Newcastle’s First Fish & Chip Shop: The building on the right of the old photo can claim this title although strictly speaking it was a fish and roast potato shop when it opened, chips hadn’t been invented and were added to its menu a few years afterwards.
People in Newcastle ate a lot of fish due to the town’s proximity to the coast, but it had a very short shelf-life before fridges became commonplace. Fishmongers discovered they could add an extra couple of days by frying the fish before it went off. This made it ready to eat, so fried fish became a popular takeaway snack in Newcastle around the middle of the nineteenth century.
John Caiger was a fishmonger from London where fish had already been paired with potatoes to turn the snack into a meal. John and his wife Ellen brought this innovation to Newcastle in 1867, opening a shop on Westgate Road. The Black Bull – nowadays known as The Bodega – was immediately to his right, and the newly opened Tyne Theatre was a couple of doors to the left; both providing plenty of passing trade.
His takeaway became a local institution and the Tyne Theatre had a pantomime song about it:
There is a shop, a canny little shop,
Next door to the Tyne Theatre,
They sell fried fish, pickles in a dish,
And a ha’penny roast potato.
Caiger was popular with his customers and used to serenade them in his shop, he claimed to have sung professionally in London before moving north. He was less popular with the authorities, who fined him five pounds in 1868 for keeping a refreshment house without a licence. He must have got his paperwork in order because he continued to trade there for another decade or so until his death in 1880 at the age of seventy.
The sign on the front of the shop in the photo says ‘AC Thornton’. This refers to Albert Thornton who had been frying fish and chips at his takeaway around the corner in Caxton House on Cross Street before moving into Caiger’s premises in 1891.
Late night takeaways are often flashpoints for violence and this was also the case in the nineteenth century. Albert had his fair share of bother in his Cross Street shop, including an incident where a police officer was struck on the head with a bottle by one of his customers at 11.20pm on a Saturday night.
Andrew McGiveny was taken into custody where he told the desk sergeant he wished he’d smashed the officer’s skull in. Nevertheless, it was claimed that the wrong man had been arrested and there were sufficient witnesses in the chippy to have the case against him dismissed in court.
The three old cottages in the top photo were demolished in March of 1893 and replaced by the building in the bottom photo.