An experienced chairperson and speaker, she regularly chairs conferences and events for, among others, literature festivals, award ceremonies, and tech shows. A barrage of vicious hate mail, often from those she’d done most to help, was sent to her home and to the press. It shares 1968 with Made in Dagenham, and the ruthless spirit of women determined to change industry. This city has lost an iconic citizen – I have lost a friend – but the greatest loss is of course to the family and friends of Yvonne. When the women got back to Hull, Mary Denness said to the press they had achieved more for safety at sea in ten days than politicians and the trade unions had in a hundred years.

Here they voted to found the Hessle Road Women’s committee, headed up by Bilocca, Blenkinsop, Mary Denness and Christine Jensen, and tasked with pressing their demands with the owners and the government. After preventing unsafe ships from leaving St Andrews Dock in Hull, during the first week of February 1968 three of the leaders - including Yvonne - travelled to London for top-level talks with the government.The women started a campaign which captured national attention, won concessions from the ship owners, and changed government policy. The Hull fishing industry went into precipitous decline in the mid-1970s and the community it sustained went with it. Yvonne Marie Blenkinsop, the last survivor of four ‘Headscarf Revolutionaries’, fisheries workers and family members of trawlermen, who led a campaign for trawler safety in Hull in 1968, died on 24 April aged eighty-three. Lavery describes a very British rebellion, with that curiously British hostility towards political thinking. The ‘Hull Triple-Trawler Tragedy’ was the loss of three Hull based deep-water trawlers, the Kingston Peridot, St Romanus and Ross Cleveland, within days of each other in the winter of 1968.

JetPack installs this cookie to collect internal metrics for user activity and in turn improve user experience. I was on my way to discuss a potential doctoral thesis with one of my lecturers when I spotted the newly-appointed Professor of Creative Writing. Many of the families who lived around Hessle Road, the heart of the fishing community, had known similar losses over the years. Their story has been told on the stage, in books (most notably 'The Headscarf Revolutionaries' by Dr Brian W Lavery), and a BBC4 documentary ‘Hull’s Headscarf Heroes’. As a depiction of human courage and the triumph of willpower, the extraordinary story of the disaster’s one survivor holds its own with Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void or any survival epic.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. Yvonne was made an Honorary Freeman of the City in 2018 which reflected on the achievements of her and the other wives. Yet throughout the vodka-fuelled history lesson all I could think was , ‘that Lily woman looks like my mother’.

Next day, Lillian Bilocca, Yvonne Blenkinsop and Mary Denness, representing the Hessle Road Women’s Group, set off for London with 10,000 signatures, their Fishermen’s Charter and a media circus in tow. Back then, it was not a legal requirement for radio operators aboard, but change was just one of their demands. With Christine Jensen, Mary Denness and Yvonne Blenkinsop, she formed the Hessle Road Women's Committee at a meeting of concerned family members which ended with hundreds of women, led by Bilocca, storming the offices of trawler owners. Indeed, while Prescott, who had some involvement with the campaign as a young trade unionist, may be keen to celebrate what the women achieved, their rebellion had more in common with Danbert from Chumbawamba dowsing Prescott with water at the Brit Awards than it did with facilitating the banking crisis or invading Iraq. She may not have ruled the world … but she certainly helped shake it up with Lil, Mary and Christine.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. News of the loss of the Ross Cleveland reached Hull as Lillian and two others waited on the dockside for the owners. Hull’s year as the 2017 UK City of Culture provided a long overdue opportunity for the record to be put straight. The tk_lr is a referral cookie set by the JetPack plugin on sites using WooCommerce, which analyzes referrer behaviour for Jetpack. Led by the charismatic Lillian Bilocca – known as Big Lil – the women embarked on a campaign of protest and direct action that, as John Prescott acknowledges in the book’s foreword, ‘achieved more in weeks than unions and politicians ever did.