Doughty Deeds With the Menu

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 229, 16 December 1927, Page 10

Doughty Deeds With the Menu

Champion Athletes and Oyster-Eating Records

IN America miglity deeds in t the dignity of “world’s r New Zealand athlete, Charlie epic feat of consuming thirl chalked up in a saloon “de o; port.

lie gastronomical line attain to ■eeords.” What of our superBradshaw, of the Bluff, whose ty odd dozen oysters is still yst.” in the southern shipping

DEALLY, sport has become much too expensive for a plain man. The son of a brewer has all the advantages! One of the favourite sports of some stalwart athletes is trying to establish new records in oyster-eating. A Bluff man holds the record of about 35 dozen at one sitting.

Once, when I was in Southland with a representative Rugby team, a certain tall forward tried to emulate the feats of the doughty men of Bluff and Invercargill but he had to cry “enough” after about 13 dozen. On the long journey back he was very quiet. Yet all the while a modest hero was putting up a tally which he kept to himself. A couple of sacks of oysters had been put in the football team’s double carriage, at Invercargill, and almost before the train left the Southern town the modest one, stout knife in hand, was sitting by one of the sacks. When the train was pulling into Christchurch he was still sitting by the last oysters in the second sack. I hasten to add that other members of the team had plenty of oysters, but the modest man’s tally of oysters he bad eaten must have been prodigious, if he had only divulged it. CHAPMAN’S RECORD

However, to our shells! What I started to mention was the fact that A. P. F. Chapman, the tall fair-haired Kent cricketer who is remembered by many New Zealanders, seems to have a mortgage on one English oystereating record. In an oyster grotte off Shaftsbury Avenue, London, to which cricketers and theatrical people frequently go, there is an oyster shell stuck on the wall, signed by A. P. F.

prouder of this han any other perform ance of merit.”

Chapman, stating that his record for a sitting is 17£ dozen or 210 oysters. Chapman, a member of a brewing firm, is lucky. Before the war, 2s a dozen was a fair price for oysters in London. Now they cost 5s 6d or 6s a dozen. With oysters at Cd each, it would cost £5 5s 6d to beat Chapman’s record, and if any man in London wanted to equal the Bluff record he would have to be prepared to pay £7 4s for the privilege. Yes, sport is too expensive!