Turtle rib

Let us now follow the turtle’s journey from the tropical waters of the West Indies to the murky and polluted waters of the Thames, into the very centre of the British Empire, and into the dining rooms of the powerful.

From the 1750s turtle soup became a symbol of the wealth and extravagant lives of London’s rich. Considered the product of conquest and as something foreign, the turtle appeared in satirical portraits of aldermen and other officials as a means of highlighting overconsumption or excess. One comic from 1773 personified aldermen as both ‘turtle and gruel’, the extreme ends of cuisine at this time, to satirise political and cultural division between opulent and frugal.8 Aldermen are described as eating ‘turtle feasts’ rather than caring about hay prices.9 Throughout the late 1700s and 1800s turtle soup was considered a delicacy, a high-status meal. Satirical comics even depict the Lord Mayor as fat and overfed with his chain of office replaced by a golden turtle.10 An 1830 comic, ‘Fatal effects of gluttony, a Lord Mayor’s Day night mare [sic]’, depicts an alderman being attacked by a turtle, and other elements of the Lord Mayor’s feast, drawing the viewer’s attention to the pointless excess of civil hospitality.11

The Lord Mayor’s banquet at Guildhall was said to have had turtle soup on its tables every year from 1761 until 1825.12 However, it is clear from my research in The London Archives that this practice continued later, perhaps as the result of a resurgence in interest. Photographs taken in 1927 demonstrate that while turtles were at this point scarce, they were still consumed by high society, now seen as not only exotic but also rare.

Recipes for ‘mock’ turtle soup appeared as early as 1758 with Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery. In this cheaper alternative, the turtle was substituted with a calf’s head and hooves; these are the ingredients described in Lewis Carroll’s interpretation of the mock turtle, the imagined animal eaten in this soup. By the late 1800s, canned mock turtle soup was widely available as the price of real turtles increased with their rarity. At the same time it became more commonplace for turtle soup to be served in pubs, especially by the river.

Turtle remains were found in an excavation of a late 1800s well at Leadenhall Buildings, suggesting that this was a place where live turtles were traded.13 Nearby was The Ship and Turtle Inn on Leadenhall Road, which remained open until 2008. An advertisement from The Morning Herald in 1850 describes the new arrival of live turtles, available to be chosen and eaten.14 In a later advertisement in 1905 in the Pall Mall Gazette, simple turtle soup is listed in a range of styles with prices attached, highlighting a changing culture around this consumption.15

In present day London, eating turtle soup, or even mock turtle soup, is considered a distant memory or even an imagined myth of the past. Today green sea turtles are an endangered species, due in part to overconsumption by British people at home and abroad. The origins of the delicate bone found on the foreshore in Greenwich lie in the British Empire’s policies of expansion and exploitation. Small, brown and organic, it could easily have blended in with the mud of the riverbed. In our hands it is a door into understanding a complicated and underappreciated history.