From the outside, the Tunny Club looks like any other seaside fish and chip shop. A short walk from Scarborough harbour, only the photos of John Wayne and Errol Flynn on the wall betray the shop’s fleeting history as a global centre for big-game fishing.
In the 1930s, film stars and the ultra-wealthy flocked to the Yorkshire seaside resort for their chance to catch the enormous bluefin tuna – known as “tunny” – lurking off the North Sea coast. In 1933, aristocrat Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry reeled in what remains the largest fish ever caught in British waters: a 386kg bluefin tuna.
Steam-powered yachts filled the bay on the hunt for even larger fish. “The bluefin tuna were coming into the North Sea to feast on the enormous shoals of herring and mackerel that were there. They would be followed by whales and dolphins,” says Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England. By the 1950s, however, the warm-blooded aquatic torpedoes had mostly disappeared, exposing a greater decline in the health of the North Sea ecosystem.
In most official settings height and weight are measured in metric.
Imperial sort of sticks around culturally because people’s measurements are meaningless unless they’re relative and you pick that frame of reference up from your family. Nobody can imagine what a 100kg man looks like, but they can imagine a 16 stone man.