The Filey Brigg Angling Society are the 2020 winners of the Scarborough Inter-Club Challenge Trophy, better known as the Sana Bell Trophy. It is the eighteenth time that the Filey Brigg club have won the trophy (a full list of winners can be found on the Whitby Sea Anglers Association website).

The Sana Bell Trophy is on display in Foords Hotel on Queen Street. The trophy has an interesting history. There are two versions. One of that the bell was taken from one of the Turkish forts at Chanak in the Dardanelles at the end of the Great War in 1918. A Lieutenant Robinson of the minesweeper HMS Kinross, grabbed the bell, but he later gave it to a Royal Navy engineer from Scarborough called J. Jubb. The bell was converted into a trophy and was presented to the Scarborough Rock Anglers Society in November 1925.

In 1937 the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that the bell had been mounted by the well-known Scarborough angler F.W. Vasey, after the trophy had been donated by an anonymous Scarborough serviceman. It claimed that the Sana had been a ship that was used by the British during the landings at Gallipoli and it had been captured after running aground. The Turkish used the ship’s bell as an alarm in their trenches. When the Turkish trenches were taken, the bell was secured by a Scarborough man and he brought it home as a souvenir of the war.

To further muddy the waters, Sana, or Sanaa, is a city in Yemen and the country was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish) until the end of the Great War.

Filey Brigg Angling Society was founded in 1922 and is one of the oldest clubs in the country. The society welcomes new members. The best place to find out about the club is either via the contacts on its website, or drop in at Foords Hotel on Queen Street on Mondays and Wednesdays when there is a weigh in at 10.30pm.