This film is one of many that the YFA hold featuring Hull’s fishing industry and especially St Andrew’s Fish Docks from around this time. It is worth viewing alongside Harrison Compilation (1950s), Royal Visit to Hull (1957) and St Andrew’s Fish Docks (1962). However, whereas in these other films it is known who made them, there is no information as to who may have made this film.  Also, unlike these other films, this one focuses on what happens to the fish after they have left the dock. It...

This film is one of many that the YFA hold featuring Hull’s fishing industry and especially St Andrew’s Fish Docks from around this time. It is worth viewing alongside Harrison Compilation (1950s), Royal Visit to Hull (1957) and St Andrew’s Fish Docks (1962). However, whereas in these other films it is known who made them, there is no information as to who may have made this film.  Also, unlike these other films, this one focuses on what happens to the fish after they have left the dock. It was presumably made by manufacturers of Summit Fish Cakes themselves as a promotional film. These kinds of films, showing the various stages of the process of manufacture, were not uncommon at this time – see also Wimsol Bleach Factory, Keighley (1951) as an example of something similar.

 

The company, Humberside Food Products, dissolved some time ago and their products seem to have disappeared without trace (for a fee Companies House provides an information service on company histories). There is possibly a motor garage now occupying the site where the factory once stood, not far from Hessle Road where the fishing community lived. There may well have been quite a number of small companies operating in Hull that would buy fish at the auction on St Andrew’s Dock and produce frozen fish products. Nationally there was Smedley’s (National Canning), and other distributors and marketers of fish, notably Smethurst, Mudd and Son, and Associated Fisheries (through Eskimo Foods).

 

Of course the brand that has become most well known, especially in relation to Hull, is Birds Eye. It was an American naturalist and inventor, Clarence Birdseye, who whilst fur trapping in Labrador in the 1910s, accidently discovered, by watching Eskimos, that if food was frozen very quickly it retained its properties. He developed multi-plate quick-freezers, which eventually reached Britain in August 1938 when Birds Eye Foods was set up.  Fish fingers didn’t emerge until 1955 when home freezers were beginning to be mass produced. Later came Findus and then Ross, the only British company of the three, then only a small family-owned fish merchanting company – see also the Context for Frying Tonight (1960). Birds Eye started in Hull about 1960 and then established a large processing plant in Hull in 1967.   This closed in 2007 with the loss of 600 jobs. 

 

But as well as fish products the film shows Summit crisps. It is said that the crisp was invented in 1853 by a chef in Saratoga, New York called George Crum – real name Speck, and not to be confused with the composer – the son of an African-American father and a Native American mother.  According to a folklore story, Crum made them to annoy a customer who kept returning his chips as being too thick. However, it was not until later that they were made for sale in grocery stores, most probably at first by William Tappendon of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895.   Later still came the invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s, which enabled crisps to become the biggest selling snack food.  Walkers become the biggest selling brand in England, though it was Golden Wonder that were the first to produce ready-salted crisps, thus getting rid of the much missed little blue bag of salt (they also introduced cheese and onion in 1962). 

 

Not much has changed in our eating habits regarding frozen fish foods and chips over the last sixty years. Indeed crisps are regarded as a major health problem, especially for children. It is estimated that almost half of UK children eat a packet of crisps every day, which translates (according to the government) to five litres of cooking oil per year (although the market in ‘healthier’ crisps is growing). Watching this film with this in mind prompts the thought that, given the health, environmental and ethical concerns surrounding food today, it might be a good idea if the entire production process of all foods were filmed, independently, and made available to all.  In this way all could more easily check exactly what goes into everything, and how it is made and transported – although this may have been far from the minds of the makers of Summit Fish Cakes.

 

References

 

Maurice Baren, How it all Began: the stories behind those famous names, Smith Settle, Otley, 1992.

Potato Crisps - A History

Robert M. Grant, Birds Eye and the UK Frozen Food Industry