Another one bites the dust

Today is the day after all the Easter egg scoffing and the big full-on lunches with family and friends that the newspaper foodie supplements dictate should be gastro-feasts.

So what more could you want than to mosey on down to England’s longest village green and watch people stuffing their faces, at considerable speed, with even more food – and not just ordinary food but hundreds of wiggly, slippery, grey baby eels?

Well for many years that was the tradition at Frampton-on-Severn in Gloucestershire.

Rosamund’s Green – nearly half a mile long – is bordered along one  edge by the high walls of the Frampton Court estate where there were always springer spaniels wandering or lying around watching the world go by waiting for the next shooting gig. The only excitement one would usually see on the green was the village cricket match.

But on Bank Holiday Monday, just opposite the the Three Horseshoes pub, it was the venue for the annual Elver Eating Contest which was preceded by an Easter Bonnet parade and various Sausage Eating Contests.

It all stopped ten years ago, ostensibly due to the soaring price of elvers but also due in part to the fact that eating competitions were starting to be considered a bit gross and medieval.

The Three Horseshoes made a lame attempt to recreate the magic in the following year using spaghetti but it didn’t catch on. Slurping spaghetti just hasn’t the fascination of gulping down mouthfuls of Severn-caught, freshly boiled baby eels.

The green used to be filled with cars almost as far up as the cricket pitch as, believe it or not, many hundreds of people from all over used to converge on Frampton to share the unique joy of the elver-eating. Much beer and cider would be consumed to add to the interest but it was always an amiable affair. Punch-ups were rare although it wasn’t unusual to see someone dripping with soaking wet mud and prettily decorated with duckweed after being pushed into one of the ponds. Boys will, after all, be boys, especially on a Bank Holiday.

Plucky contestants would take their places on chairs at trestle tables atop lorry trailers so that the assembled crowd could view and assess their technique and fully appreciate the emotions and torment of eating a plate of cooked sausages in the fastest possible time.

The kids were the most amusing – all substantially chubby examples of country boyhood – sons of sons of the soil with Just William hair, local rugby shirts and plump ruddy cheeks. These were kids weaned on rough cider and home-hung steaks. They would only ever expect to encounter a vegetarian in a zoo. It was only a matter of time before the pre-pubescent  chubbery transformed into brawn.

You could imagine the pep-talk at the breakfast table on the eve of the competition.,

“I got them five pounds of sausages down in under two minutes, lad. You get out there and make your old pa proud.

“And you mind you beat that Coole kid. Im needs bringin down a peg or too, im do.”

Les Coole, elver champion for many years and a local, was the organiser for the latter years of the elver eating.

Those kids – you were a bit of a cissy if you had to resort to ketchup to get those bangers down – were the sausage eating and elver eating champions of the future.

Les was the boy when it came to elver eating. I recall him downing a pound in about forty seconds but a guy called Peter Dowdeswell claims the world record for eating a pound in just 13.7 seconds.  If he did that at the World Elver Eating Championships at Frampton, I don’t remember it.

Unlike the sausage eating, the elver eating might include one or two average-build or skinny guys. They were always a good outside bet in case they had devised some fiendish clever technique for disabling the swallow reflex. I always had nagging doubts, though that their hearts weren’t really in it and as far as I remember, they were always beaten.

To be honest, it really wasn’t an edifying sight. Unlike the sausage eating, where you could observe and laugh at the uniquely tortured expressions produced in the course of top-gear mastications, the elver eating was more about swallowing and dribbling elvers down your face.

I’m feeling a little nauseous at the memory, actually. I often had to just look away.

On reflection, it’s probably not altogether a bad thing that this particular Great Gloucestershire custom did bite the dust. Going elver leather at your food can’t be good for you.