What a simply marvellous wealth of entertainingly presented information is to be found here!   The Very Kind Gentleman, Mr. Nigel Callaghan, has made an inestimable contribution to history and to the improvement of all our knowledge by scanning and making available for presentation some small volumes of particular information to be found, I am sure after much spirited googling, no where else on the internet! 

First in the left hand navigation bar is to be found Lecture Notes on the Herring, issued by The Herring Industry Board, formerly (we may assume) of 184 Strand, London, in March 1938.  I googled and googled and googled but was unable to satisfactorily discover whether or not there was still to this day such a thing as The Herring Industry Board.  There may be, there may not be.   I will not ruin the suspense of this singular experience for my audience by injuriously close examination of its context but will only quote: "Although the oldest document relating to our herring fishery and found in the Chronicle of the Monastery of Evesham is dated 709 A.D., it is probable that the fishery started at Yarmouth soon after the landing of Cedric the Saxon in 495.  By 1108, Henry I had made this town a burgh, for which honour an annual payment was to be made to the King d of 'ten milliards of herrings!'"

Very handily below Lecture Notes on the Herring is The Herring Book, Scores of Simple Recipes, by Mrs. Stanley Wrench, which includes many delicious recipes (although I was disappointed not to find Herrings in Pineapple Gelatin, which I think was in a Jello-O cookbook from the 1960s) and an opening chapter, "Herrings for Health by a Medical Man." 

These selections work best read aloud after the fashion of Mr Cholmondley-Warner.  If you are sadly unfamiliar with Mr. Cholmondley-Warner, please refer to his appearanceshere:

There's also Communal Feeding in Wartime, HMSO 1940 Tripe and Onions for 100 hungry ARP wardens; Shopping and Cooking, a 1935 BBC publication for depression-era housewives; The Tutor's Companion, Francis Walkingame / Isaac Butler 1860, what else can be said about that I don't know; His Majesty's Minesweeperts, Ministry of Information 1943 The contemporary story of the Naval minesweepers and their crews; and The Otter's Story,  Dorothea Jones (Gwynfryn) 1880 Short stories for Victorian children.


We very humbly thank Lloffion.com and Mr. Nigel Callaghan for making these remarkable texts available. There is certainly nothing else like them.