Fish Mongers, Harriet & Fred Dunn selling fresh fish around the streets of Yarm and Stockton.
Image and details courtesy Derek Buttle.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Fish Mongers, Harriet & Fred Dunn selling fresh fish around the streets of Yarm and Stockton.
Image and details courtesy Derek Buttle.
My Grandmother’s Family were in the fish trade all there lives. I think the last of the line was Zachariah Hick Born 1890 Died in Stockton-on-Tees 1955
I can recall meeting with my father a man called Thompson? who my father said was related to us, who sold fish for years from a market stall erected on the Odeon side of the Shambles, apart from him I can recall the two sisters who sold tripe for yoink’s near the Town Hall back door and Market Cross, spring, summer and winter they stood with never a grumble. Do you recall these market traders?. Supermarkets killed the fish trade, it should be law that on Fridays all meat sellers shops and counters and easy meal takeaways should close, in order to allow our fishing industry a chance to recover.
Can anyone identify the terrace of houses behind these fish-sellers? There seems to be a distinctive ‘terracotta’ plaque, set into the wall of the house, directly above the cart’s wheel.
yes rolled herrings (Cold) round my grandma’s at teatime smell and taste out of this world lovely
Nice to eat but too many bones.
“Callar Herrings”, was the cry, as the fishmonger with his two wheeled cart came round Norton during the Herring season, everything was in season then and when the herring flowed we lived on them. Mother always checked their eyes were still bright and bought a bucket of the silver fish.
She then gutted and cleaned them heads and tails into a pan for fish soup and they were rolled, herbs and onion scattered on them in a tray then baked in the oven, hot the first night cold there after I loved them.
Not many people will remember the fish sellers as it petered out during the war and never came back until mobile vans started to go round the newly built estates after the war, never the same though, it was already cleaned and on ice, Mother could not check the eye’s saying the fish could be weeks old. The young generation unlike us had never killed flesh or fowl as we had to do, never gutted a fish and were a bit squeamish about it all.
A time like the fish carts long gone a few of us still remember those times and I must admit salivate at the thought of those rolled herrings, never tasted the likes since.