Refugees from the Whelk Tingle

An old ship's bell outside Cunningham's Oyster Bar on Mayfair's Curzon Street clanged brassily last week for the opening of the oyster season, but it rang for few Britons. In the days of Charles Dickens oysters cost a penny a dozen and Sam Weller could comment truthfully on the "wery remarkable circumstance,' sir, that poverty and oysters always seem to go together." Today only the rich can afford oysters. The best Colchesters cost 16s. ($3.20) a dozen, Whitstable natives IDS. to 125. ($2 to $2.40), imported oysters from Holland and Brittany 8s. to 10s. ($1.60 to $2).

Total catch of oysters this year is estimated at 11,500,000, or only one-quarter oyster for every man, woman & child in Great Britain. There is a shortage, blamed on the weather and U.S. invaders. The big freeze in 1947 damaged the beds in the heart of the oyster country at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. Senior Naturalist Knight Jones of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries reported ruefully: "Mortality was 90% in the Crouch." The U.S. invaders were two snail-like creatures Railed the American slipper limpet and the American whelk tingle, which bore through the shells and eat the young oysters. The whelks and limpets stowed away when the British imported* young U.S. oysters to fatten in British oyster beds. The U.S. oysters fatten fast, but do not multiply; they find the British coastal waters too cold for spawning. The British government is now raising special oysters at Conway, in Wales, and suspends cement boxes in the water to give the larvae a chance to settle out of reach of the whelk tingles and the slipper limpets lurking below.

* There was a time when Britain was in the exporting end of the oyster trade. Julius Caesar took English oysters with him back to Rome, where Historian Gaius Sallust sourly commented: "The poor Britons, there, is some good in them after all; they produce an oyster."

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