Roger Barton

He said to call him the day before to confirm. ‘What time should I arrive?’ ‘Between 2 and 2.30.’ He means in the morning. I try to sleep at 9pm and set the alarm for just after 1am. With three layers of clothes, I arrive at the security barrier an hour later. ‘I’m going to work with Roger Barton,’ I say to the guard and we both laugh. I walk up the steps from the car park with the view of Canary Wharf behind – a very different kind of market. I go over to the stand. ‘Ali, give Dawn her coat,’ Roger says within a breath of hello. He turns to the others: ‘Tell her what we’re doing, show her, make her work!’

The so-called ‘new’ Billingsgate market (the site since 1982) is a covered hall with adjacent buildings for additional cold storage, as well as a shellfish boiling room and an ice-making plant! (see: www.billingsgate-market.org.uk.) There are 54 merchants in all, selling from stands organised along three back-to-back rows lengthways with several cross-cutting paths at intervals along them, and from shops around the edges of the hall. There’s nothing but fish and seafood on sale, broadly divided into so-called ‘fresh’ or ‘wet’, exotic, frozen, plus smoked and different kinds of seafood. The floor of the market hall is green and gleaming with water that reflects everything around. There is a whole network of pipes overhead which bring water hoses to the stands. There’s a phone at each stand and plenty of mobiles. In fact, there’s a lot of talking to the world outside. And there’s a lot of moving about. Porters are everywhere, each with their number, either working directly for a stand-holder or ‘freelance’, getting work according to the demands of the day. On the first-floor there are the merchants’ offices, some directly overlooking the market, plus the Clerk and Superintendent’s office, the Fish Merchants Association, inspectors, maintenance, police and first aid, as well as the Seafood Training School which offers courses in fish cookery.

The first thing that’s striking as you enter the market site is the smell, not bad, just there. Even the freshest fish in such quantities smells of something. It’s as if there’s an odour from all the wetness and cold too. At this time, the place is relatively empty, although the two cafes are already doing a good business. Roger tends to set up early, and it can take a small team of people a couple of hours. By the time I’ve moved a few boxes of prawns and look up, there’s already more going on. The activity creeps up on you with cries of ‘mind your legs’, ‘… your legs!’ and the rumble of trolleys. It’s the porters’ space and it’s up to you to get out of the way. I’ve no idea what time it is most of the time I am there. At one point it is still only 4am, at another it is suddenly 7.30.

Everyone works very fast. I know this because I am trying to keep up with them and it’s a struggle. There are a lot of boxes of prawns, at least 7 sizes, all 2 kilos. Some have different coloured labels, sometimes the labels are the same colours but the size is different. You have to read them then put them in the right pile. I find it hard to see where the size is written and keep getting it wrong.

‘Give Mike a hand with the congers,’ Roger says. Yeah, right. 30 kilos a box. I can’t shift them an inch. So someone tells me to lay out the snappers. I start by trying to pick up a 3 kilo fish. By the tail with a hand around its slippery body. ‘Pick the fish up through the eyes,’ I get told. I hesitate for a moment but once I get beyond the idea of it, it’s actually quite easy. You can get a firm grasp though the sockets, the bones are hard there and can take the weight. But only two fish in, I put my bare hand – ‘did you bring gloves?’ Roger had asked like I was supposed to know – into the ice and catch my thumb on the razor sharp gills of the snapper. My coat is no longer white and pristine.

By the time I come back from finding a plaster, the snapper are all laid out and I’m directed to help Jo with the prawns. ‘You need a knife and a marker for this job,’ says Roger. The marker is like a chunky black Pritt stick and the knives are varied. I use the one with the smallest blade and try to imitate the others by making a cross in the plastic packaging which I then tear away. I feel moderately helpful doing this. Then Roger says to take away the rubbish, next to the cold storage area outside. It’s piled on one of the pallets with a hand-held steering device underneath. It’s simple if you know how. I don’t so just pick up an armful of rubbish. ‘Leave it to me,’ someone says immediately. I feel useless again.

There are two clear sections to the stand. One end is run by Billy, Roger’s right-hand man. This is where most of the large fish are – halibut, grouper (brown and spotted), all sorts of snapper, tilapia, red bream, conger eels and salmon. Plus some fish from the Indian Ocean, pomfret and other things I’m not familiar with, such as doctor fish and rabbit fish. At the other end, which faces one of the exits, there’s a big selection of other smaller fish and seafood. That’s where the squid are, and smaller farmed sea bass (10 for £12), plus sardines and all sorts of other things. The effect is of abundance. Between the two is the section with the prawns, then there’s another stretch before Roger’s ‘office’ (a space to write orders underneath the phone) and the ‘till’ (a drawer!). This is my patch for the day.

Everyone sells actively. ‘I want to hear you selling,’ Roger says, ‘not waiting for people to ask you things. So, what’s your pitch?’ Now I’m comfortable, I can do this. There’s a lot of cod, £3 per kilo. ‘I want to see all that gone,’ he says. Then there’s wild sea bass, £12 but I can go down to £10, I’m told. Next to that are chunks of tuna, £12, swordfish, £10, and marlin, £9, all vacuum-packed in clear plastic. In front, there are lobsters, £16. On the side, there’s a pile of razor clams, £5, and along the top, clams, £18 for a 2 kilo box, scallops (out of the shell, £18 for a 1 kilo tub, £29 for a 2 kilo one), dover sole (small, £7, and medium, £12), and packets of crabmeat, £2, and smoked salmon, £5 – but £25 in Harrods as Roger is fond of saying. I write out the prices either on the back of one of the boxes, or on a polystyrene lid as a reminder.

When the customers come, I talk about the eyes and where everything’s caught. I spot the middle-class people and tell them that the sea bass is wild, what a treat it is. I aim the cod at the Londoners, emphasise how it’s a bargain. The quantities are not small. I talk about how you can feed a lot of people with this fish, and realise that I’m saying that more to the tired-looking white middle-aged women and young and middle-aged black women. I emphasise sociality and play on their roles of being a host or provider. None of this is planned, this is what comes out, what I find myself doing when I’m not thinking about it. Of course it’s young and not so young men who want to flirt. Three people say they want to buy me. Yeah right, I reply flatly.

Lots of people seem to buy second time around, after checking out other fish and prices at other stands. A French couple buy the largest Turbot on the stall for £50. Then they come back for 2 kilos of scallops, £29. They know what they want, and don’t treat me as if I might be a source of knowledge. Others do, however. ‘What do you do with those [razor clams]?’ ‘How do you cook a sea bass?’ Now I am really in my element![1] I offer recipes and wise-sounding guidelines: ‘With fish,’ I pronounce, ‘the principle is always not to do too much’, and so on. I am getting into my stride and thoroughly enjoying myself. One man remarks, ‘You’re in the wrong line of work, you should be a TV chef!’ I’ve been laughing at that ever since.

When I think back on the day, I have a strong image of myself swinging a cod! I’m really getting the hang of it after a while and start to be able to feel the weight. ‘This one’s heavy, more than 2 kilos,’ I say to a customer. ‘Yeah, 2.4,’ Roger states after no more than a glance at the fish I’m throwing on the scales. He knows so well through sight and hold over the years he can now bypass the weighing altogether. He’s always right.

I get faster at mental arithmetic quite quickly. The first time something weighs 3.2 kilos I can’t calculate the 0.2. I’m embarrassed by this but own up and Roger gives me a calculator. Then I get the hang of how they round up and down and I more confidently let myself know the price, taking a few moments to check it in my head – or with the calculator if someone is buying several items – while I’m weighing the fish. No one challenges me. In fact, more generally, people treat me like a fishmonger assuming that’s what I do, seeing the role ahead of the person. I’m quite chuffed that I can carry this off, at least to the general public. I’m not selling to other fishmongers, Roger deals with them.

Roger tells me to tidy up at some point as gaps start to appear in the display. ‘Presentation is everything,’ he proclaims after getting out more tuna and swordfish, ‘line those up,’ he says. I do so then repeat the process with the cod and even reach under the stand to rearrange the sea bass. Water drips down my neck. I must smell of fish all through by now. By the end of my shift, the front of my coat and legs are soaked.

It’s gone quiet without me seeing it coming and I’m sorry it’s nearly over. Some of the stands are back to their bare metal frames as some merchants leave as soon as the market officially shuts at 8am. In other places there are large amounts of rubbish and people hosing things down. I’m tired now and a bit frazzled. Roger asks me to count up the money in his drawer, a pile of assorted notes and handfuls of change. At around 9am he says I’ve done enough. ‘So, what are you going to give me for dinner?’ I say. That was the deal. ‘Whatever you want,’ he replies and sounds as if he means it. I end up with 2 large cuttlefish, 4 dover sole, and a kilo of scallops. This feels like a good exchange. I drive home very happy. And grateful that I don’t have to do this every day.

Your first appointment is at nine o’clock. (This leisurely start gives you a chance to answer emails and telephone messages from the previous evening.) As you enter the hall of an elegant townhouse, the smell of fresh coffee greets you. The good news doesn’t end there. The client has just bought a fifteen year-old Yamaha upright piano: a fine instrument in good condition. You have been highly recommended by their piano teacher so you do not have to prove yourself. Clients who have not owned instruments before will stand around the piano and watch you work. They will ask how you became a piano tuner, when pianos were invented, and how they work. This is a great opportunity to show off and a wonderful antidote to the highly skilled but somewhat lonely tuning process. So, allow plenty of time.

Next stop: a converted barn a few miles out of town. You have to walk past a four-wheel drive BMW and a top of the range Mercedes to reach the door. As before, a new client, but this piano that has been bought on Ebay for fifty pounds. On first inspection you reel off a well-rehearsed list of conditions and provisos: ‘When we spoke price on the phone you didn’t say there were six broken hammer shanks. Do you realise that if I repair these, the others (clearly in a fragile state) will probably break too? Because it is so far out of tune it may take a couple of sessions to get it up to pitch,’ and so on. The status of the piano tuner swiftly goes from one that is up with the GP or family accountant, right down to general dogsbody who earns money for old rope, and whose visit is an unwelcome irritation that has to be slotted in between getting children to riding lessons and shopping at Waitrose.

Because you did so much extra work on the Ebay piano, you eat your lunch as you drive to the local jazz venue. The band want the Steinway tuned before they rehearse in the afternoon — and for you to call back before the gig in the evening to check and tidy. You work in the half light as roadies clatter about with mike-stands and ladders, but you’ve tuned it a thousand times before and it is second nature, almost.

In the afternoon you visit an old client, a retired GP for whom you tune twice a year, as regular as clockwork. He is particular, and wants to discuss any tiny problem with the piano. But when you finally iron out any niggles, he is extremely appreciative and you leave feeling highly valued. Many tunings are on pianos for children learning, but amongst adult musicians, Doctors, University lecturers and school teachers seem to rank high in number.

You head home to telephone messages and emails. Piano tuners do not earn enough to employ secretaries and the administrative side of business stretches into the evening — an intrusion that has been eased to an extent by the mobile phone and computer. Usually, your working day ends here as you settle in for dinner with the family. But don’t forget, you must return to check the Steinway for the jazz.

The stage is cramped and you have to untangle the vocal mike-lead and the stage-light from the music desk before you can check the tuning. It has barely shifted. They could have managed without the extra visit, but you can always make some improvement. You spend ten minutes on the top octave. Money for old rope, you wonder? No, money for peace of mind; peace of mind for the pianist who can feel confident that the piano will not reflect badly on her playing. And for you, knowing that if the pianist is happy, you will be asked again.

In the early seventies, before the advent of Human Resources, Health and Safety and union-bashing Tory governments, there was work aplenty in Essex for anyone who could present themselves at the Colchester Odeon at 7am. At that time, a bona fide existence for us hippies, school drop-outs and squatters revolved mainly around smoking dope and doing as little work as possible. The words work and ethic never appeared in the same sentence. There was a lot of labouring work around for those who could be bothered, some of it ‘casual’ or ‘off the cards’, i.e. cash and tax free. In fact if you were a bloke with long hair just about the only work you could get was labouring. (It was difficult to rent a flat too and I was also turned down by the Technical College for refusing to get a hair-cut.) The railway job was relatively well paid — £40 a week take home as long as you did a weekend shift. To put this in perspective: the car I bought as a result of this employment cost £15, and the insurance, £40. Driving lessons were £3.50 at the BSM and my total outlay to get a driving licence was £73.

So one morning, I found myself waiting at the cinema with a few others. This was recruitment at its most informal. No-one spoke to me and I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going there to do. A ropey-looking bus full of grim-faced old men smoking roll-ups pulled up and I got on, sat down and rolled a cigarette too. I was feeling slightly out of place as a seventeen-year-old, bespectacled, middle-class ex-public schoolboy.

We were a track-relaying gang working for Balfour Beatty sub-contracted to British Rail, consisting of Poles (by far the best workers), Irish and locals from Suffolk and Essex. I have never since met such tough men. The work consisted of wielding implements such as pickaxes, shovels, sledge-hammers, six-foot crowbars, scythes and large forks. Track that has been in situ for ten years or so cannot just be lifted out since the stones that the track is laid on (known to us affectionately as slag) set solid after a while so it all has to be dug out. Most people find digging the garden quite hard work. Multiply that by ten.

To begin the process of relaying track the gang would spread out over a section, three beds  to a man. A ‘bed’ was the area between the sleepers. If we wanted to be more precise we used the terms four foot and six foot, - the four foot being the area between the running rails and the six foot the area between pairs of tracks. (The term four foot comes from the standard railway gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches). To dig out your beds you had to stand on a sleeper, then raise your fork high above the slag and smash it down just next to the sleeper. It would take a few goes to get to any depth at all; if and when you did, you could lever the fork against the sleeper to remove (hopefully) a decent amount of slag which you’d then chuck to one side. If you missed the slag and hit the sleeper a huge, jarring shock would be transmitted up your arm. We sometimes used pickaxes to loosen the slag but most just relied on brute force and a fork. Once you had removed some slag you could then use a foot on your fork and your entire body weight to attack the slag from less of an angle. Once you had finished excavating your beds you could have a smoke for five minutes or so before moving on to the next section.

Every now and then, the arrival of a train would be heralded by a blast on a kind of tin bugle by a one-armed man who then shouted either ‘up road’ or ‘down road’ depending on the train’s direction of travel (up being towards London and down away from London). We would stand by the side of the track until the train had passed. Once a fast train took the lid of our oversize tea-can with it which could well have resulted in an Odd-Job-style decapitation. Train toilets emptied straight onto the track at that time and we often admired the results or in some cases were sprayed. Other diversions included executing myxomatosis-infected rabbits with shovels and merciless piss-taking. Generally the Poles were the quietest, the Irish the most philosophical and the locals the most garrulous — most of their opening conversational gambits consisted of the words: ‘I tell you what…’

During the six months or so that I worked there, I saw new blokes start almost every day; some lasted an hour or so and most just one day. Absenteeism was commonplace and generally tolerated. Inactivity was not. I once made the mistake of sitting down for a breather. Luckily an old bloke called Fred advised me: ‘you can have a smoke but don’t sit down otherwise he’ll be on to you’. He being the foreman or ganger. All I remember about him is that he was Welsh and used to hold his dick with an unusual reverse grip when pissing by the side of the track. Funnily enough the sunken area to the side of the track was known as the cess.

In addition to digging stuff out, we would also pack slag under sleepers to bring the track up to the right level – a process known as tamping. This involved jacking up the track and ramming the stones home with a shovel. When we were done, or if a train was coming, the jacks would be released, the only warning being a shout. You had to learn not to have your feet under a sleeper when this happened unless you wanted a couple of tons of steel and concrete dropping on your toes. Another process was lining. Twenty men with six-foot crowbars, ten to each rail, would dig the bars in and lever against the track to push it in whatever direction was required according to a man sighting down the rail from a distance. To synchronise the pulls there would be a rhythmic shout: hey — hup hup hup, the hups being when you pulled.

The clacketty clack rhythm of train wheels hitting the joints between sections of rail bolted together with plates has largely disappeared with the advent of long-welded rails. As in all engineering of this type, expansion is a factor that needs to be catered for and in this case we used a process known as de-stressing. It was pronounced distressing which gave the activity a certain poignancy. To de-stress a section of track (usually about a quarter of a mile long), we would unclip the rails from the sleepers, cut out a small piece (about nine inches long) and stretch the remaining rail with a hand-operated hydraulic gizmo before re-clipping. The clips were sprung S–shaped steel affairs which could be removed quite easily with a well-aimed blow from a sledge hammer. I say well-aimed because you needed to have your foot on top of the clip when hitting it to keep it from shooting off. Replacing them however was much more difficult. Being sprung they had to be hit very hard and in exactly the right place, otherwise a kilo of steel would go flying off usually into your shins or worse, into someone else’s. This job was always done at night of course which didn’t help. We had a variety of lights though including Tilley lamps (run on pressurised paraffin) and lengths of cable with bulbs every few feet — as seen in miniature on your Christmas tree.

Although there were machines to do all these tasks, they were generally only available for weekend engineering works when there was a deadline to meet. That often meant very long shifts starting at midnight on Saturday and going right through until the following afternoon. The weekday work was a picnic compared to the weekend as we could stop for rain and smokes and cups of tea were brought to the track in the huge white enamel can. Weekends we worked in all weathers and snatched breaks only if the work was going well.

Night-work was conducted with a sense of urgency in an eerie half-light. Mostly there was no conversation, just gangers shouting orders. Weird-looking machines with sirens that sounded like air-raid warnings would appear for tamping and lining and there were others that ran on the adjacent track with cranes that brought lengths of rail. If there was no adjacent track we would erect temporary rails supported by devices known as pots to allow a machine to deliver rails. In the absence of machinery, we did everything by hand. It took four men to carry a sleeper with devices known as dogs and many more were required to move rails — either with dogs or crowbars. One night we moved eighteen pairs of long rails from one side of a track to the other using crowbars. It took all night with much hey-hupping. There was another huge machine which had a kind of conveyor belt that excavated under the track and dumped the resulting mixture of earth and slag on the embankment. We would spend days moving this stuff with shovels to clear up the mess.

New slag was delivered in hoppers and we had to turn a kind of steering wheel to let the stuff out (hopefully in the right place to save too much shovelling later on) then jump off and run round to the next un-manned hopper. I once jumped off onto the adjacent track right in front of an oncoming train. A slow one, luckily. No sympathy to be had though — just a bollocking.

There were no toilets or washing facilities of any kind and the only safety equipment I had was a dirty orange vest. I enjoyed my sandwiches though — and the fags, and even the disgusting tea made with Carnation tinned milk.

Further reading

Coleman, T. (1965) The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men Who Built the Railways. Hutchinson.