Part 22

The frying-pans of London are mainly supplied with soles all the year round by the trolling-boats of Barking, of which there are upwards of 150 belonging to different companies. They fish the North Sea off the coasts of Yorkshire and Holland, particularly the Silver and Brown banks. Of old the smacks used to carry their own catch to Billingsgate, but the loss of time was so great, that latterly fast-sailing cutters have been employed to attend upon the fishing-smacks and bring their produce to market packed in ice. Of this splendid craft, which can sail almost in the eye of the wind, there are forty; and the total number of seamen employed is not less than 2,000, the greater part of whom have been taken as boys from the workhouse, and trained by this capital service into first-rate seamen. It is curious to follow the small proceedings of the world into their ultimate results. The gastronome, smiling complacently as he withdraws the cover and reveals a well-browned pair of soles, would never guess that they and their kind are the immediate cause of a happy transmutation of parish burthens into the right arm of our strength. Eels are constantly imported to Billingsgate by the Dutch boats. The galliots never moor close alongside the wharf, as the wells in which they bring their fish alive cause them to draw too much water, but they anchor midway in the stream, by twos and threes--their brown sides, flat bows, with high cheek-bones, like their navigators, and bright verd-green rudders, adding to the picturesque appearance of the river. The great fat creatures brought by them mainly supply the eel-pie houses, and contribute largely, we are informed, to that oleaginous kind of soup which people too hungry to be curious mistake for veritable oxtail and calves' head. The Dutch boats do not, however, confine themselves to eels. They deal in turbot, soles, and all kinds of flat-fish, such as frequent the Dogger Bank, much to the discredit of our native enterprise, neglecting, as we do, the splendid deep-sea fishing-ground off the south-west coast of Ireland, where cod and salmon are to be found in abundant quantities, whilst those who know the west coast well, declare there is turbot enough in Galway Bay "to supply the whole of Europe for the next hundred years."

We believe, however, it is now in contemplation to go to work upon a large scale in those waters, having screw-steamers to collect the produce, and bring it to Milford Haven alive in wells, from which port it would come, _viâ_ the South Wales and Great Western Railways, to Billingsgate, within twenty-four hours after it was caught. The value of screw steamers having capacious wells has been fully tested by Mr. Howard, of Manningtree, Essex, who fitted an engine and screw into one of his welled fishing-smacks. Scarcely a lobster, out of twenty thousand put alive into the boat, was lost, whilst large numbers of those brought in sailing smacks perish. Salmon, cod, and other fish, are brought alive with the same success in the welled steamers from the North Sea and the coast of Scotland. It is almost time that some new ground were found in place of the famous Dogger Bank, which has now been preyed upon by so many nations for centuries, and has supplied so many generations of Catholics and Protestants with fast and feast food. No better proof that its stores are failing could be given than the fact that, although the ground, counting the Long Bank and the north-west flat in its vicinity, covers 11,800 square miles, and that in fine weather it is fished by the London companies with from fifteen to twenty dozen of long lines, extending to ten or twelve miles, and containing from 9,000 to 12,000 hooks, it is yet not at all common to secure even as many as four score fish of a night--a poverty which can be better appreciated when we learn that 600 fish for 800 hooks is the catch for deep-sea fishing about Kinsale.

Towards the latter end of August the great herring season commences. Yarmouth is the chief seat of this branch of the piscatory trade. Every night when the weather is fine the fishermen of this old port "shoot" upwards of 300 square miles of net. Neptune in his ample arms never gave the ocean so magnificent an embrace. The produce of this wholesale sweeping of the sea is brought to town by the Eastern Counties Railway. They come up to Billingsgate packed in barrels and in bulk, and the number sold in the year seems almost fabulous, being upwards of a _billion_. Next to the herring fishery the sea-harvest of most importance to the poor of London is that of sprats, which come in about Lord Mayor's Day, and it is a popular belief that the first dish is always sent to the chief magistrate of the city. If a telegraph were to be laid down to all the alleys and courts, the fact of a large arrival of these little creatures at Billingsgate would not be sooner made known to the lower orders than, by some mysterious process, it is at present. Mr. Goldham, the clerk of the market, accustomed as he is to the sudden invasions of the costermongers, informs us that the scene on board the smacks laden with sprats is really frightful. The people hang thick as sea-weed from the rigging, throng the decks, and swarm on every available inch of plank, until the wonder is that the whole of the puny fleet does not capsize with the weight. The cause of the scramble is that the street sellers will not buy until they have seen the sample, and every one consequently tries to gain the highest point, that he may look down into the hold, whilst a man tumbles about the sprats with a shovel, in silver showers. The plaice season succeeds to that of sprats, with the interval of mackerel, which continues until the end of May, when Scotland and Ireland begin to pass down their salmon into the market. But where do all the lobsters come from? The lovers of this most delicious of the crustaceæ tribe will probably be astonished to learn that they are mainly brought from Norway. France and the Channel Islands, Orkney, and Shetland, do, it is true, contribute a few to the metropolitan market, but full two-thirds are reluctantly, and with much pinching and twisting, dragged out of the thousand rock-bound inlets which indent the Norwegian coast. They are conveyed alive in a screw-steamer and by smacks, in baskets, sometimes to the extent of 20,000 of a night, to Great Grimsby, and are thence forwarded to town by the Great Northern Railway--another 10,000 arriving perhaps from points on our own and the French coast. The fighting, twisting, blue-black masses are taken as soon as purchased to what are termed the "boiling-houses," of which there are four, situated in Duck and Love Lanes, close to the market; and here, for a trifling sum per score, they change their dark for scarlet uniforms. They are plunged into the boiling cauldron, basket and all, and in twenty minutes they are done. Crabs are cooked in the same establishments, but their nervous systems are so acute, that they dash off their claws in convulsive agony if placed alive in hot water. To prevent this mutilation, which would spoil their sale, they are first killed by the insertion of a needle through the head. The lobster trade is mostly in the hands of one salesman, Mr. Saunders, of Thames Street, who often has upwards of 15,000 consigned to him of a morning, and who causes no less than 15,000_l._ a year to flow into the fishy palms of Norwegians for this single article of commerce. As to the total supply of fish to the London market, we borrow the following estimate from Mr. Mayhew's very clever book on "London Labour and the London Poor." The figures seemed to us at first sight so enormous, that we hesitatingly submitted the table to one of the largest salesmen who assured us that it was no over-statement:--

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Description of Fish. | No. of Fish.| Weight of Fish.| |----------------------------------------|-------------|----------------| | WET FISH. | | | | | | lbs. | |Salmon and salmon trout (29,000 boxes,} | | | | 14 fish per box) } | 406,000| 3,480,000 | |Live cod (averaging 10 lbs. each) | 400,000| 4,000,000 | |Soles (averaging 1/4 lb. each) | 97,520,000| 26,880,000 | |Whiting (averaging 6 oz. each) | 17,920,000| 6,720,000 | |Haddock (averaging 2 lbs. each) | 2,470,000| 5,040,000 | |Plaice (averaging 1 lb. each) | 33,600,000| 33,600,000 | |Mackerel (averaging 1 lb. each) | 23,520,000| 23,520,000 | |Fresh herrings (250,000 barrels, 700 } | | | | fish per barrel) } | 175,000,000| 42,000,000 | |Ditto in bulk |1,050,000,000| 252,000,000 | |Sprats | | 4,000,000 | |Eels from Holland (principally), }| |{ 1,505,280 | | England, and Ireland (6 fish per lb.)}| 9,797,760 |{ 127,680 | |Flounders (7,200 qrtns., 36 fish per }| | | | qtn.) }| 259,200 | 43,200 | |Dabs (7,500 qrtns., 36 fish per qrtn.) | 270,000 | 48,750 | | | | | | DRY FISH. | | | | | | | |Barrelled cod (15,000 barrels, 40 fish }| | | | per barrel) }| 750,000 | 4,200,000 | |Dried salt cod (5 lbs. each) | 1,600,000 | 8,000,000 | |Smoked haddock (65,000 barrels, 300 }| | | | fish per barrel) }| 19,500,000 | 10,920,000 | |Bloaters (265,000 baskets, 150 fish per}| | | | basket) }| 147,000,000 | 10,600,000 | |Red herrings (100,000 barrels, 500 fish}| | | | per barrel) }| 50,000,000 | 14,000,000 | |Dried sprats (9,600 large bundles, 30 }| | | |fish per bundle) }| 288,000| 96,000 | | | | | | SHELL FISH. | | | | | | | |Oysters | 495,896,000 | | |Lobsters (averaging 1 lb. each fish) | 1,200,000 | 1,200,000 | |Crabs (averaging 1 lb. each fish) | 600,000 | 600,000 | |Shrimps (324 to a pint) | 498,428,648 | | |Whelks (227 to half bushel) | 4,943,200 | | |Mussels (1,000 to half bushel) | 50,400,000 | | |Cockles (2,000 to half bushel) | 67,392,000 | | |Periwinkles (4,000 to half bushel) | 304,000,000 | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

And now for the _pièce de résistance_.

London has always been celebrated for the excellence of its meat, and her sons do justice to it; at least it has become the universal impression that they consume more, man for man, than any other town population in the world. It was a sirloin, fresh and ruddy, hanging at the door of some Giblett or Slater in a former century, that inspired, we suspect, the song which ever since has stirred Englishmen in a foreign land, "The Roast Beef of Old England." The visitor accustomed to the markets of our large provincial towns would doubtless expect to find the emporium of the live-stock trade for so vast a population of an imposing size. The foreigner, after seeing the magnificence of our docks--the solidity and span of our bridges--might naturally look for a national exposition of our greatness in the chief market dedicated to that British beef which is the boast of John Bull. What they do see in reality, if they have courage to wend their way along any of the narrow tumble-down streets approaching to Smithfield, which the great fire unfortunately spared, is an irregular space bounded by dirty houses and the ragged party-walls of demolished habitations, which give it the appearance of the site of a recent conflagration--the whole space comprising just six acres, fifteen perches, roads and public thoroughfares included. Into this narrow area, surrounded with slaughter-houses, triperies, bone-boiling houses, gut-scraperies, &c., the mutton-chops, scrags, saddles, legs, sirloins, and rounds, which grace the smiling boards of our noble imperial capital throughout the year, have, for the major part, been goaded and contused for the benefit of the civic corporation installed at Guildhall.[22] The best time is early in the morning--say one or two o'clock of the "great day," as the last market before Christmas-day is called. On this occasion, not only the space--calculated to hold 4,100 oxen and 30,000 sheep, besides calves and pigs--is crammed, but the approaches around it overflow with live stock for many hundred feet, and sometimes the cattle are seen blocking up the passage as far as St. Sepulchre's church. If the stranger can make his way through the crowd, and by means of some vantage-ground or door-step can manage to raise himself a few feet above the general level, he sees before him in one direction, by the dim red light of hundreds of torches, a writhing party-coloured mass, surmounted by twisting horns, some in rows, tied to rails which run along the whole length of the open space, some gathered together in one struggling knot. In another quarter, the moving torches reveal to him now and then, through the misty light, a couple of acres of living wool, or roods of pigs' skins. If he ventures into this closely wedged and labouring mass, he is enabled to watch more narrowly the reason of the universal ferment among the beasts.

The drover with his goad is forcing the cattle into the smallest possible compass, and a little further on half a dozen men are making desperate efforts to drag refractory oxen up to the rails with ropes. In the scuffle which ensues the slipping of the ropes often snaps the fingers of the persons who are conducting the operation, and there is scarce a drover in the market who has not had some of his digits broken. The sheep, squeezed into hurdles like figs into a drum, lie down upon each other, "and make no sign;" the pigs, on the other hand, cry out before they are hurt. This scene, which has more the appearance of a hideous nightmare than a weekly exhibition in a civilised country, is accompanied by the barking of dogs, the bellowing of cattle, the cursing of men, and the dull blows of sticks--a charivari of sound that must be heard to be appreciated. The hubbub gradually abates from twelve o'clock at night, the time of opening, to its close at 3 P.M. next day; although during the whole period, as fresh lots are "headed up," individual acts of cruelty continue. Can it excite surprise that a state of things, the worst details of which we have suppressed, because of the pain which such horrors excite, sometimes so injures the stock that, to quote the words of one of the witnesses before the Smithfield Commission, "a grazier will not know his own beast four days after it has left him?" The meat itself suffers in quality; for anything like fright or passion is well known to affect the blood, and consequently the flesh. Beasts subjected to such disturbances will often turn green within twenty-four hours after death. Mr. Slater, the well-known butcher of Kensington and Jermyn-street, states that mutton is often so disfigured by blows and the goad, that it cannot be sold for the West-end tables. Many of the drovers we doubt not are ruffians, but we believe the greater part of this cruelty is to be ascribed to the market-place itself, which, considering the immense amount of business to be got through on Mondays and Fridays, is absurdly and disgracefully confined. According to the official account, the number of live stock exhibited in 1853 was--

Oxen. Sheep. Calves. Pigs. Total. 294,571 1,518,040 36,791 29,593 1,893,888

But this is far from giving a true idea of the whole amount brought into London. Much stock arrives in the capital which never enters the great mart. For example, Mr. Slater, who kills per week, on the average, 200 sheep and from 20 to 25 oxen, says, in his evidence before the Smithfield Commission, that he buys a great deal of his stock from the graziers in Norfolk and Essex. Again, "town" pigs are slaughtered and sent direct to the meat market, while many sheep are bought from the parks, where they have been temporarily placed till they find a purchaser. A much more correct estimate of the flocks and herds which are annually consumed in London may be gathered from a report of the numbers transmitted by the different lines of railway, compiled from official sources by Mr. Ormandy, the cattle-traffic manager of the North-Western Railway. From this able pamphlet we extract the following table:--

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | Oxen. | Sheep. |Calves.| Pigs. | Total | | | | | | |for 1853.| | |-------|---------|-------|-------|---------| |By Eastern Counties | 81,744| 277,735| 3,492| 23,427| 386,398| | " L. & N. Western | 70,435| 248,445| 5,113| 24,287| 348,280| | " Great Northern | 15,439| 120,333| 563| 8,973| 145,308| | " Great Western | 6,813| 104,607| 2,320| 2,909| 116,649| | " L. & S. Western | 4,885| 100,960| 1,781| 516| 108,142| | " South Eastern | 875| 58,320| 114| 142| 59,451| | " L. & B. & S. Coast | 863| 13,690| 117| 54| 14,724| | " Sea from North of | | | | | | | England and Scotland | 14,662| 11,141| 421| 3,672| 29,896| | " Sea from Ireland | 2,311| 3,472| 21| 5,476| 11,280| |Imported from the Continent| 55,065| 229,918| 25,720| 10,131| 320,834| |Driven in by road, and from| | | | | | | the neighbourhood of the | 69,096| 462,172| 62,114| 48,295| 641,647| | metropolis (obtained from| | | | | | | the toll-gate lessees) | | | | | | | |-------|---------|-------|-------|---------| |Total |322,188|1,630,793|101,776|127,852|2,182,609| +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

These numbers show at a glance what a part the railway plays in supplying animal food to the metropolis, and how trifling in comparison is the amount that travels up on foot. The Eastern Counties lines, penetrating and monopolizing the rich breeding and fattening districts of Norfolk and Essex, bring up the largest share. Many of the little black cattle, that tourists see in Scotland climbing the hills like cats, come directly from these counties, having some months before been sent thither from their native north to clothe their bones with English substance. By the same line we receive a fair portion of that great foreign contribution to our larders, the mere shadow of which so frightened our graziers some years ago, principally Danish stock, which finds its way from Tonning to Lowestoff, a route newly opened up by the North of Europe Steam-ship Company. The North-Western is next in rank as a carrier of live stock. This line takes in the contributions from the Midland Counties, and, by way of Liverpool, abundance of Irish and Scotch cattle. The Great Northern is perhaps destined to surpass both in the quantities of food it will eventually pour into London, running as it does through the northern breeding districts, and receiving at its extremity the herds which come from Aberdeen and its neighbourhood.

The foreign supply last year of cattle, sheep, pigs, and calves, was more than a seventh of the entire number sent to London. The daily bills of entries at the Custom House furnishes us with a valuable indication of the fields from which we have already received, and may in future expect to receive still further additions of what Englishmen greatly covet--good beef and mutton at a moderate price. The arrivals by steam in the port of London in 1853 were as follows:--

+----------------------------------------------------------------+ | _From_ |_Oxen._| _Sheep._ | _Calves._|_Pigs._|_Total._| |-----------------|-------|----------|----------|-------|--------| |Holland | 40,538| 172,730| 24,280| 9,370| 246,918| |Denmark | 9,487| 7,515| 60| .. | 17,062| |Hanseatic Towns | 4,366| 37,443| 1| 632| 42,442| |Belgium | 449| 12,006| 1,244| .. | 13,699| |France | 105| 224| 135| 129| 593| |Portugal | 100| .. | .. | .. | 100| |Spain | 17| .. | .. | .. | 17| |Russia | 3| .. | .. | .. | 3| | |-------|----------|----------|-------|--------| |Total | 55,065| 229,918| 25,720| 10,131| 320,834| -----------------------------------------------------------------+

Holland, Denmark, and the Hanseatic Towns, it will be seen, were the principal contributors. A more striking example of the influence of the legislation of one country in modifying the occupations of the people of another could not be cited, than the manner in which Sir Robert Peel's tariff revolutionized the character of Danish and Dutch farming. Before 1844 the pastures of the two countries, more especially the rich marshes of Holland, were almost exclusively devoted to dairy purposes: the abolition of the duty on live stock in that year quickly introduced a new state of things. The farmers began to breed stock, and consequently turnips and mangel-wurzel have been creeping over fields, where once the dairy-maid carried the milking-pail, as gradually as one landscape succeeds another in the Polytechnic dissolving views. We get now from both countries excellent beef, especially from Jutland, whose lowing herds used formerly to go to Hamburg--and who has not heard of the famous Hambro' beef? We may expect in time to receive still finer meat from this quarter, for the Danes have been sedulously improving their breed, and agriculturists, who saw the beasts which were sent over to the last Baker-street show, admitted that they were in every respect equal to our own short-horns. It is gratifying to note how ready the world is to follow our lead in the matter of stock-breeding. Bulls are bought up at fabulous prices by foreigners, and especially by our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, for the purpose of raising the indigenous cattle to the British standard. An American, for instance, purchased, for 1,000_l._, a celebrated bull bred by Earl Ducie, though unfortunately the animal broke his neck on his passage out. Another noble specimen was secured, we have heard, for the same quarter, for 600_l._