

As a working-class kid growing up in Hull’s bomb-damaged Old Town, I felt I had the “freedom of the
streets” to play where I wanted. When our seafaring Dad was home, my two older sisters and I nagged him to build us a boogie (a 4-wheeled cart that could be steered). I was about 4-years old and Mam put a cushion in the old orange-box to make my ride comfy.
School days in the 1950s did me no favours. I was sent to a ‘Cripple School’ and the only thing I learnt was to play the triangle. Aged seven, I still didn’t know the alphabet or how to count beyond ten. Dad got me moved into a ‘normal’ school and they assumed I knew these things. Bullies were drawn to me because I was smaller than average and my hands were deformed. But I soon found that ‘bullies are cowards at heart’ when I fought back – for some reason, they didn’t expect or like that! Humour was also a great way to disarm people – brains, not brawn. And at different times, different minders watched out for me. There were bigger kids who liked me and unwittingly gave me a form of protection.
Instead of being able to sit my 11+ exam, I was sent home that afternoon. Mam went into school the next morning to find out why I wasn’t allowed to do the test, and was told “We wanted to save Alec the
embarrassment of failing!” They equated my physical handicap with a metal handicap. Once, when I came 2nd in my annual report at senior secondary school, four bullies grabbed me, held me up against a wall, and accused me of cheating. There we go again.
During the 1960s, my sisters joined the army and, between freight forwarding jobs, I hitch-hiked around Europe and the Middle East. I found travel to be a better education than school. In the 1970s, I got into higher education as a mature student in Psychology – leaving office work behind.
Nowadays, I am seen as a photographer and historian of Hull’s Hessle Road Fishing Community. But I am not a qualified photographer nor historian. Instead, I see myself as a ‘psychologist with a camera’ who likes to observe people in their everyday lives. Perhaps my affinity with the Hessle Roaders is that I perceive them as underdogs too – and they also got a rough deal from life. They, like any mariner, were underdogs when it came to combating Mother Nature at sea. The trawler barons ran the fish dock along feudal lines and anyone who stepped out of line was black-balled. And social snobbery by non-Hessle Roaders within Hull, tended to ‘look down their noses’ at the fishing families.
My first photo focus was “freedom of the streets” for the kids of Hessle Road. These photos, and many
others, have recently been curated by Iranzu Baker into a book called ‘The Alec Gill Hessle Road Photo
Archive (1971-1987).


