Working Morecambe Bay sands is a way of life for Jack's family

Jack Manning has lived, worked and played in this place his entire life, fishing the bay, usually alone and in the dead of night.

He’s a man who knows everything there is to know about tackling the racing tides, quicksand, and the harshest of weather – yet even he has been challenged by this harsh environment.

Now he’s retired and taking life a little easier in the cosy modern bungalow he shares with Margaret, his wife of 63 years.

It’s just a stone’s throw from the house on the main street in Flookburgh where he was born and, as you may expect, there’s a boat in the driveway.

But that’s where the fisherman stereotype ends. Jack is pretty dapper – we raid his garage to find the boots and raincoat for his photoshoot – and you wonder how his gently mellifluous voice would have been heard out on the sands in a harsh northern storm.

“I’ve been going out fishing with my grandfather from being a little lad, five or six,” says Jack.

“I started doing it full time when I left Ulverston Grammar School in 1949. I was 16, though I’d left it later than other young chaps from the area who were 14.

“I just wasn’t into education and it’s a shame, when I look back, as I definitely had some capabilities.

"I was the top of the class in three of four subjects in my first year but I went down and down."

Despite his academic prowess, there was no doubt in Jack’s mind that he would be anything but a fisherman.

However, ill-health almost drove him to a career on dry land. “I had a bad spell and I was off work for nearly a year,” says Jack,

“The doctor said I should get out of my job and, being self employed, if you weren’t working, you had no money. I’d got a young family by then so I went to Glaxo. I liked it there, though I didn’t like working nights.

“So, after two years I gave it up. I’d still been fishing, even when I worked at Glaxo, and I made more money from the fishing than I ever did from my shifts – and they probably had the best wages in the district.”

Jack’s career began in the days when horses and carts were used to carry the catch, then they were replaced with tractors and trailers.

“Our mainstay was shrimps, they really came to the fore after the Second World War, though we caught cockles and flatfish too,” he says.

“Before then, very few shrimps were caught and only for a very local market because there was no way to preserve them to send them anywhere.

"We didn’t get electric in the village until the late 1930s. Then Young’s, a company from the south of England, set up a factory just to process shrimps. That transformed the industry here."

The bay’s unpredictable sands are famous, and even someone with Jack’s wisdom can get caught.

He’s had near-misses with sand which wasn’t as firm as it looked, racing tides which circled past him cutting off a means of escape, and mud strong enough to rip the axles off tractors.

Jack says: “It can be a scary place in foul weather, especially in fog. That’s horrendous at night; out there you are looking at a blank wall.

“These days they have GPS which is absolutely marvellous. I’ve been out with my son near Morecambe in thick fog, and it was no problem. The fishermen went to exactly where they stopped working the day before.

“It was different before technology. I was the only one that went out at night alone. Most people went out with others for safety. I once broke down six miles out and had to walk home in a rotten east wind. Others in that situation would at least have had a lift."

Jack’s grandfathers were both fishermen, as was his dad, and his son Stephen, and grandsons Matthew and Tim, have followed him into the business.

It’s a tradition that has gone on for centuries, as is evident in the names of the families still living in the area. “There are very few mussels taken here on this shore,” says Jack.

“You need to go to the Furness side for them and that’s why some families from Flookburgh settled there and lots of the names are still there today. One of those is Butler.

“I’m a Butler, even though my surname is Manning. My mother was a Butler and they were a family of fishermen. My dad was adopted by one of my mum’s cousins so he became a Butler too.

"Then, when he grew up, he changed his name back to his original, which was Manning."

Jack and Margaret also have two daughters, Wendy and Lynn, and there are eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren too.

They’re a strong family unit – Jack’s enthusiasm for them is evident as his face lights up when his littlest granddaughter sidles into the room to find out who he’s talking to.

They’re a family that plays together too and there’s another tradition which has played a huge part in all their lives – music. He says: “I play the cornet, and my father played it too, in the Flookburgh Band. I was the principal cornet player until my son took over from me and my nephew after him. At one time, there were 12 of my family in the band.

“I’m still the chairman but I gave up playing a year gone Christmas. I’d done it for 70 years so it was time.

“I remember the actress who played Ena Sharples in Coronation Street used to come to stay at a hotel in Grange every Christmas. She used to come in a Rolls Royce to Flookburgh square on Christmas morning and listen to the band. We used to play at all the big hotels on New Year’s Eve and I can still see her dancing in the hallway.”

And Jack is no stranger to the big – and small screen – either, appearing in numerous documentaries and news programmes, as well as an extra in films.

But there is one news story which Jack wishes had never happened – the drowning of a gang of Chinese migrant workers in 2004.

A total of 23 bodies were eventually recovered, several of them by Jack’s son Stephen and other fishermen the morning after the tragedy.

Jack says: “There had been very few people out that day because of the short tides. It was an unpleasant afternoon with heavy cloud. We saw the Chinese workers come on to the bay and when we came off the shore we expected them to follow us but they didn’t.

“The first I knew was watching Fiona Bruce read the news and she said they were missing. The police interviewed us and then summoned us to court to give evidence.

Notwithstanding that tragedy, Jack’s enjoyed his long career and life in Flookburgh. As he says in a book he wrote in 2010: “It has been a hard life but I have lived it virtually as I wished, that is, not at other people’s dictate and most of my ambitions have been fulfilled.”

And, as his book title says: “It was better than working.”