The Weekly Machen
Arthur Machen always claimed that London was a great mystery. In the following article, he found a new source of wonder at the Leadenhall Market during the Christmas season of 1912. As a star reporter, Machen covered many Royal events such as weddings, funerals and a Coronation, but here, he tags along with the Royal poulterer, a wizard who rounds up an incredible amount of birds for the King’s holiday festivities.
Merry Christmas!
With the King’s Poulterer
How to Choose a Christmas Turkey
by
Arthur Machen
December 19, 1912
They talk in May of the Chestnut-avenue in Bushey Park; certainly mention should be made in December of the Turkey-avenues of Leadenhall Market.
Having lived in London for over thirty years, I had naturally never been to the market till yesterday morning, and I fell upon it suddenly, as the Scotsman, strange in London, found his goal unawares.
“Can you tell me the way to Caledonian Asylum?” he asked of a passer-by, who, regarding his fellow-countryman solemnly for some seconds, replied with the significant words: “Man, ye’re in it!”
And so I, pausing at the entry of what looked like an arcade, and asking, “Can you tell me the way to Leadenhall Market?” was answered:
“This is Leadenhall Market.”
Bursting with Business
Now at the Christmas season it is bursting with birds and business and buyers.
The turkey is the lord of the market. In strings and ropes and rows he hangs and dangles everywhere, white breasted, crimson polled. He rolls up in carts every few minutes, great parcels and baskets of him are piling up in the alleys of the market, he comes tumbling swiftly along on the trucks with a rattle and a clatter: he has taken the stage and holds the scene at Leadenhall.
My business in the market was to find Mr. William Bellamy, Poulterer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.
He was horribly busy, but he let me explain what I wanted him to do—to let me see him choose his birds, so that I might understand, if I could, how he did it.
“Just a minute,” said Mr. Bellamy to me. A sudden thought had occurred to him, and, addressing the dealer, he threw out the query: “What about geese?”
“I had a thousand this morning, and that’s all I’ve got left; there are the figures.”
The Leadenhall man showed a book with 875 at the bottom of a column. The figures signified not that 875 geese remained, but that that number had been sold; and Mr. Bellamy bought the remnant of 125 geese in less than no time.
The Bellamy Touch
“Fowls,” said Mr. Bellamy, and he went to a big crate, and began pitching out fowls as if they were turnips. He dived a hand down into the straw, grasped a fowl by the neck, and flung it on the ground, and repeated this process till the crate was empty. Three of the fowls out of the fifty or so that the case contained were pitched to the left instead of being thrown at the poulterer’s feet: these three Mr. Bellamy was not taking.
“I’ve just bought that lot to show you how I do it,” said Mr. Bellamy when the process was over—in about two minutes time, that is.
I didn’t understand in the least how he did it. I tried once or twice to spot the losers; there was a bird with a jaundiced skin, and another with a broken patch on it. But they both passed with honours.
I said, “How do you judge?”
“By the delicacy of the skin,” Mr. Bellamy replied, but later, after he had brought a whole row of thirty-two turkeys to show me how he did it, he confessed that he couldn’t really explain the process.
“I know all about a bird the moment I touch it,” he said, “but I can’t explain how I do it. It’s a sort of instinct. I shouldn’t know a good piece of beef from a bad piece, but a butcher would.”
Still, as he clutched one turkey after another at that part where the breast joins the neck, he allowed that firmness of flesh was a most important point.
The business of the market, like every other business, is in a high state of prosperity; “a record Christmas,” Mr. Bellamy called it.
Best Weight for a Turkey
“Turkeys are fetching 1s. 4d. a pound—about the same as last year. The farmer is getting a shilling a pound ‘live weight’; that is, feathers and everything else on.
“But I’ve never known such fine turkeys as there are this year; they’re splendid birds in first-rate condition. The reason is that we had a dry spring, and the birds were hatched out in the best weather for them.”
“What is the best weight for a turkey?”
“I should say between 12lb. and 14lb.”
“Where do most of the birds come from?”
“Nearly all of them from England and Ireland; they have pretty well driven the foreigners right out of the market. The fact is that a foreign bird is a thoroughly bad bargain. It’s not fed so well as ours; it’s all bone and head, and you may take it that an Austrian bird of 18lb. will have 3lbs. more bone than an English or Irish turkey of the same weight; and that the English bird will feed five more people than the foreign one. And all the good hotels and restaurants have found out that the English bird pays the best. And as the turkey from abroad comes to within a penny a pound of the home-bred one, it’s a very bad bargain.”
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darklybrightpress.com 
Many thanks – this is splendid!
And appearing 112 years later to the day! (Itself first published nearly 20 years after that famous Christmas-poultry Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, first appeared in The Strand Magazine in January 1892.)
Best wishes to all for the last days of Advent and for Christmas and its Twelve Days (in the Gregorian reckoning)!
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