Page 17 - MarketTimesDecember2021
P. 17

MARKET TIMES • DECEMBER 2021 17 Nigel celebrates 50 years on
 Donny Fish Market
 NIGEL BERRY well remembers the day his elder brother Ian came home from his job on a butcher’s stall at Doncaster Market and told his dad: “There’s a job for our Nigel on one of the fish stalls.”
He was just 13 and had no say in the matter.
So, back in 1971, he began working on Jackson’s fish stall on Tuesdays and Fridays after school and all day Saturday.
“I earned £2 a week and used to spend £1 and save the other,” Nigel said. He was soon hooked on the bustle and banter, and jumped at the chance to work full-time on the fish stall when he left school.
Fifty years later, Nigel is still loving life on what he firmly believes to be the country’s best fish market.
“It was a brilliant time for markets,” Nigel said. “There were no supermarkets or internet. The market was the place where everyone shopped.
“As well as the busy food market, lots of traders went really early to the doors of the fashion and textile factories and came away with last year’s fashions and ends of line, which they would sell on the market. These days everything is made in China and all that local trade has disappeared.”
Nigel worked on Jackson’s stall for 18 years. It was an old-fashioned market business selling fish and game including game birds, rabbits and hares.
“I worked out I must have skinned 100,000 rabbits while I worked there,” Nigel said.
He moved to Marsdens seafood stall in a prime spot at the front of the market because he was looking for an opportunity to be his own boss, and he took over the business 32 years ago.
“In the early days it was a fairly limited stall selling whelks, mussels, cockles and prawns. Crab sticks were just coming in,” he added.
These days Nigel sells a more diverse range of seafood as well as a range of seafood salads such as prawn cocktail, octopus in spicy sauce, and Italian salad which comprises cuttle fish, tiger prawns, octopus and squid.
“I have some wonderfully loyal customers,” said Nigel. “I have people who tell me their grandparents brought them to buy seafood at the stall, and now they are bringing their grandchildren.
“Sometimes you look around and think there aren’t as many characters as there used to be, then you realise that younger people see you as one of the market characters,” Nigel said.
Nigel’s two daughters, Andrea, 35, and Rachel, 33, have their own careers, but Nigel has no plans to retire any time soon.
“I have visited other fish markets and I have never come across one that is a patch on Doncaster, which is odd as you wouldn’t expect it in a town that is 60-odd miles from the sea.”
  Nigel (left) aged 15 on the fish and game stall at Doncaster
 















































































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