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Eating In
The first fish restaurants also belonged to the Jewish East
End. Samuel Isaacs, born in Whitechapel in 1856, ran a
successful wholesale fish business and opened his first sit
down restaurant in London in 1896. Fish & chips with a
slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea cost 9d. For this
you also got carpet, tablecloths, flowers, waited service,
china and cutlery. It was upmarket dining for the working
classes and it was incredibly popular. Isaacs opened
restaurants in many London districts as well as those
outposts of the capital - Clacton, Ramsgate, Margate and
Brighton. You get a fleeting glimpse of the Brighton
restaurant (pictured below) at No. 1, Marine Parade next
to the pier in Norman Wisdom’s 1955 film One Good
Turn. Today it’s a Harry Ramsden’s. Perhaps the most
famous name in the game Ramsden opened his first
chippie in 1928 in a striped wooden hut next to a tram
stop at Guiseley in West Yorkshire, a full 60 miles from
the sea. Three years later he opened a fish & chip palace
based on, would you believe it, The Ritz with wood
panelling and chandeliers. It is still the largest fish & chip
shop in the world.
Fish & Chips Win the War
Lord Woolton was appointed wartime Minister of Food
by Neville Chamberlain and went on to oversee rationing
in Churchill’s government.
Woolton’s forward thinking
food plan allocated rations based on nutritional needs
with priority given to mothers and children as well as to
manual labourers in key industries like mining and dock
work. The rich, at least on paper, got less to eat, which
did them no harm and the poor, at least on paper, got a
diet adequate for health. In a monumental u-turn that
could knock modern governments with their pasties and
caravans into a cocked hat, Churchill’s wartime government
removed fish frying from the schedule of offensive trades.
Fish & chips just a
few years earlier demonised and damned
as evidence of the wasteful nature of the feckless poor
suddenly became the very elixir of life itself.
Frying Tonight - Something Weird With Whiskers!
There were still all sorts of difficulties for proprietors of
fish & chip shops and restaurants to contend with, not the
least of which was interruptions in the supply of their usual
fish. Weird fish with weird names turned up: yellow-bellied
pollock, oily conger eel and the dreaded coley which
doesn’t actually taste bad but has a tendency to go grey
when cooked and so looks awful. Sometimes a shop owner
might order hake only to have a box arrive labelled “Scotch
Hake” full of an unidentifiably and strangely whiskery fish.
Shortages continued after the war and in the late 1940s
with insufficient oil to run his Truro fish & chip shop
Maurice Williams was obliged to go a-begging to Bristol
and the deliciously Orwellian Fat & Oils Board. He told the
board that his oil supply was so limited he could only open
on Wednesdays and Fridays when his
frying tonight
signs
led to queues around the block. The Board, keen to get as
many Brits as possible onto cheap, cheerful and nutritious
fish & chips agreed to supply more oil but only if the shop
keeper would provide a mobile fish & chip service in the
rural villages surrounding Truro. He agreed which led to
quite an adventure manoeuvering a Heath Robinson
adaptation of a Ford V8 van containing a vat of boiling oil
and a coal fire along the narrow and hilly Cornish country
lanes until it finally and inevitably went up in flames.