The French onion sellers.

[Vimto]

When I was n'owt but a lad in the early 1950,s it was always a welcome and interesting sight in late summer in our northern small town of Clitheroe to see a French onion seller appear on an old bicycle with his strings of the vegetables hawking them from door to door. We were at least 250 miles from Calais and I always wondered how on earth these chaps made it all the way to Lancashire but more puzzling was how they replenished their stock of onions as selling even twenty pounds of them, which was probably as much as they could carry on a bike, would not have made for a viable proposition.
Can anyone tell me how they made a success of coming all the way to Britain and how they operated. Did they have a central distributition centre? It's hard to recall exactly but they seemed to disappear around the early 1970's.
One can even see them portayed in the early I-Spy books.

[sandyRoe]

Were the onions they sold French too?

[emmie]

sandyr yes they were. There was a really interesting programme about this a while back, possibly on the programme Coast, see if i can find a link

[emmie]

the programme was on Coast, and not sure but this is the link to some info, i found it interesting at the time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tc5hd

[sandyRoe]

The entire operation must have been more organised than it appeared. To be economical there must have been a depot when the onions could have been stored. A few sacks strung over the handlebars of a bike would hardly have paid the ferry fare from Brittany.

[emmie]

sandyr, no they did it, because they loved it, seems strange to us perhaps, but i remembered the programme, and nick crane interviewing men who had been these onion johnnies an they were called, interesting people and programme.

[emeritus]

Explanation how they worked

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Johnny

[DTCwordfan]

Get the economics wrong on this and one would be in hot soup and cheesed off.