6 
Feeding the nation
The standard of living
For historians of diet the second half of the nineteenth century presents something of a puzzle. Most economic and social historians are agreed that from some date around the Great Exhibition onwards the wealth derived from Britain’s predominant industrial and commercial position began to be shared to a growing extent by all sections of the community, and that perhaps for the first time the majority of the working classes began to enjoy a taste of the prosperity which was making us the richest nation the world had ever seen. Industrialization was still far from a completed process in 1850, but the extensions of the revolution which were now taking place were proceeding under more adequate safeguards with respect to the health and comfort of the worker, his wife and children. Factory Acts and trade unions were beginning to give him a new protection and a new status; industrial towns were ceasing to be the unorganized barracks of slum populations; above all, a brisk demand for labour was providing employment, a rising standard of life, and — what was new for the majority of wage-earners — some margin of income over necessary expenditure. Yet, even at the end of the period, there is massive evidence of poverty and ill-health, overcrowding, insanitary housing, and alarmingly low levels of nutrition among large sections of the population.
The years 1850–1914 in reality comprise not one but three periods with distinct economic characteristics. The first, lasting from 1850 until 1873, has often been selected as ‘The Golden Age’ of Victorian prosperity, a period of boom and rising prices under the impact of new gold discoveries in California and Australia, but also a time when average wage-increases more than kept pace with the rise in prices. Another favourable circumstance was that food prices rose less than most others, resulting in marked increases in the use of tea, sugar, and other ‘luxuries’. Beer consumption reached an all-time peak in 1876 at thirty-four gallons per head a year, though it is also noticeable that investments in savings banks and friendly societies, as well as subscriptions to trade unions, were mounting appreciably. Other classes, it is true, shared quite as much, and possibly more, in this prosperity. It has been calculated that profits grew faster than the total wages-bill at this time, and it is in these years that the solid foundations of many middle-class fortunes were being laid in commerce and wise speculation: how unequally the national income was still divided was startlingly demonstrated by Dudley Baxter in 1867.1 Some of the rich were getting richer, but the important feature of this period was that, contrary to Karl Marx’s prognostication, many of the working classes were taking the first great stride out of that poverty which had been their lot for a century past. Professor Bowley calculated that over this period there was a rise in real wages of 32 per cent, the main advance occurring from around 1860 onwards, but such estimates tend to under-represent the effects of irregular and casual earnings and periods of unemployment which many less skilled workers still experienced. In a recent study of living standards in the Black Country Dr Barnsby found sustained full employment only in the years 1845–55 and 1870–4, and concluded that there was no substantial rise in real wages until the 1890s.2
Improvement continued for most workers, however, between 1873 and 1896, a period of very different character which contemporaries designated the ‘Great Depression’. Newly industrialized nations like Germany and the United States were now seriously challenging Britain’s predominance, and we never again enjoyed the 40 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods which we had had in 1876. This was a time of falling prices and a lowering in the rate of growth of total industrial production: profits slumped badly in such staple industries as shipbuilding and iron and steel, and most of all in agriculture when free trade Britain became flooded with cheap imported corn and meat. But the ‘Great Depression’ was primarily a depression for landowners and capitalists rather than for wage-earners. For those who could keep their jobs — and unemployment probably reached a maximum of 10 per cent in the mid-1880s — falling prices brought increased purchasing power, and the lower cost of basic foods in particular left a bigger margin which could go towards providing a better and more varied diet. Real wages increased over the period by around 35 per cent, and there is a good case for selecting the 1880s as one of the decisive periods in the improvement of the standard of living of the working classes. Paradoxically, the period of the ‘Great Depression’ brought for some of the poor a significant advance in comfort, an enlargement of the social amenities of life, and the formation of new hopes and realizable ambitions.
From 1896 down to the outbreak of the First World War forms a third, and distinct, economic period. To the outward eye Edwardian England had recovered from the effects of the depression, and was never more affluent or more powerful. With income tax usually under a shilling in the pound, a luxury Mayfair flat for £150 a year, and a ‘general’ maidhousekeeper for £20 a year, the better-off classes could afford to live lavishly and often extravagantly: for many of them these were years of conspicuous expenditure and abandonment of the frugality of earlier decades in favour of amusement and indulgence. Despite the development of social services such as education and housing and the beginnings of National Insurance and old age pensions, all of which involved some redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer sections of the community, the national income was still divided in much the same unequal way described by Dudley Baxter. In 1911 another economic statistician calculated that one-third of it was received by an ‘upper class’ of 1,400,000 persons, while the working class of 39,000,000 had to be content with the same fraction.3 Moreover, the standard of life of many wage-earners was suffering some deterioration at this time due to a rise in the cost of living which was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in wages: the result was that the purchasing power of the pound fell from 20s in 1896 to 16s 3d in 1912. This came as a serious check to the steady growth of real wages which had been continuing since midcentury, and partly accounts for the widespread social unrest, the militant labour movements and revolutionary politics which marked the years immediately before the outbreak of war.
Although some progress had been made in the condition of the working classes since the middle of the century, it is important to remember that destitution was still an outstanding characteristic of industrial society up to the First World War. Between a quarter and a third of the whole population still lived in ‘poverty’, carefully defined by Rowntree as ‘earnings … insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of mere physical efficiency’. Rowntree had found in his survey of York, carried out in 1899, that 27.84 per cent of its citizens were living in poverty so defined, while a few years earlier Charles Booth’s investigation of London had given the closely similar figure of 30.7 per cent. In 1900 one in five of the whole population could still expect a pauper’s funeral from the workhouse in which they would end their days, and more than half the children of the working class would still grow up in poverty, undernourished and underweight, the target for epidemic and deficiency diseases which were still prevalent in English towns and villages. One in six babies of working-class parents died before reaching the age of twelve months, while in 1913 the President of the Board of Education admitted, on the evidence of the recently introduced medical inspection of elementary school children, that 10 per cent suffered from defective nutrition.4 The reports of Booth, Rowntree, and other social investigators at the turn of the century made it clear beyond dispute that poverty could not be shrugged off as the just reward of the specially idle or the specially improvident, but that it was a normal condition of industrial society; that although factors such as ill-health, old age, widowhood, and excessive expenditure on drink no doubt contributed to its extent, its primary and fundamental cause was simply inadequate earnings.
The money wages received by the working classes illustrate the trends previously described — some improvement from 1850 up to the late 1890s, followed by a levelling off from then until 1914. When Professor Levi drew up his Report on the Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes in 1885, he was in no doubt about the gains which had been made since the middle of the century:
With the enormous increase of wealth in the United Kingdom, the position of the working classes has likewise greatly improved. In a large number of instances working men of 1857 have become middle-class men of 1884…. Cases of rising from the ranks are by no means so rare as we might imagine. But working men of the present day are much better off than they were twentyseven years ago, for all wages are higher. In 1857 the wages of common labourers were 15s to 17s a week; now they are from 20s to 22s showing an increase of thirty per cent. In 1857 a joiner got 27s; now he gets 33s 6d or 36s with piecework… . Agricultural wages have risen more than thirty per cent, from 8s and 10s to 13s and 15s and even 18s a week. Domestic servants, formerly satisfied with £9 and £10 per annum, now easily get £14 and £16.5
Levi’s optimistic conclusion was that, ‘Now, unless wasted, wages equal, if not exceed, what is required for legitimate wants, and, if well thrifted, leave a surplus.’.
Ten years later, in 1896, W. H. Mallock was still optimistic in his account of Classes and Masses. The tendency of the modern industrial system, he believed, was to make the poor richer, the rich, on average, poorer, and, above all, to increase the size of the middle class. Like the political economist Giffen, he considered that the working classes had increased in wealth more rapidly than any other section of the community, and that nearly the whole of the advantages gained during the past half-century had gone to them.6 From 1896 onwards, however, the wage-earner in general ceased to make further gains. The agricultural labourer, still the poorest-paid of all workers, had added 5s a week to his wage since midcentury, but in 1900 he received, on average, only 14s 6d a week; the London compositor, once the aristocrat of labour, now had his 39s equalled by skilled fitters and exceeded by the iron-founder who could make up to 42s a week. Somewhere between the two extremes stood the great majority of workers in skilled and semi-skilled occupations — the carpenters with 10 ½d an hour, the bricklayer’s labourers with 7d, and the London dockers who, a few years earlier, had almost starved in a strike to win as much as 6d an hour. An experienced male shop assistant received 28s or 30s for eighty hours’ work a week, and a police constable up to 35s. In 1906 the wage census discovered that, ‘The weekly rates of wages (exclusive of bonus, if any) of over one-fourth of the adult workmen fell below 20s, and those of nearly two-thirds below 25s, while rather less than a fifth were rated at 30s or more’ On the eve of the First World War the typical wage-earner was still far from affluence, though one stage further removed from poverty than he had been for several generations past. Compared with his grandparents, however, he did have the advantage of cheap food — the result of free trade in imports, more intensive farming for the market, and lower costs of distribution. A weekly wage below 21s would still imply poverty for a family of two adults and three children, as Booth and Rowntree argued, but with flour at Is a stone, potatoes ½d a pound, cheese at 8d a pound, eggs Id each, frozen beef and mutton at 4 ½–5 ½d, tea at Is 6d, and sugar at 2d a pound7 there were clear gains for the majority of working people who lived above the ‘poverty line’.
Food consumption and expenditure
Food continued to be the major item of working-class expenditure throughout this period and a large part of the wage-increases gained was appropriated to it. It was noticeable, however, that as incomes grew the proportion devoted to food declined: it was calculated in 1885 that whereas the working classes spent 71 per cent of their earnings on food and drink, the middle classes only spent 44 per cent.8 Examining this phenomenon in greater detail, the Board of Trade in 1889 estimated that those with incomes of between £28 and £40 a year devoted 87.42 per cent to food, while at an income of £150 a year only 34.81 per cent was spent in this way.9 The neglected subject of food consumption and expenditure was beginning to attract considerable interest from economists and statisticians towards the end of the century, and from their calculations it is possible to construct a picture of the changing food habits of the English people in these years.
The first of all attempts to measure the consumption of a considerable section of the population was made by Dr Edward Smith in a Report to the Privy Council on the Food of the Poorer Labouring Classes, published in 1863. Smith had collected the weekly budgets of several hundred agricultural labourers and poorly paid domestic industrial workers such as shoemakers, needlewomen and stocking-weavers: see Table 11, p. 112 below. ‘The average quantity of food supplied’, concluded Smith, ‘is too little for health and strength.’10
It seems clear that the diet of these numerically large classes was as bad in 1863 as it had been earlier in the century, and that they were not yet sharing in the gains being made by other sections of labour. Yet, a few years after this, the economist Stephen Bourne was in no doubt that as a nation we were consuming much more food than we had even twenty
Table 11 Dr Edward Smith’s survey, 1863 (quantities per adult)
| Agricultural labourers | Indoor workers | |
| Bread | 12 1/3 lb | 9 ½ lb |
| Sugar and treacle | 7 1/3 oz | 8 oz |
| Butter, dripping, suet | 5 ½ oz | 5 oz |
| Bacon and meat | 1 lb | 13 ½ oz |
| Milk | l ½ pints | 1 pint |
| Cheese | 5 ½ oz | — |
| Tea | ½ oz | 3¾ OZ |
years before. He was most impressed by the greatly increased quantity of imported foods now consumed:
an increase totally out of keeping with that which has taken place in the population. The estimated number of inhabitants to be fed in 1854 was 27,800,000: in 1874, 32,400,000 — a difference of 4,600,000 or 16 per cent; whereas the supplies of food from abroad, after making due allowance for those re-exported, cannot be taken at less than 150 per cent more than they were twenty years ago. The reason for this is… that with increasing means of purchasing food, the quantity consumed by the mass of the people is greater.11
In 1881 a Committee appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science considered for the first time how much the population spent per head on food and other items. Since no official statistics existed for the home production of wheat, meat, and other foods, the Committee had to rely on estimates of yield made by agricultural economists such as James Caird, which cannot be regarded as much more than informed guesses. Even so, the figures arrived at probably indicate accurately enough the directions in which consumption habits were moving, and the timing of the Report is particularly useful for showing the changes which were beginning to be evident in the critical 1880s. It is interesting to find, for example, that more money was now spent on meat than on bread, and that the estimated consumption of 1 3¾ lb of meat per head a week compares closely with that of the present day. Potatoes were easily the most important vegetable food, with a consumption of approximately 6 lb a week, but more money now went on milk and eggs than on potatoes, and such ‘luxury’ foods as sugar, tea, and butter were taking high proportions of total expenditure. Beer and spirits, however, still accounted for more than 2d of the 9 ½d which was the average daily expenditure on all articles of food and drink. The complete calculation was as follows:12
| Total expenditure | Expenditure per head per day | |
| Bread | £77,500,000 | 1.41d |
| Potatoes | 33,200,000 | 0.64d |
| Vegetables | 17,000,000 | 0.32d |
| Meat | 99,800,000 | 1.87d |
| Fish | 14,500,000 | 0.26d |
| Butter and cheese | 36,000,000 | 0.67d |
| Milk and eggs | 42,000,000 | 0.78d |
| Fruit, etc. | 11,100,000 | 0.19d |
| Sugar | 27,000,000 | 0.50d |
| Tea | 15,300,000 | 0.29d |
| Coffee, etc. | 3,000,000 | 0.05d |
| Beer | 75,000,000 | 1.4d |
| Spirits | 40,000,000 | 0.75d |
| Wines | 9,000,000 | 0.16d |
£500,400,000 |
9.60d |
Average food consumption immediately before the outbreak of the First World War was calculated by Sir Alfred Flux as follows:13
Table 13 Estimated annual consumption per head of certain foods in the United Kingdom, 1903–13
| lb | |
| Fruit | 61 |
| Vegetables (other than potatoes) | 60 |
| Butter | 16 |
| Eggs | (number) 104 |
| Cheese | 7 |
| Margarine | 6 |
| Sugar | 79 |
| Meat | 135 |
| Potatoes | 208 |
| Wheat flour | 211 |
Professor D.J. Oddy has examined changes in food consumption between 1886 and 1914 in greater detail.14 It is clear that up to the First World War bread retained its place as the staple of English diet, total flour consumption increasing from 200 lb to around 220 lb per head per annum: it is likely, however, that this does not imply that more bread was being eaten, but rather more cakes, biscuits, puddings, and pastry. In their growing capacity to choose, people were not yet eating less of the cheap, filling foods, Professor Oddy’s calculation of potato consumption also indicating a small rise from 176 lb a head in 1889–93 to 189 lb in 1904–8:15 this may have been associated with more home cooking, given the increased availability of gas cookers by the turn of the century, and with the widespread popularity of fish and chips by this time. Average fish consumption increased from 25 lb to 30 lb a year over these years. But perhaps the best indicator of improvement in the standard of living was meat, the tasty, protein-rich food to which people always turned when resources allowed: Professor Oddy’s estimate of a rise from 96 lb a year in the mid- 1880s to 111 lb in 1909–13 is somewhat lower than that of Flux, though still suggestive of a substantial gain. Increased purchasing power also went on dairy produce, milk consumption growing from 15 gallons to 22 gallons a year and butter from 11 lb to 16 lb, well ahead of the new product margarine, which from its first appearance in the 1870s rose to 6.5 lb a year by 1914. Sugar consumption leapt after the abolition of duty in 1874 from 41 lb a year in 1861 to 87 lb in 1914.
In the consumption of drink there was a noticeable trend towards nonalcoholic beverages. Tea saw a spectacular rise from a mere 1.6 lb per year in the decade 1841–50 to 5.7 lb in 1891–1900 (Table 14). Coffee consumption more than doubled between 1850 and 1880, but subsequently fell as tea asserted its position as the national drink. The most rapid rise among the beverages was, however, in cocoa (virtually a new product in the nineteenth century), the imports of which grew from an insignificant 523,000 lb in 1822 to 22,440,000 lb in 1894, and per capita consumption from a mere 0.2 lb a year in 1870 to 1.18 lb by 1910. Most of this was for drinking, at home and in the several thousand ‘coffee publichouses’
Table 14 Tea consumption in the United Kingdom (including Ireland) 1850–190
| Period | Average number of lb of tea consumed per annum | Average consumption per head per annum in lb |
| 1851–60 | 65,160,456 | 2.31 |
| 1861–70 | 97,775,548 | 3.26 |
| 1871–80 | 144,462,622 | 4.37 |
| 1881–90 | 178,130,836 | 4.92 |
| 1891–1900 | 224,176,800 | 5.70 |
which flourished briefly in the 1880s and 1890s, but by this time substantial amounts were being used by the rapidly growing chocolate and confectionery industries which were beginning to rival the Swiss and Dutch imports.16 But the temperance movement, which had been active since the 1830s, does not seem to have had a major effect on the consumption of alcohol, which reached a peak in 1875–6 at 34 gallons of beer and almost 1.5 gallons of spirits per head per year. Thereafter there was a fall to between 28 and 30 gallons of beer to the end of the century, a rise to 32 gallons in 1900, and then a continued fall to 1914.17 In 1871 Leone Levi had estimated that 56 per cent of the whole population drank alcohol in some form, and at the end of the century Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell believed that men drank twice as much as women, giving an annual consumption of 73 gallons of beer and 2.4 gallons of spirits for every adult male.18 It seems that one of the most immediate effects of rising standards had been to increase the consumption of alcohol, but that this was gradually replaced by more varied and nutritious food and an increased expenditure on other comforts, and leisure pursuits.
Lower food prices were the major cause of the increased consumption of this period, and another reason for selecting the 1880s as a crucial decade in the improvement of English diet is the fact that the largest falls occurred then. Estimates drawn from a wide range of items show that the retail price of food in a typical workman’s budget fell by 30 per cent in the ten years from 1877 to 1887 — by far the most significant price change of the century. The immediate reason for this was the large-scale import of cheap wheat and meat, but a longer-term cause was the gradual lowering of taxes on food, wihch had been continuing since Peel’s free trade budgets of the 1840s. One of the biggest subsequent reductions was in the tea duty — from Is lOd per pound in 1853 to 6d in 1865 and 4d in 1890. Altogether between 1841 and 1882 taxes on tea, sugar, coffee, and corn were lowered from £15,800,000 to £4,800,000, while those on beer, spirits, wine and tobacco were raised from £18,100,000 to £37,300,000, a fact which tempted Leone Levi to believe that, ‘The financial administration of late years has been altogether in favour of our labouring classes. 19
Food supplies
Between 1851 and 1911 the population of England and Wales, which had already doubled during the first half of the century, doubled again from 17,900,000 to 36,000,000. This continued rapid growth in total numbers, coupled with an increasing consumption of foods of foreign origin, meant that Britain necessarily became much more dependent than formerly on imports for the supply of her food. Already in 1850 the day was passing when we could hope to supply ourselves even with the basic articles of wheat and meat, although it was not until the 1870s that imports of these became really sizeable: in the intervening ‘Golden Age’ English farmers had utilized the new agricultural machinery, rotational systems, artificial fertilizers, and other techniques of ‘high farming’ to go a long way towards self-sufficiency. The decisive change was the opening-up of the North American interior by railways, a process not completed until after the end of the Civil War in 1866. Only then could the vast quantities of wheat grown in the mid-western states be moved to the Atlantic ports for shipment to Europe, wheat so cheap that it could sell here, including transport costs, for half the price of home-grown grain. Most American wheat found its way into free trade Britain, which, since the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, had no restrictions on imported grain; continental countries, still protecting their farmers, kept it out by high tariff barriers. The result was that wheat prices in England tumbled from 58s 8d a quarter in 1873 to 26s 4d in 1893, bringing down the price of the 4-lb loaf to as little as 6d for the first time in the century. In the meantime, the volume of wheat imports had risen from 17.23 million hundredweights in 1857 to 50.97 twenty years later,20 and by 1880 English bread was made almost equally of home and foreign grain. This was not the end of the story. The decline of English wheat production continued with the emergence of Canada and India as large-scale producers towards the end of the century, so that by 1914 we imported more than 100 million hundredweight and British farmers contributed less than one-quarter of our needs. Nearly four million acres of arable land had passed out of cultivation in the process.
Many wheat farmers had turned over in the 1870s to meat production, and for a time the collapse of British agriculture was staved off. Meat imports, whether in the form of live cattle or preserved (usually salted) meat, presented serious transportation problems, and even in 1880 they accounted for only about one-sixth of total consumption.21 Preserved meats were generally very poor in quality and eaten only because of their cheapness — considerable quantities of dried beef known as ‘Hamburg beef’ came from Germany,22 and from the early 1860s onwards tinned boiled mutton and beef from Australia began to appear on the English market. The huge meat-canning firms of Chicago and Cincinnati came into the field about ten years later, starting with P.D. Armour in 1868. Tinned meat was regarded, with a good deal of suspicion on medical grounds and certainly most of it seems to have been very unappetizing: it came in big, thick, clumsy red tins which, on opening, disclosed a large lump of coarse-grained lean meat, fibrous in texture, with a large piece of unpleasant-looking fat on one side of it. Its only advantage was its cheapness — from 5d to 7d a pound, which was approximately half that of fresh meat. Improvements in processing and canning gradually raised the quality, and corned beef, which first appeared in 1876 and met initial resistance, soon became popular with the working classes because of the convenience of purchase by the slice. A much superior alternative from the United States which also appeared in the 1870s was, however, chilled beef, which commanded a price comparable with the best English and Scottish joints: packed in ice at a temperature of 29–30°F, it arrived in a soft state, its only disadvantage being its short life of 15–20 days from slaughter to the butcher’s shop.23 The import of meat on a large scale had to wait until the development of steamships with refrigerated holds which could bring whole carcasses across the oceans in perfect condition, and it took more than thirty years of experimentation in Australia and the Argentine before the first really successful cargo of frozen beef and mutton was brought from Melbourne to London in the S.S. Strathleven in 1880. Meat which had sold for 1 ½d a pound in Australia now fetched 5 ½d at Smithfield. Within a few years pork from the USA, beef from the Argentine, and lamb from New Zealand were flooding the English market. By 1902 the value of imported meat, either frozen or chilled, had reached nearly £50,000,000 and more than 56 lb a year was consumed per head of the population. Cheap and good imported meat had a major impact on the diet of the working classes, and although a market still existed among the better-off for the prime cuts of home-produced meat, the English farmer on the eve of the First World War contributed less than half our total requirements.
On a smaller scale, the growing supplies of fish in the second half of the century provided another important adjunct to diet. In the 1860s and 1870s the development of the steam trawler and the use of ice for preservation enabled the rich grounds of the North Sea to be tapped for the first time. Fish packed in ice could now be landed in excellent condition and dispatched by rail to inland towns the same day, and at the end of the century the introduction of the fast deep-sea trawler again extended the area of operations as far as Iceland, the Faroes, and the White Sea. The landed weights of British catches of wet fish doubled from 553,000 tons in 1887 to 1,140,000 tons in 1911:24 by this time the fishing industry was increasingly concentrated in the east coast ports, with Hull and Grimsby landing almost 40 per cent of the total English catch. The rise in popularity of the fried fish-and-chip shop seems to have coincided with the new supplies of cheap cod (and, possibly, of vegetable fats and oils) which became available in the closing decades of the century. Its origins are obscure, but it seems likely that it grew out of the hot-pie shop, which was well known in early Victorian England: fish was first added as a side-line, but ultimately triumphed over its competitor. Mayhew reported in 1851 that fried fish was hawked around the London pubs in the form of sandwiches, but when the French chip was added is not recorded. Lancashire claims to be the birthplace of the combination, and it was in Oldham that the engineering firm of Faulkner and Co. began manufacturing ranges for chip frying between 1870 and 1875. At all events, the fish-and-chip shop had become socially and dietetically significant well before 1900; it was the outstanding example in England of a gastronomic institution designed principally for the working classes, and there can be no doubt that it made an important contribution to the protein content of the urban diet.
By the early years of the twentieth century, mass imports from the New World and Australasia had almost halved the cost of bread and meat to the English consumer. It followed that many families now had more income available for dairy products, for fruit, vegetables, eggs, and other foods which had previously been eaten in only small quantities. The British farmer was not slow to respond to the new situation, and one of the principal ways in which agriculture recovered from the depression of the 1880s was by abandoning the attempt to share in the world’s grain markets and specializing in those things not so exposed to competition — dairy farming, market gardening, poultry rearing, and fruit growing. The acreage of land under small fruit, for example, increased from 15,949 in 1871 to 76,331 by 1914,25 one important result of which was the rapid growth of the jam and preserve industry from the 1890s onwards. Imports of fruit grew rapidly in the closing decades of the century, reaching a total of 11.3 million hundredweights by 1913; more than 7 million hundredweights of this were of citrus fruits, predominantly oranges, the average consumption of which stood at 14.7 lb a year. West Indian bananas, scarcely known until the late nineteenth century, were being consumed at the rate of twenty a year by 1914, and were credited with being more popular among the poor than apples.26 Again, the British farmer could by no means satisfy the increased demand for dairy products. By 1902, imports of these had reached the remarkable figure of £41,700,000, the principal items being Danish butter (£9.3m), Canadian cheese (£4.3 m), North American lard (£3.8m), and Dutch margarine (£2.4m).
The new methods of communication by railways and steamships were now bringing tropical and sub-tropical agriculture to the service of the English consumer in this period. The ‘new colonial policy’ which developed in the later decades of the century placed particular emphasis on the transplanting of cash crops to parts of the Empire, and although some of the attempts were unsuccessful, others opened up vast new sources of food supply for the mother country. Up to 1870, for example, more than 90 per cent of Britain’s tea still came from China, which, it had been assumed, alone possessed the necessary climate, soil, and technical skill for successful tea growing; after several false starts, commercial cultivation began in India in the 1830s and in Ceylon (after the failure of a coffee-planting experiment) in the 1870s. The success of Indian cultivation, in particular, was enormous, exports growing from 1,000,000 lb in 1860 to 100,000,000 lb by the end of the century. By 1900 India supplied 50 per cent of our requirements, Ceylon 36 per cent, and China a mere 10 per cent. In the same period sugar plantations from the West Indies were successfully introduced as far afield as Queensland, while the cocoa bean became an important export from the Gold Coast and Nigeria following the opening up of their interiors by railways. Products of tropical agriculture that were wholly new in the nineteenth century include West African palm oil, ground nuts from Gambia, and West Indian bananas.
The market for these and other transoceanic fruits — pineapples, peaches, and so on — developed as rapidly as the means of conveyance, whether in the refrigerated hold or the sealed can, could be contrived. The effect was greatly to enrich the nutritional value and the variety of English diet. Britain’s dependence on overseas sources for the supply of her food was, therefore, firmly established between 1870 and 1910, during which time the total value of all imported items rose from £77,000,000 to £219,000,000.27 Free trade had greatly reduced the cost of living of the consumer, and there were few before the First World War who dared oppose the almost axiomatic principle that Britain should export her manufactures and import her daily bread — Joseph Chamberlain and the Conservative party discovered in 1906 that to advocate the return of tariffs, even for the noble cause of Empire unity, was political suicide. The strategic implication of the policy of dependence was only realized in 1916 when German submarines threatened to starve the British people into surrender.
The food industries
In 1850 the food industries, if such they can be called — ‘trades’ was the contemporary term — were still generally small-scale and unrevolutionized, supplying narrow, local markets in much the same way as they had done for centuries past. Improved communications, technological changes, and the easier availability of capital were, by the end of our period, to transform many of them into large-scale, highly mechanized industries, concentrated into fewer units with wide distribution networks. The manufacture of food was, strangely enough, the last major industry to experience an ‘industrial revolution’.
The single exception to this generalization was brewing, which even at the beginning of the nineteenth century was coming to be carried out on mass-production lines in London and other leading centres. Significantly, London brewers had been among the first customers for James Watt’s steam engine, and already by 1815 the eleven leading firms were turning out two million barrels a year — perhaps one-fifth of national production.Three years later Parliament was astonished to learn that ‘they meet together like partners in one concern, and fix the price of porter’28 for it was common knowledge to a nation which had learnt its Adam Smith that any such meeting must ‘end in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. By mid-century the London brewers had entrenched themselves still further, and when George Dodd visited them in 1856 he was bound to admit, with some reluctance one feels, that they were ‘among the most complete manufacturing concerns in the metropolis’.29 He illustrated the vast size of their operations by a few statistics relating to Barclay and Perkins in Southwark — that the brewery covered an area of twelve acres, used 100,000 gallons of water a day, had a porter brewhouse as large as Westminster Hall and 200 store-vats with a capacity of 30,000 gallons each; 200 of the finest carthorses finally dragged the butts to the publicans. Outside London, however, the large brewer had not yet achieved a dominating position. In 1851, 2,200 Common Brewers accounted for 53.5 per cent of total production, but the remaining half was supplied by nearly 40,000 small publican brewers and beer-retailer brewers:30 centres of capitalist brewing like Burton, Norwich, and Liverpool were growing rapidly, but the small man was still important for supplying local markets with beers of various types and strengths. Shortly after this, however, he was almost to disappear. The growth of the ‘tied-house’ system meant that the large brewers were able to control assured outlets for their beer, while the development of a railway network gave them the ability to command national markets. Later nineteenth-century brewing history is characterized by the rise of large firms outside London and a marked trend towards amalgamation and concentration of production in public limited companies. Brewing was now by far the largest of the food trades with, even in 1870, an estimated capital of £41,000,000 and some 840,000 people engaged in manufacturing and retailing.31 Between 1880 and 1914 the decline of the small brewers was particularly rapid; by the later date only 3,593 remained, and forty-seven firms accounted for 45 per cent of all the beer brewed. The ten largest still produced a quarter of the total — a somewhat remarkable perpetuation of the position in 1815.
By contrast, milling only became a large-scale industry in the closing years of the century. From time immemorial the wheat grain had been ground between stones, first in the quern, later in the windmill or watermill, and finally in the steam-mill; in 1879 there were no fewer than 10,450 mills in the UK.32 With stone-milling it was very difficult to obtain more than one quality of flour from the same wheat — the practical separation was simply between flour and bran. Some advances had been made in the middle of the century which partly remedied this disadvantage. ‘High milling’ was introduced, in which the mill-stones were placed wide apart and some of the wheat was ground twice, and it was thus possible to produce a superior ‘Patents’ flour; also the use of silk gauze for ‘bolting’ instead of woollen or linen cloth allowed a finer separation of the bran than formerly. Already the time had passed when the English loaf was made from English wheat. By 1886 only 36 per cent of wheat milled in Britain was home-grown; millers generally preferred the ‘hard’ American wheat, both because of its cheapness and because it gave a higher yield of flour with ‘strong’ baking qualities. Its disadvantage was that it did not grind well between stones, producing a somewhat brown flour.33 The revolutionary innovation which gave the miller a far greater degree of control over the grinding process, and which was at the same time quicker and cheaper, was the introduction of roller-milling in the 1880s. The idea of crushing the grain between rollers was at least a century old, but no real advance was made until the invention of porcelain rollers in about 1870. Thereafter the process spread rapidly in Austria, Hungary, and America, and the first roller-mill was established in Glasgow about 1872. By 1878 Radford of Liverpool was operating one with a capacity of 3,000 sacks a week, and within a few years huge new roller-mills, concentrated mainly on the ports, had almost superseded the old method. Typical of the new miller-industrialists was Joseph Rank, who came from a line of millers in Hull. He first automated his windmill, then in 1885 borrowed capital to establish a roller-mill: around 1904 he expanded to London and South Wales, and by 1914 was milling two million sacks of flour a year.34 By this time more than 80 per cent of flour was roller-milled, and the trade was beginning to be dominated by a handful of large producers — Ranks, Spillers, Vernons, and the Co-operative Wholesale Society. Roller-milling at last made possible the production of flour of any desired degree of fineness. By the end of the century grain was being passed through some fifty machines involving eighteen pairs of rollers and eighteen purifiers before it emerged, usually in six grades of flour. Despite this, it was whiter and lighter than stone-milled flour, its baking qualities were improved, and ‘it had not had the life crushed out of it’.35 Moreover, the public’s demand for ever-whiter bread could now be satisfied legitimately, because in the rolling process the dark wheat-germ was flattened into a tiny flake which could be sifted off with the bran; previously it had been ground up with the flour and had darkened it. No one at the time realized that the wheat-germ was the principal source of the valuable mineral salts, fats, and vitamins of the wheat berry, and that it also contained a high proportion of protein.
The baking trade itself began to undergo some far-reaching and overdue changes in the closing years of the century. Until then, the oldest and most basic food industry had remained in an astonishingly backward state, as the factory inspector H.S. Tremenheere discovered in his report on the trade in 1862: ‘There is probably no branch of trade supplying a vast and constant demand which has so completely remained in the primitive condition of ministering to that demand from a multitude of small and isolated sources as the baking trade.’36 At this time there were more than 50,000 bakers and confectioners in Britain, almost all in a very small way of business; ten sacks of flour a week, which was an average in 1815, was still considered a fair trade in 1862, and only one firm, Nevill’s, did as much as a hundred. Again, technological changes had hardly begun to affect the trade, despite the fact that breadmaking machinery was now well past the experimental stage. Stevens, who had patented a cheap and efficient dough-kneader in 1858, found ‘Very few [bakers] who were disposed to free themselves from the prejudice which often interposes when something new is suggested’. The dough continued to be kneaded by hand by overworked, underpaid journeymen who spent up to eighteen hours a day in cellar bakeries infested with vermin and with no proper arrangements for ventilation or sanitation. The outraged authoress of The English Bread Book was disgusted to find the exertions of the half-naked journeymen were such as ‘to cause streams of perspiration to flow and mingle with the alimentary substance’.37
Improvements began in the 1880s, partly as a result of legislation38 but mainly in consequence of greater capital investment following the Companies Act, so that by 1890 William Jago, the great exponent of scientific baking, was able to report to the Royal Society of Arts that ‘The system of making bread in large factories rather than small bakehouses has of late made steady progress’.39 By the end of the century all but the smallest bakehouses had a dough-kneader, and other machinery was being employed for a variety of purposes unimagined a generation earlier — flour sifting and mixing, dough rolling and moulding, and so on. Equally important, the output of the average bakery had grown to fifty sacks a week. Increased mechanization, technical knowledge, and capital were at last coming to the aid of the baker, though growth in scale was still a slow process. By 1910 there were still only 21 multiple-shop bakeries, owning between them 451 branches.40 Some, like E. H. Nevill and J. and B. Stevenson, were becoming household names in London, while others also operated restaurants or cafés selling bread and confectionery as part of their catering trade: the Aerated Bread Co., established in 1862, was the first to do so, growing to 100 branches by 1900 but rivalled after 1894 by J. Lyons and Co. Even so, on the eve of the First World War the multiples probably only produced 1 ½–2 ½ per cent of all bread, the co-operative societies 6 ½–7 ½ per cent: the remaining 90 or more per cent was still baked by some 33,000 master-bakers.41 There can be little doubt that the public had also benefited in the process. The bread of 1914 was not only cheaper, but purer and better baked than it had been for a century past.
Of the new food industries which developed during these years, one of the most important was margarine, which first appeared on English tables in the 1870s. The invention of this cheap butter substitute was made by a French food technologist, Mège-Mouriés, in 1869, and considerably developed by American stockyard interests shortly afterwards, the original raw material being the softer part of the caul fat of oxen. The progress of the industry in America and Holland was remarkably rapid, and as early as 1876 England was importing over a million pounds of what was euphemistically known as ‘butterine’; production was only started here on a sizeable scale by the Danish manufacturer Monsted in Cheshire in 1889. Besides Monsted, who supplied the Maypole Dairy Company, the principal manufacturers were the two Dutch firms of Ven den Bergh and Jurgens: strong competition for outlets developed between all three, Van den Bergh eventually contracting with Liptons and Jurgens with the Home and Colonial Stores.42 In the 1890s, it was found possible to blend certain vegetable oils, particularly ground-nut oil, with the beef fat, and before 1914 some margarine was being made entirely of vegetable-oil mixtures. Great advances in the purity, taste, and appearance were made by pioneers like Storch, and the new product rapidly found an important place in working-class diet. Its nutritional disadvantage was that whereas beef-fat margarine had contained appreciable amounts of vitamins, vegetable-oil margarine contained practically none. The diet of the poorest classes in 1914, which often consisted essentially of bread made from roller-milled flour, margarine, and condensed skimmed milk was, therefore, a terribly impoverished one. This particular deficiency was not remedied until the introducion of Vitaminized‘ margarines in the 1930s.
Other food industries which grew rapidly from the 1880s onwards include biscuit, jam, and chocolate manufacture. The first two had been produced domestically for centuries past, but their development to factory industries was a result of the rising living standards of the later nineteenth century and of the new technologies which made mass-production possible. It is significant that biscuit manufacture on a commercial scale, pioneered by Huntley and Palmer at Reading, grew to importance at the time when bread consumption was beginning to fall, and so provided a new outlet for the flour of the roller-mills.43 The use of machinery to produce reliable standard quantities and qualities of flour and other ingredients was essential to the biscuit maker, whose reputation depended on maintaining a uniform product of high purity. By 1900 Huntley and Palmer were employing 6,000 workers and producing 400 varieties of biscuits compared with Peak Frean’s 200 varieties, though both were now experiencing strong competition from Scotland (McVitie and Price and MacFarlane Lang) and from Jacobs of Dublin.44 Machinery also played an essential part in the rise of the cocoa and chocolate pindustries: by the 1890s it was being employed for removing the shell of the bean, extracting the fat, powdering the cocoa, and moulding the chocolate, and the industry was already coming to be dominated by a trio of giant firms. Imports of cocoa retained for home consumption mounted from 4,006,000 lb in 1865 to 22,440,000 lb in 1894. Jam-making was possibly the least advanced technology in the years before 1914. The agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s was the event which compelled English farmers to search for new markets: before the discovery of means of storing fruit pulp to make jam out of season, the manufacturers added orange marmalade and other products in order to maintain a continuous output. It seems that the methods employed were purely empirical, for the jam-makers knew nothing of pectin and until about 1900 did not even use a jam-boiling thermometer.45 Nevertheless, commercial jam production expanded rapidly after the abolition of the sugar duty in 1874, when W.P. Hartley and Stephen Chivers entered the field and soon rivalled the earlier Dundee firm of James Keiller and Sons. Lipton began jam manufacturer at Bermondsey in 1892 and the CWS in 1897. Sales of jam by this time were enormous, especially in industrial areas where a sweet, highly flavoured spread that was cheaper than butter and made margarine more palatable quickly became popular.
Similarly, the manufacture of dairy products was little affected by new techniques until almost the end of the century. George Dodd had written enthusiastically in 1855 of the growing quantities of milk brought to the capital by rail, but outside London the best milk was still that produced by town and suburban cow keepers up to the time of the great cattle plague ten years later: after that dairymen were compelled to organize the trainborne supply more carefully and extensively. The development of milktrains was helped by the use of water-coolers at or near the farm, and large churns of tinned steel plate were introduced for conveyance between it and the roundsman’s cart. Milk bottles were beginning to appear by 1900, but only for milk that had been ‘pasteurized’ against tuberculosis by Pasteur’s method of heat-sterilization. Methods of preserving milk also date from the latter half of the century — dried-milk powder was being made by 1855, but the more important form was tinned condensed milk, which was pioneered by the American Gail Borden. As Margaret Hewitt has pointed out, the working classes were only able to afford the cheapest varieties of this, and although when the tin was opened it was probably purer than the cow’s milk they could purchase, it was devoid of vitamins A and D and of fats, and was made from evaporated skimmed milk; hence the prevalence of rickets among children to whom it was fed.46 Ian Buchanan has more recently argued that condensed milk was a major, indirect cause of the diarrhoea, gastritis, and enteritis which were responsible for up to one-third of infant mortality before 1914: the opened cans of this sugary fluid attracted the common house-fly which was the main infective agent of these diseases.47 In this instance — as in that of roller-milled flour — technology scarcely benefited the consumer. Buttermaking, however, was revolutionized by the invention of the centrifugal cream-separator in 1877, which enabled the larger dairies to economize both in the labour of skimming and in the space that had previously been occupied by the large shallow pans in which the cream had risen. Again, factory processes were advantageously applied to cheese-making following the work of bacteriologists on the enzyme-ripening agent; before the end of the century, factory-made ‘cheddar’ was being exported from the United States, Canada, and Australia and sold here for less than the home-made product. The application of science and technology to the food industries, both in methods of manufacture and in processes of preservation by refrigeration and canning,48 had made significant advances in the decades immediately before the outbreak of war and, with the exceptions previously mentioned, was having important effects in lowering the cost and widening the variety of the English diet.
The retailing revolution
The later nineteenth century also saw the beginnings of important changes in the retailing and distributive branches of the food industries. Of these, one of the most far-reaching in its effects was the growth of cooperative retail societies, which concentrated on supplying their members with foods pure in quality and moderate in price, and on the principle of distribution of profits as dividend to purchasers. The first societies of which records exist, dating back to the 1760s, were small corn-mills and baking establishments formed in response to the frauds and extortions of local traders, but the modern form of co-operative society began with the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale, a group of twenty-eight poor weavers who opened their little store in Toad Lane in 1844. They had been inspired the previous year by listening to George Jacob Holyoake, who had told them:
Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-baskets of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market.49
The principles of the Pioneers were simple and businesslike — to buy wholesale, sell, only for cash, at local retail prices, and to divide the profits among members as dividend at the end of a year’s trading. They began by selling flour, oatmeal, butter, and sugar, later tea and other groceries, later still coal, clothing, and furniture. To cut out the profits of middle-men, and so reduce the price to the member, was an important though subsidiary aim: the fundamental purpose was ‘to improve the moral character of trade rather than make large profits’. After the first few precarious years, the success of Rochdale gave a great impetus to the spirit of co-operation throughout the country, and in the years after 1850 scores of societies embodying the same principles sprang up, particularly in the north and midlands: in 1862 a Wholesale Society was established to supply societies with some of the goods they sold. But membership, on the strict basis of cash transactions, was not immediately open to the majority of the English working class, still tied by indebtedness to local tradesmen who, in the face of competition by the ‘Stores’, were now often more accommodating than before. As late as 1880 the total membership of all societies was only 600,000. The big advance came in the last two decades of the century, with the rise in real wages and the fall in price of foodstuffs. By 1914 there were 3,800,000 members and the societies had a combined annual turnover of more than £100,000,000. Co-operation was already playing a highly significant part in food retailing, and, with dividends of 2s 6d and more in the pound, in working-class savings.
Most consumers, however, both in town and country, continued to rely on the local shopkeeper for their groceries and other provisions. A new problem arose after the middle of the century owing to the rapid growth of suburbs round London and other cities, and was at first met partly by the extensive hawking of provisions by itinerant dealers. Henry Mayhew estimated that in addition to 30,000 coster-mongers, who generally worked the streets close to the markets, there were well over a thousand itinerant traders in 1861 in London alone, the largest group being the tallymen, who hawked tea and other groceries round the suburbs, selling the goods on credit and collecting weekly payments in satisfaction of the debts run up. Alternatively, larger dealers would advertise goods by handbills, and then send ready-made-up parcels all over London by van.50 This latter method seems to have played a large part in the rise of multiple- or chaingrocers, who depended primarily on their sales of packet-tea. The idea of retailing tea in sealed packets under a proprietary name had first occurred to the Quaker, John Horniman, in 1826, partly as a means of ensuring that his tea reached the consumer in a pure state at a time when adulteration was rife. His sealed, lead-lined packets acquired a high reputation, and by the 1870s his was easily the largest firm in the trade, with a sale of five million packets a year.51 In 1884 packeting was first put on a massproduction basis when the Mazawattee Tea Co. offered a high-priced, extensively advertised pure Ceylon tea. By the end of the century, the packet teas of such firms as Horniman’s, Mazawattee, Lipton’s, Lyons’, and the Maypole Dairy Co. had acquired a dominating position in the retail trade.
The prototype of the modern multiple-grocer was Thomas Lipton, who opened his first shop in Glasgow in 1871: ten years later he began his first branch in Leeds, and through the 1880s opened shops in most principal English cities.52 The principles of his success were to offer only a limited range of goods strongly in demand by working-class customers, bulk purchases, quick turnover, and low profit margins, and, like the cooperative societies, insistence on cash purchases. Lipton did not deal in tea until 1889, when be began his campaign by offering it at Is 7d a pound — ‘The Finest the World can Produce’; until then no tea had sold under 2s 6d a pound. His success was spectacular. By 1914 he had a grocery empire of 500 shops, and a score or more of imitators and rivals.53 John James Sainsbury’s expansion was of a rather different kind, remaining largely London-based before 1914. From his first dairy in Drury Lane in 1869 he gradually opened branches in the suburbs (Croydon in 1882, the first purpose-designed Sainsbury shop) and in middle-class southern towns (Guildford in 1906), appealing in their decor and wider range of products to a higher-income clientele. By 1914 he had 115 branches.54 More akin to the Lipton pattern of national multiples were the Home and Colonial Stores, established in 1888 and with 400 branches in many towns by 1914, and the Maypole Dairy Co., established in 1898, which carried specialization further than any by only selling butter, margarine, tea, and condensed milk until 1922.55 By the outbreak of the First World War the shopping habits of the working classes were being transformed by the rise of the multiples, offering goods of reliable quality at the lowest prices and at convenient times (often from 7 a.m. until 10 or 11 p.m.), and already threatening the existence of the traditional corner shop and open market. In 1910 114 grocery firms owned 2,870 branches and a mere 23 meat companies controlled 3,828 butchers’ shops.56
Intense competition was a leading characteristic of the food trades in the second half of the century, and it was partly a desire to reduce this as far as possible which led to the growth in size of units, concentration and amalgamation in both the productive and distributive sides of the industry. The policy of selling through assured outlets not available to competitive producers was seen most clearly of all in the ‘tied-house’ system of beer retail, which developed very rapidly at this time, although its origins can be traced back much earlier. A complaint appeared, for example, in the Monthly Review in 1773 that brewers ‘not content with such trade and gain as might fairly and spontaneously arise’ were buying up public houses in order to sell their own beers exclusively.57 Already by 1815, 14,000 of the 48,000 licensed houses in the country belonged to brewers, and in London nearly half the total. With the only outlets for their product severely restricted under a monopoly granted by the magistrates, it was perhaps inevitable that the great brewers should compete with each other to control them. Parliamentary committees complained in vain that the practice was ‘Very prejudicial to the interests of the community at large’58 by raising prices and reducing quality, but nothing could be done to arrest its continued growth. When the new class of ‘beerhouses’ was introduced in 1830 in response to demands for a freer licensing policy, a high proportion of the 123,000 established quickly became the property of brewers, or were tied to them by advances, while, in the closing decades of the century, the policy of reducing the total number of licences in the interests of temperance only led to a greater scramble for the few remaining ‘free’ houses. The Country Brewers’ Gazette complained in 1897 that ‘Brewers are competing one against another in such a ridiculous fashion that prices have been run up 200 or 300 per cent on the actual value of the houses’, while next year a Royal Commission reported that ‘tied houses’ now numbered 75 per cent of all the licences in the country, and that in many towns monopoly was all but complete.59
Although the public house remained the principal leisure centre of a high proportion of working people down to 1914, eating outside the home was still exceptional. The public house might offer bread, cheese, and pickles to encourage the consumption of liquor, and hawkers might bring round hot pies, sausages, and saveloys to tempt the drinker, but only with rising standards of living in the late nineteenth century did catering for the working classes develop on a commercial scale. One form, the fried fishand-chip shop, grew rapidly to an estimated 25,000 by 1914,60 and clearly met a demand for tasty, cheap, and convenient food available until late in the evening. Like the corner shop, these were generally very small-scale businesses, their proprietors barely removed from the customers they served. More closely related to the retailing revolution were the new chains of cafés and teashops which appeared towards the close of the century, catering for a respectable, though not affluent, clientele of clerks, female ‘typewriters’, and shoppers up from the suburbs. Modest chains of between twenty and sixty such shops, offering a cheap, limited luncheon menu, had already been established by the Aerated Bread Co., Lockharts, and Pearce and Plenty (steak pudding and potatoes 5d, tea Id), but the outstandingly successful venture was that of Joseph Lyons in 1894, financially backed by the tobacco business of Salmon and Gluckstein. Lyons‘ principles of respectability, quality, cheapness, speed, and cleanliness ensured quick success — to the extent of 250 teashops all over the country by the 1920s.61 In the years before 1914 the food trades as a whole, last of all the major industries to be ‘revolutionized’, were already becoming dominated by large-scale producers with highly mechanized plants and extensive distribution networks. Man’s most basic need was at last becoming big business.
Notes
1 Dudley Baxter’s estimate of the distribution of the national income covered approximately ten million persons in England and Wales in receipt of independent incomes:
2 Bamsby, G. (1971) The standard of living in the Black Country during the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review XXIV, 220–39.
3 Money, L.C. (1911) Riches and Poverty.
Income per annum Number of recipients (including families) Over £700 1,400,000 £160–£700 4,100,000 Under£160 39,000,000
4 Oddy, D.J. (1982) The health of the people‘, in Theo Barker and Michael Drake (eds) Population and Society in Britain, 1850–1980, 127.
5 Levi, Leone (1885) Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes, Report to Sir Arthur Bass, MP, 30.
6 Mallock, W.H. (1896) Classes and Masses, or Wealth, Wages and Welfare in the United Kingdom, 31.
7 Mingay, G.E. (1986) The Transformation of Britain, 1850–1939, 155.
8 Levi, op. cit., 65.
9 Board of Trade, Labour Statistics (1889) Returns of Expenditure by Working Men, PP LXXXIV.
10 Smith, Edward (1864) Practical Dietary for Families, Schools and the Labouring Classes, 202–3.
11 Bourne, Stephen (1880) Trade, Population and Food, A Series of Papers on Economic Statistics, 46.
12 Report of the 51st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1881) Report of the Committee … on the Present Appropriation of Wages, etc., 276 et seq.
13 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1930), 93, 538.
14 Oddy, D.J. (1970) The Working Class Diet, 1886–1914, unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis.
15 ibid., 30.
16 Othick, J. (1976) The cocoa and chocolate industry in the nineteenth century’, in Derek Oddy and Derek Miller (eds) The Making of the Modern British Diet, 78 et seq.
17 Dingle, A.E. (1976) ‘Drink and working-class living standards in Britain, 1870–1914’, in The Making of the Modern British Diet, ibid., 118.
18 Rowntree, Joseph and Sherwell, Arthur (1900) The Temperance Problem and Social Reform, pp. 5–6.
19 Levi, op. cit., 56.
20 Bourne, op. cit., 84.
21 ibid., 92.
22 Smith, Edward (1874) Foods (3rd edn).
23 McNamee, Betty (1966) ‘Trends in meat consumption’, in T. C. Barker, J.C. McKenzie, and John Yudkin, (eds) Our Changing Fare, 82–3.
24 Oddy, D.J. (1971) ‘The changing techniques and structure of the fishing industry’, in T.C. Barker and John Yudkin (eds) Fish in Britain. Trends in its Supply, Distribution and Consumption during the Past Two Centuries, 17 (Table 1).
25 Ernie, Lord English Farming Past and Present (new (6th) edn), with introductions by G.E. Fussell and O.R. McGregor (1961): Appendix VIII, ‘Agricultural statistics, 1866–1935’, 512.
26 Torode, Angeliki (1966) ‘Trends in fruit consumption’, in Our Changing Fare, op. cit., 115–28.
27 English Farming Past and Present, op. cit., Appendix VII, ‘Annual values of imports, 1866–1935’, 510.
28 Hansard, 1 May 1818.
29 Dodd, George (1856) The Food of London, 463 et seq.
30 Baxter, John (1944) ‘The organization of the brewing industry’, unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis.
31 Levi, Leone (1871) The Liquor Trades.
32 Hunt, Sandra ‘ The changing place of bread in the British diet in the twentieth century’, series of unpublished research papers sponsored by the Rank Prize Funds (Brunei University), ‘The structure and economics of the baking and milling trades, 1880–1914’, 1.
33 ibid.
34 Burnett, R.G. (1945) Through the Mill. The Life of Joseph Rank; Joseph Rank Ltd. (1956) The Master Millers, The Story of the House of Rank.
35 Ashton, John (1904) The History of Bread, chap. 8.
36 Report addressed to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department relative to the Grievances complained of by the Journeymen Bakers (1862), XIII.
37 Acton, Eliza (1857) The English Bread Book, 31.
38 On the recommendation of the 1862 Report, Acts were passed prohibiting nightwork by juveniles and compelling the inspection of bake-houses. For fuller details, see the author’s articles in the Bakers’ Review, 4 May 1962, 765 et seq., and 15 June 1962, 1011 et seq.; also, the author’s ‘The baking industry in the nineteenth century’ in Business History, June 1963,98 et seq.
39 Jago, William (1890) The Cantor Lectures on ‘Modern developments of bread making’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 38.
40 Jefferys, James B. (1954) Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950, 213–14.
41 Hunt, op. cit., 11–16.
42 Fraser, W. Hamish (1981) The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914, 159.
43 Huntley & Palmers Ltd was founded by Thomas Huntley in 1826 and by 1851 was already employing 300 workpeople. Carr’s of Carlisle owe their origin to Jonathan Dodgson Carr in 1831, and Peek, Frean & Co. Ltd was started by James Peek at Dockhead in 1857. (‘A saga of biscuit-making’, Grocer, Monthly Supplement, August 1956.)
44 Corley, T.A.B. (1976) ‘Nutrition, technology and the growth of the British biscuit industry, 1820–1900’, in The Making of the Modern British Diet, op. cit., 21.
45 Derry, T.K. and Williams, Trevor I. (1960)4 Short History of Technology, 694.
46 Hewitt, Margaret (1958) Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, 137.
47 Buchanan, Ian (1985) ‘Infant feeding, sanitation and diarrhoea in colliery communities, 1880–1911’, in Derek J. Oddy and Derek S. Miller (eds) Diet and Health in Modern Britain, 148–78.
48 For details of the history of canning of foods see J.C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham (1939) The Englishman’s Food. A History of Five Centuries of English Diet, chap. XVIII, ‘Preservation of food’; Historic Tinned Foods, International Tin Research and Development Council, publication no. 85 (1939).
49 Holyoake, G.J. (1908) The History of Co-operation, 270–1.
50 Mayhew, Henry (1861) London Labour and the London Poor, I, London Street-Folk, 509–11.
51 Day, Samuel Phillips (1878) Tea: Its Mystery and History, 58.
52 Mathias, P. (1967) Retailing Revolution, 98. (The classic work on the rise of the multiples.)
53 Waugh, A. (1951) The Lipton Story.
54 Boswell, James (ed.) (1969) JS 100. The Story of Sainsbury’s.
55 Fraser, op. cit., 114.
56 ibid., 116 (Table 9.1).
57 Monthly Review XLVIII (January 1773), 20.
58 Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the State of the Police of the Metropolis and … upon the execution of the laws relating to the Licensing of Victuallers, etc., 1817.
59 Royal Commission on the Liquor Licensing Laws, IX: Précis of Minutes of Evidence (1898), Q.22.242.
60 Cutting, C.L. (1955) Fish Saving: A History of Fish Processing from Ancient to Modern Times, 241.
61 Richardson, D.J. (1976) ‘J. Lyons and Co. Ltd: caterers and food manufacturers, 1894–1939’, in The Making of the Modern British Diet, op. cit., 163–6.