Christmas Meat Auction At Smithfield
The carnivores of London
converged upon Smithfield Market, as they do every year for the annual
Christmas Eve auction staged by Harts the Butcher. At ten in the morning, the
rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in
white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls
over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred
had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to
carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Contributing Photographer
Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in
Clerkenwell during the nineteen fifties and, although it was his first time at
the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas
Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman
standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve
the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of
the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with
the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen
successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her
mind,
“Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I
tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious.
Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.
“We start
preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she
explained, to clarify the situation.
“Last night we had steak,”
she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation,
“and steak
again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller
appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A
stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd.
“This
is a proper English tradition,” he announced,
“it has been going on
for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away
with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands
were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood
lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement,
I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of
the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from
the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855.
Yesterday, the simple word
“Hush!” from the caller was enough to
suppress the mob as he queried,
“What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of
pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath,
and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand
puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at
twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come,
followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day –
the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers.
“Mind
your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in
their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners
as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken
the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the
crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving
their through the overwrought gathering.
“I love coming for the adventure
of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef
protectively as if it was the love of his life,
“Everyone helps one another
out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the
pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to
complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces
of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal
to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass
of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of
getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each
winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers
and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the
crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up
snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed
away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat
stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense
of fulfillment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their
carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the
spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan
celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal
instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was
Christmas I had witnessed.
