MacDougall Onion Johnnies

Recollections of Seasonal French Onion Sellers in Scotland
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78885-643-0
Verlag: Origin
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

For almost 150 years until the late twentieth century, French Onion Johnnies (or 'Ingan Johnnies', as they were usually known in Scotland) were a familiar group of seasonal workers in towns and cities throughout Britain. In this book, nine Onion Johnnies (including one 'Jenny') who worked in Scotland at one time or another between the 1920s and the 1970s recount their lives. The recollections, recorded in interviews in Brittany and at Leith in 1999 by the Scottish Working People's History Trust, provide a fascinating insight into the lives and experience of those whose livelihood and way of life have vanished forever. It paints a poignant picture of the past and a way of life about nothing in any detail has ever been published before.

Ian MacDougall, a long-standing research worker of the Scottish Working People's History Trust, played a pivotal role in recording working people's lives and publishing their stories. He authored several works of social history including Bondagers, All Men are Brethren, Voices of Scottish Journalists, Voices from War and Voices from the Hunger Marches. He died in April 2020.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macdougall, Ian

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

For almost 150 years until the late twentieth century French Onion Johnnies – or Ingan Johnnies, as they were usually known north of the Border – were a familiar group of seasonal immigrant workers in cities and towns throughout Scotland and indeed Britain. At the beginning of the twenty-first century only one, so far as is known, was still at work in Scotland. He was Yves Rolland, based in Leith, and he and the only other eight known surviving Johnnies (or seven Johnnies and one Onion ‘Jenny’, Madame Anna Gourlet) who worked in Scotland at one time or another between the 1920s and the 1970s present in the pages below their spoken recollections of their working lives.

Their recollections were recorded in interviews in Leith and in Brittany in 1999 by the Scottish Working People’s History Trust. The project was part of the Trust’s commitment to gathering the oral recollections of working men and women about their working lives in Scotland, and also about their educational, housing, recreational, and other experiences, and to publishing them in edited form. Three volumes of such recollections – by Roslin, Midlothian, gunpowder mill and bomb factory workers, by bondagers (south-east of Scotland women farm workers), and by Leith dockers – have already been published by the Trust. Many other volumes are in various stages of preparation. They include recollections by miners, journalists, railway workers, Penicuik paper mill workers, Hebridean and north-west Highland crofters, fishermen and others, Borders men farm workers, Leith seamen, public librarians, Co-operative society workers, Peeblesshire textile mill workers, Sutherland and Caithness farmers and fishermen, and building trade workers. To gather and publish in edited form such oral recollections by working men and women is, the Trust believes, a task both important and urgent if hitherto often unexplored aspects of the history of Scotland within living memory and of its working men and women and their organisations are to become generally available and accessible.

About the Onion Johnnies, scores of whom formerly came every year as seasonal workers to sell their onions in Scotland, relatively little has ever been published, except for occasional paragraphs or photographs in newspapers. What distinguishes the nine accounts in the pages below is that they are the Johnnies’ own spoken recollections of their years of working in Scotland.

Five of the nine began working as Onion Johnnies between the First and Second World Wars (even if, in the case of François Perron, only for the month before the outbreak of the Second War in September 1939); the other four began as Johnnies only in the 1950s (or in Claude Quimerch’s case, in 1949–50).

Several of these nine Johnnies (or eight Johnnies and one ‘Jenny’) began selling onions in Scotland as mere children. Thus Jean Saout, the oldest of the nine and now nearing the age of 90, first came with his father to sell onions in Glasgow in 1921 at the age of eight. Jean Milin first arrived as an onion-seller in Leith as a twelve-year-old boy during his school holidays in 1929. That was the age also at which Eugène Guyader, having newly left school, first crossed the English Channel from his home in Brittany to become an Onion Johnny. Anna Gourlet appears to have been slightly younger even than either Eugène Guyader or Jean Milin when, as she recalls, at the age of 11½ or so she accompanied her mother in 1930 or 1931 on the long journey by Channel ferry and train to Leith to become a working member of her father’s onion business there.

The others of the nine were older when they became Onion Johnnies. Anna Gourlet’s brother François Perron, who was six years younger than she and who had begun school in Leith at the age of seven in 1932, did not, as has been mentioned, become an Onion Johnny there until he was fourteen – and then only for a month or so because of the outbreak of the Second World War and the return then or within a few weeks of all the Johnnies to France. Monsieur Perron returned, however, to Leith as a Johnny after the War in 1949, when he was 23. Yves Rolland, the youngest of these nine Johnnies, began work in Leith in 1959 at the age of 14½. The school-leaving age in Scotland then being 15, it was hardly surprising that his boss or warned him: ‘If you ever get stopped by the police, if they ask what age you are you say 15.’ None of the other two or three, however, of these Johnnies who between the Wars began selling onions at even more tender years appears to have recollections of such warnings or of encounters with the police or other authorities on the matter of their age. Jean-Marie Tanguy, whose father’s onion-selling business was based in Dundee, recalls attending school there at the age of six or seven in 1935–6, although also because of the disruption caused by the Second World War he did not himself become an Onion Johnny in that city until he was 21 in 1951. Claude Quimerch and Guy Le Bihan, like Jean-Marie Tanguy, were also in their twenties when they became Onion Johnnies at respectively Glasgow in 1949–50 and Ayr in 1957.

For several of the nine the occupation of Onion Johnny was virtually an hereditary one. ‘There were,’ says Jean-Marie Tanguy, ‘four generations of us Onion Johnnies in my family.’ From around the middle of the nineteenth century his great-grandfather had been an Onion Johnny at Dundee, his grandfather sold onions there from about 1880, and his father likewise from an early age before the 1914–18 War. Eugène Guyader was at least a third-generation Johnny, and three of his uncles, as well as the wife of one of them and his own brother, were similarly employed. Second-generation Johnnies at least were Jean Saout, whose father had first gone to sell onions in Britain at the age of 10 or 11 in the 1880s, and also Anna Gourlet and her brother François Perron, as well as Claude Quimerch. On the other hand, of the nine below the remaining three – Jean Milin, Guy Le Bihan, and Yves Rolland – were evidently first-generation Johnnies, although Guy Le Bihan’s father-in-law was one and it was he who persuaded Monsieur Le Bihan to join him at Ayr in 1957.

Those three (Jean Milin, Guy Le Bihan, and Yves Rolland) of the nine whose fathers were never themselves Onion Johnnies recall that they nonetheless worked on the land either as small farmers (in the case of both Milin and Le Bihan or senior – and also as a fisherman, in the case of Jean Milin’s father) or, in the case of Yves Rolland’s father, as a farm worker. The only one among the fathers or grandfathers of the families of the nine Johnnies who is recalled as having been a craftsman is Yves Rolland’s paternal grandfather, who was a clog maker.

Only two or perhaps three (Jean Milin, Claude Quimerch, and possibly Yves Rolland) of the nine Johnnies appear when young to have had an ambition to work other than as Onion Johnnies or on the land as a means of helping their parents. Jean Milin wanted to become a merchant seaman, Claude Quimerch a naval officer. The former succeeded in becoming a seaman – but, because of the coming of the Second World War, not in the merchant navy but as a regular in the French navy. Claude Quimerch, as the oldest in a family of six children, had at the age of sixteen to abandon his studies at college (where among other subjects he was learning English, Latin, Greek, German and Spanish) and become the breadwinner as a lorry driver when his father became ill and soon afterwards died. The ambition of Yves Rolland as a boy, influenced, it appears, by his reading of comics, was to come to Scotland. It was as an Onion Johnny that he came aged 14½ – and more than 40 years later he was the only one of the nine Johnnies below who continued to sell onions and other vegetables in Scotland.

Of the occupations before marriage of the mothers of these nine Johnnies, most are recalled. Five of them (the mothers of Jean Milin, Anna Gourlet and her brother François Perron, as well as of Eugène Guyader, Jean-Marie Tanguy and Guy Le Bihan) appear as daughters of small farmers to have worked in their fathers’ fields. Yves Rolland’s mother was employed as a baker’s roundswoman. After marriage the mothers of Anna Gourlet and François Perron and of Jean-Marie Tanguy worked with their husbands in their onion-selling businesses at respectively Leith and Dundee. The mothers of Jean Saout and Claude Quimerch died when both were infants.

Premature death indeed stalks several of the recollections below. Eugène Guyader’s father lost his first wife while he was away fighting in the 1914–18 War, which claimed the lives also of two of his five brothers. The death of Monsieur Guyader’s own young son in 1957 was a factor that resulted in his transferring his work as an Onion Johnny from the south of England to Glasgow. Guy Le Bihan’s grandfather and one of Claude Quimerch’s uncles were killed in the 1914–18 War.

As the only seasonal immigrant onion sellers in Britain, Onion Johnnies all came from a relatively small area of Brittany. As Yves Rolland puts it: ‘There weren’t onion sellers like us Johnnies who came from Spain or Poland to sell their onions. The only Onion Johnnies were from Brittany.’ It was from the English Channel port of Roscoff and its small neighbouring towns or villages such as St Pol de Léon, Plouescat and Santec and their surrounding farms that the Johnnies and their onions came. Of the nine veteran...