THE LURE OF THE RED HERRING
Do I smell a rat?
There has been a slightly puzzled discussion on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english concerning the origins of the metaphor red herring, meaning “an attempt to distract attention from the real question”. This expression is puzzling because it has lost its link to its origins now that the real red herrings are as rare as hen’s teeth even in their native lands. But they were once extremely common. In fact, for several hundred years, until twentieth-century overfishing terminally depleted their stocks, the herring was easily the most important fish species caught in the North Sea and the Baltic. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771, says:
The herring-fishery is begun both by the English and Dutch towards the latter end of June; and the Dutch alone employ no less than one thousand ships therein ... from forty-five to sixty ton each.
The problem with herrings was distribution. They don’t keep — even within 24 hours of being caught their flavour and texture have begun to deteriorate badly. Drying them naturally in currents of air, which was the easiest method of preservation, employed for centuries by the Scandinavians to produce their stokkfish (dried cod), doesn’t work with the oily herring and other methods had to be found.
Several ways to preserve the fish have been developed in various places, all significantly different, which have bequeathed us a separate term for each product. The methods share a common feature of smoking and salting: the differences lie in the type, combination and duration of the processes. One was a speciality of Norfolk, especially the major fishing port of Yarmouth, and became known as the Yarmouth bloater (bloater possibly deriving from the Old Norse blautr, meaning “soft; fresh”). Further north the herring (and other fish, particularly salmon) were preserved by splitting and gutting, rubbing them with salt, pepper and spices and then curing them over oak smoke in a smokehouse or smokery to produce a kipper (a name which may come from that given to the male herring in the breeding season, when it develops a beak called the kip). A rather less well-known type was the buckling, which was gutted and beheaded, salted and hot smoked in a special oven so that it was cooked as much as smoked (the name only appears at the beginning of this century and apparently comes from the German bückling, a term applied to the bloater).
The fourth type, the oldest, is our red herring. This was heavily salted and then smoked over a fire for a substantial period, often up to 48 hours, so that it dried out, turned a deep brownish red and became almost as hard as a board. Here’s the Britannica again:
Herrings are put into a tub with salt or brine, where they lie for twenty-four hours, and are then taken out and put into wicker baskets and washed. After this, they are spitted on sharp wooden spits, and hung up in a chimney, built for that purpose, at such distances, that the smoke may have free access to them all. These places will hold ten or twelve thousand at a time; and they kindle billets on the floor in order to dry them. This done, they shut the doors, having before stopped up all the air-holes. This they repeat every quarter of an hour, insomuch that a single last of herrings requires five hundred billets to dry them.
Such preserved fish would keep for months (and indeed they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but were inedible in this state and needed to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be cooked. Together with bacon, they were for centuries one of the staples of the poor person’s diet; a slang term for them was capon, expressing a wry joke about their value and position in the diet. There’s a proverb which dates from medieval times: neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring, meaning in essence “neither one thing nor another; not fitting into any known category”. The full sense of this now rather opaque saying is: “neither fresh fish for the clergy, nor meat for the mass of people, nor red herrings for the poor”. But even in larger households they were a common item for consumption on Fridays and other meatless days and during Lent. A related form was the white herring, which was salted without being smoked.
Yet another form was eaten fresh. This was whitebait, the fry of the herring, often mixed with young fish of other species such as sprats, gobies, weavers, and pipefish, so named because they were silver and were indeed often used as bait. These were caught in the Thames estuary in spring — usually from mid-May onwards — and were regarded as an exquisite delicacy. Reports speak of plates piled high with hundreds of tiny fish, eaten with brown bread and the best hock. So famed were they that a tradition grew up in the nineteenth century of the ministers of the government holding a whitebait dinner at the Ship tavern in Greenwich during the Parliamentary recess on Trinity Sunday (the Sunday after Whit Sunday). It was almost a rite of spring, a perpetuation of a simpler celebration that had already existed for at least a century to commemorate the completion of engineering works further downriver at Dagenham to stop flooding. These dinners became a byword for gargantuan excess and were discontinued in 1894 at the end of Gladstone’s last Liberal administration.
One key characteristic of red herrings, apart from their colour, was their strong smell, so much so that one use for them on occasion was to train hounds to follow a scent. The OED quotes Cox’s Gentlemen’s Recreations of 1686:
The trailing or dragging of a dead Cat, or Fox, (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles ... and then laying the Dogs on the scent.
But this seems not to have been standard practice: huntsmen much preferred to expose young hounds to the scent of the fox itself, for obvious reasons.
All the dictionaries and reference books I have consulted suggest that the metaphor grew up because a red herring was used, not to lay a scent, but to confuse one; in particular, Brewer explicitly says that red herrings were used to confuse the hounds chasing a fox. But what that entry leaves unsaid is any clue to who was supposed to be laying this false trail, or why. It seems to suggest that an early group of hunt saboteurs were at work. Though there was much opposition to fox hunting in England from the beginning of the nineteenth century, for ethical reasons, this did not extend so far as I can discover to organised attempts to spoil a day’s sport. There were cases of physical violence, true, but they were more likely to be by disgruntled farmers stoning hounds or assaulting huntsmen for crossing their land and spoiling the crops (a frequent source of discontent). In the half dozen books on aspects of the history of fox hunting I have searched out, there is not one reference to the use of a red herring to lay a false scent.
My suspicions about this source for the metaphor are fuelled by the date of the first citation for it in the OED, which is 1884. This seems rather late, considering how long red herrings had by then been in common use, and how long fox hunting had been an organised gentlemanly pursuit. Do we have here an example of a metaphor arising through some allusion known then but now lost to common knowledge, but which Brewer has misunderstood?
Or is that argument just a red herring?
Last updated 18 May 2002
