Onions galore! Roscoff - August 20, 2011

On the onion market, the Johnnies' stall. 
Olivier Le Sann (Winchester) making strings in the traditional way.

Laurent Caroff (London).

Emmanuel Le Noac'h (London).

One of the signature features of the Onion Johnnies' bike:
the crosspiece attached under the handlebar to hang onion strings from.

Ready to hit the road...

François Quéméneur (Bristol).

Damien (London).

Emmanuel Le Noac'h stringing onions while the President of the Johnnies ' Association, François Séité (Bristol), greets customers.

Olivier Le Sann with an Anglo-Irish couple.

Damien chatting with an English customer.

André Quémener (Edinburgh).

André Quéméner conversing with visitors from across the Channel.

From father to sons

   At first sight, this scratched, yellowed photograph of a tight-lipped, melancholy-eyed young Breton onion seller does not seem to stand out from the dozens of similar studio portraits which have survived & reached us from the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
  At a time when photographic shops were still something of a rarity in rural Northern Brittany, it was almost a ritual for onion peddlers to sit for their portrait during their stay in British urban centres. These heavily staged pictures, where the sitter would usually pose rather self-consciously in front of a painted backcloth, almost always showed him carrying an onion-festooned shoulder-pole. Paradoxically, what appeared to British observers as the distinctive attribute of the Bretons' trade, was used exclusively in Britain & would have been an unfamiliar sight for their families back home, to whom the portraits were sent as postcards.
  While most portrait-cards would have been carefully kept as keepsakes by relatives, this picture appears to have been trimmed down & recycled as an identity photograph, as shown by the purple stamp mark in the upper left-hand side corner.
  What is even more remarkable is the hand-written dates on the passport which the photograph was glued on: August 24, 1916 (Police authorities, Saint-Malo) / December 22, 1916 (Aliens Registration Office, Southampton) !... at the height of the Great War, when all migrant onion sellers had officially been called back to France.
 The young hawker's name was Yves Kériven, from a Roscoff family where boys were sent away to work as onion sellers across the Channel from generation to generation.
I have met his two sons, François & Pierre.

Béret-clad Yves Kériven & his younger son Pierre showing  2 modes of onion-peddling.

François Kériven, 1960s.

François & his uncle Jean-François posing for the Manchester Evening News in the late 1960s.

This portrait of Mr François Kériven was shot last May, when I first met him by chance during his afternoon walk, in front of the Station Biologique in Roscoff.

Harvest festival

  Yesterday, the 30th edition of Plougoulm's yearly harvest festival "Gouel an Eost" was blessed with glorious sunshine.

The historical parade featured local children dressed as early 20th-century onion-boys.

Mr François Séité, president of the "Association des Marchands d'Oignon de Roscoff et de sa Région,"  marching regally in his "Confrérie de l'Oignon de Roscoff" costume.

An iconic triad: a Union Jack adorned with onion braids hanging in the company of a striped jersey inside Olivier Le Sann's stall.

Song of the Wheat

"Of the world’s great work he has done his share who has gathered a crop of wheat."

Andrew Barton Paterson (1864-1941)

  10 days ago - after onions had been pulled from the earth & left to dry on the fields, in the natural way, cured by the sun & seasalt breeze - veteran onion seller François Séité & new generation "Johnnie" Olivier Le Sann met to gather the wheat stems that will serve as the backbones of onion bundles.

François Séité, from Saint-Pol-de-Léon, who has been travelling to Bristol for almost 60 years, following in  the steps of his father & grandfather, is sharpening his sickle in preparation to traditional harvesting by hand. "It's an English whetting-stone," he remarked, "their oblong shape makes them much easier to hold."

Olivier Le Sann,  from Plougoulm, keen on keeping alive the traditional cross-Channel trade, 
has been making regular trips to Winchester for around 15 years.

First of the crop

  As summer matures into harvest time, buxom clusters of lusciously pink globes are starting to make an appearance in shop fronts & restaurants around the Léon area.
After a few months of forlorn barrenness, the nail on my living-room wall is finally back into use, hung with 2 opulent braids of onions grown & strung by Mr ANDRE QUEMENER from Roscoff.

Original hand-crafted tile panel offered to Mr Quéméner by his customer & friend, 
ceramic designer-maker, Susan Dalgleish.

   Over his lifetime, Mr Quéméner spent a combined 35 "seasons" (from late July to February) in Scotland. From his base in Newhaven, he would cycle his wares all around Edinburgh, as well as Stirlingshire & Lanarkshire, selling as many as 100 strings of onions a day. 

  Born to a small farmer 3 years before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mr Quéméner had had no choice but to leave his then overpopulated, unemployment-ridden hometown as soon as he had earned his school-leaving certificate to join his paternal uncle in Leith. To him, as to many other 14-year-old boys from the same background, crossing the Channel to become an onion seller appeared as the only way to go in life.

 Working long hours from Monday mornings to Saturday evenings, young trainees had to pick up the tricks of the trade as they went along, learning English by repeating the words they heard on their daily rounds. (According to Mr Quéméner, people in Endinburgh are easier to understand than Londoners: 

"Oh la la! They almost sing.")

  Perseverance was the paramount quality for beginner onion sellers. Mr Quémener remembers being told on his 4th visit, by a lady who had turned him down on three successive occasions: "as I can see you are a persistent boy, from now on, I will buy onions from you every month." As a rule, customers were kind & sympathetic to the hardworking teenage peddler, often asking him inside for tea & cheese sandwiches. In the evening, when he returned to the derelict warehouse where he ate his dinner & slept the tiredness of the day away, his "Master" made him take off his trousers & shook them out to make sure André was not hiding a single penny from him.

  After three years as an employee, Mr Quéméner decided it was time he stood on his own two feet & formed a partnership with his cousin. In the early 1960s, he was joined by his bride of two-weeks, who spent the next 10 seasons in Scotland. Their elder son was born in Edinburgh & christened in the Roman Catholic church of Saint-Mary's Star-of-the-Sea in Leith, where the family attended mass every Sunday, unless "there was too much work to be done." As a little girl, their daughter had absorbed the Scottish language & manners so thoroughly that her Roscoff friends called her "l'Anglaise" ("the English girl") when she returned home to spend the spring & early summer months. 

  Mr & Mrs Quéméner then thought it best they should settle in France full time for a while, so that their children could grow up in a more stable environment. But after a 14 years' break, during which he worked as a stevedore, Mr Quéméner was eager to resume his former existence as an "Ingan Johnnie." Working with renewed zest & dedication, he soon regained a large & faithful clientèle, many customers becoming friends & visiting his Roscoff home during the summer holidays.

"JUST FOR THE PLEASURE OF IT"

  Today, although officially retired, 74-year-old Mr Quéméner is preparing to embark on yet another trip to Britain this summer. Accompanied by his wife, he will take the ferry to Plymouth with a vanful of onions & then drive all the way up to Edinburgh, staying the nights at regular customers/friends', & return home after a 10-day tour.

  When asked why he keeps returning year after year while he could just sit back & enjoy a well-deserved retirement in his lovely seaside hometown, he answers he cannot let down the people who are waiting for him in Britain & that he "cannot change [his] habits." 
As his wife tersely puts it, "it's his life."

Mr Quéméner, greeting visitors at his stall during the 2010 edition of the pink onion festival in Roscoff.