Swindled
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In front of this body of mainly Radical and Liberal politicians, Hassall was given free rein to repeat most of his main allegations against contemporary shopkeepers—reading out a full list of all the adulterating substances he was aware of and elaborating their ways and means—but this time in a setting where he knew his words might influence law. Now he could wreak his revenge on all the swindlers of England. He even brought in some coloured confectionery and cakes to show the committee, so that they could see with their own eyes “how coarsely and grossly they are coloured”—with chromate of lead, red lead, Prussian blue, arsenite of copper. After displaying these gruesome sweetmeats, Hassall informed the committee that “there is sufficient in one of those cakes to produce some temporary derangement; and if a child were to be in the habit of easting two or three of those cakes, it might injure it very seriously.”98 The committee of bigwigs was evidently impressed by his dramatic evidence and asked Hassall a leading question, revealing their sympathy to his cause. “In the existing state of society do you think that caveat emptor should be changed into caveat venditor?”—in other words, should “buyer beware” become “seller beware”? Hassall did not hesitate to reply, simply, “Yes.”99
After questioning numerous other witnesses—scientists, MPs, apothecaries, shopkeepers, and commercial men—the committee reported that “We cannot avoid the conclusion that adulteration widely prevails.”100 In 1860, Britain finally passed its first general Adulteration Act, which owed its existence largely to the publicity of Hassall and the Lancet, coupled with the political activism of Postgate and Scholefield. Now, at last, it was illegal in Britain knowingly to sell adulterated food as pure. The act also made it possible for local authorities to appoint food analysts. It has been heralded as the “first food law framed in the interests of the purchaser”—the first food law in which the rule of caveat emptor was replaced by caveat venditor.
But unfortunately, even its supporters acknowledged that in practice this new law was almost completely useless. The main trouble was that, while the act permitted local authorities to check food, it did not require them to do so. And since they were not required to do so, only two local authorities in the whole of Britain bothered to enforce the new law with any vigour. Another trouble was that the new law—following Hassall’s lead here—defined adulteration very narrowly in terms of intent. This offered a great get-out clause for sellers, meaning that the dishonest had little to fear from the new legislation. Swindlers could be convicted only if it could be proven that they personally had an intention to deceive, which was, in most cases, virtually impossible to show; the grocer who sold fake tea could say that it had come to him in this form from China. And even if convicted, the most shopkeepers had to fear was usually a fine.101 This new law effectively did nothing to protect the individual consumer. “No good resulted from it,” wrote the distinguished food analyst Henry Letheby ten years later, “and it really stands upon the statute book as a dead letter.”102 It would take a lot more than this to stop the lies of the adulterators.
Mustard, Pure Food, and the Resilience of Commerce
In his evidence to the Parliamentary Committee, Hassall had dared to express the hope that government might take more responsibility for the food the public ate. The example he gave was mustard. It is fair to say that Arthur Hill Hassall was obsessed with pure mustard, or at least obsessed with the impossibility of obtaining it. Forty-two times, he had sallied out on to the streets of London to purchase some pure mustard. Forty-two times he had been disappointed. On every occasion, he had been sold instead a mixture of mustard with “immense quantities of wheaten flour, highly coloured with turmeric.”103 He knew that some shopkeepers insisted that flour actually “improved” the mustard by lessening its pungency. But as Hassall remarked on another occasion, this was “sheer nonsense.” “The volatile oil is the very essence of mustard, without it the article would be worthless as a condiment, and the addition of wheat flour does not in any proper sense neutralize it.”104 This universal adulteration of mustard was such a problem, he thought, that perhaps the best answer would be “to compel the government to make its own mustard at a manufactory of its own”—government mustard. This way, universally pure mustard could be assured.
An early advertisement for Colman’s mustard. Unlike the mustards of Hassall’s day, Colman’s was at last entirely pure.
The idea is reminiscent of a medieval guild monopoly, or of the early socialists, who envisaged cooperative industry replacing that of the market. But in 1855, Hassall’s suggestion was so far beyond the pale, it was laughable. Far from being about to embark on manufacturing its own mustard, the British government needed a lot of pressure even to pass the limited and ineffectual anti-adulteration law finally adopted in 1860. When Scholefield first brought a more extensive anti-adulteration bill before Parliament, he was strongly opposed by aggrieved grocers and coffee dealers—the so-called shopocracy—who accused him of using “inquisitorial” methods on his committee. The Commons, many of whose members were themselves involved in trade, did not find any time for the bill in the whole of 1858.105 Later that year, a mass poisoning occurred in Bradford, when more than two hundred people were laid low and twenty killed by some lozenges. The lozenge-maker had intended to adulterate his lozenges with plaster of Paris but had bought arsenic by mistake. It was only because of this Bradford lozenge scandal that the government decided that the time had come to act. In 1859, Scholefield introduced a weaker version of his original bill, and this time it became law.
It is significant that the lozenge scandal that eventually impelled the government to act involved actual poisoning rather than mere deception. Everyone in British society could now agree that poisonous—or “injurious”—adulterations were a bad thing: no one really wanted to drink foul water or to kill their children with coppered sweets. More controversial was Hassall’s view that all deceptions in matters of food were bad, whether they were poisonous or not. His— extremely stringent—definition of adulteration was “the intentional addition to an article, for purposes of gain or deception, of any substance or substances, the presence of which is not acknowledged in the name under which the article is sold.”106
Not everyone agreed with this. A significant strand of opinion still reckoned that a bit of harmless adulteration was defensible as good for trade. At the Parliamentary Committee of 1855, a solicitor and chairman of a local board of health named Richard Archer Wallington gave evidence to this effect: “There is no understanding between the public and the seller that the seller shall give you what you ask for; neither do I think it beneficial that it should be so.”107 It was not a bad thing, Wallington thought, if people sold something as “coffee” that was really 75 percent chicory. “What the eye never sees, the heart does not grieve over.” In Wallington’s view, the only kind of adulteration that required definition was the poisonous kind. As for the other kind, it was “too extensive and undefinable” to deal with. It was best for commerce, thought Wallington, to ignore it. His position was echoed in a poem by the Irish man of letters William Allingham:
“The Great Lozenge Maker,” a Punch cartoon from 1858 referring to the poison lozenges scandal that year, which killed twenty people and led the British Parliament finally to adopt anti-adulteration legislation in 1860.
Adulteration is a form of Competition
Saith a British Manufacturer and Statesman;
Shall we write upon his monument the sentence?
There are many who will frankly hold it wisdom;
There are some who interpret it more subtly,
British trade is more or less a form of cheating.108
Cheating was not always the most profitable form of competition, however. Adulteration could be bad for trade, and honesty could be good. More dynamic branches of British commerce had spotted that the new public awareness of swindling could be turned to commercial advantage. After the 1860 act, the public were invited to submit suspicious food for analysis. The analyst Henr
y Letheby noted that in the nine years from 1860 to 1869, only fifty-seven articles were submitted, and of these, only twenty-six turned out to be of bad quality or adulterated. More than half the samples were “genuine articles” that “were brought to me with the knowledge of the dealers and with the evident intention of obtaining a certificate for trade purposes.”109
Similarly, the upmarket grocer Crosse & Blackwell did an ingenious job of transforming Hassall’s bad publicity into good publicity. In the original reports in the Lancet, a number of Crosse & Blackwell products were revealed to be thoroughly noxious. Crosse & Blackwell’s bottled gooseberries, for example, contained “a very considerable quantity of COPPER. An iron rod immersed in the fluid in which the fruit is preserved became covered with a thick coating of copper.”110 Copper was also present in Crosse & Blackwell’s pickled gherkins; while Crosse & Blackwell’s anchovies were tinted with a toxic red colouring. As publicity goes, this was ruinous. When you are selling “fine” goods to fancy customers, you don’t want them to imagine their stomach lining clogging up with copper like an iron rod.
Thomas Blackwell went on the counterattack with a speed and bravura that were impressive even by the industrious standards of the day. Step one was contrite admission; Blackwell fulsomely confessed that, yes, he had indeed been guilty of using copper in his pickles and preserves in the past. Step two was to remove all copper and other toxic colours from Crosse & Blackwell products. The third step was to market this new purity of Crosse & Blackwell’s pickles and preserves like crazy, as if it were a special improvement dreamed up by themselves, rather than something forced on them by bad publicity. Confession, contrition, remedy, ruthless self-promotion: as a marketing model for ensuring that all publicity can become good publicity, this has hardly been modified since.
At the 1855 Parliamentary Committee, Hassall indeed praised Crosse & Blackwell for having ceased to use copper as a greening agent. “For this change on their part, great credit is due to them, because in many instances by doing so they run counter to the wishes and tastes of their customers.” Hassall did have to admit, though, that the effect of this supposedly brave move had been “increased custom.”111 Thomas Blackwell himself also spoke before the committee, betraying just how much he had benefited from his “honesty.” Despite an initial falling off in sales, his customers were now “satisfied” that he had stopped using green colouring. “It is more to our interest to sell a pure article than an impure one, if parties will really take it,” he admitted.112 He used the example of anchovies. In Blackwell’s own opinion, the undyed anchovy was “a very unsightly colour, an unpleasant brown,” and he knew that “many parties” would still prefer the red dyed kind (for some reason, anchovies were traditionally dyed brick red, often using lead oxide). “But the less attractive form of the article will be a sort of guarantee to the public of its being genuine.” More discerning shoppers would learn to seek out Crosse & Blackwell products for their unattractive—hence natural—colours; the tan brown of their anchovies; the khaki green of their pickles; the muddy hue of their greengages. These muted hues would trumpet what every shopkeeper wanted every customer to believe: that their products were the most genuine of all. In the hands of Crosse & Blackwell, purity became a marketing device; and it has been so ever since.
From Adulteration to Packaged Purity
The 1860s and 1870s saw improvements for the British population, both as citizens and as consumers. Working men were given the vote and, with it, political responsibility. At the same time, the undesirable responsibility of the consumer for the quality of the food he or she bought was slowly shifted to sellers. Increasingly over this period, the interests of commerce converged with those of the consumer and of government to demand more honest food. William Scholefield MP died in 1867, the year of the Second Reform Act, but his activism was continued by Philip Muntz, another Birmingham MP and a fellow Radical. From 1868 onwards, Muntz, supported by Postgate and Letheby, doggedly brought new anti-adulteration bills before every session of Parliament. Initially, the government worried about losing the votes of shopkeepers. But by 1870, there was a new worry, which benefited Muntz’s cause—the fear that Britain’s reputation for adulterated food could damage its commercial standing in Europe. The foreign secretary in 1870 sent a questionnaire to all British consulates on the subject of adulteration, trying to gauge international opinion.113 It was one thing to be known as a nation of shopkeepers, and another to be known as a nation of swindlers; this was bad for exports. That same year, the government reversed its position and committed itself to supporting Muntz’s bill. Meanwhile, in 1871, a pressure group called the Anti-Adulteration Association (AAA) was founded to “amend and enforce the law against adulteration.”114 The association campaigned for the appointment of public analysts who could put the law against adulteration into practice. In 1872, this happened, when Muntz’s Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act was passed.
An advertisement for Crosse and Blackwell from 1855, claiming that the “superiority” of its pickles is too well-known “to need any remark,” even though just a few years earlier they were coloured green with toxic copper.
This act was a vast improvement on that of 1860. It was now an offence to sell a mixture containing ingredients designed to add weight or bulk, unless explicitly stated as such. You could still sell chicoried coffee or “cassia’d” cinnamon, but only if you said that was what you were doing. New local officers—public analysts—were given extensive powers to procure samples for analysis. It was clear that “the new Act was a great advance on its predecessor, more extensive in its scope and more vigorous in its enforcement.”115
There were still some teething troubles. Grocers protested vigorously at the fact that the new law no longer made knowledge of adulteration necessary to secure a conviction. An honest shopkeeper with dishonest suppliers could thus be punished for a crime he had no knowledge of. There was now a genuine law of caveat venditor. After the Conservatives won the general election of 1874, they appointed a select committee to examine the new law; this committee concluded that “some respectable tradesmen” had indeed been given undeserved penalties. There were doubts, too, as to the competence of some of the new public analysts, most of whom lacked Hassall’s skill with a microscope and could not agree among themselves about what exactly constituted adulteration: what should the minimum percentage of fat in milk be? Did the colouring of tea count as adulteration? These problems were addressed in the Sale of Food and Drugs Act in 1875, which dealt with some of the grocers’ grievances as well as giving a clearer understanding of what does and does not constitute adulteration. This act still forms the basis of British food law.
By the 1880s the worst horrors of the demon grocers were past. The improvement in British food during this decade has been called “spectacular”; “by the end of Victoria’s reign the consumer generally received his bread and flour, his tea and sugar, as pure as he could wish.”116 In 1872, thirty-six out of forty-one samples of tea were found to be adulterated with additives such as Prussian blue, substitute leaves, China clay, and sand. By the late 1880s, adulterated tea was the exception, rather than the rule. Similarly, the work of the public analysts showed that the percentage of adulterated bread had dropped from 7.4 percent in 1877 (already much lower than the 1850s) to 0.6 percent in 1888.
British food was safer now than at any previous time in the nineteenth century. Yet opinion often lags far behind fact, and the British public continued to believe that their tea and bread and pickles were regularly tampered with—as G. K. Chesterton’s 1914 “Song against Grocers” shows—long after they really were. This mood of nervousness was a gift for manufacturers and advertisers, who created new branded goods in this era, each one promising a unique trustworthiness. Lyle’s golden syrup, Bovril beef extract, Horlicks malted milk, Bournville chocolate; all these were first marketed in the 1880s or 1890s. In the 1840s, advertisers had pushed the ideal of the “genuine”; now, no less spuriously, they pushed the ideal
of extreme purity, with the implication that whatever was concealed in the packet was safer than the food lying open to view in the marketplace. Here lay the beginning of the packaging revolution.
Thus by a strange twist, the war on swindling had given new opportunities to the manufacturers of processed foods. There were tempting profits to be made, as we may see by returning one last time to the contradictory figure of Arthur Hill Hassall. Despite his invectives against advertisers, Hassall attempted on at least three occasions to market “pure” foods himself. After suffering from a severe lung infection, he had spent the period from 1868 to 1877 establishing a special hospital for treating patients with pulmonary conditions on the Isle of Wight—the Ventnor Hospital. On the side, he continued to analyse adulterated foods and wrote frequent letters to the press on the subject, pointing out, for example, the hazards of lead colouring used in postage stamps.117 It was noble work, but not profitable, and it is clear from his autobiography that he was desperate for wealth. Hence, his ventures into the world of commerce, the very world which he had criticized so effectively in the past.
Hassall believed, however, that what he was doing was different. When selling his foods, he would “always circumscribe the statements advanced” on the food’s behalf “within the limits of sober truth.” His first attempt at selling a pure food was in the 1860s—an unpalatable-sounding product called “flour of meat.” The idea was to create “an article analogous to wheat flour in fineness” but made from real meat, bought from Spitalfields, minced, pulped, dried, and pulverized. Hassall considered this product a “real triumph of manufacture” and marketed countless varieties: Flour of Meat Mixture for Soups, Flour of Meat Food for Children, the Aged and Invalids, Flour of Meat Cocoa, Flour of Meat Biscuits, Flour of Meat Lozenges. At first, Hassall said, “orders came in freely” and “success seemed assured.” But then there were complaints that the flour did not keep well, and Hassall had to admit that “these complaints were to some extent well founded.”118 That was the end of that. The company folded. Next, in 1875, he launched a food for invalids made from baked wheat flour, malt flour, diastase, and cerealine, but this—despite its very “pleasant” flavour, according to Hassall—was no more successful.119