RED CROSS COLLECTION CITY OF LONDON: 6 MAY

On the steps of Fishmongers' Hall with our empty buckets ready to go out and charity mug hapless commuters starting their day's work in the City.  I am looking rather serious in the middle at the back and Alastair Ross, the Clerk, is also on the far right in the rear.  The two Sheriffs, Fiona Woolf and Richard Sermon, are on the scarlet robes on the middle steps.

The Livery Companies were asked by the Sheriffs to help collect for the British Red Cross on and around London Bridge on the morning and afternoon.  To really put the fear into the giving public we were asked to appear in full livery.

I was on the morning shift with Alastair Ross, the Clerk.  We started at Fishmongers' Hall, just on the north side of London Bridge. With a number of others I decided to head northwards to Bank and I set up post outside one of the exits.

It has to be said, after at least a couple of hours close observation that the average commuter leaving Bank station in the morning rush hour is seemingly so ground down by the London Underground 'experience' that charitable giving has become a very low priority.  Even my decidedly unusual dress on a very warm late spring morning excited no comment.  But with iPods full on it is difficult to make anything other than eye contact and conversation is quite impossible.

I had clearly chosen a particularly non-productive site and after an hour or two, although my bucket was heavy it contained a lot of twopenny pieces. Others, especially those on London Bridge itself did significantly better.

We were kindly given bacon sandwiches and other refreshment by the Fishmongers before going back to work.  Later we were told we had raise some £3000.  I fear my contribution was just over 2% of that.  But I have made two firm resolutions: to smile warmly at other charity collectors with buckets in future and at least give something.  So far both resolutions are holding up.

SKINNERS' LUNCH: 11 JANUARY

Arms of the Skinners' Company

On Tuesday it was the Skinners turn to host the Great XII Masters and Clerks.  This is traditionally a lunch party.  A tradition I was informed went back to the Blitz when it was decided to continue with Company functions but to move them to daylight hours to save electricity and avoid the risks of night bombing. Quite plausible as traditions go and if you read this post further you will find another link with the London Blitz of 1940/1.

Roberts leading his column from Kabul to Kandahar in 1880.  The artist has imagined a very neat and tidy Afghanistan with no dust - Roberts' horse looks as though it is on Rotten Row - and not a fly in sight.

As lunch concluded Hugh Carson, the Master Skinner, set us a a collective conundrum by first asking us to link Alexander the Great, British India and the London Livery Companies.  None of us could answer.  He then offered a further clue that the person was one of only two commoners to be granted a lying-in-state in the twentieth century.  At this point someone recognised it was Lord Roberts, or 'Bobs', the archetypal imperial hero of late Victorian Britain. 

Hugh also went on to mention that, along with a plethora of other honours, Bobs was a member of the Fishmongers and Merchant Taylors, thereby creating the London link.  The reference to Alexander the Great was a link to Roberts' march from Kabul to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1880 where he followed, in part, the great Macedonian's route of 2,210 years earlier.  Kandahar is also a corruption of the Alexander's name. 

Finally to sustain perfect symmetry the day of the lunch was the exact centenary of the first competition for the Roberts of Kandahar Cup.  This has become the blue riband of Swiss downhill race and first took place in Crans-Montana in 1911,

Even today Alexander's march from Kabul to Kandahar starting in September 330BC and lasting through the winter seems almost unbelievable.  Particularly as he is reported to have led 32,000 men through this most inhospitable country with relatively few casualties.

Lord Roberts won a VC during the Indian Mutiny in 1858.  But he came to national prominence as the leader of the column that marched from Kabul to relieve the garrison at Kandahar in 1880 in the Second Afghan War.  An action was fought before this at Maiwand where a British column was severely mauled and had to retreat to Kandahar.  Heroic withdrawals have always been a mainstay of British miltary art and Richard Caton Woodville's well-known painting Saving the Guns at Maiwand is part of this canon (no pun really intended).  I only include this picture as I can remember many years ago being in a unit that received this image from a neighbouring gunner unit as their Christmas card.  Without, as far as I could discern, any trace of irony this scene of mayhem was accompanied by a wish that the recipient should enjoy a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. 




We may have concerns about advertising ethics these days but it would hard to beat the chutzpah of Wilson's Beer!  Or is it a sly comment making an intellectual or some other comparison between a bottle of beer and a general?

Hugh also showed one of the treasures of the Company, the George Cross posthumously awarded to Leonard Miles GC for the great gallantry he showed at Ilford, Essex on 21 September 1940. Like many other Londoners at that time he was a part time air raid warden in the street where he lived with his family.  On that evening there was an unexploded bomb in the street.  On hearing about this he left the safety of his shelter to warn others about this.  He was fatally wounded when the device exploded. Leonard worked for the Skinners' Company and his family presented the medal to the Company.


The George Cross was instituted in 1940.  Leonard Miles GC received one of the earliest awards.  Only 161 GCs have been awarded in the last 71 `years.

It was a stimulating lunch.

FISHMONGERS' COMPANY: VISIT TO BILLINGSGATE 19 OCTOBER

On 5.50am on Tuesday I was walking down a near deserted King William Street towards Fishmongers’ Hall on the Thames Embankment for a visit at the invitation of Robin Holland-Martin, Prime Warden of the Fishmongers' Company, to Billingsgate fish market.

Ensuring that the quality of fish sold in London has been one of the responsibilities of the Fishmongers’ Company since the middle ages.  For more details see www.fishhall.org.uk/ and http://www.billingsgate-market.org.uk/ 

A general view of the market hall. This, and the picture below, taken from http://www.seafoodtraining.org/ the website for the Seafood Training School run at Billingsgate Market by the Fishmongers' Company and offering a wide range of interesting courses.

A view of the entrance to the market.  Canary Wharf on the left. 
  

The original site a few hundred yards downriver from the Fishmongers’ Hall closed in 1982 and a new market was built at the north end of the Isle of Dogs. I can recollect that at the time New Billingsgate was a novelty and added a distinct splash of colour to the wasteland that then existed round the West India Docks.  Today it is dwarfed by the huge developments in and around Canary Wharf and tangled up in the skein of the ever more complex track layouts of the Docklands Light Railway.

I can also remember the pervasive urban myth at the time of the move that the deep freeze storage in the basement of the old Billingsgate had created a crust of permafrost that kept the building firm on its foundations and that once turned off it would melt slowly into the Thames. Urban myths are usually far more exciting than the reality and the building, restored by Norman Foster, still stands.

Back to Billingsgate.  As we arrived the market was in full swing, it is open betwen 5.00 and 8.30. The Fishmongers maintain, at their own expense, a small team of inspectors to ensure the high quality of seafood sold at New Billingsgate

The Fishmongers’ inspectors took us round the main trading floor. This comprises a over fifty dealers with varying sized stands selling a huge variety of species.  We were initiated into a whole range of useful information.  How to spot a factory farmed turbot from a distance, the way that species of fish differed in detailed colour and texture depending where they are caught and the huge expansion of more exotic species, led by the ubiquitous tilapia, being introduced into the trade.

Afterwards it was back up river to Fishmongers' Hall by the commuter catamaran for a breakfast that, of course, included a good, fishy kedgeree.