Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (11 page)

Cows in Soho and the black pump

As London’s population grew, so did the demand for milk. In 1798 there were 8,500 cows in the city, many of them kept in squalid conditions, including basements in Golden Square, Soho. Dairymen would collect milk from the cows, add to it from the black pump (i.e. from water wells) and carry it in open buckets, where it was enriched by bird droppings, flakes of soot and general street dirt. But from 1840 the coming of the railways ensured a ready supply of fresh milk from the countryside, causing prices to fall and consumption to soar.

Taste the Difference: blonde or brunette?

In 1848 an article published in the respected medical journal
The Lancet
reported the results of some experiments carried out in France on breast milk. It claimed that ‘in the milk of a brunette, when compared with that from females of fair complexion, there existed a greater amount of solid matter.’ It added that ‘milk is stated by some to be influenced greatly by mental emotions and even the sudden death of the infant has been asserted to have arisen from such alterations’. As far as is known neither of these propositions has subsequently been shown to be true.

Milk, among the most nutritious of natural products, was nonetheless associated with tuberculosis, the biggest cause of death in 19th century Britain. A survey of Manchester in the 1890s revealed that one fifth of the city’s milk supplies was affected. A campaign to promote better hygiene in dairies followed and in 1901 Liverpool set up Infant Welfare Centres where sterilized milk was supplied, with immense benefits to the city’s children. Other cities followed Liverpool’s lead and these measures, together with the introduction of pasteurization (rapidly heating and cooling the milk to kill harmful microbes) meant that milk could much more safely be consumed.

I
t was Richard II who in 1393 decreed that all ale-houses should carry a distinctive sign so that they could easily be recognized by ‘ale-conners’ (those who tasted the ale for strength and purity). This accounts for the popularity of the number of ‘White Hart’ signs since this was the emblem of Richard himself. The importance attached to the quality of ale may be judged by the fact that it is mentioned in the
Magna Carta
and, along with bread, was the subject of the
Assize of Bread and Ale
of 1266. The
Liber Albus
also describes processes by which the quality of ale was checked by elected officials. When a brewer ‘shall have made a brew, send for the Ale-conners of the Ward wherein they dwell, to taste the ale, so that he or she sell no ale before that the said Ale-conners have assayed the same, under pain of forfeiture of the said ale.’ If the ale was suspected of containing too much sugar then the test was to pour a pint on a wooden bench and sit on the damp patch in leather breeches until it was dry. If the breeches stuck to the bench the ale was over-sugared. Oddly, the use of hops in making beer was forbidden and in 1421 ‘information was laid against one for putting an unwholesome kind of weed called Hopp into his brewing’. Hops remained a prohibited ingredient until the reign of Edward VI after which the oast houses of Kent began to flourish. During the 19th century, when cholera and typhoid affected much of the water supply and caused many deaths, ale saved many lives as the brewing process kills harmful microbes.

J
ames I’s ancestor, King James IV of Scotland (reigned 1488–1513) liked a glass of whisky and granted the Edinburgh Guild of Surgeon Barbers the right to produce the drink in 1505 but it was James I himself, when king of England, who licensed the first distillery at Bushmills in Northern Ireland in 1608, where whiskey is still produced. The word derives from the Gaelic language (spoken in Ireland and Scotland), the original name being
usquebaugh
, meaning ‘water of life’. Both Scotch whisky and Irish whiskey are produced mainly from malt and barley though the distillation process is slightly different. Early legends suggest that St Patrick learned the art of distillation on the continent (where it was certainly already in use) and took it to Ireland in the 5th century. There is more evidence to suggest that in the 6th century it was taken from Ireland to Scotland by the Dál Riata clan, overlords of the archipelagos and coasts of western Scotland and Northern Ireland. By the 17th century whisky was popular enough in Scotland for the Scottish Parliament to tax it and drive much of the production underground. In 1823 the Excise Act, passed by the British Parliament, moderated the taxes, licensed production and thereby created the foundations for what is now the worldwide whisky business. Scotch, with exports of over £3 billion a year, dominates as Scotland’s largest export business.

M
ost of us managed without sugar until well into the 16th century when its importation from India and the Americas found a ready market amongst the wealthier classes, human taste buds being predisposed to this sweet but nutritionally valueless product. Its cost meant that it could only be afforded by the wealthiest; this feature of the product was observed by a German visitor called Paul Hentzner who visited Queen Elizabeth I’s court at Greenwich and commented: ‘Her face oblong, fair but wrinkled, her eyes small yet black and pleasant, her nose a little hooked and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar).’ In the years that followed, a number of well-informed commentators observed the harmful effects of sugar, several of them commenting upon what later became know as tooth decay.

In spite of this, sugar found a redoubtable champion in Frederick Slare (1646–1727), contemporary and friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Fellow of the Royal Society whose book
A Vindication of Sugars
claimed that, far from damaging the teeth, he had ‘made my Gums better and Teeth whiter’ by rubbing them with sugar. Moreover, according to Slare his grandfather, who consumed prodigious quantities of sugar, grew to a hundred and had grown a fresh set of teeth at the age of eighty! Slare also recommended it as a cure for sore eyes and scurvy. Annual sugar consumption peaked at about 43 kilos per head in the 1930s and, despite its well-known harmful properties the average British citizen still consumes approximately 38 kilos per year.

H
aggis consists of sheep’s offal (heart, liver and lungs) minced with onion, mixed with stock and simmered in the sheep’s stomach for about three hours. It is traditionally served with ‘neeps and tatties’ (swedes, turnips and potatoes) boiled and mashed and with a ‘dram’ (glass) of Scotch whisky. The first recipe for ‘hagese’ is found in a book from Lancashire dated 1430, a reference by the Scottish poet William Dunbar following in 1520. However, Robert Burns’s 1787 poem,
Address to a Haggis
, has made it incontrovertibly Scotland’s national dish and it is invariably served with great ceremony (and the poem recited) at the Burns Night supper celebrations which mark the poet’s birthday on 25th January, an event celebrated not only in Scotland but throughout the world, notably in Russia.

P
otatoes, one of the great cornerstones of the modern British diet, did not arrive in Britain until the 1580s. Their introduction, from the Americas, is often attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh though the first reference to them by an Englishmen came from Sir Francis Drake. In November 1577, during his voyage round the world, Drake put into port in Chile and recorded that ‘the people came down to us at the waterside with shew of great curtesie to bring us potatoes, rootes and two very fat sheepe’. The Germans erected a statue to Drake as the discoverer of the potato in the town of Offenburg but it was removed by the Nazis. In the early days it was a luxury product, two pounds of potatoes being supplied to Queen Elizabeth I for five shillings (25p) – far more than a working man’s weekly wage at the time.