How Britain Worked Page 9
Like nineteenth-century factory workers, the trawler crews worked up to eighteen hours a day. They lived in cramped conditions below decks with no more space per man than was needed to bunk down. Storage for sails, rigging, nets and the fish was far more important. Before there were trawlers, boats that set out to catch fish in bulk used long lines – sometimes miles long – that might have up to 5,000 baited hooks attached. Fishing with nets was limited, partly due to the difficulty of hauling a large enough net through the water. Two boats might be used, each towing lines to hold the mouth of the net open wide enough to trap a decent quantity of fish. The Brixham trawlers were to change all that. These boats were fast and powerful, and able to deploy enough sail to haul large nets. A forty-foot-wide wooden beam was used to spread the mouth of the net with boards or vanes at each side, forcing it open while also working with the weighted lower edge of the net to stir up the sea bed and frighten more fish into the trap. By the middle of the nineteenth century, an average day’s catch for a trawler in the North Sea fishing grounds might be a ton of fish – mainly haddock but also plaice, whiting, turbot, brill and cod.
ICE ICE BABY
The trawlers developed in Brixham were soon to be found operating from ports all around the British coast, and especially from the east coast harbours that worked the North Sea fishing grounds. Their great advantage was that they were fast enough to get their huge hauls back to shore while the fish was still fresh. The other problem had always been how to get the fresh fish to the big inland towns before it all started to smell like something that died a week ago – which it probably had done. The trawlers were fast, but that wasn’t much good if everything then had to be loaded onto a horse and cart. From the middle of the nineteenth century the railway network was able to help solve the transport problem on land. It was soon possible for fish that was landed in Grimsby in the morning to appear on a plate in a London restaurant the same evening – though only if it arrived fresh and could be kept fresh, even in the scorching heat of summer.
The answer was to pack fish in ice. Every fishing port had an ice house that would be stocked up from local rivers or ponds during the winter, the blocks of ice separated with straw or sawdust to stop them freezing together. The ice house at Barking in London could store up to 10,000 tons of the stuff. An ice house had no windows and thick walls to keep any sunlight that might hit the building from transferring the warmth of its melting rays inside, but storing ice could never be entirely successful. Ice was even imported from Scandinavia, but that, like storage, made it very expensive. What was really needed was a way to make fresh ice whenever you needed it, at whatever time of year, whatever the weather was like.
By 1756, a Scottish medical doctor and chemist called William Cullen had demonstrated how a liquid in a vacuum would first boil, then freeze. Research chemist Mhairi Matheson agreed to stage an experiment for me, based on the public demonstration given by Cullen that led to the development of artificial refrigeration. Mhairi was eminently qualified to do this. She had even made a molecule – benzodiazepine. I’ve never made a molecule, so I left Mhairi in charge. She explained that this experiment is the principle on which our modern fridges are based. We had a glass bell jar, the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place covering a stuffed parrot, with a tube coming out of it. The tube was attached to a hand pump and Mhairi had me cranking away at it for ages without much result. It was only when I told her it was her shift that she plugged the tube into an electric pump!
It was shortly after that the whole experiment went pear-shaped. I had been wondering why they had made us wear protective glasses for the experiment. We were only making a spot of ice and filming it for the telly, after all – what could possibly go wrong? The answer came when the big bell jar suddenly exploded. Actually, it imploded, but there was a heck of a bang and a fair few shards of glass flying around. By the way Mhairi screamed, I could tell that, even though she had done this experiment a hundred times, this had never happened before. I didn’t scream, but the words that came out of my mouth are not the sort of thing you want to hear on telly and certainly not something a gentleman would ever be heard to utter in front of a lady. Unfortunately, I got such a shock that I forgot, for a moment, that I was a gentleman.
Undaunted, Mhairi fetched another bell jar and we had another go. I wondered what William Cullen thought when he had a few of these mishaps? It must have happened to him when he was trying to perfect his experiment. I guessed he must have just kept going, so that’s what we did too – with an even sturdier bell jar.
When the pump evacuated all of the air from the jar, the water started to boil – at room temperature. Nature hates a vacuum, you see, so the water wanted to expand to fill the vacuum and the only way it could do that was to evaporate. Water usually needs to be heated in order to boil and evaporate but because it had no external heat or energy source, the water used energy within its own molecules. The evaporating molecules of water took energy away from the water in the beaker, leaving the remaining water molecules with less and less energy. When molecules run out of energy, they grow cold. Eventually, the water freezes. Once ice could be created at any time of year, it meant that everything travelling by rail could be delivered fresh – not only fish, but also meat from a slaughterhouse and vegetables from a farm. Ice became cheaper to buy, meaning that fishing boats could afford to use more of it and stay out at sea longer to bring in bigger catches.
DO YOU WANT SALT AND VINEGAR WITH THAT?
There was definitely a demand for the fish – more so than ever before. Seven years of famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1852, when their potato crops were destroyed by blight, led to mass emigration, with thousands of Irish weavers arriving to work in the mill towns of mainland Britain. The Irish Catholics ate fish on Fridays and demand for fish in the second half of the nineteenth century soared.
Part of that demand was down to the way that fried fish was sold from stalls in the street. The fish was covered in batter to seal it, making it last longer and helping to stop it from smelling. By the early 1860s, it was reckoned that there were 300 fish fryers in London. They didn’t yet offer you chips with your fish, though. Chips appear to have been invented by the French during a fish shortage, when street vendors cut potatoes and fried them instead of fish. It was a delicacy that soon caught on in Britain, especially in the north where Oldham and Leeds were thought to have had a fish ’n’ chip shop for every 400 people – pretty much one chippy on every street corner.
Nowadays we have all sorts of fast food – Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, burger houses, you name it – but the chippy is still one of Britain’s favourite takeaways. There are something like 10,500 fish ‘n’ chip shops across the country. There are only 1,200 McDonalds and 350 KFCs. Around 80,000 people work in chippies and the industry is thought to be worth around £1.2 billion annually, serving up 300 million portions.
I like to think I made that 300 million plus one, when I tucked into some fish ’n’ chips while watching the restored Leader put to sea. A lot of people had volunteered their services to get the old girl shipshape again, and they had benefitted from a £170,400 Lottery grant. Leader didn’t leave her berth in quite the same way as she would have done when she was new. You can’t just fling up a few sails and set off from the quayside – a sailing ship needs a bit of room to manoeuvre under sail power – so trawlers like Leader were towed out into more open water. They used steam-powered tugs for that job, and before steam power the sailing boats were towed by gigs. These were fast rowing boats with six strong men at the oars. They competed to get to boats coming in to harbour, either to put a pilot on board whose local knowledge allowed him to steer the ship to safety through treacherous sandbanks or rocks, or to tow the ship to its berth. The fastest boat got the job, and the fee.
When Leader finally set sail, she had no need of a gig or a tug. Nowadays she has a six-cylinder, eight-litre diesel engine tucked away below decks, which gives her plenty of power to manoeuvre. When sh
e unfurled her sails and cut the engine, Leader looked just like she would have done when she was heading for the fishing grounds over a century before. There are a few slight differences – below decks is no longer crowded out with smelly fishermen and their gear, and they no longer haul a ton of fish aboard each day. Instead, Leader’s decks hide comfortable bunks for twelve guests and five crew members, and a large saloon where everyone can eat in comfort, their meals cooked on a gas stove in a fully equipped galley. There are hot showers, two toilets (they call them ‘heads’ on board), a generator supplying electricity to sockets so that you can charge up your mobile and, naturally, all of the most modern navigation aids.
Mr Robbens’ Lowestoft crew would surely love it – no fishing, just sailing for leisure and pleasure!
It’s little wonder that the traditional image of Death, the Grim Reaper, is a cloaked and hooded figure carrying a scythe. The scythe represented the way that the Grim Reaper stalked through the darkness of the night harvesting, or reaping, souls. That was the scythe’s day job – harvesting crops, that is, not souls. When used for gathering crops, the chine would be attached to the snaith at right angles, forming a giant ‘L’ shape with the cutting edge on the inside. When the scythe was held ready for use in two hands, using the grip at the top of the snaith and another halfway down, the chine would be parallel with the ground. It’s a good word that, isn’t it – chine? Say it out loud and it sounds just like the noise a scythe makes as it slices through long grass. The scythe wasn’t only used for harvesting crops, you see. In the days before the lawn mower, it was the tool used by gardeners to mow the lawn.
The proper technique for mowing with a scythe, and I was schooled by an expert so can describe this with some confidence, is to swing the scythe from right to left with the blade staying parallel to the ground. The aim is not to cut a huge arc of grass in front of you, as you might at first think – well, I did, anyway. The way an eighteenth-century gardener would have done it would be to swing the scythe as he walked forwards, cutting a small strip of grass on his right, then tipping the cut grass off the blade to his left, on an area of lawn he’d already mown. That made it easy for someone following on behind (I’d be following at a very safe distance) to pick up the cuttings. The mower was more likely to work his way round in a circle and finish in the middle of the lawn than try to move up and down in straight lines.
Some scythes had a kind of s-shaped curve on the snaith that helped the mower to keep the chine skimming parallel with the ground. If they dug it into the earth it would not only chop up the lawn but it would blunt the blade. The cutting edge of a scythe used for lawn work would be paper thin, achieved by a blacksmith peening the blade – working the metal while it was red hot. A damaged blade might need re-peening, so what with loss of earnings and repair costs, the mower really had to get it right. Even for a skilled mower, cutting a lawn was backbreaking work and it would take a team of three or four men several hours to mow a large garden in front of a country house. It also had to be done early in the morning because the scythe did the best job while the grass was still damp with dew. The best job might well be a lawn shorn to just a few millimetres, bowling-green smooth.
Seems a heck of a lot of trouble and expense to go to just for a bit of grass, doesn’t it? But that was the whole point. Any visitors arriving at your house would see your beautifully manicured lawn and be suitably impressed. A lawn looks nice, but it’s not a productive thing. It’s not an orchard or a field of corn or a cow pasture. It doesn’t earn you any money. It is simply the owner of the house saying, ‘This is my land and I have so much money that I can afford to grow grass here even though it is not a cash crop and I have to employ men to keep it looking in tip-top condition.’
BRITAIN IN BLOOM
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, gardens were for the rich but, as it did with almost every other facet of life in Britain, industrialisation, the coming of the factories, steam power and the growth of the cities, changed the nation’s gardening habits. People from all walks of life were encouraged to develop green fingers.
Botanists have been collecting and growing plants for centuries. It might seem like there is nothing more English than a rose, but the Chinese were collecting and cultivating them 5,000 years ago. The rose is, in fact, one of the oldest flowering plants, having been around for some thirty-five million years – long before there were gardeners around to do any ‘dead-heading’. In ancient Greece, Aristotle was studying botany 350 years before the birth of Christ and explorers were collecting plant specimens from all over the known world. When exploration really came of age with sailing ships from Europe circumnavigating the globe in the sixteenth century, all manner of exotic plants found their way back to Europe. In 1580, adventurer Sir Francis Drake is credited with bringing the humble potato to Britain for the first time – a plant that had obvious commercial value in that it would become a staple part of our diet. Where would we be without chips? Other plants were brought back by plant hunters purely because they were so beautiful or unusual. In 1656, the rhododendron, a common sight in so many of our gardens, was introduced to the UK from its home in the European Alps.
There was money to be made in finding useful vegetables, like the potato, or transporting plants like the tea plant from China to India to create a whole new agricultural industry. But it wasn’t only farmers who were interested in new types of plant. Scientists were always looking for new species in order to learn about their properties and perhaps develop medicines from them. Botanists were passionate about studying plants from all over the world from a purely scientific point of view. It took time and effort to bring specimens back to Britain from the farthest reaches of the planet and sadly most of them died along the way. Those who set out looking for new species often didn’t do any better than the plants they were after. David Douglas was a Scottish botanist who was sent to America by the Royal Horticultural Society as a plant hunter. He sent back hundreds of plants to Britain, including varieties of pine trees that helped to establish our timber industry: the Douglas Pine is one of many species named after him. Douglas didn’t have it easy, though. Out in the wilds of Canada in 1823, looking for seeds and intending to take cuttings from fruit trees, he had climbed a tree to take a close look at some mistletoe when his guide ran off with his coat, his money and his notebooks! He survived many adventures exploring the west coast of America, including encounters with hostile natives, illness, starvation and falling into a raging river where he lost his rifle and all of his kit, leaving him stranded in the wilderness with only the wet clothes he was wearing.
Douglas met a tragic end in 1834 in Hawaii when, his eyesight failing, he was exploring the slopes of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain on the island – actually an active volcano – and fell into a bull trap. Domestic cattle that had gone wild were a problem in Hawaii and were hunted using pits that were dug across paths the animals were known to take when foraging. Many of the hunters who came to Hawaii to help cull the animals were ex-convicts and there is some doubt about whether Douglas fell into the trap or was knocked on the head, relieved of some of his money, and pushed in. In any case, the bull in the pit put an end to Douglas’s plant-hunting adventures.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, steam ships were cutting journey times enormously, although plants in transit still had to survive huge variations in temperature, being lashed by salt water blown across the deck by strong winds or being eaten by rats if down in a darkened cargo hold. Then in 1829, an East London doctor called Nathaniel Ward stumbled across the solution to the problems of transporting plants. Ward’s home and surgery were in the Docklands area where the atmosphere was grey, gloomy, dismal and smoggy. He longed to grow delicate plants such as ferns in his garden, but the air quality simply wasn’t good enough. The good doctor also had an interest in entomology, the study of insects, and was observing a hawk moth chrysalis when he made a remarkable discovery. He had put the chrysalis on some leaf mould in a sealed glass jar, hoping
that he would be able to see the moth emerge. The moth died but the leaf mould came to fascinate him even more. Seedlings sprouted from the mould, including a fern of the kind that he had found so difficult to grow outside. Ward worked out that the plants were protected from the foul atmosphere inside the jar: the moisture in the leaf mould was evaporating during the day, then condensing on the glass when the temperature dropped in the evening and running back to be absorbed by the mould again.
Ward knew all about the difficulties of transporting plants around the world and decided to stage an experiment. In 1833, he built two strong wooden cases and planted in them a variety of grasses and ferns before sealing them in under glass. The cases were sent to Australia on the deck of a ship. The plants all survived the journey in good condition, as did some Australian ferns, never transported live to Britain before, on the return journey.