Book review: The Would-be Wife by Annie Wilkinson

As she grew up in a small terraced house in the hub of Hull's fishing industry, Lynn Carr longed to escape the stench of fish, the din of clogs on cobbles and the aroma of smoke-oven chimneys.

And when she married handsome, ambitious Graham Bradbury and moved to a house in the smart end of town, she thought her dreams had come true… until a cruel betrayal turns her comfortable life upside down.

Annie Wilkinson, the daughter of a Durham miner, pays homage to her adopted home town of Hull in a moving and compelling saga charting the rigours and perils of the fishing industry, and recalling the battle of the brave wives who famously launched a campaign to improve working conditions at sea.

Almost exactly fifty years ago, Hull’s ‘headscarf revolutionaries’ took on the might of the Establishment and fought to improve safety in an industry that was killing their men. The women’s protest became one of Britain’s most successful civil action campaigns of the 20th century.