Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (13 page)

I
n January 1831
The Lancet
reviewed a book whose title tells its readers all they need to know about its contents. The book was called
Deadly Adulterations and Slow Poisoning, or Disease and Death in the Pot and Bottle; in which the Blood-empoisoning and Life-Destroying Adulterations of Spirits, Beer, Bread, Flour, Tea, Sugar, Spices, Cheesemongery, Pastry, Confectionary, Medicines etc. are laid open to the Public, with Tests and Methods for ascertaining and detecting the Fraudulent and Deleterious Adulterations and the good and bad Qualities of those Articles: with an Expose of Medical Empiricism and Imposture, Quacks and Quackery, Regular and Irregular, Legitimate and Illegitimate; and the Frauds and Malpractices of Pawnbrokers and Alehouse Keepers. By an Enemy of Fraud and Villainy, 1830
.

For the purposes of publication, both the author of the book and its reviewer were anonymous though the reviewer was probably the editor of The Lancet, Thomas Wakley, who founded the journal to campaign against quack medicines and the widespread adulteration of food. Wakley followed up the review by commissioning his own enquiries in the years that followed and publishing the findings in his home-grown organ.

Always read the label

Peruvian bark, sold as a remedy against malaria, was often in reality mere sawdust from English oak, a quarter the price of the genuine article to the chemist (though not, of course, to the unwitting customer).

Tea was found to contain elder, ash, molasses and clay, with liquorice being added to impart colour to tea leaves which had already been used. Another trick was to collect used tea leaves and coffee grounds from London hotels, boil them with ferrous sulphate and sheep’s dung and restore their colour with verdigris or carbon black before reselling them.

Green pickles were more expensive than brown and the desired coloured effect could be achieved by boiling brown pickles in a copper vessel with copper coins. Even this abomination, however, was less harmful than the method for clarifying cloudy white wine which required the ‘wine merchant’ to put melted lead into the cask and seal it for a while. Red wine, on the other hand, could be made redder by adding potash! Likewise black pepper could be converted into the more expensive white pepper by steeping the black pepper in a mixture of sea water and urine (human or animal).

Milk was found by
The Lancet
to have been diluted with water which was itself often foul but more alarmingly some dairies offset the effects of the water by adding snails to the mixture, their mucus acting as a thickening agent while producing a pleasant and reassuring froth on the surface of the liquid. Red lead and arsenite of copper were used to give colour to cheese while sulphuric acid and powdered glass imparted smell and texture to foods and snuff. Sugar contained large quantities of wood, lime, iron and, more worryingly, living insects and lead. Since lead was expensive as well as poisonous it must be assumed that this, along with other foreign substances, had probably entered the food chain by accident rather than by design.

Coffee and chocolate houses had been expensive and fashionable gathering places since the middle of the 17th century and they feature in the diary of Samuel Pepys at that time. Since the products they sold were also expensive they began to attract the attentions of the most skilled chemical forgers who added roasted peas and beans, butter, dandelion, parsnip and, surprisingly, lard to bulk up the products. Contemporary writers even advised different adulterating substances for different markets: ‘the other ingredients for making chocolate may be varied according to the constitutions of those who are to drink it.’ Nutmegs, clover and lemon peel were advised for those with ‘cold constitutions’ while for those of warmer temperaments almonds and rhubarb were preferred, the rhubarb alone being added for ‘young green ladies’, whatever they were. Our ancestors must have had cast-iron constitutions to survive all that!

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n December 1662 Dr Christopher Merrett (1615–1695), a physician from Gloucestershire, presented a paper to the recently formed Royal Society called
Some Observations concerning the ordering of wines
. He described a process by which sugar and molasses could be added to wine to induce a secondary fermentation in the bottle and make sparkling wine. Merrett’s interest appears to have lain more in the process by which glass bottles could be made strong enough to accommodate the fermentation without exploding, a technique pioneered by Sir Robert Mansell in Newcastle earlier in the 17th century. So the British had the fermentation techniques and the bottles to produce wine by the
methode champenoise
long before Dom Perignon in 1697. Unfortunately they didn’t have the grapes! Merrett’s name is sometimes used on bottles of British sparkling wines. Britain, which had many vineyards run by monasteries before their dissolution by Henry VIII in 1535, is undergoing a revival in its viticulture. There are now 300 vineyards in England and Wales, some of them producing high quality white wines without the adulteration so commonplace in previous centuries.

G
iven the prevalence of dangerously adulterated foods a vegetarian diet might have been advisable, using only produce direct from the ground – but even that would have had its pungent dangers. In his account of
Six Weeks Tour Through the Southern Counties of England and Wales
, published in 1771, Arthur Young commented approvingly on the fact that fresh vegetables were being conveyed cheaply to the markets of London and other towns and cities via the developing system of canals; but Young then noted, equally approvingly, that on the journey to the farms to collect the vegetables, the barges would have carried cargoes of human excrement from the towns to manure the fields in a virtuous cycle of recycling!

‘A thousand screaming victims’ The Vegetarian Society was formed at Ramsgate in Kent in 1847 by Joseph Brotherton MP (1783–1857) and his wife whose contribution was to write early vegetarian cookbooks which substituted loaves and melons for the loaves and fishes of the Biblical miracle. In Britain the most conspicuous vegetarian was the playwright George Bernard Shaw whose vegetarian zeal was compromised by the wife of the artist William Morris who surreptitiously fed him pudding containing suet. However Brotherton was not the first or most fanatical British vegetarian, a prize that could be claimed by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). In 1812 Shelley wrote A
Vindication of Natural Diet
in which he attributed many of the world’s ills to the practice of consuming meat:

‘Hospitals are filled with a thousand screaming victims; the palaces of luxury and the hovels of indigence resound alike with the bitter wailings of disease; idiotism and madness grin and rave among us and all these complicated calamities result from the unnatural habits of life to which the human race has addicted itself during innumerable ages of mistake and misery.’ He went on to compare the vicious habits of carnivorous humans with the gentle, vegetarian orang-utan. He advised his readers, in capital letters: ‘NEVER TAKE ANYTHING INTO THE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD LIFE’. Having deserted his young wife, who drowned herself in the Serpentine, he was himself drowned in Italy at the age of thirty. His death was celebrated in some circles, mourned in others.