The End of Elvering

I have a few odd jugs and bowls about the cottage where I keep things that might one day be useful or that I can’t bring myself to throw away. This one – a harvest mug commemorating Fleming’s Cider and Perry, made at Wellington Mill Pottery – has a gadget with a small wheel for measuring distances on maps, a few plug fuses, some drawing pins and odd shoelaces and, right at the bottom, a blue plastic disc about the size of an old penny,  stamped NRA 26.

When I made my living catching eels, every ‘fishing instrument’ – each fyke net, for example – had to carry a number to prove that it was registered with the National Rivers Authority and could therefore be legally used to catch eels. I had to pay a few quid for each licence – probably just enough to cover the cost of making and issuing the tags – and that was the last the National Rivers Authority heard of me.

It seems astonishing now. There were no quotas, no catch returns, nothing to suggest that the NRA was interested in eel population levels or in ensuring the fishing was sustainable. Eels are now seen to be a keystone species, that comprised 50% of the total biomass of the once-pristine freshwater systems of the UK. They had an important place in the culture, the religion, the economy and the language of England, before they fell out of favour with everyone except London’s East Enders. Now, unsurprisingly, after years of not being cared about, they are under threat.

 I only fished for adult eels, so I mostly came across elvers and elver fishing when I wanted to restock the waters I had fished. I would call Horace Cook, one of the Severnside elver merchants, who would sell me a couple of kilos of elvers if he didn’t have enough to be worth taking to Heathrow to airfreight to Japan. I think it salved his conscience a little, for no-one else restocked eels in those days,  but even so these polystyrene boxes, each containing 3,000 transparent eels not much bigger than a darning needle, would cost me something in the region of £200.  This was in the early days of what became the elver gold rush.

Originally elvering was partly a country pastime and partly a cheap way to feed the family, when the elvers beyond number rode the big tides up the river in the springtime. Men with huge muslin nets would stand on their ‘tumps’ on the river bank, waiting for the tide to fall and the elvers to swim to the sides of the rivers to ride upstream on the backwash of the dropping tide. They would dip the corners of their nets into the stream of elvers and let the water wash the elvers in.

Eels, elvers and lampreys have always been important on the River Severn. For centuries the city of Gloucester sent the monarch a lamprey pie at Christmas. King John was not alone in his interest in eels and lampreys. Edward I decreed various price controls, which set the value of a ‘stick’ of 25 eels at 2d. Henry VIII banned the taking of elvers for ten years around 1533, and Elizabeth I made this ban permanent, which is quite curious, because she was no protector of wildlife, and enacted the notorious Vermin Laws. Charles II introduced a 5-shilling fine and confiscation of nets for anyone caught fishing elvers. It is far from clear why these restrictions were introduced, and in 1778 new legislation permitted the taking of elvers for household consumption but not for sale, and elvers for breakfast with a bit of bacon now became a legal as well as a local delicacy. This continued along the banks of the lower Severn as part of country life until the 1860s, when fishing for elvers was again banned as a result of the Salmon River catchment boards set up under the 1865 Salmon Act, and the 1873 Salmon Fisheries Act.  Section 15 of this act stated ‘That no person between the first day of January and the 24^th day of June shall hang, fix or use in any salmon river any basket net or trap whatsoever for catching eels (or the fry of eels) or place in any inland water any device whatsoever to catch or obstruct any fish descending the stream.’   It seems pretty clear that this renewal of the ban on elver fishing was for the benefit of the aristocracy, who were often the owners of commercial salmon fisheries and of sporting salmon-fishing beats on the newly fashionable sporting estates. They were ostensibly interested in protecting the salmon smolts migrating out of the rivers to grow to maturity in the ocean, and in preventing them from getting caught in eel traps. It is also likely that they were keen to discourage working men from lurking around the river banks at night in case they also poached salmon, and the ban on elver fishing may thus have had more to do with protecting salmon than preserving eel stocks. This new prohibition led to much discontent around the Severn, especially among the dock workers of Gloucester, whose work unloading grain was seasonal and who depended on the elver fishing in spring for food and for income. They were a new class of industrial workers who were not obliged to defer to the aristocracy, and many of them defied the new regulations, resulting in so many incidents and prosecutions that the phrase ‘Elver Wars’ was coined. Eventually, after many hotly contested court cases, an elver fishing season was introduced, which lasted until 1935, when the legislation was repealed and there was no limit to elver fishing, a situation that continued until very recently, when the decline in eel numbers could no longer be ignored.

To harvest the very young fry of any fish is anything but sustainable, and is most unusual, but then the eel is most unusual. The elvers came up the rivers in such numbers that the supply seemed inexhaustible, and in the past when the land was less drained and more porous they threaded their way to every stream and pond in the entire country. Neither the fishing nor the building of navigation weirs across the Severn seemed to deter them, and if they died below the weirs or were scooped up by the ton to be sold to the glue factory in Taunton, there were always more shoals arriving, year after year.

Then around the First World War a German set up the first elver depot, to buy elvers from the locals to supply eel farms on the continent, where a new hot-smoking technique had made eel a sought-after delicacy.  Eel breeding was then still a mystery, and the only way to farm eels was to buy wild elvers. From this point on elvering slowly became more commercialised.  Businessmen set up more elver depots and negotiated with elver merchants in Japan, and later China, as the market for sushi exploded. By the 1970s it began to seem like a gold rush. It was no longer a rural oddity; one well-known dealer left his job in a marketing department in Knightsbridge when he heard of the money to be made catching elvers on the Somerset Levels. There were still the local good-old-boys whose families had always liked a bit of elvering, who loved all manner of fishing and just being out on the river bank, but there were also many for whom elvering provided quite startling amounts of cash at the height of the boom. And there were the businessmen, running the elver depots, people like Mike Hancock down on the Somerset Levels, Horace Cook of Minsterworth, and in particular a series of businesses involving one Peter Wood, originally a vet from Gloucester, the latest of which is called UK Glass Eels. These were good times for the fishermen, even better times for the dealers but not so good, as it turned out, for the eels. From about 1980 it began to look as if the eel population was in freefall, not just in the UK but throughout its range, from Scandinavia across Europe to North Africa. Unlike salmon, with distinct populations in each river system, eels are what is called panmictic – there is a single European population, and increase or decrease will affect the entire population equally.

I looked on this, when I was fishing eels, with some bewilderment. That the elvers should be sent to the Far East to be fattened and eaten seemed to me to be the worst of all the possible alternatives, and that the authorities should make no attempt either to regulate the quantities of elvers fished or to tax the very considerable cash-in-hand earnings seemed inexplicable. It was as if the eel was beneath notice in a country more concerned with protecting the sporting fish of the well-off than the eel, a fish only beloved of the working class in the East End of London. I firmly believe we would have watched the eels disappear from our ecosystems with hardly an official qualm had we not been in the European Union. To save the whole panmictic European eel population from free-fall, pan-European legislation was required.

In 2007 the EU required all member states to enact eel management plans to aid the recovery of the European eel. In addition the European eel was listed in Appendix II of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) in 2009, and the EU placed a ban on the import and export of eels in 2010. As a result elver merchants in the UK could only export to Europe either for aquaculture or for restocking lakes and rivers. The Far Eastern market was now illegal, though so lucrative that smuggling of elvers broke out throughout Europe, making elvers the most illegally-trafficked animals in the world in terms both of individual numbers and cash value. That was bad news for the elver fishermen and the only remaining elver shipper, who was now said to be regretting having voted for Brexit, and the situation got worse as soon as we left the EU because he could then no longer export any elvers whatever from the UK to the Europe he had voted to leave. Europe now only permitted trade in elvers and eels within its borders. Luckily, or so he must have thought, he still had the possibility of sending elvers to restock Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, one of the most important wild eel fisheries in Europe. Since the UK was concentrating its eel conservation work on building fish passes, there was now very little money available for restocking, and though there was a requirement under the Eel Management Plan for 60% of elvers caught to be offered for restocking, there was very little take up.

As a result the last of the UK’ elver merchants, a man who seemed to have made enough money from the sale of elvers to be able to transport them throughout Europe in his own private airplane, had only one outlet for his elvers, and the traditional elver fishery on Severnside could only operate when he had an order from the Lough Neagh Fisherman’s Cooperative. Where once he might have bought all elvers offered to him, he now announced the days when he would be buying elvers and, in theory, only bought the amount for which he had orders.

It is hard not to sympathise with him when he discovered that the man entrusted with getting Brexit done had negotiated a Northern Ireland protocol that resulted in NI being part of the European free trade area. As a result he was now also banned from sending elvers from the UK to his last remaining market as it was considered, as far as elver sales were concerned, to be within Europe..

Not a man to take things lying down, he used a CITES provision (called a Non-Detriment finding) to argue that an exception should be made for the Northern Ireland trade. This essentially involved research approved by various official bodies such as the Joint Nature Conservation Committee,  DEFRA, Natural England, and the Animal and Plant Health Agency to evidence a considerable surplus of elvers arriving annually in the Severn estuary, many more than would be required to support an optimum population of eels in these river systems, and therefore to demonstrate that a specified quantity of elvers could be fished without detriment to the eel populations of these rivers. The second pillar of the Non Detriment Finding was that the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative would have to demonstrate that they could limit the catch so as to allow a 40% escapement of the mature silver eels from the lough to migrate back to the Sargasso to breed. The EU has never ruled on this NDF and so has in practice not accepted it. DEFRA was more compliant, but just as your man was picking himself back up and dusting himself off the very future of the Lough Neagh fishery was put at risk by the pollution and eutrophication of the lough caused by sewage and farm effluent and fertilisers. This year (2024) the fisherman’s cooperative refused to buy his elvers, though they ended up accepting a gift of elvers from a French dealer.

Luckily he had used the NDF to argue that he should be allowed sell elvers to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic, and DEFRA, inexplicably, had agreed to this. In 2023 he also attempted to use the NDF to argue that he should be allowed to resume sending elvers to the Far East, but DEFRA refused to allow this trade, and after some expensive litigation the only option still open to him was to sell 500kg of elvers to Russia. This year DEFRA allowed him to export a tonne of elvers to Kaliningrad (three million individuals), flown over in two trips from Cardiff airport in his private plane, G-EELS.

DEFRA has a habit of making decisions that I am not alone in finding questionable. They seem to give more weight to the arguments of landowners than to those of conservationists, whether the issue is badger culling or the release by shooting estates of alien invasive pheasants near sites of special scientific interest. The decision to allow elvers to be sent to Kaliningrad, when ICES (the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea) is recommending that there should be zero eel catches in all habitats in 2024,  is made even more questionable not just because we have been sanctioning Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, but because Kaliningrad has been used as a staging post for the smuggling of elvers to the Far East and is ideally placed to continue to do so. The fate of the elvers, unlike those exported to Lough Neagh under the Non Detriment Finding, cannot be monitored. They are supposedly being taken for restocking as a conservation measure but are actually taken to an aquaculture facility run by a Russian company called Gudfish, where they are reared to fingerling size, before apparently being released into the Kaliningrad lagoons. The Kaliningrad Russian media openly describes the trade as commercial, and I am told the Russians are surprised that the UK authorities permit it. These elvers will have been sold by the kilo but when released they are likely to be released as counted individuals, and the opportunity to siphon off valuable elvers through this accountability gap cannot be policed by European bodies such as CITES. They are then released, in numbers that may or may not correspond to the weights of elvers specified in the DEFRA permits, into the two Kaliningrad lagoons.  One of these is shared with Poland and the other with Lithuania, so the opportunity specified of Lough Neagh to be able to police the escapement of 40% of the mature silver eels to the Sargasso Sea to breed can not exist here. Smuggling elvers is a huge and profitable business involving international gangs and linked by its very nature to the laundering of huge sums of money, and the elver deal with Kaliningrad should not, in my opinion, have been countenanced because of the impossibility of policing both the risk of smuggling and the NDF stipulation that 40% of the silver eels should be allowed to return to sea to breed. And for once the beneficiaries of DEFRA’s bizarre decision comprise not the whole farming or shooting community but only one old man past retirement age whose business has given him a good life for the last forty years or so, (and who owns another elver business in France), plus a few seasonal fishermen along the Severn and a few part-time seasonal elver packers. The rumours – and I stress these are just rumours – are that DEFRA is hardening its stance somewhat. It is said that applications have been made to export elvers to Belarus and to Ukraine, and further elvers to Russia, and that Defra has refused to agree. It is not worth trying to check this officially as DEFRA is sure to say it is commercially sensitive information. As with Kaliningrad, although there are innumerable lakes in Belarus where eels have been stocked for many decades with elvers from the UK and France, there is no way that the escapement of mature eels can be monitored, and the risk of these elvers being trafficked to the Far East cannot be adequately policed either.  For DEFRA to sanction such trades at present would be as hard to justify as their original decision to grant permits for export to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

I confess to not having much sympathy for the elver dealer, but I do have considerable concern for some of the elver fishermen. I say ‘some’ because as the elver gold-rush built up many men became elverers attracted only or mainly by the prospect of making big tax-free money. But there are – as it seems to me seen through the lenses of my various prejudices – some elver fishermen who love the river, and who feel most truly alive when out at night fishing the big tides, remembering how they learned about it from their fathers and uncles. They may have made money in the good times, but now in the bad times they are eager to go out elvering even if they don’t get paid, and to donate the elvers for restocking. If the world of the elver depots is over – the desperate efforts to find ways to sell elvers to dodgy places in Eastern Europe may well be the death throes of the UK elver trade – I would be very sad to see the good old boys of Severnside unable to continue what is, at least for the best of them, part of their culture, virtually all that is left of the Severnside vernacular fishing tradition that once included racks of salmon putchers on the mud flats around Goldcliff,  compass nets for salmon in the mouth of the Wye and in Wellhouse Bay, men wading out fishing for shad and salmon with great lave nets on treacherous tide-swept sandbanks, the families running salmon drift net boats out of Newport, and clotting or ‘rayballing’ for eels in the rhines of Sedgemoor and the reens of the Caldicot and Wentlooge levels.

I hope there may be some possibility of a new role for these men. The mighty Severn has been badly constrained by our activities. The wetlands and marshes, the very lungs of the river system, have been drained and dried. The big river has at least seven navigation weirs, major obstructions to an important assembly of migratory fish such as shad, eels, lampreys, salmon, trout and sturgeon, a serious detriment to this great river, where the cash value of tourist boating (now that the commercial barge traffic is pretty much finished) takes no account of the value to the planet of a fully functioning river eco-system. The elvermen see the elvers queuing up below the weirs, and fear they will die before some great high tide overtops the weirs and allows them to pass. Millions are spent on fish passes, but many of the elver men believe that they need to be customised for each individual weir if they are to work for elvers, and to be kept free of the inevitable rubbish that obstructs them. It is illegal to catch elvers and release them higher up the river, and the elver men can only eat them if they cook them on the river bank, which some of them did this year on the last night of what may turn out to have been the last commercial elver fishing season.  Even if the elver men donate elvers to the elver station in the belief they will be used for restocking, this is not guaranteed and much bureaucracy and irritating delay is involved in planning such restocking.

The best hope for the eels of Severnside, it seems to me, is for them to be free from the pressures of the elver gold-rush mentality and resume a calmer place in the culture of the region, becoming once again plentiful and cheap enough to eat for breakfast. A new generation growing  up to love and value the eels of Severnside, not as a way to make black cash but as part of their emotional, spiritual and food culture, may offer the best hope that the eels will be cherished in the future.

A project in the Somerset levels is putting fish tanks in primary schools, where children can observe eels. Elsewhere Landscape Recovery Projects are looking at rewetting the peat and improving habitats, in cooperation with the local communities. In Powys the Red Kites were saved from extinction in part by a kind of folk movement, where scouts and army cadets were mobilised to guard the nests from egg collectors. The weirs on the Severn and the obstructions of the Somerset Levels  could be the focus for a similar folk movement, where volunteers and elvermen and school children  come together to help the elvers past the weirs so that eels can once again become a part of the local spiritual and gastronomic culture. Giving the elvers a helping hand over the obstructions could anchor people in a sense of a local revived riverside and wetland culture and provide an opportunity to reconnect young people with nature, such a vital part of changing from a culture of mercilessly exploiting nature to one which nurtures it and samples its riches with respect and restraint. Alongside this, a growing awareness of the biodiversity we have lost in draining all our fens and marshes may encourage us to open up more landscapes to the ebb and flow of the tides that bring the elvers every Severn springtime.

POSTSCRIPT

I cannot leave this subject without pointing out that those who are trying to save the elvers, the eels and the eel culture of Severnside are at the mercy of other forces. The Magnificent Severn and its catchment is fragmented, drained and dried and systemically polluted. The real barrier to eels in the River Severn may be chemical, rather than thee physical weirs and floodgates; the adult eel population does not seem able to reach the levels that the recent elver runs should support. Farms release nitrates and phosphates from unsustainable farming and from industrialised animal farming, and most farmers use a wide range of chemicals, often called crop protection or pesticides, a use of words that tries to hide their true nature as biocides that indiscriminately harm living things. Our water and sewage infrastructure has been handed to companies for whom an important part of their business model is the deliberate discharge of sewage into rivers. The Severn was once a sacred river, as all rivers should be, and it is not enough to work in silos, saving the eel or the shad or working to increase the awareness of school children. If we cannot revert to holding the natural world in reverence, rather than seeing it as something to be exploited for private individual profit, all our conservation projects are likely to be futile.