Herring (eBook)

A History of the Silver Darlings

Mike Smylie (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-1-80399-813-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The story of herring is entwined in the history of commercial fishing. For over two millennia, herring has been commercially caught and its importance to the coastal peoples of Britain cannot be measured. At one point tens of thousands were involved in the catching, processing and sale of herring. They followed the shoals around the coast from Stornoway to Penzance and many towns on Britain's east coast grew rich on the backs of the 'silver darlings'. Fishing historian Mike Smylie looks at the effects of herring on the people who caught them, their unique ways of life, the superstitions of the fisher folk, their boats and the communities who lived for the silver darlings. With a wealth of illustrations, this fascinating book reveals the little-known history of the herring. And for those who've neglected the silver darlings for lesser fish such as cod and haddock, there are a number of mouth-watering recipes to try.

MIKE SMYLIE is a maritime historian who specialises in the fishing industry and has written numerous books and articles on the subject, including Thomas Summers & Co. and Voices from the Shoreline for The History Press. He is also a founder member of the 40+ Fishing Boat association, which was founded to promote and preserve British fishing traditions and vessels, and edits their thrice-yearly newsletter Fishing Boats.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

Henry Sutton’s Finest

The midday sun is tepid, yet across the dusty square my neighbours sit under the shade of their vine, aghast as we continue working, clearing fertiliser-bagfuls of rubbish from the house during this, the siesta hour. Downstairs, the cellar is dark and dank, having no window large enough to let in more than a smidgen of the spring sun’s rays. The house, last inhabited in 1963, needs company to let it hum once again.

It is a new acquisition, this house. This is the first sortie after weeks of negotiation and paperwork to secure the sale. Two weeks to prepare for major works to transform the place from unlived in, near dereliction to paradisiacal home. Clearing out the old, breathing in some new; keeping, of course, the tangible elements of the house’s past and the atmosphere of originality.

So out go the old bags of fermenting wheat from below ancient wooden store bins, as does firewood infested with huge wormholes, and lime plaster that has fallen away from high walls. We sort through boxes containing relics of a past life – rusting tins, battered aluminium pans, nails, hinges. There’s a wooden loom in various pieces and a hollowed-out tree trunk that was once a grain hopper. A box full of sheets of paper appears from beneath this. I lift it, and another similar but empty, box and take them to the light to investigate. They seem to be ledger accounts, sums of money owed by individual names. There are pages of them, I notice as I flick through. One has ‘1924’ written at the top, another ‘1931’.

The boxes themselves are wooden, with red and blue stencilling on their outer sides. I shriek because I cannot believe what I am reading. For this house, as you may have guessed, is not in Britain. No, it is high up in a mountain village in central Greece.

‘Hey, look at what I’ve found,’ I cry out to a friend working above, ‘You won’t believe this!’ In red there’s a huge ‘HS’ surrounded by ‘HENRY SUTTON, GT. YARMOUTH’ and below, in bold letters, ‘FINEST SELECTED CURED HERRING’. In smaller writing, ‘CURED & PACKED UNDER THE MOST MODERN HYGIENIC CONDITIONS’. Inside there’s a triangular stamp with a crown and the word ‘SOMMEN’ with ‘SWEDEN’ below. Obviously the boxes are of Swedish origin, being filled in England and exported to Greece. Later I learnt that Suttons exported almost exclusively to Mediterranean countries. Fate had surely delivered me to these boxes.

John Mowson began working for Suttons in the 1950s. Henry Sutton himself had started the business by pushing a loaded narrow troll-cart (sometimes called a row-cart after the ‘rows’ within which the fishermen lived) selling herring at ½d each. That was way back in the 1870s. His son, also Henry, later took over and developed the business, smoking herring and exporting it, especially to Egypt, Cyprus and Greece. He built himself a house on the front at Yarmouth, where the Prince of Wales was a regular visitor. Percy, his son, in turn took over, further expanding markets in West Africa, South Africa, America, Australia, the Middle East and Italy, where silver herring – those smoked for only twenty-four to forty-eight hours – were eaten in the fields. John travelled extensively attending to these markets during his time with the company and remembers over 500 people being employed by them. ‘Yarmouth was alive with smokehouses in those days,’ he told me.

By chance I met Aleko the evening following the find of the boxes. A group of us were in a bar and he came over, recognising my Greek friends. It was Aleko from whom I’d bought the house, but I’d not met him as the whole transaction had been dealt with through Petros, my Greek friend, and his father, Alekis. It was Aleko’s parents who had died in 1963, thus leaving the house empty for almost forty years. After the first ten years of tending it, the family had begun to forget. But not enough for him to be unable to fill me in on the history.

Alongside the main house was a former taverna, its roof now totally collapsed, walls in a sorry state. This was the original structure, inside of which his father had opened a small store in 1923, selling produce and, of course, herring. He bought his boxes from a merchant in Athens, some 100 miles to the south. How he had got there he wasn’t sure, for the village was only accessible by using a steep mountain path that wound its way up from the coast some 2,500ft below, although the mountain base was only half a mile from the sea. Donkeys were the only mode of transport then. Today, tractors and 4x4s wind their way up the six miles of road from the town below – a town that only grew up after the 1960s.

The Place to make Red Herrings, by S.V. Meulen (1792).

Herring in Greek are ‘regga’ (ρ´εγγα), perhaps a reflection of their regal status! Or perhaps this produces ‘to regale’ – to entertain lavishly; to feast. Maybe this denotes food fit for kings, or the fact that herring really are the kings of the sea. However, the point is that once I’d come across these boxes – and let’s face it, there cannot be many people who would get excited about such a discovery – I began to ask specific questions about this source of food.

Given the diverse food available in Greece (although the critics say the food is boring, it is so only for the tourists and not for the natives) – it is perhaps natural to wonder why herring were imported all the way across Europe into these remote tiny villages. The reason, though, is the same as it was in British villages and towns, it was cheap and nutritious. Herring was regarded as winter food, so that supplies packed in Great Yarmouth during the autumnal fishery could arrive in Greece by the beginning of the winter period. Thus they were caught in the North Sea, cured and smoked in Great Yarmouth, packed into Swedish boxes, loaded onto vessels and shipped to Athens and many other ports in the Mediterranean. Once there, they would last for up to six months.

The herring were surrounded in paper in their pretty boxes. They were heavily smoked, whole with their guts in. They were golden herring, similar in looks to red herring, although not exactly the same. A company called AJK also exported golden herring mainly to Greece and Italy, according to Reggie Reynolds. They were cured in big concrete tanks in the ground before being slowly smoked for up to two weeks. Reggie described them as being ‘salty as hell’! Aleko’s father sold them individually from his little shop, from where they were carried home to be baked over the fire. The women of the house saw to this, turning them over frequently as they heated. Then olive oil and lemon was poured over the top – oodles of oil fresh from the trees at that time of year – and they were traditionally served with the local green vegetable ‘horta’, which literally translates as ‘grass’ and resembles spinach. This grows wild on the mountains and is still widely eaten these days, being very tasty. And, this being Greece, the fish was washed down with liberal amounts of ‘retsina’, always homemade just as it is today, and tasting strongly of the pine resin that makes this white wine unique.

In 1932 they built my house, and the shop doubled up as a taverna. Here herring was served. It is said that the taverna owners used to always bake the herring because this made it even saltier. The fish themselves were a lovely golden colour and full of salt. Making the fish more salty allowed them the luxury of drinking more retsina! Then, in 1942, the Germans came to the village and took over the top floor of the house. Aleko’s parents were forced to live downstairs, where they stayed for nearly twenty years after the Germans had gone. War must be abysmal for those who experience it, but for those of us who haven’t it is merely sad. In my village, Karya, war came in the form of reprisal after Greek resistance fighters ambushed and killed twelve German soldiers. The houses were set alight and the villagers fled into the mountains. My house, the German barracks, survived, so that now it is the oldest in the village. After the war, Aleko’s parents stayed below and the taverna never reopened, such were the scars of battle. But the two wooden boxes from Henry Sutton remained with them among their meagre possessions.

One evening we went to Georgios’ workshop where he restores furniture. Work had ceased and a table had been laid out on a board supported by two saw benches. The board was covered in a tablecloth and the cloth in turn by plates of salad and grilled lamb. Retsina came from plastic bottles. Feta cheese was sprinkled with oregano from the mountains. Petros got some fried chicken. An impromptu feast was about to begin. Kostas sat opposite me. He was probably in his late sixties, with hair as white as the cheese and a face that reflected all that is good about Greece. He had been a carpenter, an expert of the wood, I was told. However, once the subject of herring came up, he recalled his first job of the day when he had been serving his apprenticeship in Athens. He made wooden skewers so that he and his fellow workers could roast the herring over the workshop fire for their breakfast. Herring, he said, were the food of the poor man in Greece, and they only ate them in winter. Later that evening he sang, while Vasilis played guitar and Yanis the bouzouki. The music was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.5.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Naturführer
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Zoologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• Themenwelt: Weitere Fachgebiete ► Land- / Forstwirtschaft / Fischerei
• Schlagworte: COD • commercial fishing • East Coast • fish • Fishing • Haddock • Herring • history of commercial fishing • history of fishing • history of the herring • Recipe • Recipes • shoals • silver darlings • story of the herring
• ISBN-10: 1-80399-813-X / 180399813X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80399-813-8 / 9781803998138