Page 11 - NFF News March 2019

60 Seconds with The Smelly Alley Fish Company is a traditional high-street fishmongers in the centre of Reading, Berkshire.
Tell us about your business...
I have owned the business from 1973, but I started as a Saturday boy when I was 8 years old and got told to go and collect the fish from the fish dock at Reading station. Poor boy trying to push a sacktruck of fish a mile to the fishmongers – the boxes on it I were nearly taller than me! So that makes me 64 years in the fish business, but properly 54 years in the trade as I started working fulltime in the fishmongers when I was 18. The fishmongers started life as Frosts, owned by a Mr Frost. The second owner was Mr Haddock! “Smelly Alley” is a pedestrianised street in the middle of Reading. It has been called “Smelly Alley” since Elizabethan times when it had an open sewer running down it – the name is nothing to do with the fishmongers!
Pedestrianisation in the late 90s was a bad thing for my business, preventing customers from parking nearby, and I had to diversify or close. What planners don’t realise is that people spend thousands on their cars, the one thing they want to do is – use it. First I increased the volume of trade I did with pubs and restaurants. Secondly, after a few years, I started a website. I now send seafood all over the UK.
How did it all start?
I spent some of my youth being a hairdresser (I had to leave when I turned a customer’s hair green), working for the Coop bakery, but went to work for my father at the fishmongers – he managed the shop. The fishmongers is leasehold, and when Mr Haddock decided to close down his empire of 36 butchers shops and one fishmongers in 1973 he bought all of his butchers a house. Nothing so good for me, he offered me the chance to buy the fishmongers, even though I made more profit than all the butchers
put together! I was 26 at the time. With the help of a sympathetic bank manager – not available nowa- days – I persuaded my uncle to lend me the money to buy the leasehold. On the bank manager’s advice we discussed the loan in a pub, the whisky I kept buying him might have helped.
As a young man who’d left school at 15 and who came from parents who rented a house, I had no security of my own to offer. With a lot of hard work I managed to pay my uncle back within four months, helped by my evening work running my own disco. This disco was famous in its own right, and there was a protest march in the town when we closed down. Some of my customers still remember it even
though it closed more than 35 years ago.
Plans for the future
Survival is my plan for the future. I am now easing myself out of the fishmongers, leaving the running of the shop to two competent young men, Gareth Watkins and Ricky Rumblow. They have been with me for 30 and 15 years, so between us we have
nearly 100 years’ experience as fishmongers.
I have toyed with the idea of taking the business out of town to an industrial site, but the fishmongers is best located in the town centre. Reading has a very diverse population, which likes to buy fish. The other advantage of being in Reading is its central location, meaning that I can source fish from the whole of the UK in the least possible time. Alongside the physical town centre shop is my internet business and my wholesale business. The future will be difficult, because town centres are declining rapidly and fishmongers paying rent in town centres are approaching extinction, for example our nearest neighbour fishmonger in Windsor closed recently.
It needs an enlightened council to make sure that small businesses survive as councils usually control parking and available, nearby and free parking is the key to a successful small business. (And lower rents, and lower business rates.) The future will be hard, but as long as you sell top quality products and have very experienced staff with different skills, and you look for new openings all the time, you have a chance of survival.
A Typical day
The typical fishmonger’s day – starting at 6am when we get the wholesale orders from the answerphone and off the computer. Then sorting out all the fish that has been delivered. While all this is going on my wife would have sent us all the website orders (she has the luxury of working from home). There is not the hurry to get the slab laid out early these days, as most customers don’t appear until about 11am.
All this activity goes on at the same time – sorting the fish, packing the orders, organising the website orders, putting out the show, dealing with customers – until it all calms down. The three of us, or the two of them as I ease into retirement, work well together and what looks like chaos is actually a well-ordered business.
One thing that has changed in the last 20 years is that I need staff who are computer literate, not just to be good at hands-on fishmongery. There are other aspects too – they have to be good at photography so that they have good images of the fish for my website!
I am the longest-serving member of Reading’s BID (Business Improvement District). Any town that has these is lucky – in our case it means excellent Christmas lights, free cardboard collection and other benefits.
I should mention that in the past 4 years I have taken on another role – I give amusing talks to just about any group that wants to listen. If anybody knows me, they will tell you that what I like to do is talk, so this is an ideal second occupation for me. I give about 40 talks a year (paid for!) on subjects as varied as the fishmongers, eccentric customer, fights with bureaucracy, my animals and the history of Smelly Alley. (Note to the NFF – why not hold a comedy evening at Fishmongers’ Hall – I’m up for it!)
I say “my animals” because at my home in Somerset I run a sanctuary for animals that need a home. I have a dog, 16 cats, 2 geese, 19 ducks, a mule, three ponies, three goats and numerous white pigeons. They live on my 12 acre smallholding, and the fact that it is in Somerset means that I have got to know the A303 very well over the past 26 years.
March2019 11
60