Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  Thankfully, Lane could rely on help from his brothers, Dick and John. The three of them chose a name for their new imprint (Dolphin Books and Porpoise Books having been suggested and rejected), and despatched the young artist Edward Young to London Zoo to draw a penguin. The resultant sketch would become famous as the Penguin Books’ colophon (though it would go through several tweaks over the years).

  The covers Young proposed for the new company’s books represented a sea change in paperback design. There would be no tacky illustrations – indeed, no illustrations at all – with the titles printed in clear black lettering across a band of white. To ease identification, each book would be coloured according to genre. Novels would be orange; dark blue was chosen for biographies; while crime-fiction titles would be green. As time went by, further genres were added and allotted their own colour: travel and adventure (cerise), drama (red), world affairs (grey), essays (purple), and miscellaneous (yellow). Only in later decades did Penguin paperbacks begin to be adorned (or defaced, according to your taste) with illustrations, but these were still a far cry from the tawdry drawings of the pulp-fiction merchants.

  The imprint was launched on 30 July 1935, with an initial roster of ten paperbacks, including A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and, of course, something by Agatha Christie: her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This had been published in hardback in the UK in 1921 and had actually made it into paperback form previously (in 1935) but at the higher price of 9d.

  Each book in the series was allotted a number. This proved to be an astute move because it encouraged readers to start collecting them so that they might have the pleasure of owning the first ten or the first hundred and so on, even if some of the books might not particularly interest them. Ariel, a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley by André Maurois, pipped Hemingway’s novel of love and war to the honour of being number one.

  Allen Lane declared later, ‘We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.’ His bet came off in spades. Legend has it though that he did have one dicey moment before the launch had even occurred. It is said that the brilliantly titled fancy goods buyer at Woolworth’s, an American named Clifford Prescott, was not enthusiastic about stocking the new imprint. When Lane gave his 15-minute pitch at Woolworth’s executive office in Mayfair, Prescott was less than keen, telling the publisher that his books were not ‘fancy’ enough to be stocked. Customers, he claimed, liked their books to have hard covers adorned with colourful illustrations. It was vitally important for the Lane brothers to get into places like Woolworth’s if they wanted to sell their books in high volumes, and this must have been a terrible blow to Allen. Thankfully, just as the audience with Prescott was ending, the American’s wife happened to pop her head around the door. She had been on a rare shopping expedition in town and her husband had promised to take her out for lunch. Seeing the books on the table between the two men, she raved about how successful they were likely to be, saying that she herself would be likely to buy several every week. Prescott relented and ordered 36,000 copies. That figure soon rose to 63,000 as many of Lane’s first ten titles sold out very swiftly. The Penguin imprint broke away from Bodley Head and on 1 January 1936 became a separate publishing company.

  Soon Penguin was expanding into other areas of literature. Pelican Books was launched in 1937 to publish educational titles; Puffin Books began catering for children from 1940; the short-lived Ptarmigan was set up to appeal to the young adult market in 1945; and Penguin Classics started to reprint great works of literature from 1946.

  The company’s moment of greatest notoriety and, to many eyes, its finest hour, came in 1960, when Lane published an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the specific intention of challenging the Obscene Publications Act, which had come into force the year before. A trial ensued, which Lane won. The case was seen as a landmark victory for freedom of expression. It also gave to posterity the infamous observation made by lead prosecutor for the Crown, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, that Lawrence’s novel was not a book that any upright citizen would wish his maidservant to read. Rarely can those in the upper reaches of the legal system have seemed more out of touch with ordinary citizens.

  After Penguin, the culture of bookselling and book-reading in Britain changed completely. No longer was ownership of quality books the preserve of those well enough off to afford them. In the opening decades of the 20th century, it is true that those who could not afford to buy a book did have the opportunity to borrow them from a library, but not always for free. This was because many libraries were privately owned affairs run by such as Boots the Chemist (somewhat incongruously) and shops including W. H. Smith and Harrods, and there was a charge per book. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 had introduced the concept of the free council-run library, but Conservative MPs had opposed the bill so virulently in Parliament – fearing the consequences of an educated public – that the bill’s guiding hand, Liberal politician William Ewart, was forced to make a raft of compromises that had severely limited the number of public libraries that were opened.

  As Lane said himself in an interview with The Bookseller in May 1935, his imprint could be counted a triumph ‘if these Penguins are the means of converting book-borrowers into book-buyers’. That they certainly did, as they proceeded to sell in their millions, spawning copycat imprints by other publishers.

  Allen Lane was knighted for his services to publishing in 1952 and died of bowel cancer in 1970. Although he evidently revolutionised the way books were bought and sold in Britain, it’s a sad fact that, were he to return to Exeter St David’s station today, he would find the situation there much as he had encountered it back in 1934. As Caroline Lodge notes in her Book Word blog, ‘At Exeter St David’s station the only books sold today have to be tracked down in the dingy cave that is WH Smith’s…The shop stocks bestsellers, fiction and nonfiction. Nothing I was tempted to buy and I doubt whether Allen Lane would have thought much of the selection either.’ You can lead a railway station to literature, it would appear, but you may not be able to make it drink at the fount of knowledge for all that long.

  Health & Safety

  Derided as the product of the so-called nanny state by people who would clearly rather be ill and endangered, the practice of ‘health and safety’ has entered many areas of our national life only after a tragic accident has occurred. History is also littered with inconsequential events in which a reckless disregard for these two pillars of prudence has had a disproportionate effect on British life, for good or ill.

  The people of Bradford briefly develop a taste for arsenic

  ‘Bah! Humbug!’ was famously a favourite expression of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser who stomped grumpily about the novel A Christmas Carol. Back in 1843, when Charles Dickens was creating one of his most celebrated characters, he could not have known just how appropriate it would be to have put the word ‘humbug’ into such a poisonous character’s mouth.

  Just 15 years later, a simple misunderstanding brought about one of the worst cases of mass poisoning in Britain and it was all caused by a single batch of humbugs.

  Arsenic was the poison involved. It occurs naturally in a large range of minerals, and although nowadays the substance tends to be associated with the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, its toxic properties have been known since time immemorial. Many is the tale of an ancient Greek or Roman being done away with by an unscrupulous rival with a grudge and access to a pinch of arsenic.

  Sugary sweets, of course, are far more recent victuals. In Victorian times, sugar beet had yet to make its arrival on the flat fields of the Fens, and Britain had to import every last teaspoonful of the sugar it ate, as it had always done. When the new and exciting foodstuff first came to Britain, probably in the mid-13th century, it was so expensive that it was the preserve of royalty alone. It was the capture, transportation and enslavement of Africans in t
he 17th century that really began to bring the price of sugar down. Large plantations, worked by slaves, were established in the West Indies, with the cane sent to Britain to be refined.

  Huge fortunes could be made from the sale of ‘white gold’. Keenly aware of this, successive governments set high taxes on the commodity. So it was that, come 1858, the price of sugar made it a treat for a special occasion rather than the staple it has become in modern times. It would not be until 1874 and the abolition of the sugar tax that molasses became affordable to the masses.

  Much in the same way that Class A drugs today are often cut with talcum powder or some other such matter in order to maximise profits, in the 19th century, unprincipled sugar dealers would covertly bulk up their merchandise by adding something that looked like sugar but was much cheaper. A common additive – known as ‘daft’ – typically consisted of powdered limestone and/or gypsum (as used in plaster casts). The resulting product could then be sold at a price more within the budget of the working classes, thus opening a huge market to the sugar merchants.

  In October 1858, William Hardaker was working at his confectionery stall at the Green Market in Bradford. Well known in the area, he had been nicknamed ‘Humbug Billy’ by the locals. His humbugs were styled ‘lozenges’ because they were believed to have some mild medicinal effect on account of the peppermint they contained. He did not make the boiled sweets himself but procured them from a spice dealer called Joseph Neal. He in turn sourced his daft (gypsum in this case) from a pharmacist named Charles Hodgson in Shipley, three miles away. On 18 October, Neal sent out an employee, John Archer, to pick up some gypsum from Hodgson.

  In the days following the poisoning, the police pieced together what had happened next. Archer had evidently travelled to the pharmacy as he was told. Hodgson was on the premises but was feeling unwell, so his assistant, William Goddard, had attended to the customer. Unsure of the location of the gypsum, the young Goddard had sought out Hodgson, who had informed him that he would find it in a cask in a certain corner of the attic. Goddard had served Archer and the latter had returned to his employer with 12lb of white powder. This was handed to a man called James Appleton, who was to make up a batch of humbugs. He used 40lb of sugar, 12lb of daft, 4lb of gum and some peppermint oil and soon had a large quantity of confectionery ready for distribution. The sweets had turned out a slightly different colour than usual but not so dramatically as to drive Appleton to any great speculation as to why. The confectioner, who appears not to have been a very inquiring soul, was poorly for a few days afterwards but had put it down to a cold and had thought no more about it. Hardaker came by on the Saturday to buy some humbugs for his stall. He, too, queried the humbugs’ change of hue but Neal put it down to a new batch of gum that Appleton had used. To mollify Hardaker, the spice dealer knocked a ha’penny per pound off the price.

  That same weekend, a Bradford man named Mark Burran had stopped by at Humbug Bill’s stall to purchase some of the sweets. He went home and gave one each to his two sons, five-year-old Orlando and John, a toddler. It wasn’t long before he was obliged to call John Bell, a local doctor, to the family home. Both boys had become extremely ill and, despite the physician’s efforts, they died on the Sunday evening. Although it was suggested that the cause might have been cholera, the doctor suspected that they had been poisoned and the police were called in.

  Before long, the local constabulary was overwhelmed with accounts of mysterious illnesses and deaths occurring all over Bradford. It didn’t take the deductive power of a Sherlock Holmes to work out that the one element tying the victims together was that they had all eaten humbugs bought at Hardaker’s stall in the Green Market. Officers learnt the sweet-seller’s address and called round. They were surprised to find that he, too, was unwell.

  Having questioned Hardaker as to his supplier – and taken some of his humbugs for analysis – they spoke next to Joseph Neal. The spice dealer was the first person to point the finger of suspicion at the daft that had been used in the mix. Moving on to Charles Hodgson’s pharmacy in Shipley, the police quite naturally followed up on this hypothesis. One can only imagine the horror-stricken look on the pharmacist’s face when it became apparent that Goddard had misunderstood his instructions and had taken the powder not from a cask that contained gypsum but from one that held arsenic trioxide. Aside from sharing a colour, the two powders are both odourless and tasteless, making the error only too easy to commit.

  The good citizens of Bradford buried their dead. In all, 20 people – mostly children – had perished from eating the corrupted humbugs while around 200 others suffered the lesser but still very unpleasant effects of arsenical poisoning – stomach cramps, convulsions, vomiting of bile and blood, diarrhoea, delirium and shock. Despite this, the survivors could count themselves very lucky indeed, because it was estimated that a single humbug contained over one-and-a-half times the dose necessary to finish a person off in ordinary circumstances.

  Three arrests were made. First, William Goddard was seized and brought before the local magistrates on 1 November 1858. Pharmacist Charles Hodgson and spice-dealer Joseph Neal were then charged with manslaughter alongside the hapless assistant. Charges against Goddard and Neal were subsequently dropped and Hodgson was acquitted at York Assizes in December.

  Dickens had A Christmas Carol end happily, with Scrooge seeing the error of his ways and finding redemption. Likewise, there is a silver lining to the sorry tale of the Bradford humbug poisonings. The hullaballoo that ensued contributed in no small measure to the passing in 1860 of The Adulteration of Food and Drink Act, which regulated what could be added to foodstuffs. This was followed in 1868 by The Pharmacy Act, which tightened up the procedures that pharmacists had to follow regarding poisons. This included a requirement for the purchaser of a poison to sign for it in a pharmacist’s register – a stipulation beloved of crime writers of a certain era.

  These laws are the forerunners of modern-day legislation designed to shield us from adulterated food and drink. Progress on this front is not a given, however, for such protections may well find themselves watered down by transatlantic trade deals and Britain’s planned departure of the European Union, an organisation that has very strict food regulations in place. In the meantime, with Britain beset by an obesity crisis, the government has announced the introduction of the first sugar tax in nearly 150 years, albeit one that applies only to soft drinks. It’s ironic, given the tragedy that occurred in Bradford when all eyes were on the arsenical content of the humbugs, that sugar is now recognised as something of a poison itself.

  Henry I indulges in a few lampreys too many

  It’s a curious thing that two words – ‘surfeit’ and ‘lampreys’ – are seldom uttered in English nowadays unless they are used together in an infamous phrase to describe the cause of death of Henry I. Of all the myriad ways it was possible to meet one’s end in the Norman era, it took a king to bring about his own demise by consuming ‘a surfeit of lampreys’. We can only speculate as to how many further violent deaths might have been avoided in the 18-year civil war that followed his untimely death had William the Conqueror’s fourth son had the willpower to temper his ichthyophagous gluttony. On a more positive note, Henry’s rash decision to fill his belly with this barely edible eel-like fish would eventually lead to the drawing up of arguably the most important document in the history of the nation.

  Henry was born two (or possibly three) years after his father’s 1066 invasion of England. He seized the throne in 1100, when the king, William Rufus (one of his older brothers), was killed by an arrow in a hunting accident in the New Forest. No sooner installed he married Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland, and defeated the forces of his older brother, Robert, thus securing the throne.

  So began Henry’s 35-year reign over England and Normandy. It was characterised by the monarch’s efficiency, a virtue only soured by his tendency to ruthlessness. All would perhaps have been well, had his only legitimate son and heir,
William Adelin, not been drowned along with 300 others when a vessel called White Ship went down in the English Channel in 1120.

  Matilda of Scotland had died two years earlier, so Henry swiftly married one Adeliza of Louvain in the hope of producing a new heir. Unfortunately, this union proved fruitless, and so Henry was forced to choose a successor from a group that included his daughter Matilda, his illegitimate son Robert (the Earl of Gloucester) and his nephews. The most likely of this last set to gain the avuncular blessing was Stephen of Blois (who was married to yet another Matilda).

  In 1127, Henry declared that, on his death, his daughter would become queen. It was unusual to choose a female successor but there were no hard-and-fast rules laid down regarding succession to the throne and Matilda was the pragmatic choice. In preparation, Henry married her off to Geoffrey of Anjou, hoping to rebuild an alliance with that state. This proved a not altogether happy choice, since the couple turned not only against each other but, when they became reconciled, then turned against the king. They were incensed when he refused their requests to cede castles in Normandy to Matilda or to compel his Norman nobles to swear an oath of loyalty to her – moves that would have strengthened her claim to the crown. Normandy and Anjou shared a frontier and, as relations between Henry and his daughter and son-in-law deteriorated, the king spent his final months hurriedly reinforcing the border against his southern neighbour.

  It is at this troubled time, towards the end of November 1135, that a desire to go hunting brought Henry to the forest of Lyons in Normandy. The king was in his mid-sixties – a grand old age in those days – and had habitually enjoyed unusually robust health. There is no reason to suspect that this was not the case when he arrived at the forest. What happened next was set down by the chronicler Roger of Wendover: