The sixth Earl of Granville, godson of the Queen, has been busy in the
dispatch department. Since taking over the Hebridean Smokehouse on North
Uist, he has proved himself to be a laird for the 21st century. Instead of
hunting, shooting and fishing, Fergus Granville busies himself with ethical
fish farming, the fine details of smoking fish and all the dreary tasks that
come with running a small business. He hoses down the floor, picks tiny
pinbones out of sides of salmon and, this morning, assembles boxes and
sticks on labels.
And if these humble tasks were not enough, he is also a weekend barrow boy.
Last month Granville’s products went on sale at London’s Borough market for
the first time. The Hebridean stall sells the full range of smokehouse
goodies as well as cheese, haggis and oatcakes from the Western Isles.
Granville was there, persuading the beautiful people that smoked salmon pâté
would make their dinner party complete.
Borough market is foodie nirvana for disciples of Nigella: credit crunch or
not, this is where the dedicated come to find something new and sensational
to throw in with the mizuna leaves and argan oil on Saturday night. Enter
Granville and his seafood. “The smoked scallops went down especially well,
because not a lot of people have tried them,” he reports. “They do polarise
people. You either love them or hate them.”
Why is a Highland earl spending his weekends persuading Oscars and Indias to
swap their baby artichokes or flying fish roe for his smoked scallops? It is
not the career anyone would have predicted for him. He has lived on North
Uist for most of his life, enjoying an Enid Blyton childhood of picnics,
beachcombing, fishing and running wild punctuated by the annual visit of his
regal godmother. Britannia would moor every summer and the Queen and party
would come ashore for a picnic. One year she got lost: not difficult on a
flat island of many inlets and white beaches. Young Fergus was sent to find
her. The half-hour march home, he recalls, was a very long one indeed.
The family estate covers most of North Uist, which is 17 miles wide, 13 miles
long and has a population of 1,700. In 1960, when Granville was a baby, his
father left Staffordshire and moved the family to the island when it was
even more remote than it is today. There was no causeway linking North Uist
to Benbecula and South Uist then. When the fifth earl built the family home
on the north-west shore of the island, all the materials were brought in by
boat.
Young Fergus was uprooted at age 11 and sent to Eton. Then came Aberdeen
University and a stint in finance in London, but the desire to return home
overtook him in the 1990s. He was married to a nurse, Anne, and working on
the family estate when the chance to buy the Hebridean Smokehouse, which was
already an established business with a loyal customer base, came up.
“I was very lucky in buying the smokehouse when I did as that essentially
saved me five years in building up the business,” he says. “It already had
an excellent reputation and my main aim was simply to expand in new
directions, ensuring that it remained an environmentally sustainable
industry.”
The timing could not have been better. Granville is operating at the very top
end of the market, producing peat-smoked seafood that has knocked the socks
off the pickiest palates in the land. Prue Leith and Albert Roux are just
two of the veteran foodies who rave about its firm, dry fish, an ocean away
from the greasy, soft salmon that fills supermarket shelves.
Then there are the environmental credentials: Granville’s are impeccable. All
the smokehouse’s raw materials are local. Trout and salmon are farmed on the
island, using native breeds rather than Scandinavian imports. The density is
kept low, to reduce pests and allow the fish to develop the lean muscle
associated with their wild cousins. Lobsters and scallops are landed just
seven miles from the doorstep, at the picturesque harbour of Kallin. And the
smokehouse has a special reed bed to process its waste water, so there’s no
discharge to spoil the beautiful surrounding environment.
There are several ways of getting hold of Hebridean Smokehouse products but
popping out to Asda isn’t one of them. Most of the firm’s sales are mail
order, over the phone or online. Fortnum & Mason and a few branches of
Waitrose also sell its products. Then there is Borough market, or you can
swing by the smokehouse the next time you’re in Lochmaddy. Don’t forget your
credit card: these are lovingly produced artisan products, with a price tag
to match.
“I know that not that many people will be splashing out on a whole smoked
lobster regularly,” says Granville, possibly regretfully. “However, our peat
smoked salmon pâté is less than a fiver a tub, with slices of hot and cold
smoked salmon, peat-smoked scallops and lobster tails falling somewhere in
between the two.
“People are very aware of food now, taking into account environmental issues,
specialist products and the sheer enjoyment of the finest food, carefully
prepared. There’s a reason why specialist producers are continuously popular
and that all comes down to quality. Most people would rather indulge in a
little of something delicious than a lot of something bland.”
Granville pays keen attention to detail. Mail order customers want their pâté
posted through their letterbox, not waiting at the post office. So he set
out to find the average size of a letterbox to devise the right size of
package.
He did his research in Lanarkshire, where his wife’s family live. “I nearly
got arrested,” he recalls. “The police probably thought I was pouring petrol
through them. But you would not believe how much variation there is in the
size of letterboxes.”
On dispatch duty, he watches carefully to see if the credit crunch has taken a
bite out of his business. He is yet to notice any teeth marks. “I like to
keep an eye on how much people are buying and it doesn’t seem to have had an
impact yet. Luckily we do most of our business at Christmas, between 60% and
70%, and people don’t seem to mind splashing out then.”
And while some of the parcels he sends out are to delicatessens and
restaurants, the majority are to individuals who just love the products. “We
send a lot to people in the south of England. They like to think it’s their
little secret in the Hebrides. I probably shouldn’t tell you that there are
around 200 of them.
“There is a hardcore of people who order every week or every fortnight. They
just order a small quantity. Maybe they like getting parcels.”
