Goose Fair, Cocks-on-Sticks montage, Paul Fillingham

Goose Fair 2: Chums, Chips and Cock-on-a-Stick

Originally published in 2012 as part of theSpace arts project funded by Arts Council England and the BBC

The Sillitoe Trail focusses on five locations from the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958): Old Market Square, The White Horse, Raleigh, the River Trent and Goose Fair.

The fifth featured location on the trail is Goose Fair, where anti-hero Arthur Seaton is caught with too many women; his wife Winnie and two people with whom he was having an affair, her married sister Brenda and Doreen. Goose Fair is an annual event in Nottingham during the first week of October and can be traced back seven centuries. In the second of four essays, historian Ann Featherstone, looks at the changing menu of the fair..

Nottingham’s Victorian journalists liked Goose Fair on the whole, particularly the journalists on the Nottinghamshire Guardian who used the opportunity to fill two columns of a broadsheet with their best descriptive prose.

They would begin with a potted history of the fair, how it was probably in decline but still wonderful and a credit to the town, and sometimes, if they were in a mournful frame of mind, wrote about how it marked yet another year passing.

But there was always some mention of how the fair was a great meeting point, how “strangers meet at the fair and become friends for the first time, weddings are celebrated, prospects are discussed.”

Which is, of course, what happened to Arthur Seaton, who was taking his women, sisters Winnie and Brenda, to the fair, and not only bumped into his other woman, Doreen, but also Brenda’s husband, Jack, and Winnie’s husband, Bill. It was not a happy coincidence!

But the point is that you always meet up with folks you know at Goose Fair, whether you intend to or not. You’re sure to see someone at the hot-dog stand who you haven’t seen for years and didn’t think you liked and then, heigh-ho, you’re sharing the sauce bottle.

Perhaps it’s something in the air, the smell of Goose Fair – diesel engines, onions, vinegar, doughnuts – that is so potent. Perhaps there is an as-yet undiscovered chemical in fair-time food that turns people suddenly loving or crazy.

Because it’s a time of celebration, food and fairs are irresistibly connected. In the same way that we eat Christmas Cake and Easter Eggs, we eat Goose Fair candy floss or mushy peas. Every fair had its speciality food, particularly in the 19th century, the golden age of the fairs.

At Donnybrook Fair in Dublin you might fancy pig’s face and boiled greens. At Stratford-on-Avon Mop the ox roast was fair-food, and Brigg Fair in Lincolnshire sold a special plum bread just for that occasion.

According to Charles Dickens, there were stalls at Greenwich Fair which sold little dishes of pickled salmon (fennel included), whelks and huge oysters. Oysters, of course, were 19th century fast food, along with all varieties of meat-pies.

At Bartholomew Fair in London:

There’s sausages frying in grease,

No-one can dislike but a snarler,

Black-puddings a penny a piece,

Walk in and sit down in my parlour.

And Goose Fair?

It has always liked to be up with the most recent trends and so in the 1870s there were stalls selling glasses of ice-cream or pineapples. You could buy coconuts and filberts and hot walnuts, as well as ham sandwiches, hot potatoes and fried fish.

Some people have claimed that the Goose Fair speciality was Grantham gingerbread and ‘Brooks’s tuffy’ (both mentioned in 1859), others that it was brandy snap and Cleethorpes oysters.

Arthur, Brenda and Winnie ate brandy snap and ice creams. The current website claims that the 2012 fair will cater for the “traditional Goose Fair food of mushy peas and mint sauce, candy floss and brandy snaps” but now, given our global appetite, visitors can look forward to “eating their way around the world with chestnuts and doughnuts to food from the Caribbean, Chinese noodles, Indian kebabs, Spanish churros, paella and French crepes.”

For me, the ‘cock-on-a-stick’ is the archetypal Goose Fair food, a novelty of recent years (though in fair terms that can mean going back many centuries), which invites just the kind of ribald jokes and quips that you would expect.

Sweet, brightly coloured and shaped like a cockerel rather than a goose, it is only ever sold once a year and plays that fair-time double-entendre game of being fun for kids and naughty for adults. Its history is part of a tradition which no one can trace but everyone imagines they know. Wherever it came from, whatever it means, the cock-on-a-stick embodies the reckless, raucous raunchiness of Goose Fair.

Fairs and Fisticuffs
In the third of four essays, historian Ann Featherstone, shows how fairs and fighting have become synonymous with each other over the centuries.

The Sillitoe Trail

Take your own interactive tour of the author’s city and follow in Arthur Seaton’s footsteps around Nottingham, exploring the real locations of key scenes from the novel. You can go back to the Old Market Square or visit The White Horse pub, the Raleigh factory, the River Trent and Goose Fair. For updated content, visit Sillitoe Trail Xtra

Follow: Arthur Seaton @Thespacelathe on Twitter

Download: Sillitoe Trail Factory Handbook (17MB PDF)