A year and a half on, I can add some more to the Dogger Bank part of this discussion.The uncredited text I quoted above is indeed Sam Larner's, though it has On passage where he sang A passage, and He's for He is in the final line of verse 2. The only significant difference is that it omits Sam's final chorus:
So watch her and twig her, the porra-per-ay she goes,
High heels, painted toes, Jinny is all the go;
She is one of the flash girls, doesn't she cut a shine?
She can do the double shuffle on the Knickerbocker Line.
This from Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, The Singing Island, 1960. Sam apparently learned the song around 1890. For more on the chorus, see The Knickerbocker Line, above.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (Yellowbelly Ballads, part 1, 1975) gives a composite of Sam's tune with a text which appeared "in the correspondence columns of Lincolnshire Life, vol.XI, number 4 (1971) page 48; the contributor, P. Courley, having found it in Travels at Home (where it appeared without a tune) published by the Great Central Railway circa 1904. In the latter publication, the song was said to have been composed by a blind fisherman-fiddler. There were further verses, which the writer in Travels at Home could not recall".This early set from print illuminates a few points in Sam's version.
THE GRIMSBY FISHERMAN'S SONG
We're rearum tearum fishermen, we come from Grimsby town,
And in the "Lion" and "Kitchen" we've had many an up and down,
But when our stocker's all spent, and we've had a jolly good spree,
Why, then we crack aboard of a smack for to plough the stormy sea.
Chorus:
Crying, watch us, twig us, we're a popular jubyju!
Give her sheet and let her rip, we're the boys to pull her through.
You ought to have seen her running when the winds were blowing free
In our passage from the fishing grounds to Great Grimsby!
Our skipper he's a Shanghai Rooster, he likes a glass of good ale.
Our second edition, a Ribstone pippin, was born inside of a jail.
Our third hand, he's a bushranger, our decky comes from the Dials.
Our dirty old cook, you can tell from his look, he comes from the African wilds.
Now when we get our trip aboard, for Grimsby town we steer,
And all that we have in our heads, my boys, it is Mrs. Sturgeon's beer.
We crack on all the canvas and we battle through every gale,
Until the Spurn is left astern, and then we take in sail.
From O'Shaughnessy's notes:
"The Lion and Hell's Kitchen were notorious Grimsby taverns. Stocker means stock of cash, funds.
A juberju is defined in the annotations to The Cruise of the Bigler as the jib boom, the raffee yard, the crosstree, upon which sailors at times climbed to ride the halyards down to the deck when hoisting sail.
A Ribstone pippin is a Yorkshire apple. The Dials means Seven Dials, a London area and formerly a very disreputable one.
Mrs Sturgeon was a well-known Grimsby innkeeper."