Frying tonight?
COLLECTING: The sale of a painting of an old chip van brings back happy childhood memories for John Vincent.
YCLING through dark lanes on a chilly evening to a fish and chip shop may not have been the most sophisticated entertainment on offer – even for a lad growing up on a Norfolk farm in the 1960s.
But for me those once-a-week trips with my friend Roy to the village chippie run by one Bunny Farrant and his wife were joyous occasions. Parking our bikes beside the blackboard chalked with the words “Frying Tonight” we would join the queue in the steamy, brightly-lit emporium for our “bob’s worth” of fish and chips.
One night Bunny’s cosy world was shattered when a mobile fish and chip van trundled into the village. Of course, Roy and I, along with half the population, couldn’t resist sampling the wares of the daring new rival and poor old Bunny’s business suffered for a year or so until the travelling chippie moved on to pastures new.
Memories of long ago came flooding back with the emergence at Tennants of Leyburn of a magnificently nostalgic image by Pitman painter Norman Cornish depicting a queue outside a horse-drawn chip van in Spennymoor.
As regular readers may recall, the work of Cornish, who spent 33 years down the pits and died last year aged 94, has increased substantially in value of late and the mobile chip shop painting went for £10,800 (including premium) to a North East private collector. The horse-drawn van – now restored and in the Beamish Museum – was run by the Berryman (or Berriman) family, Dickie, the father, and sons Dougie, Billy and Dickie Jr, who lived in Duncombe Street, Spennymoor.
Cornish knew the family well and recalled in 2010 that the chip van was an obvious subject for an artist who enjoyed painting people. “I have lived here all my life and known four different chip vans. The first two I had to pass four times a day when I was a boy. They were made almost for a fairground so that people would not walk without noticing. I think why the devil was Spennymoor so well off with chip vans.”
Cornish’s pictures capture real-life characters from a long-gone industry and cover every aspect of Northern life, above and below ground. Six more of his paintings fetched decent prices at Tennants, with one, A man seated at a table with pints of beer, realising £10,800.