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