52 The last word
THE WEEK 9 April 2022
Before Li Hua left his village
in the rural Fujian province
for a new life in England, he
knew little about the country
beyond what he’d seen on
TV. He was trafficked by a
“snakehead” gang who sent
him on a tortuous journey
of many months, via Russia,
Eastern Europe, Germany
and the Netherlands, before
finally being brought into
England in the back of a truck
and travelling to Liverpool.
From there, he was sent out
to work picking cockles.
On 5 February 2004, Li Hua
was driven to Morecambe
Bay on the Lancashire coast.
“Welcome to the office,” the
foreman said as the minivan
pulled up in the village of
Hest Bank. By now, it had
been explained to Li exactly
what was required of him in
his role as a cockle-picker and
that it would take most of the
day, from morning light to early evening darkness, to fill just one
of the orange nylon bags he’d been given with cockles – small
edible clams found buried in sediment. They were not dredged but
hand-picked, as they had been for centuries, and then sold in bulk
as seafood. Most of the cockles
were processed for export to
European countries, and the
Chinese workers were paid
as little as £5 per 25 kilos
of cockles picked – or more
accurately raked – scandalously
below the market rate.
Li had never encountered a landscape such as this before and
he surveyed the vast flatness of the bay, recalling images of the
limitless spaces of the Gobi Desert. This is not how he’d imagined
England: isolating, crushingly cold, so alien. He looked towards
the hills but there he saw no shining light to encourage him.
He was given a pay-as-you-go mobile, waterproofs, a black
beanie hat with an LED light attached, as useful in the winter
darkness as a miner’s Davy lamp was underground, and boots.
He pulled the beanie down tight over his ears against the ripping
winds, squally showers and the oppressive cold. Each worker was
given a short-handled rake and Li was shown how to use it to sift
the sands, extracting the cockles when he could find them. But
mostly he found it easier to dig in the dirt with his bare hands.
Through the day, his back ached as he scrambled and raked for
cockles. By mid-afternoon, it was getting dark, and yet they were
being urged further out across the monotonous flatness of the
wet sands, following the retreating tides.
Chinese workers had started appearing on the sands the previous
year. Local fishermen received them with suspicion and controlled
certain key sites, forcing the
despised Chinese pickers
further out into the bay in
search of more distant cockle
beds. What was peculiar, in
retrospect, was that local
people had seen the cockle-
pickers come and go, but
the authorities chose not
to see them. They were just
shadows on the sands.
Morecambe Bay has the
largest expanse of intertidal
mudflats and sandflats in the
UK, and is the confluence of
four principal estuaries:
Leven, Kent, Lune and Wyre.
The sands are submerged at
high tide and, when the sea
is out in the bay, they are
cross-cut with shifting river
channels. These channels,
combined with treacherous
quicksands, deep hollows and
fast-moving incoming tides,
are why there has been an
official Queen’s Guide to the
Sands since the 16th century. Every 12 hours and 25 minutes the
tide comes in at a rate swifter than a galloping horse, as locals say.
Before the Furness Railway link opened in 1857, crossing the
sands at Morecambe Bay estuary
provided the most direct route
from mainland Lancashire to
North Lonsdale (now part of
Cumbria). The journey by horse
and carriage was hazardous.
In 1846, nine young people
were returning from a fair in Ulverston to Cartmel when the
fisherman’s cart in which they were travelling overturned in
a hollow. The water closed in and everyone drowned.
That day in 2004, it soon became clear that Li and the other
workers had stayed too long on the sands. The tide was rushing
in and Li was ordered back to the minivan. But water was surging
along deep channels, isolating the cockle-pickers and cutting them
off from the foreshore. They hurried towards the van as the driver
was attempting to start the engine. Although he turned the
ignition, the vehicle did not move: the wheels span and churned
in the mud. The water was rising fast as they clambered in; the
foreman, sitting beside the driver in the front passenger seat,
started shouting obscenities, his panic palpable.
Li could see nothing because of the darkness, but he could feel the
pressure of the rising water outside. Someone opened the doors
and seawater surged into the vehicle: dark, salty, cold. Li forced
his way out and attempted to climb with some of the others onto
the roof. But he fell back into the water and tried to wade-push
against the currents. They were too strong and he tumbled
backwards. Salty water flooded into his mouth and lungs. He
resurfaced, gasping. He found he could stand again, his head and
The Morecambe Bay tragedy:
a survivor’s story
Chinese workers were paid as little as £5 per 25kg of cockles picked
In February 2004, 23 trafficked labourers from China drowned while picking cockles on the Lancashire coast. Jason Cowley
meets Li Hua, who was the only survivor of the group that was trapped on the sands by the rising tide
“Water surged along channels, cutting the
workers off from the foreshore. The driver tried
to start the van but its wheels span in the mud”
