Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (10 page)

P
erhaps the most unexpected royal monument in Britain commemorates not a British monarch but a Native American princess. In the churchyard of St George’s, Gravesend, is a monument to Pocahontas who died in 1617 and was buried nearby. Born in c.1595, Pocahontas was the daughter of Emperor Powhatan who headed a group of tribes in the coastal region of Virginia which was settled by British colonists in 1607. John Smith, one of the colonists, was captured by some of the tribesmen after a dispute and was, he later claimed, rescued from execution by Pocahontas. During another dispute between the tribesmen and the settlers Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom during which time, in April 1614, she married an English tobacco farmer called John Rolfe. This appears to have improved relations between the two communities and in 1616 Pocahontas and Rolfe travelled to England to recruit more settlers for the colony. They lived for a while at Rolfe’s ancestral home of Heacham Hall in Norfolk. Pocahontas was also presented at Court to James I and Queen Anne but, though treated with courtesy, was unimpressed by the scruffy and unprepossessing monarch. In March 1617 the pair boarded a ship to return to Virginia but Pocahontas became ill, possibly with smallpox, and died at Gravesend where she is buried. The couple had one child who has many descendants, amongst them two First Ladies: Edith Wilson, wife of the World War I President Woodrow Wilson; and, more recently, Nancy Reagan, wife of President Ronald Reagan.

F
ish and chips are first recorded as being offered by a Jewish fishmonger called Joseph Malin in the East End of London in 1860, though its origins as a meal lie much further back. Fried fish was a traditional Jewish dish which had been introduced to England when the Jews were invited back to England by Oliver Cromwell, after their expulsion by Edward I (who owed them money) in 1290. Chips probably originated in Belgium, the first reference to them in England being found in Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
in 1859 where he refers to ‘husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil’. The dish rapidly became a popular, cheap and nourishing food, and its popularity grew in World War II when it was one of the few foods that was not subject to any kind of rationing. The long tradition of eating them as a takeaway with salt and vinegar, wrapped in newspaper, was a casualty of the health alarms of the 1970s when it was suggested that the ink used on newspapers might be toxic but the food remains one of Britain’s most popular dishes, with over 8,600 fish and chip shops in Great Britain. A variant of the traditional dish, fish fingers, were first produced in Grimsby in 1955 and remain extremely popular with children.

I
n the 17th century scientists started to experiment to understand just what the British diet should be. One of the least successful but most heroic dietary experiments was conducted by a British doctor called William Stark (1740–1770) on himself. Stark was a friend of Benjamin Franklin who informed him that, in his younger days, he had lived on a diet of bread and water. Perhaps it was this that set Stark upon his fatal course. In June 1769, a healthy male weighing 12 stone 3 lbs, he started the diet by consuming nothing but bread and water for ten weeks. At the end of this time he had lost a stone in weight and his gums were swollen and bleeding, presumably from scurvy. He then adjusted the diet to consist of meat, milk and wine and then switched to bread, meat and water by which time he had ‘blackened gums with foetid white stuff round their edges’. For a month he lived off ‘puddings’ consisting of flour, oils and water before deciding to adopt a new diet of fruit and vegetables. This would presumably have been his salvation since the diet would have provided the vitamins he needed. Unfortunately he changed his mind and confined himself to honey, puddings and Cheshire cheese. On 23rd January he died, racked with scurvy and a martyr to the cause of scientific enquiry. His last diary entry was ‘Nothing passes through me except sometimes a little wind upwards or downwards and that without relief’. At no stage did he complain about his sufferings.

T
he medieval peasant diet in times of good harvests was one of the best we have ever enjoyed. This was pottage, a stew of fresh seasonal vegetables, pulses, cereals, seasoning and, when affordable, a little meat. This was supplemented by seasonal fruit, milk, cheese and bread baked from unrefined flour – that is to say flour containing most of the bran and other elements that are removed by the refining process which produces flour for white bread. This diet contained all the nutrients required for healthy, strenuous living centuries before anyone knew about protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins and minerals. It was very similar to the diet of the orphans of London’s Foundling Hospital, founded in 1739 by Thomas Coram. This provided its charges with ‘all the produce of the kitchen garden’ – vegetables and fruit grown by the orphans themselves – as well as milk and meat.

T
he Worshipful Company of Bakers is one of London’s oldest Livery Companies, having paid a gold mark to the Exchequer every year since 1155. About 150 years later the bakers split into two factions which reflected later controversies about the nutritional value of bread that continued well into the 20th century. The bakers of brown bread formed their own guild producing a coarser (but more nutritious) bread from rye, barley or buckwheat (sometimes used in pancakes but not related to wheat at all). The bakers of white bread produced loaves from more refined wheat flour which, though less nutritious, was preferred by those who could afford it.

In 1645 the two factions reunited into the Worshipful Company of Bakers which, even today, takes its place in the Lord Mayor’s Procession and in the governance of the Square Mile. In 1266 the
Assize of Bread and Ale
was the first ordinance to set standards of quality, quantity and price. It laid down the relationship between the price of wheat and the farthing loaf which would be set annually by magistrates and ‘four discreet men chosen and sworn thereunto’. Nine different kinds of bread could be baked, varying from superior Ranger Bread baked from white, sieved flour to Bread of Common Wheat which contained more roughage and, at half the price, was healthier.
The Liber Albus
(‘White Book’) compiled in 1419 at the request of Richard ‘Dick’ Whittington, Mayor of London, laid down the penalties to be imposed on bakers who produced defective bread (for example if the loaves contained sand):

The pillory, in which the victim had to stand with his head and wrists held fast, could amount to a death sentence since onlookers were invited to throw anything to hand. Dead animals were favoured missiles and, though unpleasant, were rarely fatal but unpopular offenders could expect no mercy from a crowd which was usually drunk. One poor fellow, a counterfeiter, had his ears nailed to the pillory and only escaped by leaving parts of them behind.

Kaiser Bill and Hitler to the rescue of the British loaf

During the early modern period, an obstinate preference amongst the more affluent classes for refined white bread was applauded by many including Adam Smith who commented that ‘the common people of Scotland who are fed with oatmeal bread are in general neither so strong nor so handsome as the same rank of people in England who are fed with wheaten bread’. He was misguided but his views were widely shared. During the 18th century poor harvests led Parliament to promote Standard Bread, marked with an S, costing less than white bread and containing more barley, oats and bran. It was healthier than refined white bread but regarded as inferior.

The controversy ran into the 20th century and was revived by Sir Oswald Mosley (1874–1928), father of the later Fascist leader, who persuaded Hovis to launch Smith’s Old Patent Germ Bread whose nutritional qualities failed to overcome the familiar prejudice. It was soon withdrawn but the cause of nutritious bread was soon rescued by Kaiser Wilhelm II whose U-boats so curtailed the supply of wheat that British millers and bakers were obliged to reduce the amount of nourishing bran they removed from wheat in the refining process. In World War II an even less likely benefactor, Adolf Hitler, came to the rescue again when a shortage of wheat obliged a reluctant population to switch from white bread to the British Loaf which made a significant contribution to the wartime diet. After the war the conflict resumed between millers and nutritionists and it is only in the last twenty years that a large proportion of the British public has come to recognize that wholemeal bread is not only more nutritious: it also tastes better! The days when bread was the main element of our diet have long passed but we still consume, on average, about 720 grams per week, rather less than a loaf. If that seems a lot, just think of all those high-street sandwich shops.

M
ilk has long been recognized as an exceptionally nutritious product and a staple of the British diet, though some of the ideas surrounding it have been bizarre in the extreme. In 1584 Thomas Cogan, the author of a book called
The Haven of Health
, explained that ‘Milk is made of blood, twice concocted. Until it comes to the udder it is plain blood; but after by the proper nature of the udders it is turned into milk’. He added that it was recommended for those of a melancholy nature ‘which is a common calamity of students’!