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The Experts’ Expert
John Walton, as Professor of Social History at the
University of Central Lancashire in the 1990s, bet his
students that anything could be the subject of academic
study and, to prove it, he wrote Fish and Chips and the
British Working Classes 1870-1940. The recognised
experts' expert, he accepts the East End Jewish origins
for fried fish and says there was “a Lancashire chips
tradition growing out of the regional baked potato
business, onto which fried fish got grafted.”
Sir Shirley Murphy, Medical Officer for Health for the
Edwardian London County Council records that at the
time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 fried fish was sold
with either baked potatoes or bread but that the trade was
revolutionised in about 1870 with the practice of selling
fried fish with potatoes-a-la-mode in the French style.
Chips arrived from France but a popular story (in Belgium
at least) credits a poor Belgian housewife with their
invention. In the winter of 1680, the river froze in the
Meuse Valley. With fish unavailable, she cut potatoes into
fish shapes and fried them instead.
We can return to Dickens for the first literary mention of
chips. It comes in A Tale of Two Cities published in 1859:
“Husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.’
Lancashire was probably the birthplace of the chipped
potato trade in England and London, it seems, came up
with fried fish. But who was the first to put the two
together? Londoners claim that it happened in the East
End but northerners give the crown to Mossley near
Manchester.
My vote goes to London’s East End where it is said that
in 1860 a 13-year-old Jewish boy called Joseph Malin
had the bright idea of combining fried fish with chips.
His family were rug weavers but to make ends meet they
had begun frying chips at home, which were still very
much a novelty food. Joseph sold the chips on the street
from a tray hung round his neck and started to combine
them with fish from a nearby fried fish shop. Before long
the family moved into shop front premises in Cleveland
Street, Bow. Why not the northern theory? Well we know
that in 1863 another young man, 28 year old John Lees, set
up a wooden hut on the Mossley market ground and with