IF London were to be besieged, the lines of defence would contain five millions
of people. How would they be fed? It costs as many pounds now to feed London for
a twelvemonth as there are miles from the earth to the sun! What
would it cost then?
If this country were to lose the command of the
seas the people would starve. A blockade would
knock off a third of the meat supply, and all the
groceries; that popular gauge of prosperity, the quartern loaf, would at once treble in price, and
fruit and vegetables would be a luxury. And in
the stress London would come off worst. Not
long ago a snowstorm nearly caused a famine in
the metropolis, and now a three days' fog in the
Thames Valley would put us on half rations. To
live, we must hold the roads by land and sea,
and keep them clear; if once the roads are blocked,
we are done. And just as London cannot exist
without the country, so the country cannot exist
without the colonist or the foreigner, for Britain
alone of the kingdoms of the world feeds on more
than it can grow, and only lives as the citadel of
an ocean empire.
The country is fed a good deal from abroad;
London is fed almost entirely from the outside.
London within the lines - for, strangely enough,
owing to the physiography of the Thames Valley,
the fortifications of the metropolis would follow
the outer boundaries of the metropolitan boroughs
- grows hardly any of its food. The ever-advancing
builder has appropriated the market-gardens,
and run streets through the cornfields, so
that besides a few dairy farms and watercress-beds, there is no area left for the produce of food
within the only possible lines of defence. By the
road, the rail, and the river, all but an infinitesimal
part of London's commissariat is carried in; and
the consideration of how it is carried in times of peace will enable us
best to appreciate what the
difficulties would be in times of war.
A large subject is the feeding of the capital, and
not an easy one to handle. We have no gates and
no octroi; there are no official statistics to give in
the amount of the different commodities at a glance.
We have tried in all directions. We have appealed
to the Board of Trade, the different railway companies,
and the different market authorities, but
in all cases the answer has been the same. The
home trade is free, and no records are kept, and
to compile the statistics required would be impossible.
Like our predecessors in the quest, we
must depend on estimate, and do the best we
can.
In one item we are tolerably sure of our ground, and
fortunately that is the most important one. We have all been taught to sing of the Roast Beef
of Old England - hard and stringy as it must have
been, to judge by modern improvements, and by
no means the delightful viand that legend would
have us think - and the amount of roast beef (or,
let us say, the butcher-meat of London) can be
estimated with a near approach to accuracy.
Thanks to the splendid markets of the Corporation,
and the admirable way in which their statistics
are presented by the courteous officials of the
City, there is little doubt as to the meat supply of
the hungry millions. But with regard to the other
thousand and one articles that go to form a city's
food, a very different state of affairs exists. Of
the sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, rice, butter, cheese,
eggs, wheat, flour, fruits, and vegetables consumed
within our limits no exact statement is possible.
One guide we have, it is true - London contains an eighth of the population of
these islands, and we shall not be very far wrong in assuming that the total
food imports, divided by eight, will give the metropolitan consumption. We might even
take the London imports to guide us, but unfortunately London is a port and a
centre of distribution,
and there is no record of the food sent into
the country from it, which of course it would be
needful to deduct to arrive at any approximation
to the real figures. In butcher-meat we are, however,
safe; practically, no meat received at the
London markets is consumed beyond the London
boundary. So with the roast beef of old England
let us begin.
"No foreign meat sold," advertises the butcher,
and on inquiry we find that by "foreign" he
means colonial as well as continental. "I call all
meat foreign," he explains, "that comes from
farther than Ireland; and I have none of it! "
Would that we could believe him, even if the
"home" were better than the" foreign," which
it is not. But consider for a moment
what the chances are of his being
wrong when there are consumed in
London alone in one year over one
hundred and thirty thousand tons
of meat that was neither bred nor
fed in these islands!
Of this enormous mass, the
greater part imported alive, is
landed at Deptford, on the Thames.
Come with us to Deptford, that
ancient dockyard which claimed to have been founded by the Britons,
and, appropriately enough, retired
from the ship business by launching
its Druid. The old brick terraces
that served as offices, quarters, and
shops, are still there. The old
building sheds, wide and lofty and
patched with skylights, still stand
by the riverside. The clock still
marks the time, as it did when the
dockyard was in its glory, and that
famous three-decker, the Queen
Charlotte, the biggest ship it ever
built, "took the water gracefully,
and was with difficulty restrained
from grounding on the opposite shore." But the dull red buildings
are now bank branches; the naval
officers have given place to market
clerks; the licensed drover is there,
and not the blue-jacket, and, instead
of the ring of the shipwright's hammer,
we hear the bleating of sheep
and the lowing of cattle.
Enter one of the old sheds, now
floored with granite, and cut up into
a wilderness of post and rail. Here
are scores of oxen from the prairies
of the North-west. They have travelled
four thousand miles, and been
fifteen days at sea on their passage,
and yet look presentable. These
are quiet enough; sometimes the
"ranches" are much more lively,
and indulge in a Wild West performance of somewhat
alarming vigour. Here is a long line of
beasts from Spain, beautiful chestnut brown in
colour, sleek and well-built, though rather depressed
in look, as Spanish cattle always are - even at a bull-fight. Next to them is a
score of
Dutchmen-piebald, black, and white, coarser in
limb, and livelier in bearing. Opposite to them
is a herd of more solid, sturdier animals, that
have come here from Schleswig-Holstein, and
seem rather to have enjoyed the trip.
The cattle trade, like all trades, has its seasons.
From July to December the imports are
greatest from the Northern Dutch and Baltic
ports; from January to June the trade is briskest
from Flushing and the Belgian ports; all the year
round Germany sends us sheep from Bremen and
Hamburg, and Spain and Portugal send cattle
from Vigo and Oporto; and all the year round
come in the American supplies. In 1887, of the
53,000 head of cattle that came to Deptford, 33,600 were American, but this was
not all the
American contribution to the London trade, for
Canadian cattle enter by the western ports and
come by rail to Islington. In 1887 there were
21,400 live Canadian beasts so sold, and the American share of our metropolitan cattle herd
was thus brought up to 55,000 head. At Islington
there were also sold 15,200 Canadian sheep; but
no transatlantic sheep at all came to Deptford.
Of the 53,000 beasts landed at Deptford, over
4,200 hailed from Spain and Portugal, and over
10,000 from Tonning, the port of Schleswig-Holstein.
The remainder of the beasts, and all the
calves - 26,405 - came from Holland. And from
Holland came a mighty flock of 495,585 sheep.
Antwerp sent us 5,000 sheep; Hamburg and
Bremen sent us nearly 170,000; and Tonning over
48,000. And the pigs - over 18,000 - came from
the Dutch ports, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and
Harlingen in almost equal quantities, Harlingen
sending the greatest share.
Market days are Mondays and Thursdays, and
the cattle-boats come up the Thames chiefly on
Sundays and Wednesdays. The Deptford figures,
when worked out, show that on the average 500
tons of meat are received for each market. The
stoppage of one of these deliveries at the mouth of the river, by fog or blockade, would mean the
loss.
of a dinner to two and a quarter millions of people.
Luckily that has not yet happened, but such considerations
are useful as bringing home to us the
magnitude of the figures.
with which we are dealing.
Every year over
1,100 steamers discharge
their living cargoes on the
Deptford jetties, many of
them little boats of 500
tons, some of them nine
times as large. Some of
the larger vessels tranship their
cattle at Gravesend
into the Corporation's
own steamer, the Racoon,
and 27,000 beasts came
to market in that fashion
in 1887.
It does not take long
to clear out a cattle-boat.
The sheep are all in pens,
so as to keep together
when the ship rolls; the
cattle are all haltered and
hitched to rails, so that
they cannot get loose.
The boat comes alongside
the strongly-built jetty;
the steam crane lifts high
in the air a substantial
gangway, which it gently
lowers until it bridges the
gap between the pier and
the ship. The first sheep-pen
is opened, and the
first sheep "persuaded"
to come ashore; the other
sheep follow, pen after
pen is opened, and faster
and faster run the sheep
up the slope and along
the road to the sheds.
Soon the sheep are out,
and the calves are set
loose and follow; then
the oxen are liberated
and clumsily rush ashore;
and in a quarter of an hour from the time she
stopped the steamer is off again up the river to
deliver whatever other cargo she may have. She
had not arrived unexpected, a telegram from the
cattle agent at Gravesend had informed the market
authorities that she was on her way.
Driven into lairs in one of the old building-sheds,
every animal that arrives has to be examined
by the Government Inspector to be certified if free
from disease; and then begins a sorting out into
the different hands or marks as given on the ship's
mainfest. So many sheep marked with a blue
diamond have to be found for one consignee, so many
with a cross for another, so many with an A
for a third, and so on, the marks of every sheep
being recorded. But when the consignee takes
possession he disregards the marks and sorts the
sheep out into qualities only, so that the market authorities have no further trouble with marks,
and take over for safe custody only such-and-such
a number. And these sheep thus ready for the
market - 23,000 have been here in one day - are,
in another of the sheds, in beautifully clean pens,
with a cradle of hay hung into each pen from
above, up to which they have to stretch their heads
to get at their first meal since leaving
the Continent, for during the
short trips no food is given, and
often hours elapse before the victim
has recovered sufficiently from the
sea voyage to care to eat. Some,
however, are better sailors than
others. As we pass we see a young
calf just come ashore kicking his
legs about and dancing with joy at
having again got on firm ground,
and evidently ready for anything in
the fodder line that may come
along.
Though all the cattle come into
Deptford alive, nothing alive ever
leaves it. All round the lairs are
long streets of slaughter-houses,
wherein the killing goes on as required.
But a slaughter-house is at
its best but a chamber of horrors,
and we need but glance at the last
scene, in which oxen and sheep become
beef and mutton under the
hands of the brawny, half-naked,
pole-axing men. A wonderful sight
is the long avenue of huge sides of
beef, being trimmed and divided to
hang here for half a dozen hour
before they are distributed; and
even more remarkable is the display
of the carcasses of the sheep, skinned
and cleaned, and thrown smoking
into the carts, to be carried away
immediately. In these economical
days nothing is wasted that can be
saved. A stroller round Deptford
Market discovers this under many
fragrant conditions. In one place
he will come upon a wholesale manufacture
of tripe, in another a gigantic
boiling of offal, in another a peculiarly unattractive
conversion of alimentary canals into sausage-skins. Curious are the intricacies of trade.
The ox of the Wild West is borne by railway to
New York, and crosses the ocean to Deptford; he
dies, and his interior, cleaned and made ready, is
exported to Germany, and as the covering of the
humble sausage that interior finds its way back
again to London, where so many things end.
Islington, however, is the great live cattle-market
of the metropolis. There as many as
10,000 beasts have been on sale in one day, and
38,500 head of sheep have been gathered for one
market. In 1887 there were sold at Islington, for
London consumption, 235,762 beasts, 809,914
sheep. 13,349 calves, and 1,119 pigs. Of the
beasts, 21,400, as we have before said, came from
Canada, and 11,450 from foreign ports; and of
the sheep, 15,200 came from Canada, and 13,700 from elsewhere beyond sea. Great as is the
inland trade at Islington, it is only now recovering
from a period of depression ; in 1864, 346,000
beasts were sold, and in 1868 the sheep that paid
toll amounted to 1,786,000. On Mondays and
Thursdays, about seven o'clock in the morning,
there is such a scene of life and movement as is
worth going miles to see. From the roof of the
ring of offices that cluster round the central tower
the eye ranges on one side over rows upon rows
of orderly cattle, each firmly secured to the rail
that marks the gangway, and oh the other are
pens after pens of sheep huddled within the gates.
The mist is thick enough to shut in the view all
round, and the sea of ovines and bovines seems to
be limitless. It is a heaving, restless, noisy sea,
with the booing and bleating in irregular bursts,
now in one grand diapason, now in a distant solo,
but always continuous. Dogs bark and men shout
as down the crowded gangways, between the long
lines of writhing horns, there hurry the twos and
threes and dozens and half-dozens chosen by the purchasers, many to journey off
to the private slaughter-houses, the rest to meet their fate in the public
abattoirs close by. In the past the cattle used to come to the metropolis by
road, and it was a curious phenomenon of the highway that all
the footmarks pointed to London. Now we have
changed all that, and the market is fed by the
lines of railway that run into it from all
parts.
And so it is with the great Central Meat
Market
in Smithfield, that stands on the site of the old
cattle-market that was transferred to Islington in
1855. Into it there came by rail in 1887 over
123,000 tons of country-killed meat, nearly 25,000
tons of American-killed meat, 15,100 tons of meat
killed in Australia and New Zealand, and brought
across the sea in cold storage chambers, and over
18,000 tons of "general foreign meat and produce."
To th:s was added nearly 75,000 tons of
"town-killed meat," most of it from Deptford and
Islington, and this we shall be safest in not taking
into account. The year's total distributed from
Smithfield is thus 181,000 tons, or, say, an average
delivery of 500 tons every day.
It is interesting to note the proportions brought
in by the chief railways. The London and North Western delivered not less than 58,000 tons, the
Great Northern about 26,000, the Great Western
about 20,000, the South-Western about 15,000,
the Great Eastern over 13,000, the Midland over
10,000. Altogether the railways sent to Smithfield
in 1887, 154,540 tons, the shipping companies
supplied 7,778 tons; salesmen and slaughtermen
brought in 59,114 tons; and miscellaneous carriers
were responsible for 37,950.
The scene at Smithfield in Christmas week and at other times
has been so often described that we need not linger on it here. There is, in
truth, little that is picturesque in sides of beef and carcasses of mutton, even in such overpowering
quantities
as are there displayed. But the Meat Market
is one of the sights of London nevertheless; there
is a charm about its general atmosphere of prosperity
which is irresistible! Every shop is occupied,
and is loaded as heavily as it can be, and the
Market has even overflowed into the poultry branch
adjoining. Not long ago the Cold Air Stores were
opened, and these have already been found too
small during the summer months. In them is such
a collection of English, Scotch, Irish, Continental,
Icelandic, American, and Australian carcasses
mixed together, that it is no wonder the retail
, butcher fails to separate them, and dubs everything
"home-fed" that Smithfield supplies him
with.
There are other markets at which meat is sold
that has not been taken account of in the figures
we have given. There is Leadenhall, which is
mainly a retail market, and of which no statistics
are available; there is the Jews' Market in Whitechapel;
and a large amount of killed meat finds
its way to London direct to the suburban retailer.
We shall be well within the mark in allowing
10,000 tons for such odds and ends.
It is time, however, to " combine our information"
and come to totals. Averaging oxen at
two to the ton, calves at twelve to the ton,
pigs at thirty to the ton, and sheep at forty
to the ton, we find that London in 1887 received
from foreign and colonial sources 130,216
tons of meat. Of this Deptford received 48,446
tons, Islington 23,650 tons, and Smithfield 58,120
tons. Of home-bred live-stock, Islington received
115,675 tons, and of home-bred dead-stock - that
is, meat fed and killed in Great Britain and Ireland-
Smithfield distributed 122,880 tons - to
which we should add our extra 10,000. This makes
for the year's meat 378,771 tons, which means
1,038 tons per day, or less than half a pound of
uncooked meat and bone per head for the five
millions of people.
II.
LONDON requires other meat to feed it besides
the live cattle and cold carcases of which
we have heard so much; and a large proportion
of this comes from across the seas. Even
in minor matters, mere sundries as it were,
generally thought to be of home production
exclusively, it is astonishing to what an extent
we are indebted to the colonist and the foreigner.
As an example, we have in the newspaper on the
morning this is written, an announcement that a
steamer has just arrived from the River Plate with
14,334 carcases of mutton; 1,051 half carcases;
26,110 tongues; 27,390 hearts; 119,050 kidneys;
50 tails; and 10 casks of tripe. Do not let this
typical cargo be pooh-poohed as mere "frozen;"
the cold-air storage chambers in which it made
its voyage are on exactly the same principle as
the huge larders of the Metropolitan :Meat
Market, in which meat, home grown and foreign
grown, is kept side by side, and not one person
in a thousand could tell the native place of the
mutton when it comes to table, except perhaps
that the meat that came farthest might be the
best flavoured, owing to its having been fed on
richer pasture.
Let us give as briefly as possible - for we have
other food to interest us - London's share of
imported meat sundries. Of salted beef, reaching
us chiefly from the United States, London
claims nearly 1,700 tons a year; of tinned meats,
84,000 cases; of hams, nearly 6,000 tons; of
bacon, 18,150 tons; of salt pork, over 1,700 tons. The hams, bacon, and pork, like the salted beef,
come chiefly from the United States. To them
we may appropriately add the rabbits, chiefly from
Belgium, of which London, in 1887, consumed
60,000; and with these rabbits, which weighed
nearly 750 tons, we may as well mention the
poultry and game, amounting to 2,550 tons. In
short, to the live cattle, and meat imported, we
shall be well within the mark in adding 33,000
tons of poultry and odds and ends. One item of
meat that we have forgotten - vegetarian meat let
us call it - runs into even larger figures. How
many foreign eggs does the reader suppose come
into the kingdom in a year? In 1887 the return
presented to the House of Commons gives the
number at 1,088,380,440! Taking London's
share of this at an eighth, and that is a very low
estimate, the metropolis consumed, in 1887, over
136,000,000 foreign eggs, of which Germany supplied
more than a third, France about a third, and
Belgium a sixth.
But we must say more about the poultry and
game than this, for the London consumption runs
into much larger quantities than would be suspected.
One railway company alone, the Great
Eastern - whose goods manager has very kindly
supplied us with a detailed statement of the line's
food traffic for the last ten years -brought into
London in 1888, 2,587 tons of poultry! Let the
Londoner visit the Central Poultry Market, and see for himself the quantities
that that are being handled,
and let him consider that unlike butcher's meat, the amount of poultry that passes through
Smithfield is a mere fraction of what London eats.
Let him go to Leadenhall, and add what he sees
there to what he has seen at Smithfield, and still
he will be far off the gross total.
Leadenhall likes not statistics, and is somewhat
of a mystery as a market, but it is the most interesting
of lounges under Corporation control. It
is a grand miscellaneous show of the living and
the dead. All alive-o! - and noisily alive - are
cocks and hens, and pigeons and turkeys, and
peafowl and guineafowl, and ducks and geese, all
tempting the amateur as ornaments for the back
yard, and all meaning roast or boiled in the immediate
future. And huddled with them are more
unprofitable pets - hawks and canaries, larks and
linnets, parrots and owls, rabbits and ferrets, dogs
and cats, hedgehogs and goldfish, foxes ("that
had been best unmentioned! ") and "water-snails
for the aquarium!" And close by are lofty displays
of New Zealand mutton; and bins-ful of
"frozen kidneys," and joints from the Plate, all
doomed to the dish; and game innumerable, all
hanging dead in plumes; and venison, skinned
and unskinned, such as this market distributes in London alone to the tune of
350 tons a year.
Where does the game come from? Scandinavia
and Russia, Germany and Italy, :Manitoba and
Wisconsin all contribute. Even "the quails of the
desert" come to Leadenhall. The grouse come
from Yorkshire and the Highlands of Scotland;
the pheasants and partridges from Norfolk and
Suffolk; the teal, the widgeon, and the wild fowl
from Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire and the
lowlands of Holland. A well-known salesman
estimated that there are supplied in one year
100,000 grouse, 125,000 partridges, 70,000 pheasants,
80,000 snipe, 150,000 Irish plover, 30 ,000
Egyptian quail, 70,000 widgeon, 30,000 teal,
200,000 wild duck, 150,000 small wild birds, and 400,000 larks. And to this he added 400,000
pigeons, mostly from France; 100,000 geese, mostly
from Holland; 350,000 ducks, a good many from
Buckinghamshire; 104,000 turkeys, mostly from
East Anglia; 100,000 hares, 1,300,000 rabbits,
and 2,000,000 domestic fowls, mostly from Surrey
and Sussex. This was some years ago, and we shall be within limits now if we add
to these all that we have already mentioned as reaching us by sea. When we consider that fifty years since the
sale of game was illegal, what a "development of
commerce" have we here! And yet how small
a matter it is after all! Add all the quantities together
and it will be found that reckoning them
all as equal, from the lark to the turkey, all as so
many head, we have not allowed two birds a piece
per year for the people of London, But how
many of the Londoners we may be reminded taste
not bird-flesh from year's end to year's end. Full
well we know it. But take "the upper ten thousand,"
not as a figure of speech but as a figure of
arithmetic, and allow each of the ten thousand a
bird a day and you have accounted for 3,650,000
of the mighty flock!
In our salesman's estimate the large supplies
from Ireland are included. Other provisions come
from Ireland besides poultry - pork and bacon, for example, in large quantities - but no means exist
of arriving at the amount of Irish produce consumed
in London, and we must leave it as a
margin for our other estimates. Large, though
the quantity is, it is small in proportion to the
numbers it has to feed. Butter, too, comes in
large consignments from Ireland, but it is now
having a hard fight against the importations from
across the other Channel. Of home-made butter
London is said to take 10,000 tons; its yearly
share of foreign butter is about the same, and of
margarine, the imitation, it receives nearly 9,000
tons. The margarine reaches us chiefly from
Holland, but it also comes from Norway and
Belgium. Butter comes to us mainly from Den
mark, France yielding the next largest supply, and
Holland and Germany the next.
Of milk, all of it produced in England and excluding
all Lac dubium and the yield of Vacca ferrocaudata, London, at a moderate estimate, drinks
125,000 gallons a day or 875,000 gallons a week;
and as a cow can be safely set down to yield ten
gallons a week, we are faced with the formidable
herd of 87,500 cows required to furnish the metropolitan
milk supply. Of these some 14,000 are
kept within the London boundary. The milk
from the rest is brought in "churns" from almost
every railway-station. Familiar objects are these
churns to the railway traveller. In the early
morning about four o'clock they are delivered
full in hundreds, and again about one o' clock in
the afternoon they are loaded out from the trains
wholesale, and all day long the empty churns go
back in the brakes and special vans. The farmer
realises about as much per gallon as the retailer
does per quart, the difference going chiefly in carriage.
Of late there has been a great increase in
London milkmen owing to a greatly increased
consumption of milk. And there has been a
great increase of business among the larger firms,
one company, for instance, making as many as
11,000 calls a day at customers' houses.
In addition to the fresh milk there should be
mentioned the condensed milk sold in tins, of which
the London yearly consumption is 80,000 cases.
And from milk we are easily led to cheese, of
which the United Kingdom annually imports over
90,000 tons, and London uses 11,465 tons. Twothirds
of the cheese come from Canada and the
United States in about equal proportions. And a
sixth comes from Holland. Adding the home
produce, we can put the consumption of cheese in
London at 50 tons a day. With these "provisions"
we may as well take lard, of which America
supplies the Londoners every year with 5,000 tons.
What home-made lard is used we know not, for of
the home-bred pig and all connected with him we
frankly confess we can make nothing, although
we have tried our hardest. One astounding fact
we have gathered, and that is that the London
cookshops annually sell over 600 tons of black
puddings, polonies, and saveloys.
Having disposed of the meat and
provisions, we can now attack the fish, with which we might more fashionably
have begun. And first for the oysters, which are not strictly fish but are
certainly fishy. Forty years ago a calculation was published showing that the London consumption of oysters was
in round numbers 500,000,000. There can be no
doubt that more oysters are eaten now than then,
but as 500,000,000
would give us even
now a hundred per
head of the population,
we may perhaps
quarter the amount
with advantage and
be satisfied with two
dozen each. The
British oyster is of
course in a minority,
but in his competition
with his Dutch,
French, Portuguese,
and American cousins
it is emphatically
a case of quality
against quantity.
Billingsgate is the
great centre of London
fish distribution.
There are other markets,
but Billingsgate
laughs them to scorn.
Shadwell still exists,
and the new Smithfield
market has
opened hopefully,
but the confidence
of Lower Thames
Street is unshaken.
Last year Billingsgate
received toll on
over 136,000 tons
of land-borne and
water-borne fish for
the Metropolitan
dealers. We put land-borne
first, owing to
its greater importance, for the river no longer brings
in the bulk. From the road came 79,000; from the
Thames only 57,000. The bulk of the water-borne
fish is brought in by four fishing companies; the
Great Northern Steam Fish Company brought in
14,000 tons, the Steam Fish and Ice Company
12,000 tons, the Grimsby Ice Company 10,000
tons, the Great Yarmouth Steam Carrying
Company 9,000 tons. Of the land-borne fish, the
Great Northern Railway are the largest carriers;
they were accountable for nearly 19,000 tons out
of the 79,000. Next came the London and North Western, and Great Western, each with 9,000 then
the Midland with 7,000, then the Great Eastern with 5,000, the London and
South-Western with
3,500, the South-Eastern with 2,500. the Chatham
and Dover with 2300, and the Brighton with 1,300.
The chief characteristic of Billingsgate on a market morning
is perpetual motion. An eager, bustling crowd, struggling and beckoning and
bidding, is pierced in half a dozen directions by single files of hurrying
white-frocked porter. Tracing back the files to the quay, we find them starting from the "steam carrier" moored in the
river. A double gangway lead from the steamers into the market. Up one side come the white
porters, one by one in close order, swiftly and
regularly, each with a "trunk" of fish on his head; down the other passes
a less regular file of
porters
returning empty-handed - or rather headed - to
dive into the ship's hold and join the laden
stream. At the end of the pontoon are a couple
of lighters, and down to them lopes a line of
slippery boards; on to these boards the empty
trunks are thrown, and down they slide toboggan-fashion till they are safe below.
From London Bridge to Water Lane, or say
Lower Thames Street generally, there is a block of
carts and railway-vans; the market has overflowed
into the street. As an example of the long line, let
us take one of the Great Northern waggons which
stands opposite the main door of the Custom
House. On it is a fish-tank the size of a railway-truck,
which was loaded at Grimsby last night.
and slung off the truck on to this London waggon
this morning. On the tank is a small crowd peering
down into two hatchways in the top, the lids
of which are thrown back; and a white-frocked
man amongst them is shouting at the top of his
voice, "There's no better in the market this
morning; now then, what do you say ?- what do
you say?" And a lazy. leisurely sort of bidding
is going on: the bidders stooping down into the mass of fish and picking up first one and then
another, and throwing them back again with a
flop. On the off-side of the waggon is a crowd
of hucksters' barrows and spring-carts, and these
extend right up Arthur Street and round the
Monument and beyond.
The railway-van is one of many; the shouting
group is one of many groups; and under cover in
the market the uproar is deafening. There the
salesmen, "bummarees," or what not, stand
among heaps of fish and stacks of laden boxes.
"Gigantic salmon, fresh caught from the firths
and bays of Scotland, or from the productive Irish
seas, flounder about, as the boxes in which they
have travelled disgorge them upon the board;
quantities of delicate red mullet, that have been
hurried up by the Great Western all the way from
Cornwall, for the purpose of being furnished fresh
to the fastidious palates at the West End; smelts
brought by the Dutch boats, their delicate skins
varying in hue like an opal as you pass; pyramids
of lobsters, a moving mass of spiteful claws and
restless feelers, savage at their late abduction from
some Norwegian fiord; great heaps of pinky
shrimps; turbots, that lately fattened upon the
Doggerbank, with their white bellies bent as for
some tremendous leap; and humbler plaice and
dabs, from our own craft; all this bountiful accumulation
forms a mingled scene of strange forms
and weird colours, that no one with an eye for the
picturesque can contemplate "without interest" - set
off as it is by the bustling throng, the grey misty
light. and the slippery, sloppy, filthy, greasy flags.
At five o'clock the big bell tolls, and the market
opens; by six the West End mongers have taken
the pick of the supply; by seven the costermongers have come on the scene and begun their
bargaining; by nine the distribution is complete;
and, after a feeble haggling with the late comers,
lingering on into retail, there comes the close
with a grand clean down at three in the afternoon.
Above the market are galleries of offices. Below
it are "the shellfish vaults," where the curious
explorer will find among piles of empty baskets,
sundry unappetising-looking mounds of mussels,
whelks, and cockles; and in one corner a steaming
kitchen, from whose wide bubbling vats the
once blue lobster comes a brilliant scarlet corpse.
On the river front is a broad floating pontoon,
alongside which are not only the steamers that
have collected the takes of the North Sea smacks,
but the little open barges in which the fish has
been lightered from the docks; and out in the
stream are three deep-welled Dutch galliots,
quaint and clumsy, varnished and green-limed, in
which most of the morning's eels have come to
town.
And what is the year's fish bill? We have
seen its weight, 136,251 tons; but what does that
mean in quantities? Official figures there are
none, but the following proportions are vouched
for as being near the mark, and the quantities
will total up to the tonnage required. 400,000
each of salmon and live cod; 60,000,000 soles;
12,000,000 whiting; 2,000,000 haddock; 22,000,000
plaice; 16,000,000 mackerel; 800,000,000 herrings;
an eighth as many sprats; 6,000,000 eels;
300,000 dabs and flounders; and a million sundries.
Add for the "dry" fish, 50,000 barrelled
cod, and 1,000,000 salt cod; 15,000,000 haddocks;
100,000,000 bloaters; 30,000,000 red herrings - the
"Billingsgate pheasant" - 10,000,000 kippers;
and 300,000 sprats. Add for the
"shell-fish," over 125,000,000 oysters;
1,000,000 lobsters; 500,000 crabs;
300,000,000 shrimps; 3,000,000 whelks;
30,000,000 mussels; 40,000,000 cockles;
and 100,000,000 "littorinas of the pin,"
the "wink-wink-winkety-winks," that curl
out from their convolutions on so many
Sunday tea plates, east and south of Paternoster
Row.
"What an exaggeration! " says the incredulous
reader, for a moment. Let him
add together all the "wet," and the "dry,"
and the "shell;" let him reckon the sprat
as the equal of the salmon, and count the
cod, the shrimp, the bloater, and the periwinkle
as each an "ego," and therefore
entitled to an equal vote in the democracy
of the seas; and he will find his total fall
short of 1,800,000,000. Let him divide that
by the days in the year and the number of
London's people, and he will find that in
our case, to speak within the limit, we
have given the Londoners less than a single
fish a day to feed on.
To give the people of London only a
periwinkle apiece, you would require so
many bushels that the baskets containing
them, placed one over the other, would
overtop the cross of St. Paul's.
III.
As with the meat
and provisions,
so with the fruit
and vegetables. We
could not feed our
people without our
imports. Last year
there came into this
country £600,000
worth of miscellaneous
vegetables,
2,000,000 bushels of
apples, 5,000,000
bushels of oranges
and lemons,
25,000,000 bushels
of fruit "unenumerated,"
35,000,000
bushels of onions,
and 140,000 tons of
potatoes. The last
is but an insignificant
proportion of
the consumption, it is true, for the United Kingdom
produces 5,000,000 tons of potatoes in a
year; but still it is noteworthy. The Great
Eastern Railway brought into London in 1888
78,600 tons; the other railways together brought
in about five times as much, and the potatoes
we find among the imports are nearly all early
varieties that come to Covent Garden.
Covent Garden is the great vegetable market of
the metropolis. Columbia sells from 300 to 400
tons of potatoes and roots in a week; Farringdon
sells chiefly watercresses; Spitalfields does a much
larger and more miscellaneous trade; the Borough
deals in larger quantities than Spitalfields; but
taking all four together, and adding the Great
Northern potato market - the main source of the
London supply of that vegetable - the united trade
would not be a third of what is done at "the
Garden."
As Billingsgate extends into the streets so does
the great vegetable market. Garrick Street,
James Street, Long Acre, Great Russell Street,
Bow Street, are thick. with carts and vans on
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.
About seven o'clock the sight is at its best. The
towering waggons that have been crawling to the
centre all through the night are half unloaded,
and the dealers are bearing away the spoil.
Flowers there used to be many, but now there are
few; those who wish to see the flowers must be
up at three in the morning to see the new Flower
Market in full glory.
Under a clear sky, with the early sun beaming
down on the cool deep green of the vegetables,
the warm reds and rich yellows of the fruits, and
the clean white and brown of the baskets, heaped
among the crowd, there is a freshness and fragrance about that few can help enjoying, and a
pleasant out-in-the-air feeling characteristic of no
other market. All round the waggons are being
unloaded by the salesmen's men, and the content
carried into the crowd, and from the salesmen'
desks the green stuff is being borne outwards
again by the buyers' porters - a constant stream
in and out from the waggon to the cart.
The gardeners' waggons are loaded ten or a
dozen feet high with a hundred and fifty dozen
each of cabbages or cauliflowers, the sides as
level and true in angle as the cells of a honeycomb;
the railway waggons are loaded almost as
high, but with boxes, barrels, baskets, and crates,
held firm by visible cords. The cabbage waggons
have no cords, and how their contents are kept
wedged together is a mystery; but not so great a
mystery as the number of cabbages the many
waggons bring to market in a year, for no one
seems to know what the consumption really is.
Combining our information from many sources
- much of it vague and evidently misleading, although
appearing in type - we shall not be very
wide of the mark in the following figures: Potatoes
for the whole of London, 400,000 tons, being
about half a pound per head per day; cabbages of
all descriptions, 110,000 tons; turnips, 60,000
tons; onions, 50,000 tons; cauliflowers and brocoli, 30,000 tons; Brussels sprouts, 15,000
tons; carrots and parsnips, together, about the
same; green peas, 20,000 tons (the Great Eastern
alone brings in over 4,000 tons); beans, 13,000
tons; lettuces, 2,000 tons; vegetable marrows,
2,000 tons; cucumbers, 300 tons - 200,000
gherkins have been cut in one morning by one
gardener; rhubarb, 900 tons - rhubarb first appeared at Covent Garden in
Waterloo year, Mr. Miatt after much trouble managed to sell three
sticks the second day he sent it to market! - celery,
800 tons; asparagus, 300 tons; radishes, 200
tons; turnip-tops, herbs, and unspecified items,
say 500 tons, which amounts, duly cast and divided,
yield an average of about six ounces a day of
green vegetable food for each inhabitant of the
metropolis. Give them each another ounce and
you would require another 50,000 tons.
Dealing with such large numbers we can afford
to throw into the bargain the thousand tons of watercresses for tea, which we may as well confess
we forgot, but which we are glad have a sentence
to themselves so as to include a note as to the
quite remarkable speed at which they are cut.
The quickest harvesting imaginable is watercress
cutting; it is quicker than even walnut shelling
and pea shelling as practised by the scores of
women who are huddled together at work in the
thick of the crowd on market morning at Covent
Garden.
A good deal of the vegetable supply is grown
within the London area on the flats that every
year are encroached upon by the ever-unsatisfied
builder. One grower will sometimes send to one
salesman in one day five or six thousand pecks of peas and twelve hundred dozen cabbages. Lowly
as the crop may be, the cultivation is the highest
of the high. Take one market garden as a sample.
"Towards the close of October cabbages are
planted out; in November, when these are off,
the land is trenched and cropped with early celery, rows of lettuce or colewort being interposed
between
the rows of celery; when the celery is removed,
the ground is cropped with winter greens, which form a speedy and profitable crop for the
London market; by the beginning of March the
colewort is cleared off, and is speedily replaced
by onions; when the onions are gathered, more
cabbage or colewort is put in; and then come
cauliflowers, gherkin cucumbers, French beans, or scarlet runners. So the gardener proceeds, never
allowing his ground to remain idle for a single
day, and acting upon the well-assured maxim
that the enormous expense of manure and
labour will be more than repaid by the enormous
returns per acre per annum. It is said that
in November this garden contains more than
twenty acres of London greens; every hole
and comer under trees, and every bit of
spare space being filled with them. There are
fifty acres of apple, pear, and plum plantations;
the trees are pruned after the manner of currant
bushes; and the ground under them is cropped
with rhubarb, currants, and gooseberries in
summer, and with colewort and cabbages in
winter."
But the bulk of the produce comes from
beyond the London district, from every part of
the kingdom, in fact, even from Cornwall and
Cheshire, and Norfolk and Northumberland.
And from beyond the sea, from France and
Holland and Germany, from Spain and Italy and
Algiers do many of the London vegetables come.
And the fruit comes even farther. Australia is
sending us an ever-increasing supply of all sorts;
America is swamping us with apples; Spain and
Portugal, the Azores, the Madeiras, the Ionians, Italy and Sicily pour in their
lemons and oranges; grapes, nuts, chestnuts. pineapples, cocoanuts come in from
the Mediterranean and the West Indies; even South Africa, the Mauritius, India,
and China add their quota to the feeding of
London. In one year alone over £300,000 has
been paid to the shippers for foreign fruit sent to
Covent Garden.
The centre of the foreign fruit trade is, however,
the square round the Monument. There
the apples, the oranges, and the lemons in their
millions of bushels mentioned at the outset are
chiefly distributed. But of what does
the "unenumerated fruit" consist?
Pears, cherries, grapes, pineapples,
cocoanuts, plums, currants, tomatoes,
pomegranates, melons, bananas, mulberries,
and samples of every commercial
fruit that grows. But wearisome is the
repetition of numbers. The fruit, homegrown
and imported, consumed in London
is not far short of a hundred thousand
tons a year.
But then there is the canned fruit; and
what of the dried fruit and the groceries?
The canned fruit we can disregard; the
dried fruit for London only can be set
down very closely at 50,000 tons of currants
and 30,000 tons of raisins. Tea is
an important item, say 10,000 tons;
coffee, 1,700 tons; cocoa, 880 tons. It
is not so long ago that in this magazine
we dealt rather fully with the grocery
trade and noted the stocks in the docks;
we need not travel again over the same
ground; a list of leading quantities will suffice us. Here is the list for London only:
cinnamon, 62 tons: ginger, 470 tons; pepper,
1,600 tons; rice, raw and manufactured, 22,000
tons. Rice takes us into the grain, which need not trouble us much, for a convenient statistic
enables us to estimate all the flour and meal
yearly consumed in the London limits as equal
to 827,520,000 half-quartern loaves of two pounds
each.
Of the flour of which these loaves were made
less than a third was ground from wheat grown in
this country. The most serious item in the hole
of our food question is this of imported grain.
Out of every three loaves we eat, two have to come to
us from over the seas. Bread is not eaten in waste;
among our people, as a rule, bread is kept from
being wasted with almost superstitious care,
and only enough is provided to satisfy necessity.
Think what it would mean, then, to cut off two thirds
of that supply. In London alone there would be over three millions by whom bread
would not be procurable.
It is an old cry, but we can never try to drive
the lesson home too often. Our country has to
be fed from its rivals or its dependencies. In 1887
there were imported into the United Kingdom
55,784,685 cwt. of wheat, and 18,056,545 cwt.
of wheat meal and flour; of barley we received
14,277,180 cwt.; of oats, 14,468,733 cwt.; of peas,
2,990,296 cwt.; of beans, 2,477,293 cwt.; of
Indian com or maize and Indian corn meal we
had 31,128,923 cwt. Of the eighteen million
hundredweights of flour, nearly fifteen came from
the United States, a million and a third from Austria, a million from Canada, and half a
million
from Germany. Of the fifty-five million hundredweights
of wheat twenty millions and a half came
from the Atlantic seaboard of the United States,
and ten millions from the Pacific seaboard, eight
millions and a half came from India, five millions
and a half from Russia, four millions from Canada,
two millions and a quarter from Chili, a million
and a half from Germany, a little less from Australasia,
over half a million from Roumania, and
nearly two hundred thousand from Egypt. The
other grain supplies we need not trace; sufficient
has been said to show how dependent we are for
our existence on our keeping clear the highways
of the ocean.
Of sugar in all its forms, all from abroad, the
Londoners would require for a year's supply
150,000 tons. Sugar naturally leads us on to beer,
of which a thousand million pints is the annual
metropolitan consumption. Add to these thousand
million pints, equal to 125,000,000 gallons,
4,700,000 gallons of spirits, and 1,800,000 gallons
of wine, and you have a drink bill to make a tea-totaler shudder. To comfort him a little we
may
mention the 45,625,000,000 gallons of a less harmful
liquid supplied yearly by the metropolitan water
companies, the proportion of which used as food
we will leave him to estimate for himself. As a
curiosity we may as well end in smoke, and add
the 2,630 tons of tobacco that floated in clouds
from London's lips in 1888.
Taking all London's food together, the fish, the
meat, the poultry, the provisions, the vegetables,
the fruit, the groceries, and the bread, we get an
annual consumption of close on a million and a
half tons a year. Add to this the drink-excluding
the water-and dividing by 365, we have a
daily consumption of 5,800 tons.
Clear Trafalgar Square of its fountains and its
monuments, pack it with one day's supply of the
great city's food, as solid and straight as the cabbages
are packed on a market gardener's waggon,
and you will have a mass higher than Nelson's
column.
Even the half-quartern loaves eaten in London
in a single day would, if placed side by side in
single line, extend from London to Leeds.
W. J. GORDON
articles from The Leisure Hour, 1889