Fishing

Being now on the second reading of 'Au Rendez-Vous-des-Terres-Neuvas', I came across a new-to-me bit of trawler jargon this morning, a patron pêcheur. Literally the chap in charge of the fishing and out of context one might have thought the captain or skipper of a fishing boat, fisherman for short, but in this context it seems to be the chap in charge of the trawl, a position subordinate to that of captain of the trawler. Perhaps 'trawl master' would be a good translation. But a translation which reference 2 does not recognise, even when I get the right accent on the fish bit. Wrong accent and I get rather poor results.

Simenon also suggests - and I dare say he knew - that the deep-sea trawlers of his day - say the early 1930s - were rough places where the captain, on occasion, might need to get out his revolver to calm his crew down a bit. This making a captain a tough customer: I would not care to have to face down an angry crew on a trawler in the middle of the Atlantic, with or without a revolver. With my own understanding being that Hull was a rough enough place, with all its trawlermen, in the 50s and 60s.

I was also prompted to look up patron, a word with a boss flavour in French, but more of a client flavour in English. OED did the full business on this occasion, with three columns on 'patron' itself and as much again on various relatives. A word with all kinds of interesting meanings, with the common client meaning occupying just a couple of lines at meaning I/3c - in a list of meanings which goes on to V/12c. While from Larousse I learn that half patron, patron and full patron are three sizes of top hat.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/deck-chairs.html.

Reference 2: http://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/search?source=auto&query=patron+p%C3%AAcheur.