What''s your poison?

We live close to the past. It's right behind us, breathing down our necks. The older I get, the more I realise that.

Around 1905 ...

My grandmother was born in 1890 and died when I was in my thirties. One of her sons, my uncle, lives nearby at the time of writing. She told me that once, when she was a toddler, she was 'rushed to hospital' suffering from the effects of alcohol and opium. She hadn't got in with a bad crowd at nursery – she was given it by her mother. Laudanum, a combination of opium and alcohol was commonly used in Victorian times as a sedative, pain killer and cough suppressant.

From time to time a mate of mine will suggest we 'get some lodlum down us', i.e. go and drink beer. My grandmother pronounced the word laudanum as  'lodnum'. And I know that the alcohol part of it was sometimes provided by adding a pellet of opium - legal and available over the counter - to beer or wine. So maybe that slang is left over from the medicinal or recreational habits of the Victorian poor. I have no evidence with which to corroborate that speculation however.

I love the Victorian age but I'm not sentimental about those times, knowing that they were not good times for very, very many of the people alive then, and were full of dangers and discomforts we have long since forgotten about.

So - to continue with the subject of beer and its adulteration. I grew up in a beer drinking culture and am happy to carry the tradition on. In the 1970's, when good beer and and ale in Britain were threatened with anihilation by the business practices of brewing corporations, some worried drinkers formed a resistance movement: the Campaign for Real Ale. It is living proof that consumer movements can work: we now have a delectable range of products widely available. 

It would be a mistake to think that that took us back to better times. As far as beer is concerned, now is the better time and the 1970's was by no means the first time brewers tried to foist fake beer onto the drinker. 

The Manchester Beer Epidemic broke out around 1900. The cause of the horrible symptoms suffered by thousands of victims, resulting in death for many, was discovered to be arsenic in their beer. 

The Medical Officer for health in Salford, Charles Tattershall, tracked down the source of the arsenic.

He found that it was in the beer because brewers, ever on the lookout for cheaper ways of making a better profit by knocking out a not necessarily better product, would try any old stuff to generate alcohol. Sugar could be got cheaper than malted barley and could be fermented to get alcohol. Shove in a bit of colouring and Bob's your uncle (to use a Victorian expression - possibly ... see Bob) - you've got 'fourpenny ale'. But in the area round Manchester the sugar they used had arsenic in it.

A major supplier to the breweries there was the firm of Bostock & Co. of Liverpool. They manufactured their sugar by boiling starch in sulphuric acid. (There's no crisp fresh sugar cane in this story.)

Bostock's got their sulphuric acid from Nicholson's of Leeds. Nicholson's manufactured their acid using iron sulphide (pyrites), which is also a source of naturally occurring arsenic, some of which would carry through to the end product. Nicholson's knew this so they took a proportion of their product and purified the arsenic out of it. They thus had two grades: one with and one without arsenic. With arsenic it was cheaper and would be OK where the arsenic didn't matter. Without, or 'dearsenicated', it was more expensive but was safer for uses involving, say, food and drink.

In 1900 demand for dearsenicated sulphuric acid was high and Nicholson's were struggling to keep up. They checked through their contracts to see if they were supplying dearsenicated product to anyone who didn't need it - i.e. had not specifically asked for it. If so they could replace it with the arsenic tainted product and redirect the purer stuff to those who did ask. 

Bostock's were getting dearsenicated acid but had not specifically asked for it. Nor had they told Nicholson's what they were using it for.

So in March 1900 Nicholson's switched Bostock's supply from dearsenicated to arsenic tainted acid. Bostock's used it to make sugar, which they sent out to some 200 breweries in the North and Midlands. The breweries made it into cheap beer, and a mysterious epidemic broke out amongst the poor people who drank it because it was cheap.



Symptoms at first included nausea and vomiting, eventually in some victims after every meal or pint. Then runny eyes, bronchitis, hoarsness and  diarroeah possily tinged with blood. All sorts of skin problems flared up; in many the skin started to take on strange colours, from a reddish tinge through copper to black. Skin texture changed, possibly to a point where it would slough off. Many died. There were psychological and neurological symptoms. People became zombified - vacant and unaware. They became confused, losing perception of time and space. Some were paralysed.

Sales of beer slumped; Oh Goody trumpeted the temperance campaigners. Sales of whisky rocketed; Oh Dear cried the temperance campaigners. The brewers had to react quickly and they did. Thousands of gallons of beer went down the drain.

The whole episode came to the usual messy sort of conclusion. There was an inquest in 1901 to see if Bostock's and Nicholson's were guilty of manslaughter or criminal negligence. Nicholson's said they weren't to know the supply was for human consumption because Bostock's didn't tell them. Bostock's said they weren't to know the arsenic was there because Nicholson's didn't tell them. From our perspective we can see there was what we would call a duty of care on both of them, the one to find out from customers what the acid was needed for, and on the other to make sure their ingredients were safe and to specify food quality product when ordering. In fact the tainted acid was a slightly different colour to the sort they usually used and they should have been alerted by this.

But they got off on lesser negligence charges. However they were successfully sued by breweries for large damages; Nicholson's went out of business because no-one wanted their stuff any more.

I get a bit fed up with hearing people sentimentalise the Victorian era - declinists who spout on about how things have gone down hill since. It is true that wonderful things were achieved in that spectacular age - a big reason why I like it - but it is wrong to think that it was all done because of some great sense of purpose by a united population in pursuit of common sense goals. 

The Victorians were living in a world which was changing at dizzying speed, where stuff was crowding in on them at an incomprehensible rate, facing them with organisational challenges of unprecedented size and complexity. Within the space of a lifetime the population trebled and changed from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban. With that came dreadful epidemics, in a time when there were no scientific ways of understanding and dealing with them. After the event it is too easy, looking back, to visualise a bunch of stolid worthies organising a stable and predictable world. No. They literally didn't know what they were dealing with.

(There's a good summary of population during the century here: http://www.icup.org.uk/reports%5CICUP601.pdf? )

The organisation and structures which eventually made our lives cleaner, safer and healthier came about as the thinkers who engaged with this new world and its problems fought with each other to get their ideas through, and with the usual suspects we know so well - the complacent, the apathetic and the assholes (See the post, Assholes in another blog of mine). 

...and 70 years later.

Which brings me back to my gran and Nottingham again. She was born in an overcrowded slum in a city which had seen its population increase sevenfold from around 29000 at the beginning of the century. During the first half of the century the area of the city which had to contain all these people stayed the same because its burgesses would not free up adjacent land for building - because they were profiting from property price inflation caused by shortage. Conditions in the back-to-back houses crammed into the seething warren of Nottingham's 'courts' were infamous.

When she was 7, just stepping out into the world, a Nottingham man, one of those heroes nobody's heard of, was leaving it. Thomas Hawksley (1807-1897) was a brilliant engineer, honoured in many countries for his schemes to provide healthy drinking water. He was one of the authors of the ground breaking Inquiry into the Health of Towns of 1844. You can read a very useful summary of his life here: Forgotten Hero . It's well worth it, he's a fine example of someone at the good end of whyswhys's  Assholes spectrum. All I'm going to say here is that through his innovative water supply scheme, Nottingham suffered less than other cities in the cholera epidemics of the mid 19th century despite the awfullness of its slums; and that he took on and eventually defeated the  self-serving councillors and slum landlords so that land finally became freed up for building to relieve the congested city.

Part of Hawksley's contribution to the 1844 Health of Towns Report 

However it has to be said that serious work on getting rid of the slums did not get going until well into the 20th Century. This picture shows the notorious Narrow Marsh area just as demolition was beginning beginning in the early 30's.

***

Notes and afterthoughts:

• Arsenic was very widely used in Victorian times. People were even made ill by their own wallpaper. You can read about the havoc it wrought in James C Whorton's rivetting book, The Arsenic Century, published by OUP, from where I got the details of the beer epidemic.

• Another old drinking expression I hear used is the word, 'paralytic', to describe someone very far gone in drink. Now, I've explored the far gone in drink zone fairly thoroughly but don't think I've ever been paralysed by it. Most often, the opposite. If paralysis occurs at all it occurs next morning as one feels one's way along the landing wall to the bathroom. Again, it might be that the expression has persisted in the language from the time when the epidemic and its symptoms were current affairs and common knowledge - and the banter of the day.

• I have many times enjoyed a descendant of laudanum: Gee's Linctus, a cough remedy which was widely used - and maybe still is. I think it still has an opium component, if not the alcohol. Check it out at: www.medicines.org.uk

• All of this reminds me of another story of a tainted product causing horrible illnesses, a more modern one which many of us have lived through: leaded petrol. In the early 20th century it was discovered by one Thomas Midgely jnr that adding lead to petrol prevented knocking in the car's engine. The bad effects of contact with lead were well known so the manufacturers didn't call it leaded petrol, instead calling it 'ethylated' or some such. Midgely and others worked hard to suppress criticism of leaded petrol and it was close to the end of the century before petrol became lead free. Bostock and Nicholson had been guilty of appalling negligence in not ascertaining the safety of a product made for human consumption, but Midgely and his associates knew the safety risks and deliberately played them down for profit. Later in his life, Midgely made his other major contribution to the health of the world: CFC coolants.

The story of Midgely, the man Bill Bryson describes as having '... an instinct for the regrettable bordering on the uncanny', had a tragi-comic end when one of his inventions turned round and bit him. It's here in wiki:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.#Development_of_leaded_gasoline

Here is a good source for the 1844 Health of towns Report:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2140185/


The photos are by Roger Whysall except Hawksley's 1844 illustration and the picture of the Narrow Marsh houses, which are from the brilliant photo website run by our local authorities, http://www.picturethepast.org.uk

Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson is an absolute must for anyone interested in Victorian urban history - I can't recommend it highly enough. As well as giving lots of toe-curling detail, he provides a well reasoned critique of the politics and of the motivations of the big players. Also his website is a very rich source of information and good reading:
www.victorianlondon.org

A good place to start with population and housing in Nottingham is:

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/learning/healthhousing/theme1/introduction.aspx

Like Enid Blyton 3

Long before Colston Bassett (see Blytons 1 and 2), I was involved with another old country house. My parents were friends with the licensees at Colwick Hall, at this time being used as an hotel for jockeys and staff during race meetings. We would visit most Saturdays and spent the occasional weekend there. It had a large bar with a beautiful Adams fireplace, far away from anyone wishing to enforce the 10 o'clock closing time law then in force. I am of course sure that this had nothing to do with our visits.

There were two rainwater heads with dates on them. One said 1775, the other, 1776. At age eight I struggled with the maths, but eventually was slightly disappointed to work out the place didn't yet qualify for being 200 years old.

The Hall, designed by John Carr of York, began as the home of John and Sophia Musters. Shortly after their marriage they had their portraits done by George Stubbs, in front of their new house. Stubbs was famous for his paintings of horses, which may explain why he was chosen - Musters was passionate about hunting and racing. He rode a winner at Nottingham in 1775. Confusingly, that would not have been right outside his door, where Nottingham racecourse is now: in those days it was on the north side of the city.

John and Sophia Musters at Colwick Hall, by George Stubbs, 1777

In 1831 the Hall was looted and torched by rioters protesting at the defeat of the electoral reform bill in the House of Lords. Mary Chaworth Musters, erstwhile love interest of Lord Byron, had married John and Sophia's son in 1805, and was at the Hall at the time. She escaped the rioters by hiding all night in the bushes outside in the pouring rain, and died a few weeks later, it is said from the shock.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century it was acquired by the Nottingham Racecourse Company and the Hall and park  became what we would now call a visitor attraction, enjoyed by trippers from Nottingham for many years.  

Colwick Hall in its Leisure Heyday, the 1890's
Photo:  Picture the Past 

By the time we knew it, the Hall was in a pretty run down state. I and my brother and the licensees' son Bob had the run of the place, rattling round the (I think) eighty-odd rooms. Parts of the building, no longer used, were just abandoned. Our dad, an amateur artist, loved this aspect, and did a series of paintings.

The Old Kitchen, Colwick Hall, by John Whysall 1953 

I remember we were forbidden to go onto the uppermost storey because the floors were unsafe. (We did though). We ventured down into creepy old cellars with only a hurricane lamp to light our way and we found our way out onto the rooftops. Once we found a low brick-lined tunnel going from a yard by the kitchen. We crouched down and scuttled along it, popping out at the other end right down by the edge of the lake. 

photo: Picture the Past  

This nineteenth century picture of the Hall is taken from across the lake. I have been back since to see if I can find the end of the tunnel. The only thing I can find is what looks like some concrete infill which may be where it has been sealed. 

Despite the ramshackleness and abandonment of parts of the house, those parts remaining in use were homely and even gracious. The hub of the place was a big kitchen where someone referred to as 'the maid,' but who seemed to be more like a housekeeper, worked and cooked. As well as the family and the maid, we and various others would hang out in there. Included in the 'various others' were a couple of Polish guys who would sometime cook for us what seemed me delicious and exotic food. 

There was a huge (to my eight year old eyes) black iron fireplace. It was the same design as the one at home in our little terrace house: fire grate in the middle, black hobs with ovens either side - but on a vast scale. (There's a similar one in the picture of the old kitchen above.) We would sit in front of it with our backs against the big kitchen table, grilling in its mighty radiance.

There was a sitting room, spacious and light, comfortably furnished with (I think) period furniture, which looked out towards the lake. We would spend afternoons in here, sometimes playing Newmarket. I was obsessed with the game for two or three afternoons, then it dawned on me that it mostly involved losing money so the fascination waned.

Electric power was provided by a treacherous generator out in the grounds. From time to time it would fail, much to my delight. When this happened victorian paraffin lamps were brought out and lit. I moved happily about in the flickering light of the lamps and the glow of the fire, transported back to the olden days . 

Attic, Colwick Hall, by John Whysall 1953 

The Round Oven, Colwick Hall, by John Whysall 1953

Still Room, Colwick Hall, by John Whysall 1953

Saturday Night, Colwick Hall, by John Whysall 1953

This phase of our lives went on for perhaps a couple of years. We moved out of the area, other licensees came and went, and I guess life just moved on. In the sixties the Hall went into a decline; Nottingham Corporation  bought it and it fell into disrepair. I seem to remember that some of the beautiful fireplaces were looted. There's a happy ending though. Tim Jones and Chek White won a competition to carry out its restoration in 2003, it was sold to Pearl Hotels and Restaurants and is now beautiful and thriving once more.

Here's its website:

http://www.colwickhallhotel.com/

There's a very entertaining piece about Sophia Musters here:

http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/tart-of-week-sophia-musters.html

And there's a very interesting story about one of those looting and torching rioters and what subsequently happened to him here:

http://www.nottinghampost.com/trail-Australia-s-convicts/story-12242574-detail/story.html

Photographs in this post are from Picture the Past , the excellent photo archive service run by our local authorities.

You can read about the Musters family here:

http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/books/colwick/colwick7.htm

And there's an article about the famous architect John Carr, designer of Colwick Hall, here:

http://www.countrylife.co.uk/art-and-antiques/fine-art/great-british-architects-john-carr-of-york-1723-1807-23967

And of course, here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carr_(architect)

Like Enid Blyton 2

Saturday night, coming up to 11 o'clock. In the top bunk, in the small glow of the kelly lamp I had fixed to the wall, I lay in my sleeping bag, warm under the weight of the extra blankets laid on top. In winter or if the weather had been wet there might be a slight touch of damp about the bag and a faintly musty smell. But it didn't make things any less comfortable and would soon disperse. 

Picture: James Butters
http://www.jamesbutters.com/

We had a Perdio Piccadilly, one of the first generation of solid state radios, tiny compared with the valve radios that had gone before. At eleven it would bring us the lush sound of Samantha by the Pete Moore Orchestra, signalling the start of Pick of the Pops, the BBC's first ever top 20 chart show. Introduced by David Jacobs it had the now familiar countdown format, playing the top 20 hits of the week. On the brink of becoming 1960's teenagers we drowsed to the sounds of a new era beginning. 

***

We roamed freely, exploring the abandoned grounds and buildings. 

Looking across the garden from the french window, can be seen some of the  'great glasshouses' described by Jacks  in 1880 (See Blyton 1). We went poking around in these places, our feet crunching on glass, smashed where it had fallen from the disintegrating roof. Overgrown travesties of the old horticulture writhed among opportunist invaders such as bramble and buddleia. Leaning against walls and lying on the floor, implements rusted in the stillness left by their users, as they closed the doors behind them decades before, never to return.




I was intrigued by the electric light bulbs, permanently sealed into their sockets by ancient corrosion. They were a different shape to the ones we knew: straight sided, tapering back toward the socket end. I guessed they were an earlier evolutionary stage of the light bulb and was impressed that in its day this place must have been very modern indeed.

***

In one outhouse there were two large black double-doored cupboards and once again I had the feeling I had walked in on a day in the life of someone long ago. Inside there were shelves filled with hundreds of empty wine bottles. The shelves had been lined with newspapers and we cleared some bottles away so we could carefully pull a few out. I still have one of them now. It's the Midland Free Press from March 1880. It's become very fragile indeed and will crumble away to dust very soon.

This was the first time I had encountered an old style newspaper with its column after column of tiny print and few pictures. A lot of what was in here was dull stuff to me. A general election was coming up and there were long pieces by candidates, written in the verbose style of the day. In a column of foreign news snippets though, there was an item I still remember. It reported 'atrocious murders in Chicago'. I was a teenage boy, a fan of crime fiction; The Untouchables, all about Al Capone and Elliott Ness was on TV and  the film, Al Capone, was in the cinemas. I expected atrocious murders of Chicago. And these were atrocious: bodies fished out of the river were found to have had their innards removed, carefully sliced up, as if by butchers, and reinserted. And I had thought horrible crime in Chicago was a nineteen twenties thing.

This stuff remained with me and so when I was choosing options in history more than ten years later one of them had to involve that period in  America.  So I did get to find out about that appallingly fascinating era of exponential expansion in Chicago, the stockyards and meat packing industry.

As I'm putting these posts together I'm struck by how I was surrounded by attention grabbing history as I grew up. No wonder I became a history buff. 





However this might be the moment to state that, not so long after the events described here, I failed history at GCE 'O' Level.

***

Colston Hall from another viewpoint, around 1900
Photo: Picture the Past 

• Pictures unless otherwise stated are by Roger Whysall

• I got the picture of the radio, identical to one of ours (we had two, the other one blue), from a brilliant website by James Butters. I'm struck by how beautiful these mid 20th century bits of technology were, especially compared to the slug-like objects of the era we have just lived through. Mr Butters does them proud. If, like me, you are interested in the history of everyday things, visit him now at

http://www.jamesbutters.com

• Music and smells are very powerful memory cues. When I hear this, I go back in my head to the musty pleasure of those moments:

http://bbc.in/1EXaz9j