Knowing your onions
‘You aren’t one of those French onion sellers, are you?’ the woman asked Hercule Poirot. The scene being set in 1930s Wimbledon and Poirot being dressed as a French workman in characteristic blue jacket and trousers, perhaps it was a reasonable question.
My grandmother born in 1910 and from Chiswick in West London, not so far from the setting of Poirot’s encounter, used to talk of French onion sellers travelling around London by bicycle and selling from door to door. The story always sounded true, but seemed odd. How could it possibly pay to travel from France with strings of onions and try to make a profit by going from door to door? It was a story that conjured images of moustached men in black and white hooped shirts and black trousers pushing large black bicycles along suburban streets. Being realistic, it could not have been a common activity, the cost of travel and accommodation would have made the enterprise hardly worth the effort.
My grandmother’s memories had been discounted as her recall of an isolated incident, or my mistaken recall of what she had told. Had Poirot not been mistaken as a door to door vendor, it would not have occurred to revisit the story.
My grandmother’s telling of the story, right down to the striped shirts. According to Wikipedia, the onion sellers were Breton and in 1929, the peak year of their activity, some 1,400 of them imported some 9,000 tonnes of onions into the United Kingdom. The economics of their business seems even stranger than first imagined – the Onion Johnnies, as they were known, brought their onions to England in July and stored them in barns, waiting until the autumn and winter months brought higher prices before embarking upon their selling. Presumably, they returned to Brittany in the interim; they could not have simply sat and waited, could they? In which case, why did they not make the business simpler by storing the onions in France and wait until the autumn before heading out on their English tours?
The Wikipedia article points out that the trade was hit badly by the devaluation of Sterling and by the trade restrictions after the Second World War, but gives no clue about how much it cost to produce and distribute the onions and how much the ‘Johnnies’ might have earned for their efforts.
The whole thing is a matter of no more than esoteric interest, except that people doing odd things in unexpected ways might be a path to economic recovery, because one thing is for certain, the conventional paths are leading us into deeper and deeper problems.
Hi,
Very interesting entry. I would love to know the Hercule Poirot book to which you are referring – do you know which one?
Many thanks
Piu Das Gupta
It was one of the television episodes starring David Suchet as Poirot – I’m afraid I don’t know the title.
It was the episode ‘The veiled lady’. One of my favourite Agatha Christie stories.