Fish-and-chip shops were everywhere in the 50s and 60s and I refer to them on Upper-Class Onions. I wrote the following some years ago, it talks about how the fish got to (and for all I know still does get to) the shops.
Having spent the latter part of 1972 travelling longitudinally across Africa in a Land Rover I was in a frame of mind to do a mundane job. Who needs pressure when you’re feeling chilled?
I saw a job advertised for drivers on night work, and this seemed suitably non-demanding, so I phoned and was asked to appear at around 11pm at a depot in Camden Town.
I did not have with me any papers, for example proof of who I was or tax records or anything, I said I’d bring these later and this was seen as no problem.
The job consisted of arriving at the depot five evenings a week, Monday to Friday, at about 11pm. In the depot were a number of flat-backed 7-ton trucks, and each of these was assigned to a driver. There was one extra driver who covered for absences.
The drivers took it in turns to start the evening going to the London railway stations, St Pancras, Euston, Paddington, and Liverpool Street where boxes of fish had been unloaded from recently-arrived trains and labelled for their recipients, one such being this company in Camden Town. (At all of those stations, at the time, there was a roadway between two platforms, where the vans and lorries could pull up to pick up stuff unloaded from trains.)
On the station run the driver picked up his boxes of fish, and if he could nicked a few extras from other peoples’ orders. Some of the drivers were quite nifty at doing this without being seen.
Back at the depot, lorries had arrived also laden with boxes of fish, and the other drivers, together with the depot staff, were assembling these for distribution among the 7-tonners. The boxes of fish that came from the stations added to this collection.
The Paradise Fish Bar, Newington Green, photographed on 11 February 2015. The Paradise Fish Bar is the second-oldest remaining shop on Newington Green I think. The oldest is Jesshops baker’s. If I remember correctly the Paradise Fish Bar started up some time in the 1960s. I like the typeface – don’t know whether that dates from when it opened, it may do – stylish,curly, narrow.
At about 1am, each of the flat-backs headed off to a segment of greater London, to deliver the fish to fish-and-chip shops.
To know your round, you needed to know where to leave the fish, for of course the shops were pretty-well universally closed when you arrived at anything from 2am to six in the morning.
But you had to know something else too. You had to know which shop owners were diligent about weighing their fish, which were more trusting and relaxed, and which had left money out for extra fish that had been nicked from other people’s boxes, or from the station, or from their own boxes sometimes, if the chip shop owners were known to be not too pernickety about weighing what they got. The driver left the extra fish and the money went in the driver’s pocket.
The first job of the run, then, was to stop the truck in a quiet street and do some shuffling of the contents of the boxes, by slipping the hand in and extracting a few likely-looking fillets, for the driver’s bunce.
As it was my first night, I was shown my round by the cover driver, Sid. For whom I felt really, really sorry.
Sid explained why there was the job vacancy; the previous incumbent, who was very experienced and had the round completely under control, had been caught doing the fish nicking and had got six months in prison.
Sid was in an uncomfortable position, for he was expected to continue the previous driver’s routine so far as he could, and he could because he knew the job inside out, but as he explained to me, he was 72-years-old and really didn’t need a spell in gaol at his time of life. But as he said, rather unconvincingly I thought, ‘You have to do it, well you can’t live on the money they pay you now, can you?’
‘Are you married, Tony?’, he asked me. For some reason Sid had got it into his head that my name was Tony. I’d tried correcting him a couple of times but he still insisted on calling me Tony, or Tone.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Yeah, me too, I’ve been married four times. This one is better than the other three though as she pushes me into doing things, like.’ Not sure what these things were, or how much she knew about his precarious position vis-à-vis Pentonville.
My round took me down through south London, ending up at Merstham in Surrey. Then I had to drive the wagon back to Camden Town with the early-morning traffic on its way to work, arriving back at the depot at about seven. Refill the wagon with diesel and give it a bit of a hose down, and then off to Camden Road station for the train back home.
Everyone on the morning rush-hour train smelled to me of soap. As Geoff said when I told him this, they probably thought that I’d been on the job all night.
The following night I agonised with myself whether or not to go back. At about midnight, I phoned the depot manager and told him I thought the job was not for me, mate. That’s OK, he said. Some months later I looked out of the north-London line train window, from where you could see the depot, and saw that it had closed down. It had been going for years, I think that Sid had spent pretty-well all his working life there.
Dave
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