| Description. | Leadenhall. | Newgate. | Total. | Proportion sold in the Streets. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Game, &c. | ||||
| Grouse | 45,000 | 12,000 | 57,000 | One-eleventh. |
| Partridges | 85,000 | 60,000 | 145,000 | One-seventh. |
| Pheasants | 44,000 | 20,000 | 64,000 | One-fifth. |
| Snipes | 60,000 | 47,000 | 107,000 | One-twentieth. |
| Wild Birds | 40,000 | 20,000 | 60,000 | None. |
| Plovers | 28,000 | 18,000 | 46,000 | None. |
| Larks | 213,000 | 100,000 | 313,000 | None. |
| Teals | 10,000 | 5,000 | 15,000 | None. |
| Widgeons | 30,000 | 8,000 | 38,000 | None. |
| Hares | 48,000 | 55,000 | 102,000 | One-fifth. |
| Rabbits | 680,000 | 180,000 | 860,000 | Three-fourths. |
| 1,283,000 | 525,000 | 1,807,000 | ||
| Poultry. | ||||
| Domestic Fowls | 1,266,000 | 490,000 | 1,756,000 | One-third. |
| —— —— (alive) | 45,000 | 15,000 | 60,000 | One-tenth. |
| Geese | 888,000 | 114,000 | 1,002,000 | One-fifth. |
| Ducks | 235,000 | 148,000 | 383,000 | One-fourth. |
| —— (alive) | 20,000 | 20,000 | 40,000 | One-tenth. |
| Turkeys | 69,000 | 55,000 | 124,000 | One-fourth. |
| Pigeons | 285,000 | 98,000 | 383,000 | None. |
| Game, &c. | 2,808,000 | 940,000 | 3,748,000 | |
| 1,283,000 | 525,000 | 1,807,000 | ||
| 4,091,000 | 1,465,000 | 5,555,000 |
In the above return wild ducks and woodcocks are not included, because the quantity sent to London is dependent entirely upon the severity of the winter. With the costers wild ducks are a favourite article of trade, and in what those street tradesmen would pronounce a favourable season for wild ducks, which means a very hard winter, the number sold in London will, I am told, equal that of pheasants (64,000). The great stock of wild ducks for the London tables is from Holland, where the duck decoys are objects of great care. Less than a fifth of the importation from Holland is from Lincolnshire. These birds, and even the finest and largest, have been sold during a glut at 1s. each. Woodcocks, under similar circumstances, number with plovers (45,000), nearly all of which are “golden plovers;” but of woodcocks the costermongers buy very few: “They’re only a mouthful and a half,” said one of them, “and don’t suit our customers.” In severe weather a few ptarmigan are sent to London from Scotland, and in 1841-2 great numbers were sent to the London markets from Norway. One salesman received nearly 10,000 ptarmigan in one day. A portion of these were disposed of to the costers, but the sale was not such as to encourage further importations.
The returns I give show, that, at the two great game and poultry-markets, 5,500,000 birds and animals, wild and tame, are yearly sent to London. To this must be added all that may be consigned direct to metropolitan game-dealers and poulterers, besides what may be sent as presents from the country, &c., so that the London supply may be safely estimated, I am assured, at 6,000,000.
It is difficult to arrive at any very precise computation of the quantity of game and poultry sold by the costers, or rather at the money value (or price) of what they sell. The most experienced salesmen agree, that, as to quantity, including everything popularly considered game (and I have so given it in the return), they sell one-third. As regards value, however, their purchases fall very short of a third. Of the best qualities of game, and even more especially of poultry, a third of the hawkers may buy a fifteenth, compared with their purchases in the lower-priced kinds. The others buy none of the best qualities. The more “aristocratic” of the poultry-hawkers will, as a rule, only buy, “when they have an order” or a sure sale, the best quality of English turkey-cocks; which cannot be wondered at, seeing that the average price of the English turkey-cock is 12s. One salesman this year sold (at Leadenhall) several turkey-cocks at 30s. each, and one at 3l. The average price of an English turkey-hen is 4s. 6d., and of these the costers buy a few: but their chief trade is in foreign turkey-hens; of which the average price (when of good quality and in good condition) is 3s. The foreign turkey-cocks average half the price of the English (or 6s.). Of Dorking fat chickens, which average 6s. the couple, the hawkers buy none (save as in the case of the turkey-cocks); but of the Irish fowls, which, this season, have averaged 2s. 6d. the couple, they buy largely. On the other hand they buy nearly all the rabbits sent from Scotland, and half of those sent from Ostend, while they “clear the market”—no matter of what the glut may consist—when there is a glut. There is another distinction of which the hawker avails himself. The average price of young plump partridges is 2s. 6d. the brace, of old partridges, 2s.; accordingly, the coster buys the old. It is the same with pheasants, the young averaging 7s. the brace, the old 6s.: “And I can sell them best,” said one man; “for my customers say they’re more tastier-like. I’ve sold game for twelve years, or more, but I never tasted any of any kind, so I can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong.”
The hawkers buy, also, game and poultry which will not “keep” another day. Sometimes they puff out the breast of a chicken with fresh pork fat, which melts as the bird roasts. “It freshens the fowl, I’ve been told, and improves it,” said one man; “and the shopkeepers now and then, does the same. It’s a improvement, sir.”
In the present season the costers have bought of wild ducks, comparatively, none, and of teal, widgeons, wild birds, and larks, none at all; or so sparely, as to require no notice.
Of the Street-Purchasers of Game and Poultry.
As the purchasers of game and poultry are of a different class to the costermongers’ ordinary customers, I may devote a few words to them. From all the information that I could acquire, they appear to consist, principally, of those who reside at a distance from any cheap market, and buy a cheap luxury when it is brought to their doors, as well as of those who are “always on the look-out for something toothy, such as the shabby genteels, as they’re called, who never gives nothing but a scaly price. They’ve bargained with me till I was hard held from pitching into them, and over and over again I should, only it would have been fourteen days anyhow. They’ll tell me my birds stinks, when they’re as sweet as flowers. They’d go to the devil to save three farthings on a partridge.” Other buyers are old gourmands, living perhaps on small incomes, or if possessed of ample incomes, but confining themselves to a small expenditure; others, again, are men who like a cheap dinner, and seldom enjoy it, at their own cost, unless it be cheap, and who best of all like “such a thing as a moor bird (grouse),” said one hawker, “which can be eat up to a man’s own cheek.” This was also the opinion of a poulterer and game-dealer, who sometimes sold “goods” to the hawkers. Of this class of “patrons” many shopkeepers, in all branches of business, have a perfect horror, as they will care nothing for having occupied the tradesmen’s time to no purpose.
The game and poultry street-sellers, I am told, soon find out when a customer is bent upon a bargain, and shape their prices accordingly. Although these street-sellers may generally take as their motto the announcement so often seen in the shops of competitive tradesmen, “no reasonable offer refused,” they are sometimes so worried in bargaining that they do refuse.
In a conversation I had with a “retired” game salesman, he said it might be curious to trace the history of a brace of birds—of grouse, for instance—sold in the streets; and he did it after this manner. They were shot in the Highlands of Scotland by a member of parliament who had gladly left the senate for the moors. They were transferred to a tradesman who lived in or near some Scotch town having railway communication, and with whom “the honourable gentleman,” or “the noble lord,” had perhaps endeavoured to drive a hard bargain. He (the senator) must have a good price for his birds, as he had given a large sum for the moor: and the season was a bad one: the birds were scarce and wild: they would soon be “packed” (be in flocks of twenty or thirty instead of in broods), and then there would be no touching a feather of them. The canny Scot would quietly say that it was early in the season, and the birds never packed so early; that as to price, he could only give what he could get from a London salesman, and he was “nae just free to enter into any agreement for a fixed price at a’.” The honourable gentleman, after much demurring, gives way, feeling perhaps that he cannot well do anything else. In due course the grouse are received in Leadenhall, and unpacked and flung about with as little ceremony as if they had been “slaughtered” by a Whitechapel journeyman butcher, at so much a head. It is a thin market, perhaps, when they come to hand. A dealer, fashionable in the parish of St. George, Hanover-square, has declined to give the price demanded; they were not his money; “he had to give such long credit.” A dealer, popular in the ward of Cheap, has also declined to buy, and for the same alleged reason. The salesman, knowing that some of these dealers must buy, quietly says that he will take no less, and as he is known to be a man of his word, little is said upon the subject. As the hour arrives at which fashionable game-dealers are compelled to buy, or disappoint customers who will not brook such disappointment, the market, perhaps, is glutted, owing to a very great consignment by a later railway train. The Inverness Courier, or the North of Scotland Gazette, are in due course quoted by the London papers, touching the “extraordinary sport” of a party of lords and gentlemen in the Highlands; and the “heads” of game are particularized with a care that would do honour to a Price Current. The salesman then disposes rapidly of divers “brace” to the “hawkers,” at 1s. or 2s. the brace, and the hawker offers them to hotel-keepers, and shop-keepers, and housekeepers, selling some at 3s. 6d. the brace, some at 3s., at 2s. 6d., at 2s., and at less. “At last,” said my informant, “he may sell the finest brace of his basket, which he has held back to get a better price for, at 6d. a-piece, rather than keep them over-night, and that to a woman of the town, whom he may have met reeling home with money in her purse. Thus the products of an honourable gentleman’s skilful industry, on which he greatly prided himself, are eaten by the woman and her ‘fancy man,’ grumblingly enough, for they pronounce the birds inferior to tripe.”