Mary Denness
Open-knowledge reference entry
Mary Denness (nee Taylor; 1937 – March 2017) was a British ship's steward and fisherman's wife. She helped to lead a campaign that led to improvements in the safety of fishing trawlers following the 1968 Hull triple trawler tragedy. Denness afterwards served as a school nurse and was a matron at Eton College.
Early life
Mary Taylor was born on the Hessle Road in Hull in 1937. Her family were involved in the fishing industry and as a teenager she worked as a steward on board ships for Thomas Wilson Sons & Co., a job usually then carried out by men. She married Barry Denness, the skipper of a fishing trawler, in the 1950s and they had three children.
Hull trawler tragedy
The city of Hull was hit by the triple trawler tragedy in early 1968. Within two months three trawlers – the St. Romanus, Kingston Peridot, and Ross Cleveland – were lost with 58 of their crew. A campaign was started amongst local fishermen's wives, led by Lillian Bilocca, to improve safety standards aboard the trawlers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Denness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.