Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Let them eat mangold wurtzels

I collect old books. (I also collect new books, but that is not relevant 
here.) An old book I picked up at a market stall recently was Young 
Australia — An Illustrated Monthly for Boys.

The imprint page was missing, but internal evidence indicates it was 
published in 1898. Curiously, despite its title being elaborately embossed 
into the cover, it's not Australian at all. It's not even about Australia.

It is in fact a reprint, with an "Australian" cover, of an English 
publication, Young England. Disappointing, but like anything over a 
hundred years' old, its very age makes it an object of interest.

The editors' ideas of what will interest boys are as you would expect. 
There are the usual stories set in posh boarding schools, and profiles of 
"Some Of Our Empire Builders" along with Conversations with leading English 
and Australian cricketers.

Accounts of hunting seemingly anything with fur or feathers abound, as do 
encounters with cannibals and other "savages". There are two novellas, one 
about gold prospecting and claim jumping in the Rockies of Colorado and the 
other set during the Jacobite uprising of 1715.

All peppered with short items of natural history, or ponderous pieces of 
humour. A surprising number of the stories are written by reverend 
gentlemen.

One such caught my attention. It was on page three: "Some Of My 
Schoolfellows" by the Reverend Philip Barnes. A reminiscence of his 
childhood, it was probably set in the 1850s or '60s.

The doings of his schoolfellows were not of themselves overly interesting, 
but their lifestyle was. reading Barnes' account of life then was to open a 
time capsule to another age.

In fact, it is doubtful whether some of his anecdotes would even be 
intelligible to many modern kids. Why would a railway porter be "slamming 
carriage doors"?

What are — or were — Ostend rabbits? And what had they to do with 
fishmongers?

Why would someone send a Yorkshire pudding "to the bakehouse" to be cooked? 
Why not cook it at home?

And what curiously mixed messages would a modern child get from a man 
reminiscing that "I could not have been more than five years old, and still 
in frocks"?

In England in the late 19th century and indeed for much of the 20th, 
passenger train carriages were divided into compartments. These 
compartments had doors that opened directly on to the platform.

The side of such a typical carriage consisted of a row of doors, each with 
a window on either side. It was the job of the porter or station attendant 
to go along the platform seeing to "the slamming-to of the carriage doors" 
(i.e., making sure they were all shut) before the guard gave the all clear 
whistle for the train to proceed.

The occupation of railway porter, like that of bus conductor, has simply 
been done away with today. You can carry your own bags at stations, and too 
bad if they are heavy or numerous.

In an age when poultry — whether chicken, duck, goose or turkey — was 
seen on the average family's table only at Christmas, and when mutton was 
your "Sunday meat", rabbits were the poor person's treat.

Rabbits were sold from the fishmonger's shop, which did not look much like 
a modern shop, as the Reverend Barnes indicates in outlining his boyhood 
ambition to be a seller of rabbits:

"To hammer hooks and long nails all over the front of our house, and to 
hang rabbits thereon by their hind legs, must, it seemed to me, to be the 
height of human bliss."

And Ostend rabbits? The rabbits that the poor ate were "your English warren 
rabbit, with his skin on". Quality London folk dined on ready-skinned, big, 
purpose-bred European domestic table rabbits, imported via Ostend, hence 
the name.

Barnes notes that in his out-of-the-way village, they had never even heard 
of Ostend rabbits, let along seen one. It would have been rather high by 
the time it got to them, I would think.

Most ordinary people did their cooking in a skillet over the fireplace. 
Stews and soups and pot roasts were feasible, but the average family did 
not have an oven of their own.

The baker baked not only bread for his local customers, but also such baked 
dishes as people brought to him, ready for the oven, for baking.

It was the father of one of the Reverend Barnes' school friends who sent a 
Yorkshire pudding to the bakehouse "with a mangold wurtzel over it instead 
of a piece of meat". A mangold wurtzel (usually spelt wurzel, these days), 
for those who don't know, is a large variety of beet, used as cattle 
fodder.

Not wishing to start a cookery column I won't go into why the Yorkshire 
pudding would normally have a piece of meat on it. Ask a friend who cooks.

Barnes' friend's father had substituted the mangold wurzel (pronounced 
mangle wurzel) for meat in an unsuccessful attempt "to discover a cheap and 
nourishing dish for the poor". Alas, beet and Yorkshire pudding was not it.

But how typical of those who seek to "help" the poor to cope with their 
poverty, rather than to liberate themselves from it, that he would consider 
cattle fodder (with Yorkshire pudding) as suitable food for the poor?

(And frocks on young children of both sexes? It was simply the fashion.)