Return to the saddle for Onion Johnny

FOR generations they landed at ports around Britain each summer, an invading army from across the sea, instantly recognisable by the berets they wore and the cargo they carried on bicycles to the far flung corners of the country.

The annual influx of the "Onion Johnnies" of Brittany, their skilfully strung tresses of pink, sweet produce wrapped around shoulders and draped across handlebars, was anticipated eagerly by hordes of regular customers who queued up to preserve a tradition that had survived for 170 years.

But by the late 20th century, the relentless march of agricultural mechanisation and the coming of the wholesale vegetable trade appeared to sound the economic death knell for the immigrant workers from Roscoff, whose shouts of "buy my good onions" once echoed through Scottish towns and villages from Selkirkshire to Shetland.

A handful of so-called Petitjeans still make the yearly pilgrimage to Cornwall or Wales to renew lifelong friendships and do business in the old-fashioned way. But few, if any, have been spotted in Scotland in recent times.

The exception may well be Andre Quemener, a sprightly 65-year-old, who first came over with the Roscovite Johnnies in 1951, when he was just 14.

This week, his pedal cycle - festooned with bunches of onions grown on his smallholding - has been seen in Peebles, Penicuik and Melrose. The jovial door-to-door salesman from north-west France managed to dispose of 400 strings of Brittany’s finest inside two days. Who knows, perhaps market forces will allow the Onion Johnnies to stage a comeback.

M. Quemener, a farmer’s son, first left his homeland with a party of experienced Onion Johnnies to make the rough sea crossing to Leith more than half a century ago.

The ship’s hold was crammed with 400 tons of freshly harvested juicy onions.

Young Quemener would spend up to six months each year in Scotland, cashing in on the demand for the French onions grown in fertiliser made from seaweed.

In the Fifties, thousands of Bretons would be deployed across Great Britain and Ireland; half of them stringing and tressing the Roscoff onions in storerooms while the rest were touting for business as their cycles covered allocated territories.

"It was a hard life to begin with," M. Quemener recalled yesterday as he relaxed in West Linton before setting out for home at the end of the week. "I stopped selling onions for a living in Scotland in 1972 to pursue other interests, and I come now mainly for pleasure and to visit friends who bring back many memories."

These days, he makes five or six one-week trips to Scotland and to Cornwall, where he receives an equally enthusiastic welcome.

He still strings the onions himself, and there is always a steady demand from the shopkeepers and housewives of south-west England.

"I have about one acre of land which produces four or five tons, enough for my purposes," explained M. Quemener. "People expect me to come back, and I will do it for as long as I am fit enough.

The legend of the Onion Johnnies was established by Henri Ollivier, a 20-year-old Roscovite who brought a boatload of onions to England in 1828 and sold them all in next to no time.

His success sparked the onion trade’s equivalent of the gold rush, and there was soon a steady stream of farmers and labourers criss-crossing the Channel in search of their fortunes.

But it was not all plain sailing. When a boat went down off Roscoff in 1905, 70 men perished in a disaster which is still talked about in Brittany.

Now the days of the Petitjeans are strictly numbered and, when M. Quemener decides to call it a day, the Onion Johnny tradition in Scotland seems set to disappear for ever.

However, the legend of the onion sellers will live on in a book researched and written by Ian MacDougall, a secretary and researcher for the Scottish Working People’s History Trust.

Mr MacDougall, a customer of an Onion Johnny who made regular visits to his home in Edinburgh for 17 years, tracked down eight veterans of the trade, now aged in their 80s and 90s and retired contentedly in the Brittany countryside.

"They told me how they worked in companies of ten to 16 people with three or four bosses and the rest working Johnnies," said Mr MacDougall.

"Individual sellers had up to 500 customers each, but they were not paid for up to six months, so there was a good deal of hardship by the end of the season.

"I wanted to get something written down before this unique form of work died out completely."

Onion Johnnies, by Mr MacDougall, and published by Tuckwell Press, should be in the shops later this month.