The history of fisheries administration in the British Empire covers the growth of government authorities for the regulation of the sea and fresh-water fisheries in the United Kingdom and in its colonies and dominions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England and Wales the central authority grew out of the two inspectors of fisheries, at first inspectors of salmon fisheries, appointed by the Home Secretary under the Salmon Fishery Act 1861. The first two, William Ffennell and Frederick Eden, came from the Irish fishery service; later holders included the naturalist Frank Buckland, the historian Spencer Walpole and, from 1881 to 1885, Thomas Henry Huxley. The Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act 1886 transferred them to the Board of Trade and made them inspectors of sea fisheries as well, and in 1903 the department passed to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. The actual regulation of the English sea fisheries was committed from 1888 to local sea fisheries committees of the county and borough councils, whose by-laws had no legal force until confirmed by the central authority, usually after a local inquiry held by an inspector. In Scotland the fisheries were administered from 1882 by the Fishery Board for Scotland; Ireland had a fisheries board from 1819 and, from 1899, a Fisheries Branch of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.
England and Wales Origins under the Salmon Fishery Act 1861
By the middle of the nineteenth century the salmon catch of England and Wales had been falling for decades, at a time when the population was growing faster than the home supply of meat. The rivers were fished and used by groups whose interests conflicted: upstream owners and anglers, who wanted the spawning fish protected; downstream owners, whose nets took most of the catch; tidal fishermen; mill owners, whose dams blocked the fish; and factory owners, who used the rivers as drains. The old fishery statutes, some dating from the thirteenth century, had become so confused that the Royal Commission of 1861 found it hard to say what the law was, and magistrates often declined to act on it. The commission, one of whose three members was the Irish fishery reformer William Ffennell, looked to Ireland, where close seasons had been enforced since 1842 and regional boards licensed fishermen. It recommended consolidating the law, suppressing weirs and fixed engines, setting uniform close times, requiring fish passes on mill dams, paying for river management through licences, and appointing central inspectors with a system of by-laws to fit general rules to local conditions.
The government bill lost much of this in Parliament. Conservative members objected to fishery boards as an interference with property and to paying inspectors from public funds; the clause creating boards was dropped, and the Act as passed had thirty-six clauses in place of fifty-seven. It abolished fixed engines and required passes on new dams, but only allowed, and did not compel, owners to fit passes to existing ones. The inspectors it authorised had in strict law only the power to approve fish gratings and no power to prosecute. The Act also renewed the old power of justices to appoint conservators, without giving them defined duties or powers.
For most of the nineteenth century there was in England no actual supervisory staff or fisheries office, and it was not until 1886 that one was created. The Salmon Fishery Act 1861 had, however, made somewhat elaborate provision for the regulation of the fresh-water fisheries, and had placed their general superintendence under the Home Office. Two inspectors were appointed by the home secretary, who, with the local "conservators or overseers for the preservation of salmon", were entrusted with the task of carrying out the provisions of the Act. The first two inspectors were both Irish fishery officials: Ffennell, who had drafted the Irish salmon Act of 1848, and Frederick Eden, a fishery commissioner for Ireland. Both kept their posts as fishery commissioners in Scotland. In November 1861 the Home Office instructed them to visit and inspect the rivers of England and Wales, to consult the owners of fisheries, to decide which fixed engines might stay on the ground of long usage, to examine fish passes, weirs and nets, and to report every March. Their duties were to undertake the inquiries necessary for the administration of the fresh-water fisheries, and to prepare and lay before Parliament an annual report containing a "Statistical Account of the Fisheries, with such other information as may be collected, and suggestions for their regulation and improvement". This, in the words of the marine biologist James Johnstone, writing in 1905, "was the germ of the English central authority". The historian Roy MacLeod describes the two inspectors as the first permanent staff appointed to supervise the fisheries of England and Wales. He notes that a royal commission of 1878 regarded the Salmon Acts, with the later Alkali Acts, as the only Acts under which public money was spent on inspection mainly to protect private property.
The sea fisheries were another matter. The Sea Fisheries Act 1868, which gave effect to the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1863, provided for their regulation only so far as the preservation of order or the interests of the navigation of fishing boats were concerned. It gave the Crown power to make Orders in Council for the policing of the territorial waters in the interest of the exclusive fishing rights of British subjects; for the registration, lettering, numbering and lighting of fishing boats; and generally for all matters connected with the actual conduct of fishermen at sea, but apart from the actual regulation of the methods of fishing. Commissioned officers of H.M. ships, British consular officers, and officers of Coastguard and Customs had powers to carry out the provisions of Orders made under the Act. Beyond this the Board of Trade's jurisdiction over the sea fisheries extended only to regulating the oyster and shell fisheries and to granting orders conferring rights of "several fishery", that is, the exclusive privilege of fishing on limited portions of the foreshore or sea-bed.
The Home Office inspectorate, 1861–1886 The deficiencies of the Act became clear in a year. A fisherman still could catch salmon in the close time and export it to France, so this trade grew until a short amending Act of 1863 closed it. No way was established to pay for watching the rivers, or compensating a mill owner when his dam had to be altered. Ffennell and Eden grasped the obvious: whoever gained from protection ought to help pay for it. Thus they asked for, report after report, for establishment of a local body where every river interest had a say, funded through a combination of water rates (like in Scotland) and the sales of fishing licences (like in Ireland). The Salmon Fishery Act 1865 granted them their wishes. Elected boards of conservators now covered whole river systems; they could charge licence duty on fishing gear and send bailiffs to look over weirs, dams and fixed engines; passes on mill dams became compulsory; and a special commission of three was appointed to settle, once and for all, which fixed engines were lawful. The boards still lacked the power to make by-laws.
Then, inside a year, the office lost both of its men. Eden, ill since 1865, asked to retire. Ffennell, nearing sixty-seven, died in 1867. They were replaced by two very different figures. Frank Buckland, an outspoken proponent of fishiing whose books and fishery museum had made fish culture a popular subject, started work in February 1867. Spencer Walpole, a twenty-eight-year-old War Office clerk, followed in March; after being apppointed by the home secretary, Spencer Horatio Walpole, who also was his father (MacLeod suggests that the father's recommendation got the son his position). In a wider change, the new inspectors no longer sat as fishery commissioners for Scotland, and the idea of one set of inspectors looking after salmon on both sides of the border came to an end.
The sporting press had declared Buckland too much of an entertainer and Walpole too much of his father's son. In practice the pairing worked out well, and their first joint report was praised as a marked improvement on its predecessors. Buckland looked for facts: how salmon bred and travelled, how badly a river was fouled, which sort of ladder a fish would actually climb. He also began gathering sales figures from Billingsgate and the other big markets, brought in the chemist Edward Frankland to examine river water, and moved his Museum of Economic Fish Culture into the Science and Art Department's buildings at South Kensington, where he could try out new fish passes. Walpole, the quieter of the two, was dealing with gaps in the Acts of 1861 and 1865. In his opinion, the boards lacked real power to supervise their districts. Walpole argued for penalties for anyone who fouled a salmon river, for every watershed placed under a single board, and for every fishing instrument licensed.
Parliament looked at the whole question again in 1869 and 1870, when a select committee under J. P. Dodds, chairman of the Tees conservators, heard witnesses over twenty-one sittings. Most of what it recommended had been recommended before, by the Royal Commission of 1861. The new element was a call for a proper central authority, answerable to one of the departments of state, with power to alter and merge fishery districts and to keep the local boards in step with one another. Until the country's fisheries were thought large enough to deserve a department of their own, the committee said, the salmon inspectorate should go to the Board of Trade. Buckland and Walpole were not keen. They liked the loose rein they had under the home secretary, and feared that a big department would smother the personal persuasion on which their work depended. What came instead was another Act. The Salmon Fishery Act 1873 let the boards make by-laws, provided the home secretary approved them, made their membership representative, and did away with the special commissioners.
From 1873 the inspectors reached beyond salmon. In that year Walpole took over the oyster inspections previously carried out for the Board of Trade by H. Cholmondeley Pennell. In 1875 the inspectors studied the Norfolk crab, lobster and oyster fisheries, in 1877 the crab and lobster fisheries of the whole United Kingdom, and in 1878 the herring fisheries of Scotland. The Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade, T. H. Farrer, complained that the Home Office was taking up sea-fishery matters without consulting his department.
Two public inquiries belong to this period. In 1878 the home secretary appointed a commission to examine into the state of the fisheries; its members were the two inspectors of salmon fisheries for England and Wales, Buckland and Walpole, and it reported in the following year. In 1878 Buckland and Walpole had also reported, with A. Young, Commissioner of Scottish Salmon Fisheries, on the herring fisheries of Scotland. The commissioners recommended that the powers exercised by the Home Office under the Salmon Fishery Act in respect of the fresh-water fisheries be extended to the sea fisheries, and that the home secretary should have power, after due inquiry, to issue provisional orders restricting trawling in defined areas. To carry out such inquiries some authority was necessary, and they advised that the powers possessed by the salmon inspectors should be extended so as to include the sea fisheries also. This was not done immediately.