Curry and My Family History

When I was in the top end of primary school in 1959 or thereabouts, I used to go to Burnden Park every other Saturday to watch Bolton Wanderers home games. Sometimes I even travelled to away games on specially provided supporters coaches. I wore my black and white bob hat and scarf wrapped up against the cold. It was always cold in Bolton. Once or twice I even got my photo in the Bolton Evening News as an avid supporter. Only fifteen seconds of fame, not the full wack of fifteen minutes.

In those days part of any well-equipped football fans’ gear was a wooden rattle. You held it above your head and whizzed it round to make a clunky noise when it seemed appropriate. Goal!!! Clunk. Clunk. Seems incredible now that all grounds let supporters in with these lethal weapons. They were banned in the 1970’s.

Mine was quite special. It was even more chunky and looked like an antique in comparison to the fashionable light weight models my mates had. Because it was indeed an antique, even a family heirloom. It had been my grandad’s who was an Air Raid Warden in the WW2 and used to tell people to get to safety.

The final piece of what every trendy young football supporter in the 1950’s needed was a flask to keep you warm. I guarded it from rattle clunks of others and opened it at half time and carefully poured it out.

“Whoa? What’s that smelly stuff?” came the fortnightly cry.

“It is mulligatawny soup” I replied. “Curry soup”

“Curry soup?” I got looks of doubt and bemusement.

“I always eat it. It comes from India. My mum was born in India.”

“Born in India?”

Looking at me with more looks of doubt and bemusement, not sure what to make of it. Cutting off their “Well you don’t look Indian” I quickly jumped in and said, “Her dad was a soldier. He took his wife, my gran, and went there with the Army after the First World War in 1919. My mum was born in Mhow in December 1920.

Funny to think now that curry is the most popular food in Britain because in those days no one had ever really heard of it. The family returned in 1932 and brought this exotic taste back with them. Where she got the mulligatawny soup from I’ll never know. In those days all you could get was Heinz Mulligatawny Soup. It was one of Heinz 57 Varieties. Probably number 57 in terms of sales and popularity.

Whether the Wanderers won or lost it always did the trick, kept me warm and because everyone else thought that it smelt horrid I didn’t have to share it.

At home she would sometimes “make” curry. This was a dish she made in a frying pan with a small amount of water, fried onions, peas, chicken, sliced boiled egg and sultanas, with rice, most people only knew about rice in rice pudding but we knew more than that. and, of course, curry powder. It was expensive and hard to get. But she got it.

She also made curried potato hash. Potato pie, no crust and curry powder. Fusion food before it was invented. She made curried pasties with what was left. For my 70th birthday I asked my sister to make some. Comfort food.

The next step on the nation’s culinary journey to chicken korma, and poppadoms was Vesta Curry.

Vesta Curry was introduced in the early 1960s and by 1970s it had become popular. It came in in a brightly coloured box and was seen as an exotic, accessible, and trendy with boil-in-the-bag beef or chicken with rice meal. Home cooked, of course, when funeral directors were thought to be the only kind of takeaways. How things have changed but you can still buy it on Amazon at £80 for 12 boxes.

Right now there are said to be more than 8000 curry restaurants and takeaways everywhere in Britain. It has been suggested that the curry industry contributes £4.5 billion annually to the British economy annually.

But back to my mum to finish with. Although she spent the first twelve years of her life in India, early years, often regarded as the most formative years of your life, she never spoke about her time there much. However apart from the curry she, along with her parents, brought back artifacts particularly paperwork that now stand as some of the most important in my collection of family history documents.

As kids, my sisters and I, used to love to look at photos of my mum and her parents in India. It must be said that their India was an expat colony where my granny and my mum lived in privilege while my granddad was away defending the Khyber Pass with the British Raj Army. Photos in the big brown cardboard albums kept in the bottom of a wardrobe in my mum’s bedroom, provided us with a glimpse of what was going on in their life, including (below) her and her friend sitting on a leopard skin that my granddad had shot dead. Not politically correct now, of course.

Amazingly there was also my mum’s school report. How documents like that have quite literally travelled across the world and ended up almost one hundred years later in Blackpool would tell a stories all of their own. It’s the photos and documents that make family history exciting. 

And I still love mulligatawny soup and- you can get it everywhere now. Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Asda, Aldi, Lidl, the lot- perhaps the beginning of Britain’s love affair with curry. Try it.

Thanks for reading, Bill Allison