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Then the British-owned trawlers left. Just as in the age of sail, governments had seen fishermen as a low-cost way of maintaining a reserve of able-bodied seamen, they now saw their ships as a reserve of vessels easily convertible to war service. The trawlers were fast, built for rough weather and also for towing, which made them excellent minesweepers. Or, with batteries of guns mounted fore and aft, a trawler became a patrol boat. When war came in 1914, the British Admiralty commandeered most British-owned trawlers longer than 110 feet and no more than ten years old.

In an age when little attempt was made to measure fish stocks, the British Ministry of Agriculture then undertook a study of the British trawlers out of Hull and Grimsby that had been working the Icelandic shelf. The study showed that a single trawler off of Iceland landed as many fish as three trawling the North Sea Banks. Historians now believe that Icelandic stocks would have soon been reduced to the same state as North Sea stocks had not the war provided a four-year respite. Icelandic fishermen saw their catches go up in 1917 and 1918 and then start declining again once the British returned.

After the war, British fishermen did not get back all their trawlers as promised by the Admiralty. Many were destroyed or damaged. But they were soon replaced with larger, faster, better-equipped ships. Improved landing facilities and better rail links made Aberdeen, Fleetwood, Hull, and Grimsby major ports for the British Icelandic fleet, supplying the nation through seafood companies, which, like those in New England, were becoming large corporations. But as vessels got bigger and better equipped, fishing required a greater capital investment. By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer—the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.

Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish—especially cod, haddock, and plaice—because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class. Both Iceland and Britain were fishing Icelandic water to supply this market. In addition, in the 1920s, the German fleet became a major presence in Icelandic cod grounds.

The inshore fishermen, a major sector of the economy, began protesting that their gear and grounds were being destroyed by trawlers, and among Icelanders there was an increasingly widespread sentiment that the territorial limit should be extended. But the Anglo-Danish Convention of 1901 said that the waters off of Iceland, up to three miles from shore, were open to the world, and the colony of Iceland did not have the power to change this. Instead, Icelanders built a sizable and well-trained coast guard and worked closely with the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES), the accepted authority on commercial fish populations, in an attempt to monitor the size of the fish stocks. By the late 1920s, the Icelandic Coast Guard was making frequent arrests of German and British trawlers caught trespassing on inshore grounds.

The British responded by using the new wireless on their trawlers to alert each other to Coast Guard activities. Most famous were the so-called Grandmother messages of 1928. Three messages—“Grandmother is well,” then “Grandmother is still well,” and finally “Grandmother is beginning to feel bad”—were used to indicate when a Coast Guard vessel was leaving its harbor. Finally, in 1936, coded wireless messages were outlawed in Icelandic waters. But the Grandmother messages continued, with code systems often organized by British seafood companies.

The end of the Grandmother messages and a reprieve for the dwindling cod stocks came in the form of World War II. Again, British