Mauve

by Simon Garfield

  Perkin was astonished that the mauve had led to this. ‘When this year opened, I received a New Year’s card from my old friend Hofrath Dr Caro, in which he referred to this year being the golden jubilee of the industry. I little thought that I should hear any more about the matter …’

  Chemists cheered and laughed and clapped, but the tone of his speech was serious. Perkin wished to remember those who were no longer around, especially his father and brother. He had kind things to say about the French, who had greatly encouraged him by presenting him with his first Mulhouse medal in 1859, a year when some of his fellow Englishmen still thought he was crazy. He recalled learning something from the visiting French professor St Claire Deville who tried a few experiments at the Royal College. ‘One experiment was the casting of a large ingot of sodium, and the question was as to what vessel it should be melted in, when Deville noticed an iron tea-kettle standing by, and said that would be the very thing. This amused us very much; the idea of pouring melted sodium from a tea-kettle was indeed a novelty.’

  The experiment was a success, but it was merely a dry run for a more prestigious display later that week at the Royal Institution. For this, the Institution’s secretary, the Rev. Mr Barlow, thought a tea-kettle too undignified an instrument for such an august body. Accordingly, the sodium was melted in an open iron ladle, and the naphtha with which the sodium was covered burst into flames. Michael Faraday came to the rescue with water in a porcelain dish. ‘If the tea-kettle had been used this would not have happened,’ Perkin noted.

  Perkin was delighted with all his trinkets, not least the still-wet portrait by Arthur Cope that he would hang in his home. It showed him in his Sudbury laboratory looking stout and proud in a velvet jacket, holding a skein of mauve wool; with his wild white beard he looked like a common vision of God. He promised to leave the portrait to the nation when he died. He also liked the bust by F. W. Pomeroy, to be placed in the library of the Chemical Society, the venue where Perkin reported the majority of his researches. When he joined in 1856, the Society’s fellowship numbered 261; it was now more than 2,700. At the close of his speech, Perkin declared all this great acclaim to be particularly gratifying ‘at this period of life, when the sun is declining in the west, and the evening is approaching …’.

  Outside, in the Kensington streets, mauve was fashionable once again. In Brompton Oratory a wedding was taking place between Lord Gerard and Miss May Gosselin, and the six bridesmaids’ gowns were of white chiffon, with mauve Empire girdles and mauve ribbon, falling at the back in long strands almost to the hem of their frocks. They each carried a white enamel Empire staff, topped by a ball of gold, and clusters of mauve Alexandra orchids and fragile asparagus fern were tied to the staffs with mauve satin. One newspaper called it ‘the freshest cavalcade of colour’.

  Inside the Hotel Metropole, a reporter from the Daily Telegraph was taking notes. He was working on the German angle, what he called ‘the shadow-side to this epic of colour’. No one had yet written a more pained or stereotyped critique of Britain’s failure to capitalise on its inventions, while making it clear that this was not a new affair. ‘England had, as usual, in Sir William Perkin the genius. Germany had, as usual, a disciplined organisation in the shape of a host of trained chemists, capable of seizing an idea and working it out in all its applications.’ The writer recalled Hofmann’s prediction forty years earlier that nothing could prevent England from becoming the greatest colour-producing country in the world. But now England exported vast amounts of the crude by-products of its coal to Germany and Switzerland, and received back the finished article. ‘We have forfeited our heritage, and upon the foundation of an Englishman’s work the superstructure of the most commanding scientific industry in the Fatherland has been erected.’

  Despite this, there was marvel. The Telegraph correspondent had recently been in India, where he had observed how Perkin had waved an invisible wand over ‘the many-hued myriads’ of the Asiatic cities.

  India is losing the more subdued and pensive harmonies, Old Testament-like in their effect, derived from the texture of its own looms dipped in its own vats. Everywhere the eye is notably struck by the more metallic and emphatic blaze of tints announcing the conquering march of the aniline dyes. Among the scenes of the great Delhi Durbar nothing is more vividly remembered to visitors to India than the astounding crash of orchestral colour … It was seen at once that the adoption of aniline dyes in recent years has raised Asiatic colour to a crescendo.

  Some months after the jubilee celebrations, a local event took place in Perkin’s honour in the Harrow region, with a musical note. A brass band played as Perkin and many Anglican friends strolled one evening in January 1907 to the New Hall in Sudbury, the mission Perkin had himself founded, to hear churchmen pay tribute to the inventor’s devotion to spiritual and educational work. A certain Mr Wood, prominent in the Evangelisation Society, remarked how unusual it was, in that post-Darwinian age, for a man eminent in science to be also eminent in the love of the gospels of Christ. But there was much science in the Bible, he noted. Wood also praised the work of Lady Perkin, and it was his greatest privilege to present them both with an illuminated address from all their well-wishers at the New Hall and East Lane missions. The Harrow Gazette reported that, with the exception of gold, ‘all the colours used in that illumination had been discovered by [Perkin], and he probably knew more about them than any other man in the whole world’.

  Lady Perkin was given a silver tea pot as a souvenir. At the close she gave a little speech, saying that her husband had received many addresses and tributes, but this had been the only one in which she had been allowed to take part.

  Perkin said he found all the celebrations exhausting, and was happy now to resume a normal life. The photographs of the period show no sign of frailty. When Ralph Meldola saw him in the middle of 1907 he thought that he looked healthy. Perkin had only recently returned from Oxford, where he had received the degree of Doctor of Science in the same ceremony as Mark Twain was made a Doctor of Literature. ‘He bore all the excitement and fatigue without the least indication of discomfort,’ Professor Meldola remarked. He had, however, picked up a virus of some sort, and there was a little creeping pain.

  Perkin resumed his research into unsaturated acids until confined to bed on the morning of 11 July 1907. ‘Although he complained of suffering pain he spoke hopefully of his condition,’ Meldola noted, ‘and anticipated being soon able to leave his room.’ But it was a false note. Perkin had entered the arena of the unwell with double pneumonia and appendicitis, and these proved more serious than he or his family first realised. Near the end, Lady Perkin told her husband that they must be separated for a time. According to The Christian newsletter, his reply was: ‘May you have much of the joy of the Lord.’ An attendant then told him, ‘Sir William, you will soon hear the “Well done, good and faithful servant”.’ Perkin observed: ‘The children are in Sunday School. Give them my love, and tell them always to trust Jesus.’ He then let out the first verse of the hymn ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’, and when he reached the last line, ‘And pour contempt on all my pride’, he said, ‘Proud? Who could be proud?’

  Then he fell asleep. Then he woke up, and at about six o’clock in the evening on 14 July 1907 he died, aged sixty-nine. His friends agreed that, in view of his activity, his death could not be regarded as premature.

  The funeral at Roxeth two days later was a day of many blooms, most of them mauve. Gas World was there, and would tell its readers how the deceased gentleman’s name was worked in mauve flowers on a white ground. The cortege consisted of twelve carriages, including one specifically for floral tributes, and Sudbury took off its hat and bowed its head as they passed. All the Perkins and all the chemists were there, with the exception of his eldest daughter Annie, who was in Tangiers when she heard of her father’s death and got back too late. (His youngest daughter, Helen Mary, had been married in the same church just a year before, and Perkin had led her do
wn the aisle to the tune of ‘Father, I Know that all my Life is Portioned out for Me’.)

  The grave was lined with lilies of the valley, and the coffin was solid oak and lined with lead. The brass inscription plate just gave his dates, but the tombstone that followed would be religious. The floral arrangements had notes attached: With loving sympathy, with deepest regret, to dear Grandfather with love from Wilfred and Isabel. One said: ‘To Dear Lady Perkin, Please to accept these lilies from my poor little Charlie as he is so broken-hearted, and he wants to give these out of his garden as a last token of love with great sympathy. From Mrs Cattermole.’

  At the service, Mr Wood drew comparisons between the life of Perkin and Enoch. The Harrow Gazette recalled four key points: ‘(1) Why God took Enoch; (2) how; (3) where; and (4) for how long’. Not long afterwards, as the large crowds dispersed, the Sudbury Hall girls sang ‘The Glory Song’, Mrs Swaffield accompanying on the harmonium.

  *

  The following Sunday, J. W. P. Silvester, the vicar at the Wembley Parish Church, talked of Perkin’s great inventions, and said he was proud to have known him. ‘It is not the least pleasurable memory to me to know that almost the last letter, if not the last letter he wrote on earth, was, inter alia, an appreciation of my article on Funeral Reform, published in the Wembley Parish Magazine, July issue.’

  His will left all his property to his wife. She also got his watches, jewels, clothes, plated articles, furniture, glass, china, live and dead stock, medals, musical instruments and £500. He left his servants ten shillings for every month he’d employed them. His children received a regular and equal annual payment, and his sons got his chemical apparatus and research books and specimens. The net value of his estate, which included over thirty freehold properties (and confirmed him as by far the biggest landowner in Sudbury), was valued at £73,444, but the sale of many buildings achieved far greater sums than those included in this estimate.

  Among the many letters of condolence received by Lady Perkin was one from J. W. Bruhl in November 1907, who wrote from his university post in Heidelberg. ‘In July, when reading in the paper the sad news of the loss you and indeed the whole world suffered at the demise of Sir William Perkin … The sudden death of your dear husband grieved me as much as it amazed me. Not long before he had written me a detailed letter in which he had expressed his satisfaction with his good health and spoke about diverse scientific matters. Only a few days before his end he sent me a copy of his last research with some especially kind words.’

  And there was one from the ageing Heinrich Caro in January 1908.

  Dear Lady Perkin,

  It is a sincere comfort for me to know that the cruel bereavement which you and your dear family have suffered should not have broken the link which through a lifetime has connected my soul and mind with the immortal name of “Perkin”, and that my thoughts may still continue to wander to the Chestnuts in Sudbury …

  The attack of illness which so sadly interfered with my full appreciation of those wonderful days of the Perkin Jubilee was finally got rid of by a fortnight’s sojourn in beautiful Folkestone. But of course the burden of my 74 years makes itself more and more felt, and the loss of nearly all my old friends and contemporaries causes an ever-increasing feeling of loneliness. My hardest blow was the premature passing away of Sir William, who had been my guiding star through my life and one of the best and greatest men of my time.

  The obituaries for Perkin in the newspapers were full, and sincere. The Daily Telegraph wrote of his amiability and charming modesty. The Daily Express realised he had given a new industry to the world. The Daily Mirror was grateful that he had only been unwell for three or four days. The Harrow Gazette enjoyed the idea of Perkin’s triumphs with coal-tar causing ‘the deliverance from their chemical dungeon of the imprisoned spirits of the rainbow’. The Daily Mail estimated that there were now 500 colours that owed their existence to mauve. The Manchester Guardian wondered how anyone in those times possessed the genius to experiment on black sludge when most chemists would have thrown it down the waste pipe. It noted how well his intuition had rewarded him commercially. The New York Times recalled how Perkin had found fame in the ‘black diamonds which the British Islanders dig from out of their coal mines’. In America, despite his recent visit, the Perkin story had also undergone transmutation: the chemist had been struggling with molecular formulae when ‘one day, in a fit of disgust over the failure of an experiment, [he] made hot resolution to be quit of the science and seek other fields … [he] thought better of it the next day and lived to create more industries than most any who have ever gone before him … to open avenues for an army of workers in the arts of peace which numerically exceeds the standing army of Great Britain.’ Back in Great Britain, Tribune wrote that Sir William’s feat would remain unequalled until such time as chemists found a way of making artificial food.

  For many readers this would have been the first they had read of this scientist. Perhaps some thought the eulogies were overplaying it a little, the way one always does when a good man dies. Few could have imagined how extensively he would be fêted in years to come, and how prolonged and significant would be the effects of his work. Or how, in subsequent years, Perkin would also be blamed for the perilous state of the industry he had himself created.

  *

  Five miles from the heart of Bristol, on the site where food scientists first made the drinks that were marketed as Ribena and Babycham, two biological scientists are developing ways of reintroducing ancient woad. In a glasshouse at the edge of the Long Ashton Research Station, David Cooke and Kerry Gilbert are growing 300 small plants, none more than a half-metre tall, and are employing modern methods to extract indigo for textiles and inks. Theirs is an expanding market – offsite, they have farmers working 15 hectares to meet their demands.

  In the second week of January 2000, Dr Cooke was in his laboratory telling a Belgian visitor of the historical significance of his endeavours. ‘In Queen Boudicca’s day, the army used to smear their faces with woad to look more fearsome.’ Although he has no great evidence, Cooke likes to believe that woad was also an antiseptic, and that smearing before battle could guard against infection from wounds.

  Cooke is a wiry man of fifty-three, with a boyish demeanour. He has worked at Long Ashton for thirty years, specialising in the regulation of cell-membrane stress in plants. He has no great liking for many of the products or methods of modern chemical industry.

  He says that the philosophy behind his work on woad is threefold. A lot of the materials we use today, including dyes, are derived from the petroleum industry, the successor of coal-tar as the major source of chemicals. But of course these are not infinite resources. As the supply declines, so the cost will go up, and eventually governments will prioritise their usage. This will result in a decline in our standard of living. As Cooke says: ‘If you want to go on a holiday to Spain but you can’t get on an aircraft because there’s no fuel, you may get a little bit upset. If you want to go to London in a car and you can’t, you’re going to get a little bit upset.’ There are thousands of aspects of one’s life which may be affected by the decline in fossil fuels, although Cooke is reluctant to estimate when this day will come.

  To prevent too many people becoming too upset, he has, with the aid of a European Community grant, been looking for alternative sources of chemicals. Dyestuffs were chosen because they were the most obvious and easiest: if you want to derive a colour from a plant it’s a great deal simpler than trying to extract a great many other esoteric molecules. And of course it’s been done in the past.

  The woad project would also benefit farmers. With profits down, and a European surplus in many meats and crops, farmers are leaving the land. ‘This is a bad thing,’ Cooke maintains, ‘so they have to be provided with an alternative to food production, and industrial crops seem to be the answer.’

  The third element of Cooke’s philosophy attempts to provide the customer with choice. A lot of people prefer t
o wear natural textiles rather than polyester or nylon, but they find that the artificial dyes on natural textiles are irritants. ‘It spoils the whole thing. It used to be that the washing powder industry had a lot of problems with the allergies caused by their powders; they have now improved their product to the extent that there are very few allergies, but new allergies are still being traced to synthetic dyes. There is an ever-growing list of dyestuffs which are banned for use on textiles. So by providing natural dyes we can supply a niche market.’

  Above Dr Cooke’s head is a board with illustrated examples of dye plants grown in the UK: woad, dyer’s weld, madder, yellow camomile, golden rod, greater celandine (yellow). Woad was chosen because there are 80,000 tons of indigo sold in the world each year, representing about 10 per cent of the world’s dye market, most of it going into jeans. So there is a definable market, and it would be easier to persuade the dyers to take a natural product if they knew there was a demand for it.

  ‘It’s not as if we’re producing yellow,’ says Kerry Gilbert, Cooke’s research associate, aged thirty, probably the only person in the country to have a PhD in the Cultivation of Woad. Their first indigo project lasted from 1994 to 1997, at the end of which they were able to show that it was both financially and industrially feasible to produce the dye naturally again. Then they were commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to make a natural indigo ink for computer printers. At present the computer ink market is dominated by inks made from methyl ethyl ketone, a chemical that’s allergenic and carcinogenic. The Ministry was concerned that the ink used to print the sell-by date on the labels of perishable goods may be absorbed into the food, particularly in those products with a high fat content that take up solvents at a very high rate. Also, Cooke says, ‘computer inks are the only product on the market at the moment that are worth more than their weight in gold. That’s how the computer companies make all their money – the printers they sell you are dirt cheap, but they fleece you on the ink cartridges. Although it’s a niche market, it’s an extraordinary profitable one.’