My copy of Old London Cries is a facsimile of a book that was published in 1885 by Andrew Tuer. He was a publisher with an interest in the antiquarian and the fading. He produced books in a chapbook style, mine is small, wrapped in marbled paper and ties together with strings. He also filled it with many old prints and a few newer woodblock prints produced at the time but in a retro-style.
Cries themselves have not completely died out in London, visit a street market and the people there will still be reeling out their “five pounds a pound” or extolling the virtues of their fish or meat. The most memorable one I heard was when I was eight and a man was selling toy spiders by yelling, “biiiig ‘airy Sp-I-ders” in a very distinctive way. When I was little, Evening Standard hawkers still had a very distinctive cry (that sounded nothing like the words ‘Evening Standard’). There’s a man in Camden Market who calls his “bhang bhang chicken” in a way that once heard can never be forgotten. It’s not a dead art, but it’s a much diminished one.
Old London Cries reads rather like my paragraph above, it’s not an academic work, it’s a collection on remembrances, anecdotes, notes & queries. The cries are not organised thematically, chronologically, geographically or at all - it’s a jumble of these memories (as well as written and drawn accounts) spanning the fifteenth century to the time the book was produced.
There’s the ‘jovial fellow’ in Fleet Street who proudly cries how stinking his fish are, the jack-in-the-box seller who makes a noise as the clown pops up that buyers are disappointed to find do not come with the product. One famous seller was the ‘Tiddy-Dol-man’ who features in Hogarth’s picture of the hanging of the idle apprentice. He was a gingerbread seller dressed in second-hand finery who made up little nonsense rhymes ending “tiddy-dol-dol-dol” to advertise his food. He also rather undersold the gingerbread, saying it would “melt in the mouth like a red hot brickbat”.
I was rather charmed by the man selling ‘young lambs’, a children’s toy made of lambskin with a pink bow on them. His cry was reported as;
“Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell
Two for a penny, young lambs to sell
If I’d have as much money as I can tell
I wouldn’t cry young lambs to sell
Dolly and Molly, Richard and Nell
Buy my young lambs and I’ll use you well.”
The accompanying print shows the lamb seller as having a hook for a hand, possibly an old sailor or soldier on hard times.
The eighteenth century was a boom time in recording London Cries and many of them are culled from this popular e genre. Paul Sandby did one, Cruickshank has a few, some entered children’s books, chap books and nursery rhymes. Many of them are pretty plain, a simple call to buy whatever the person was selling. However, like the cries in the market today, it was often how they said it. Some products had recognisable rhythms and tunes to the cry, an idea that was incorporated in the ‘Who Will Buy?’ scene in Oliver!
Some of the cries represent old fads, fashions and jobs that no longer exist. Nobody walks about the street with bundles of canes calling to fix your chairs, nor does anybody wheel a knife-grinder around to fix up your old knives and scissors. (Though there is still a scrap metal man up my way who has a slow horse pulling a carriage, calling out “scrap metal” and people come out to put it on the cart - I was amazed to see that in 2025).
The cries also reflect food and drink no longer as popular. There was a man crying “Saloop”, which was a sassafras drink that men drank to gain energy for a night on the town - I imagine a sort of Dr Pepper. Then there’s Hokey Pokey - a cheap form of ice cream sold in blocks in different coloured and flavoured layers, I imagine like a Neapolitan. However, it was firmer than ice cream and slower to melt and, it was suspected made from mashed up turnip rather than cream. Ice creams themselves were served in penny-licks, a special bowl a customer would buy to lick the ice cream out of before giving it back to the vendor to use for a new customer. I suppose the tune of a modern day ice cream van is rather like an old street cry.
This is a charming book, pleasingly told by Andrew Tuer, though it can get a little repetitive with some of the cries. I’m not sure how many times in this small book I read the words ‘sweet lavender’ or ‘ripe strawberries’.
The back of the book included other works published by Tuer, and one in particular caught my attention.
Why Not Eat Insects? was published in 1885 by Field and Tuer and written by Vincent M Holt. As far as some cursory googling tells me, it was his only work.
It’s not a joke, but a genuine little polemical pamphlet encouraging more people to eat our creepy crawly friends. He was a few reasons for this, which he repeats a number of times:
1 - many insects are very clean animals, especially the vegetarian ones and are much cleaner than pigs or lobsters, which are very popular food items.
2 - They are plentiful, nutritious and free, which should endear them to the poor.
3 - Eating insects will stop them eating and ruining our plants.
4 - People of the past ate insects with relish.
5 - People in other countries eat them with relish.
6 - Many highly prized foodstuffs, like oysters, aren’t much different to insects anyway.
7 - They taste good and it’s only cultural prejudice keeping them off the table.
He talks about Romans and Greeks enjoying them, natives of West Africa and Australia, even the French and their snails. He talks about Erasmus Darwin trying some and enjoying them, and of his own culinary experiments. He talks about a very fashionable event where people tried a Chinese meal, which didn’t have insects but did have Bird’s Nest soup - and insects have to be nicer than twigs and bird spit (not to mention the Chinese do have insect and chrysalis meals).
He says woodlice taste like prawns, some caterpillars taste delicious and it’s a mistake that only some snails are edible, they all are and so are slugs.
The best part of the book is where he creates two insectivorous menus. One starts with slug soup, braised beef and caterpillars and ending in gooseberry cream - with sawflies. The second includes curried cockchafers, wireworm sauce, caterpillars as garnish and ends in moths on toast - though whether spread or laid, I don’t know. To make these dishes seem more classy, he gives the same two menus with French names. I can’t say he swayed me (though I have had crickets and they were fine).
This book is one of those joyously bizarre things you come across sometimes and I am putting it in the bedside table of my spare room alongside How to Speak Wookie and Knitting with Dog Hair.
No comments:
Post a Comment