At our recent meeting addressed by Gareth Thomas on Laverbread he mentioned the demise of many fishing practices around our local coast. I found the following explanation in Sanitising Swansea by Peter E Rees. A copy of the full monograph is in the Society’s library.
“In 1939, there was a body of thought that maintains that Swansea Bay had been polluted. This hypothesis is based on the fact that, historically, the Bay had supported a thriving shellfish industry. Swansea oysters had been highly regarded since Roman times, and as recently as 1871, there were some 200 oyster skiffs operating out of the Bay and along the south Gower coast to the west and as far as Porthcawl in the east. The annual catch was said to be ten million oysters, worth £50,000 at market, with some 600 people employed in the trade.
“The decline of the industry was rapid. By 1880, the oyster fleet was reduced by half. Overfishing and disease were blamed, but neither domestic sewage nor industrial discharge into the Tawe, Neath or Afan rivers is ever quoted as being a contributory factor for the decline of this ancient fishery. This is a surprising fact, when considering that the metal processing activities of the three towns of Swansea, Neath and Aberavon had freely used the rivers as a source of water and as a means of carrying away their unwanted and highly toxic effluent. By 1830, the last oyster skiff had retired, some six years before the Swansea main drainage scheme was opened.”