Mary, 90, reveals the secrets of Shildon's best fish and chips

The archive photograph, taken in 1981, appeared in our celebration of fish and chip shops that appeared in Memories 684.

Mary Prestedge, with her hands on The Northern Echo ready to wrap fish and chips for a customer, in 1981 in Shildon Fisheries

The picture was taken 40 years ago, and on Wednesday, Mary celebrated her 90th birthday.

“We took it over in ’68 and retired in ’91, so we had a good spell in there and, I’m going to brag here, people used to come in and say these are the best fish and chips in Shildon,” she says.

“Shildon then was a little thriving town, with the railway works, and it was a good business – there used to be queues in the street outside – but the closure of the wagonworks affected us, affected all the businesses in the town.”

Mary grew up in Seaton Carew where her mother, Lizzie, helped out in Ormond’s fishie.

“When I was a young un, my uncle had one in Garbutt Street in Stockton and that was the start of it,” she says. “It was a coal heated pan – now, running a coal range is a real art.”

Lizzie was the family inspiration.

“She was a matriarch. She was determined,” says Mary’s daughter, Carole. “To get her own fishie going in Stockton, she trailed round town to get a loan, because it was so difficult for a woman in those days, and she borrowed her opening night float off her brother, who worked in the co-op. She was determined to make a go of it.”

The family refers to a “fishie” rather than a “chippy”.

Mary celebrating her 90th birthday on Wednesday

Lizzie set one of her sons up in a fishie in Hartlepool, and then when Mary married Stan, a joiner, she took him to Shildon to show him a fishie that was up for sale in Church Street. When he agreed, Lizzie put down the £2,000 deposit towards the £6,000 cost of Shildon Fisheries.

Then Mary and Stan had to make a go of it, starting at 10am with the potatoes and not finishing serving until the pubs shut.

Just preparing the fish took three hours, but rather than throw away the offcuts, Mary turned them into her own recipe fishcakes.

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“I could sell dozens of them, so I did corned beef patties, with onion and potato, I put them in breadcrumbs and then in the batter, and they went well as well, so I made cheese ones and they went a bomb as well,” she says.

Mary and Stan’s better batter was the key to their success.

“It was a secret of my mum’s,” she laughs. “Really it’s just flour and water and a teaspoonful of batter powder which we got from a wholesaler, but you had to get the batter to the right consistency, not too thick or too thin – that was the secret.

“And we cooked in beef dripping – that was the thing, beef dripping. We used to get it in great blocks.

“Getting the right temperature of the beef dripping was another thing – you’d look for the colour of the steam coming off it, and if it was a bluey colour, you knew it was right.”

There are many secrets to fish and chips, and it is only a little disappointing that she doesn’t mention that The Northern Echo provides the best wrapping to go with her perfect batter.

Fridays were the busiest day of the week, and Good Fridays of the year when the whole family – including Mary’s four daughters, Carole, Jill, Jackie and Jane – would be working dawn to dusk and beyond into the dark hours of the traditional fish-eating day.

Mary celebrated her 90th birthday with 100 people in the masonic hall in Shildon, including her seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Her brother, Geoff Watson, retired from his fishie in Mowden Park, Darlington, five years ago, which was the last one in the family, so now they are fishie-free – although, every so often, Mary still enjoys a fish supper.

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