How did the Hardacres make their money? Fried herring was only half of it
If you've watched Channel 5's rags-to-riches drama The Hardacres — back for a second series from 14 May 2026 — you'll know the family rockets from the fish docks to a stately home at improbable speed. Here's exactly how they got rich.
The short answer
Fried herring — then gold. In episode one, the family launches a fried herring stall that becomes a booming business, and a banker invests their profits in shares in a South African mine that promptly strikes gold. Total fortune: £250,000 in 1890s money, enough to buy Hardacre Hall outright.
From the gutting sheds to the stall
The series opens in a North Yorkshire fishing village in the 1890s, where Sam Hardacre (Liam McMahon) works the docks and his wife Mary (Claire Cooper) guts herring. Then Sam mangles his hand in an accident and can't work.
When Mary asks their employer, Mr Shaw, for an advance, he suggests she sleep with him for it. She declines — emphatically.
Broke and desperate, the family scrapes together enough to buy a barrel of herring and sets up a fried fish stall — no chips, notably. A trial run at a local horse-racing meeting has punters swarming, a couple of local lads who pinch the takings are swiftly dealt with, and the stall becomes a shop.
The other half: a gold mine
The herring alone didn't buy the mansion. Flush with takings, the Hardacres find themselves a banker — Callum "Cal" Saunders, who becomes manager of Hardacre Herring — and put a portion of the profits into a mine near Cape Town. It strikes gold almost immediately. Within a single episode, the family goes from penury to one of the richest households in the county, buying the very estate where they'd once sought domestic work — furniture, servants, and snobbery included.
Honourable mention: Ma (Julie Graham), Mary's mother, who briefly revives her old trade of smuggling contraband booze with granddaughter Liza before the herring money renders it unnecessary.
Is it based on a true story?
No — it's adapted from the novel series by C. L. Skelton, first published in the 1970s. Skelton himself lived a life stranger than his fiction; his publisher's biography, quoted in the Telegraph's 2024 review, credits him with "hunting the Loch Ness monster and selling insurance and brushes door-to-door."