by James Walvin
After the 1898 US acquisition (although sometimes only temporary) of new overseas territories such as the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico, the USA had come of age as a major international and imperial power. Curiously, sugar had been a major consideration in the way the USA tried to balance its domestic and global interests and obligations. In 1900, no other foodstuff had become so important in the USA and its international dealings.
By the early twentieth century, sugar had become vital to the US economy as a whole, not merely to the vested interests of refiners and manufacturers. It was an integral feature of economic and social life, and any threat to supplies – or to the price – of sugar could cause serious disruption to American life – with untold political consequences. This was confirmed in spectacular fashion, both in Europe and America, during the course of the First World War.
Today, it seems odd – far-fetched even – to suggest that sugar could have proved so instrumental an issue in international matters. Yet contemporaries were in no doubt. Arguments about sugar were not reserved for specialist journals or cabals of vested interests. The ‘sugar question’ was a deeply contentious issue with far-reaching international consequences. Sugar was not simply a domestic matter – it was an explicitly international problem concerning the rights of new territories and the responsibility of colonial power. In 1897, for example, the American Monthly Review of Reviews published an article entitled ‘Sugar – The American Question of the Day’.36
In 1900, sugar was widely discussed in newspapers and magazines. It was a source of political controversy and of economic theorising; it was a matter of political skullduggery and high diplomatic principle. Much the same was true a century later. Cuba and the USA entered the twenty-first century overburdened by a mutual historical legacy that had been conceived and nurtured in the story of sugar.
12
A Sweeter War and Peace
FOR CENTURIES, EUROPE’S slave empires had ensured that their metropolitan hinterlands would be avid consumers of sugar. When slavery vanished (in the British case, in a puff of self-righteous celebration), it left behind an unquenchable appetite for sweetness in all things. That taste continued to be sated by a changing mix of cane sugar from former slave colonies, from new tropical settlements, and from beet sugar yielded by Europe and America’s expanding beet industries. The British imported large volumes of German beet sugar, but that came to an immediate end with the outbreak of war in 1914.1
Sugar was big business in Britain itself, its importance visible enough in the form of refineries in many British port cities. London had been the home to Britain’s first sugar refineries, but the rapid expansion of the industry saw the proliferation of refineries at many of the country’s major ports – Liverpool, Bristol and Greenock – though the majority were in London. In 1851, for example, there were an estimated 1,200 ‘sugar refiners’ working in the city.2 But it was an industry which, like most others, changed in the nineteenth century with the rise of modern technology, which speeded up the process of refining cheap granulated sugar. Where it had once taken weeks to produce sugar loaves, now tons of granulated sugar spilled from London’s modern refineries in a matter of days.3 New machines also made possible the mass manufacture of a host of new sweets and chocolates. What had once been slow manual labour was now speedily dispatched by machines, as described by Henry Weatherley, a machine manufacturer, in 1865:
The large increase in the consumption of sweets, made from boiled sugars, in the UK during the last quarter of a century, has arisen principally from the cheapness and facility of manufacture, derived from the introduction of machinery . . .
Where it had once taken half an hour to make boiled sweets by hand, a machine now took a mere five minutes.4
Along with Hamburg, London had become a major trading centre for global sugar. The East End of London had been dotted with sugar refineries, mainly strung out along the river in Whitechapel and along the Commercial Road,5 but their numbers declined with the advance of sugar technology. In 1864, seventy-two British refineries processed 500,000 tons of sugar; by 1913 this had been reduced to thirteen refineries, but they were producing more than 1 million tons of sugar.6 The process of technological and scientific change transformed the food habits of Europe and North America after c.1850 and, as a result, millions of people turned to a new urban diet, all of which was discharged by modern machinery and delivered swiftly by new transport systems. Moreover, wherever we look, cheap granulated sugar lay at the heart of those industrial foodstuffs.7
Cheaply produced sugar and, from the mid-century, an era of free trade enabled sugar to consolidate its position as a central ingredient in the British diet. In 1810, the annual per capita consumption of sugar in the UK was 18lb. That had doubled by 1850 to about 30lb, rising ever further as the century advanced: 68lb in the 1880s; 85lb between 1900 and 1909; and a truly astonishing 91lb on the eve of the First World War – almost half as much again as the German average.8 By the mid-twentieth century, that had increased even further to 110lb. By this time, despite the staggering volumes of sugar being consumed, plant modernisation and corporate amalgamations actually saw the number of British sugar refineries decline, from thirteen in 1900 to seven in the 1970s.
Such enormous levels of sugar consumption, and the related levels of imports of cane and beet sugars, inevitably caught the eye of governments. Arguments about duties, tariffs, about protection for colonial sugars, and/or free trade, all ensured that sugar was as important a political issue in the twentieth century as it had been in the eighteenth. In both Britain and in the USA, sugar was basic to the nation’s diet and drink, guaranteeing that it remained at the heart of heated political debate in both Parliament and Congress.9
The British were in good company in their attachment to sugar. The Western world at large was thoroughly dependent on sugar by 1900. It was consumed in great volumes by all levels of society, in all corners of the world – clean across North America, in the expanding communities of Australia, and in every major country of Western Europe.
Australians led the way, devouring 107lb each in 1900, with the British close behind. This remarkable story, rooted in a colonial past, was transformed by the emergence of beet sugar which, by the mid-nineteenth century, had replaced cane sugar as the principal source of sweetener in Europe. Even in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, 80 per cent of Britain’s sugar came from European beet – and most of that came from Germany and Austria, whose imports had been greatly encouraged by the British abolition of duties on sugar imports. The result was that sugar was much cheaper in Britain than in Europe.10
The increasingly urban and industrial world of the midnineteenth century enhanced the position of sugar. In fact, modern industrial societies devoured sugar as never before. Looking back from 1936, an agricultural scholar claimed that the rise of sugar consumption was ‘the most significant change in the nation’s diet during the last hundred years’.11 This had come about partly because of the fall in sugar prices caused largely by the removal of duties, by the expansion of sugar production, and by the massive increased use of sugar in the industrial production of basic foodstuffs. Sugar became a major additive to other foods and drinks as it had been with tea and coffee for centuries. People did not consume sugar on its own – they added it to other foods and drinks. Whatever the British bought from their shops and corner stores – tea, bread, flour, bacon, jam – they also bought sugar, which, in the words of Peter Mathias, was ‘the greatest complementary commodity . . .’12 Now, however, manufacturers were also adding sugar to food before it reached the customer. Sugar was in the flour that made the nation’s bread, it was in the beer they quaffed by the barrel load, and it was added, in industrial volumes, to cakes, biscuits, chocolates and sweets. Above all, perhaps, sugar was poured into the astonishing range of jams which became a central feature of the diet of British people – especially poorer people. Jam factories sprouted throughout urban Britain, normally employing cheap female
labour. Jam companies evolved from fruit farms, which made the most of new canning and bottling facilities, and branched into jam manufacture in the late 1800s. Chivers and Sons, for example, grew out of an East Anglican fruit farm to become one of the country’s major jam producers. Marmalade – most famously perhaps Keiller’s of Dundee – grew almost by accident from a decision to convert unsellable Seville oranges into marmalade in 1864. They, too, used the new canning and bottling systems.13 Lipton’s opened their first shop in Glasgow in 1871; by 1914, they had 500 across Britain, all aiming at the working-class customer. One of their best-selling products was jam, which was made in a huge range of flavours in their own factories with the fruit grown on their own farms. But it was always manufactured with the copious addition of sugar.
Lipton’s jam factory in Bermondsey in 1892 churned out jams in enormous volumes, in a range of flavours and weights, and all promoted via aggressive, eye-catching advertising and promotion.14 The end result was that working-class diets, by the late nineteenth century, particularly for women and children, seemed to rely on sugar – highly sweetened tea, jam and bread. Social investigations of the urban poor from the East End of London to the slums of York confirmed, time and again, the importance of sugar and jam among the very poorest of British people. Millions of people found their basic sustenance in sweet jams spread on bread made from flour with added sugar, and all washed down with sweet tea. Not surprisingly perhaps, the emergent dental profession found abundant evidence of dental decay among working-class children in the late nineteenth century. For all that, doctors accepted that sugar was an important provider of energy for labouring people: ‘Its real value as a muscle-force-producing substance is not fully recognized.’15
For people with a little extra cash to spend, there were plenty of new foodstuffs to enjoy – although they were always accompanied by vast amounts of sugar in new industrial foods. Cakes and biscuits, sweets, chocolates, jams and syrups – all and more flew from the new industrial plants of the food industry, tempting the British consumer from the shelves of new retail outlets. Breakfast cereals (invented by Dr Kellogg in the USA in 1899 as a ‘health food’) quickly established themselves as an essential feature of the breakfast table. And once there, they were lavishly drenched with sugar. By 1912, the British could choose from sixty brands of breakfast cereal.16 But of all the new foods to establish themselves before 1914, few could match the impact and scale of confectionary products.
These years were most notable perhaps for the remarkable success of the major British chocolate companies – Fry, Cadbury and Rowntree. They blossomed via their modern industrial and technical production lines and distribution systems – Rowntree built their own railway line to link the factory to the mainline – and all operated in large factories. They also housed workers in neighbouring ‘model villages’. Almost everything they produced – chocolates and sweets – contained huge quantities of sugar. Around 1914, all three companies had a turnover in excess of £1 million, and images of their best-selling sweets and chocolates were festooned on billboards, in newspapers, on the sides of buildings and on buses up and down the land.17 Throughout the war that followed, just as in the Boer War, the chocolate magnates ensured that troops in the trenches received regular supplies of their favourite chocolates and sweets.
Alongside the chocolate manufacturers, the years before the First World War also saw the rise of major British manufacturers of cakes and biscuits. Many are familiar because their names survive to this day, although their corporate identity has often been swallowed by global conglomerates. These were the years when the British became a nation of biscuit lovers. In 1900, Huntley and Palmer manufactured 400 varieties of biscuits; Peek Freans had 200 varieties. They were stocked on grocers’ shelves alongside an array of jams, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, tins of highly sweetened condensed milk, and chocolates and sweets – all of which had been manufactured in large, modern factories. All these products, and many more, were cheap – and were filled with sugar.
They also accounted for a massive share of the nation’s sugar consumption – an estimated 110z of sugar were consumed by the average Briton each week.18 By 1938, for example, British homes consumed 1.1 million tons of sugar directly, but another 300,000 tons went into the manufacture of confectionary products.19 In the years between 1880 and 1914, when the expansive confectionary industry disgorged their biscuits, cakes, sweets and chocolates by the ton, the British per capita consumption of sugar increased by more than one third from 68lb to 90lb.20 The British were consuming vast amounts of sugar in their sweets, chocolates, cakes and biscuits.
The outbreak of war in 1914 transformed everything. So vital was sugar that, within days of war being declared, the British Government established a Royal Commission for Sugar Supplies. It was to mark a quite remarkable phenomenon, and one that was to last throughout much of the twentieth century – state involvement in the procurement, distribution and pricing of sugar. Here, at a stroke, was the most telling indication of the commanding position of sugar in the diet, politics and economy of the British people.21 Of course, this was only one aspect of the much broader story of wartime state intervention into most corners of the social and economic life of the nation. To fight the war that was declared in 1914 required the state’s involvement in, and control of, all sorts of commercial activity which would have been unthinkable in peacetime. Looking back, it is now clear that such state intervention – which was even more dominant and pervasive after 1939 – would not be easily removed. The state was here to stay and, among many other issues, the state thought it vital to manage the nation’s sugar.
The British Government responded to the loss of European beet sugar supplies by scouring the world for other sources – from Java, Mauritius, Cuba and other Caribbean islands. Sugar rationing was inevitable, and remained a working-class complaint throughout the war.22 And while the restrictions of wartime proved upsetting for consumers, government assistance and subsidy proved a boon to the domestic beet growers and refiners. For the next sixty years, the British sugar industry was to thrive on the back of state support.23
The enormous British military machine of 1914–1918 swallowed up huge quantities of sugar to feed its soldiers and sailors. Major confectioners – of jam and biscuits, of chocolates and sweets – were kept busy despite sugar rationing, providing the millions of men in uniform with the sweet essentials they had grown accustomed to in peacetime. Jam, rum and sugar figured prominently in the military’s basic foodstuffs. When Robert Graves left his public school to join the Army in 1914, his first meal at the front consisted of ‘bread, bacon, rum and bitter-stewed tea sickly with sugar’.24 There was sugar in the tea, sugar in the bread and rum extracted from sugar cane; and rum was vital on the eve of combat, that gulp of alcohol giving a much needed boost to men about to ‘go over the top’, lending an iota of steely resolve in the face of the horrors to come.
Wartime sugar shortages taught the British a lesson. The immediate post-war years proved a boom time for sugar refiners, as it did for their US counterparts. Anxious to learn the lessons of wartime, the British governments from 1921 began a vigorous promotion of the British beet industry to avert the problems caused by the earlier reliance on European beet. At the same time, they increased imports of cane sugar from imperial sources. Sugar began to arrive from new sources – Australia, South Africa and Fiji – and although the British beet industry went through hard times after the war, it survived in large part because of government help. The end result was a massive over-production of sugar, and a consequent political and economic balancing act between producers, refiners and government officials. In effect, the British sugar industry was subsidised by the British Government; taxpayers’ money went into the pockets of sugar-beet farmers. Unwittingly and unpredictably, sugar beet had become essential both to British agriculture and to the British consumer. Thanks to the taxpayer, beet farmers and refiners now showered the British people with unprecedented volumes of sugar. In the process,
the major sugar refiners emerged as a real power in the land, acquiring substantial wealth and influence, and insinuating themselves into a range of commercial outlets.
Until rationing intervened in the Second World War, British sugar consumption simply grew and grew – by 50 per cent between 1880 and 1939. In the century to 1936, there had been a fivefold increase in British sugar consumption. These were the years of falling sugar prices, and the years when sugar established itself – along with wheat and potatoes – as a key source of carbohydrate in the British diet.
Although working people relied on sugar for the energy needed in their daily labours, by the late 1930s British sugar consumption was fairly evenly distributed among all social classes. It also remained an important ingredient throughout Britain’s food manufacturing industry. Indeed, by then about 40 per cent of the sugar consumed by the British was in industrially processed foods. The list of those foods containing sugar is so familiar because it represents a modern-day problem, from chocolates to breakfast cereals.25
What added a new dimension to the entire question of diet was the development, in the early twentieth century, of the modern science of nutrition – the discovery of vitamins, amino acids and mineral elements. These provided scientists and medical officers with the means of studying the nature and quality of the nation’s nutrition. At the same time, there was a continuing social scrutiny and analysis of the extent and levels of poverty, and of physical well-being in the British population. From Charles Booth in London, to Seebohm Rowntree in York, through to the initial steps towards a welfare state guided by Lloyd George and Churchill before 1914, a vast body of literature had emerged about the nature and causes of British poverty. It was now widely accepted that between a quarter and one third of the urban population was poor, and existed on an inadequate diet. Bit by bit, the new nutritional sciences confirmed that such problems could not be solved merely by giving people more to eat; they needed different and better food.