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with a tripe hut. Am I making you hungry? In nearby
Oldham he came across a man selling tripe with chipped
potatoes in the French style. Lees started selling chips but
there is nothing to suggest that he sold fried fish even
though it wasn’t uncommon as time went by for people
to come and buy his chips and bring their own piece of
fish for a quick plunge in the boiling oil. How can I be
so sure? Members of the jury I give you the photograph
to the left taken in about 1902 of the Lees’s shop front,
please read the writing on the window. I rest my case.
Fish Dinners for the Poor
It is probable that the popularity of fish & chip shops
would have gradually evolved, quite literally by word
of mouth, but there were, at the beginning of fish suppers,
forces at work to promote the health giving properties of
fish. In 1881 a pioneering nutritionist by the name of
Dr. Mortimer Granville (pictured right) wrote this of fish:
“..the brain is nourished by it, the nerves quietened, the
mind grows stronger, the temper less irritable and the
whole being healthier and happier when fish is substituted
for butcher's meat.”
Evangelical in his beliefs and frustrated that no one was
taking any notice of him he started up a campaign for
Fish Dinners for the Poor
. Workhouse inmates, having no
say in the matter, were to be fed a compulsory fish diet but
they complained about the blandness of the fare and the
doctor was forced to add a sauce of melted butter with
anchovies. “Look at that”, said outraged of England,
“honest hard working folk can’t afford la-di-da sauces on
their fish dinners but these paupers get the whole lot free,
I ask you” etc. This only goes to prove that we are a born
nation of Daily Mail readers and were ripe for it when the
newspaper itself arrived some fifteen years later.
Disenchanted by the apathetic response to the fish thing
the extraordinary Dr. Granville went on to invent the
electric vibrator, which he called a percusser, to relieve
muscle aches publishing at the same time a treatise entitled
Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment
of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease.
When more
creative uses of his invention came to light he was aghast,
earnestly proclaiming that "I have never yet percussed a
female patient”. Gosh those Victorians were dark horses!
Granville’s campaign however caught the eye of Victorian
philanthropists including Angela Burdett-Coutts who
offered free fish & chips to all the London poor who