Not Only A Delicacy.
Supposed medicinal value of snails.
A recent death at Bath as a result of eating snails which had been feeding on ivy has called attention once more to the fact that in the West of England there are many people who regard snails as a delicacy, while others eat them on account of their real or imaginary medicinal properties.
For forty years Charles Reed, who lives in Avon-street, Bath, and is known to all his acquaintances as "Snail Charley," has made a living by collecting snails for commercial purposes. Reed claims that a particularly fine variety of snail found at Bathampton are descendants of the edible snails bred and fattened by the Romans during their occupation of Bath.
To an interviewer Reed recalled the time when a collector of snails could earn as much as a sovereign a day by bartering salt fish for snails collected by school-children. Now, he declared, the demand is so large that the common snail is doomed to extinction in the district unless snail farms are started.
While some West Country people make the snails into savoury dishes - first killing them by placing them in brine - footballers, according to Reed, use them as a substitute for linament, and others adapt them as remedies for goitre and spinal weakness.
Snails prepared in Bath are regularly supplied to a colony of glass-blowers at Bristol, and a frequent visitor to Reed's saloon is a singer who consumes them as an aid to voice production.
Evening Despatch, 13th March 1914.
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