'The Whipping of the Herring': A fishy tale from Cork Easters of the past

SOME of the oldest customs associated with Easter survive to this day, but many are now all but forgotten, among them a bizarre Cork tradition which involved the whole city turning out to beat up a dead fish.

The Christian and cultural holiday of Easter Sunday marks the end of Lent, which celebrates the 40 days and 40 nights that Jesus Christ is said to have spent in the desert, and commemorates his later resurrection.

Even now, in these more secular times, the most obvious practice associated with Easter has clear Christian origins and is perhaps a millennium old.

The presenting of eggs on Easter Sunday morning dates back to the Middle Ages, when Christians in Mesopotamia, forbidden to eat eggs during Lent, painted them red – to denote the blood of Christ – and, some say, gave them as a special treat to children.

In Cork in the late 18th century, with the eating of meat forbidden during Lent, people relied on fish for sustenance instead. On Easter Saturday, to celebrate the end of what was annually a very lean time for them, butchers would hold mock funerals for herrings.

In a practice that would become known in Cork as the Whipping of the Herring, a single herring would be tied to a pole and borne down to the River Lee where, presumably heart-sick of the sight of fish after 40 days without meat, the people of Cork would turn out to beat the poor dead creature with sticks.

Once the procession got to De Banks, whatever was left of the piscine corpus was then thrown with minimal ceremony into the river, only to be replaced by a leg of lamb, said to represent Jesus. The ovine limb also, and presumably entirely coincidentally, represented a return to business for the city’s butchers.

A painting by Cork artist Nathaniel Grogan, completed around 1800, commemorates the tradition and is entitled ‘Whipping the Herring out of Town – A Scene of Cork’, and it hangs in the Crawford Art Gallery.

The painting depicts a procession of rowdy people following a man bearing the herring to its reward, while behind him a man prepares to whack the dead fish.

Beside them a fiddler plays and beggars, revelers and drunkards swirl around, while behind them a better class of people leave by carriage on the North Gate Bridge.

In the foreground, a dog bites the ear of a boar, which in turn butts a woman and knocks her on her rear, exposing her legs, by the moral standards of the time quite scandalously, while a ruddy-faced man breaks his heart laughing at her plight.

The scene has the sort of chaotic detail that would later be adored by generations of schoolchildren in the works of the late British comic genius Leo Baxendale, who in the pages of The Beano gave the world the antics of beloved characters such as The Bash Street Kids.

We don’t know when precisely the practice of the Whipping of the Herring died out, but the Lord Mayor of Cork, Councillor Kieran McCarthy, says it likely occurred some time in the early 19th century.

“John Windele, in his book ‘Historical and Descriptive Notices of Cork’, speaks about old customs and practices from the 18th century struggling to survive in pre-Famine Cork,” Mr McCarthy says.

“Indeed the 19th century brought further modernisation of Cork culture from new art paradigms, to new architecture, to new music, to new approaches to education, and these swept away older thinking around cultural practices.”