wonderful work." Robert Macfarlane

 

"What a treasury you have gathered here! ... I have enjoyed spending time in that rich and salty air, made particularly spicy and vivid by the voices of the people themselves. That world is something that will never return and you have secured it a place in the memory. Southwold will be grateful to you, above all for the care and grace with which you have looked after these inestimably valuable threads and patches of the past." Adam Nicolson

 

"This is an extraordinary piece of oral history that brings a bygone community vividly back to life and deserves to sit on the same bookshelf occupied by Ronald Blythe and George Ewart Evans." D J Thomas