The day another magical slice of old Britain died
As the last ever eel fisherman hangs up his traps, GRIFF RHYS JONES — who hunted with him — laments . . .
EELOMANIAC, eelophile, fanaticeel ... whatever the word is, I am potty about eels. Their rich, fatty meat is delicious. You can stew it, smoke it, fry it or serve it in jelly and I’ll gobble it up.
I even have a 4ft-long eel with glinting eyes, stuffed and mounted in a box above my dining table, where it terrifies my guests.
So the news this week that Peter Carter, the last professional eel fisherman in Britain, is to stop laying down his hand-crafted traps made me deeply sad. This is a tradition that stretches back 5,000 years, to the Bronze Age in Britain — and now it has ended in 2016.
No one can blame Peter. He was a loyalist to the last but, as he said: ‘It breaks my heart but I can’t live on empty pockets. So the last wicker eel hive and grigg [his traps] have been lifted from the river. I will not be making any more.’
As it happens, I once went fishing with Peter. I was filming a series called Rivers for BBC1, about seven years ago, and we punted out on his boat across the Cambridgeshire Fens to collect the hives and griggs, which are woven from willow.
The griggs are made to an ingenious design dating back at least 1,000 years, like giant raffia bottles: the eels can swim in but they can’t get out.
For bait, he used the smelliest meat he could find — road-kill was most effective, and the full moon and new moon were the best time for catching the eels. Don’t ask me why — it’s an eel mystery!
Even then, Peter told me that he could make as much money weaving traps as decorations for tourists to buy, as he could from fishing. And there was no guarantee, as we poled across the shallow waters, that we would find a single elver — a baby eel — that night.
Back in the Eighties, Peter reckoned, he could scoop 150lb of eels out of the river in one night. Now, he was lucky to gather 50lb in an entire month.
Little wonder that he was the last man scraping a living at this age-old job ... though as a boy, he said, there had been so many rival fishermen on the Fens that they would bribe him with bags of sweets to sabotage each other’s traps and let the eels out.
Peter wasn’t the only eel fisherman I’ve known. We have a house somewhere on the muddy border between Suffolk and Essex, and not far from our place there lived a grand old man who was the harbour-master of the nearby creek.
This marvellously determined chap would go out on his flatbottomed boat with eel traps and a blunderbuss, because he was one of only two people round our way licensed to use a duck punt gun.
At dusk, once the ducks had settled down to roost in the reeds, he would stuff his shotgun, which looked like a cross between a cannon and a tuba, with all sorts of metal fragments — tin tacks, ball bearings, shrapnel of every kind.
He would fire it off with a tremendous bang, which, apparently, sent his boat skimming backwards at about 20mph, and then he’d spend the rest of the night emptying his eel traps and splashing around looking for dead ducks. He’d come home with a boat piled high with eels and feathers.
Eels go through all kinds of changes in their life cycle, from the tiny eggs that hatch more than 3,000 miles away in the Sargasso Sea around Bermuda, to the twoinch transparent ‘ glass eels’ that migrate across the Atlantic to the rivers of Europe, to the yellow and green ‘barley eels’ that swim up river to feed and grow fat.
They live in fresh water for anything up to 20 years, before their skins go grey and their digestive organs shrivel away. Then they are ready to make the long swim back to the Sargasso Sea, living off their energy reserves because they are unable to eat, so that they can spawn and die.
My harbour-master friend didn’t kill his eels immediately: he kept them in a freshwater stream up on his brother’s farm, which cleaned them out, because that’s the way his best customers, the Chinese restaurant market, liked them. He gave up the trade a while back, though. His wife didn’t like him being out all night. I imagine the local duck population heaved a hefty quack of relief, too.
Eels were once a great British delicacy. And we caught them in colossal numbers, without ever seeming to harm the population.
In Cambridgeshire, the fisherfolk paid their tithes to the church in eels, supplying such enormous quantities in the 11th century that they helped pay for the construction of Ely cathedral. That’s the secret of the name ... Eely.
Londoners loved them, too. Throughout the East End, there were stalls and pie-and-mash shops, selling jellied eels. They still exist, but you have to seek them out.
And many pubs are named after them — such as the Eel’s Foot Inn in Eastbridge, Suffolk.
When my children were aged about ten and 12, I took them on a pilgrimage to White’s in Walton- on-the-Naze, a seaside town on the Essex coast. White’s is a real pie-and-mash shop where jellied eels are served just as they were 100 years ago.
I ordered a plate, and urged my children to tuck in. They looked at me like I had invited them to eat cold vomit.
I suppose it’s true that jellied eels are not the most appetising dish to behold but they taste like the nectar of the gods. I consumed the whole dish, smacking my lips and uttering small cries of joy. My children thought I was mad.
I must have looked really mad, one Christmas around 1980, when I turned up at the home of my thengirlfriend’s parents with a massive smoked eel. It’s a festive delicacy in Germany, where, so I was told, they drape their eels around the Christmas tree, and I’d got it into my head that this is what we should do.
The eel came from a delicatessen called Hamburger Products in Old Compton Street, Soho, but these days I buy them from Pinney’s smokery in Orford, Suffolk — because a smoked eel is still an important part of my Christmas ritual. I no longer wrap it round the Christmas tree... though recently a Japanese aquarium used an electric eel to power their Christmas tree lights.
Eating a smoked eel is an extraordinary experience. It’s a wet, fatty meat that must be stripped out of its skin, which is done with one fluid movement, like pulling your foot out of a sweaty sock after a run.
Eels are such mysterious creatures that a mythology has grown up about them across Europe. Because they hatch so far away, people in ancient and medieval times assumed that they didn’t reproduce at all, but grew from the mud.
That misconception was helped because eels can travel across wet land, wriggling like snakes. And they can even climb trees and drop from overhanging branches into the water.
What they cannot do is leap over concrete dams or survive water turbines, which chop them into slices. Belatedly, sluices designed to act as ‘eel highways’ around these man-made obstacles have been put into place by the UK Environment Agency and its counterparts in Europe, but very few elvers find their way through.
Worse still, Japanese trawler fleets have been scientifically targeting the eel routes, scooping them up wholesale before they can return to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.
The Japanese diet is deeply traditional, and every worker likes to have a piece of eel or eelskin in his lunchbox every day. No substitute will do. And a market like that is irresistible to the fishing fleets — until very quickly, the eel stocks are wiped out.
An England without eel trappers such as Peter Carter and my harbourmaster is sad enough. The thought of a world without eels is unbearable. They are such magical creatures.
Even the Swallows And Amazons stories of Arthur Ransome reflect this — one tribe of children, in a book set in East Anglia called Secret Water, are known as the Eels, and in another, The Big Six, the gang learn to fish for eels.
Whether future generations will be able to enjoy eel, I don’t know. I try to be optimistic: perhaps with managed breeding and fishing quotas, it will be possible, but in a divided world such common- sense arrangements are difficult to maintain.
The simple fact is that the eel is too delicious for its own good. If you’ve never eaten it, I recommend you do. Just don’t eat so much that we lose these magical creatures for ever.
Griff’s Great Britain is on STV, on Mondays at 8pm.
Unappetising? Jellied eels are the nectar of the gods!
Skinning one is like pulling off a sweaty sock