It begins in 1810, with the voyage of a recently commissioned East Indiaman merchant ship, the Astell, under Captain Robert Hay. The ship sailed to both Chennai (then Madras) in India and Bengal. And at some point in its adventures, it acquired a large, youngish elephant, who was given the name Chunee (sometimes spelled Chuny). Accounts disagree on the exact date, but in July of 1810 or 1811, Chunee arrived in London – and this is his story, even if it can’t possibly be the version he might have told himself if he could.1

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This was at a time when demand for exotic animals in the capital was high: the Tower of London had had one since the 13th century, but by the mid-18th, there were numerous establishments showcasing global fauna to the paying public.

An English edition of French naturalist Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom – a book which influenced Charles Darwin – contained this description of our particular pachyderm:

The fine specimen of the Asiatic… measures between ten and eleven feet in height, and weighs at least, by computation, between four and five tons. This huge mountain of flesh consumes daily three trusses of hay, and about two hundred weight of carrots and other fresh vegetables, together with from sixty to eighty gallons of water; this animal is observed, when turning the proboscis up to the mouth in feeding, to incline it always on the left side, which may be a specific and not an individual character, though certainly unimportant.

Chunee was quickly snapped up for public show. His first owner was Thomas Harris, who had been the proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre for about 40 years and always had a keen eye for a spectacle. He paid 900 guineas for the privilege (£945 then, around £50,000 now).

By December 1811, Chunee was in his first pantomime, Harlequin and Padmanaba, or, the Golden Fish, performed on Boxing Day. He wasn’t the only animal on the bill: in the same show, the clown was none other than the legendary Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) – now at the height of his career2 – who had hitched up a spaniel (some accounts say two) to four wheels of cheese to create a crazy pram to ride in. Yes, like this:

Disconcerting company for anyone, let alone an elephant.

A later account gives a little more detail on Chunee’s role:

Mrs. Henry Johnstone was his graceful rider, and he was ‘played up to’ by the celebrated columbine, Mrs. Parker, whose husband had a joint interest with Mr. Harris in the new performer.

Another show Chunee appeared in was Blue Beard, alongside the actor Edmund Kean (shortly before his fame as a Shakespearian actor – proving there’s sometimes hope for escaping panto). An 1878 account recalled how Chunee “had kept up an intimate acquaintance with Edmund Kean, whom he would fondle with his trunk, in return for a few loaves of bread”.

One of Chunee’s fans at these shows was Stephen/Stephano Polito, who had recently acquired a long-standing menagerie at the Exeter Exchange (aka Exeter ’Change) in the Strand; he renamed it the Royal Menagerie and Chunee was signed over to him to be part of it.

Our old friend Lord Byron was another celebrity met by Chunee. He notes in his journal in 1813:

There was a ‘hippopotamus,’ like Lord L—l in the face; and the ‘Ursine Sloth’ hath the very voice and manner of my valet—but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again—took off my hat—opened a door—trunked a whip—and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead.

After Polito died in 1814, this establishment was taken over by Edward Cross (father-in-law to Polito’s brother John), who had been the superintendent there for 20 years.3 And there Chunee would be based for the rest of his life. He was known in these early days for his gentle nature, and one keeper, John Taylor, later wrote of how we would sleep in close proximity to his beloved charge.

The engraver John Thomas Smith (1766–1833) wrote a memoir in which he recalled an encounter with Chunee when he was strolling down The Strand with a friend at night:

… just as he and I were approaching Temple Bar, about one o’clock, a most unaccountable appearance claimed our attention,—it was no less an object than an elephant, whose keepers were coaxing it to pass through the gateway. He had been accompanied by several persons from the Tower Wharf with tall poles, but was principally guided by two men with ropes, each walking on either side of the street, to keep him as much as possible in the middle on his way to the menagerie, Exeter Change; to which destination, after passing St. Clement’s Church, he steadily trudged on with strict obedience to the commands of his keepers. I had the honour afterwards of partaking of a pot of Barclay’s Entire [a dark porter ale] with this same elephant, which high mark of his condescension was bestowed when I accompanied my friend the late Sir James Winter Lake, Bart., to view the rare animals in Exeter Change—that gentleman being assured by the elephant’s keeper that if he would offer the beast a shilling, he would see the noble animal nod his head and drink a pot of porter. The elephant no sooner had taken the shilling, which he did in the mildest manner from the palm of Sir James’s hand, than he gave it to the keeper, and eagerly watched his return with the beer. The elephant then, after placing his proboscis to the top of the tankard, drew up nearly the whole of the then good beverage. The keeper observed, “You will hardly believe, gentlemen, but the little he has left is quite warm;” upon this we were tempted to taste it, and it really was so.

An 1814 advert for the Royal Menagerie gives us another detail of Chunee’s life, so profoundly divorced from its origins, as neighbour to a rhinoceros:

… in the adjoining den, in the same apartment, there is a fine large Male Elephant (indisputably one of the finest specimens of its species ever brought from India, and adorned with long ivory tusks); those, the two most formidable enemies in nature, are so closely united, and so reconciled, as to suffer to take their food from each other.

Astonishingly, the Royal Menagerie was upstairs in the building, too – and as Chunee grew, so his guided walks down the Strand came to an end, and he was fully imprisoned.

Should we be surprised, then, that things eventually went wrong?

The most detailed account we have is by Edward Cross himself – hardly an unbiased witness – and ran to nearly 5,000 words in William Hone’s Every-Day Book of February 1827. I’ll give just a few extracts. First, he sets the scene “when the animal’s increasing bulk and strength rendered it necessary to enlarge his den”:

With Mr. Harrison, the carpenter, who built his new den, and with whom he had formed a previous intimacy, he was remarkably docile, and accommodated himself to his wishes in every respect. He was occasionally troublesome to his builder from love of play, but the prick of a gimblet [gimlet – a sharp point] was an intimation he obeyed, till a desire for fresh frolic prompted him to further interference, and then a renewal of the hint, or some trifling eatable from the carpenter’s pocket, abated the interruption. In this way they went on together till the work was completed, and while the elephant retained his senses, he was happy in every opportunity that afforded him the society of his friend Harrison…

About six years ago this elephant indicated an excitement which is natural to the species, and which prevails every year for a short season. At the period now spoken of, his keeper having gone into his den to exhibit him, the animal refused obedience; on striking him with a slight cane, as usual, the elephant violently threw him down: another keeper seeing the danger, tossed a pitchfork to his comrade, which the animal threw aside like a straw.

Cross describes how he whacked Chunee with a shovel and rescued the man. He notes: “This was the first appearance of those annual paroxysms, wherein the elephant, whether wild or confined, becomes infuriated.”

What he appears to be describing here is ‘musth’, a long-known, huge rise in testosterone which causes bull elephants to become aggressive and seek dominance.4 Not ideal when stuck in a cage on an upper floor in central London.

Cross describes how he tried giving vast quantities of ‘medicine’ (mostly emetics) to Chunee with limited effect, and how as the years went on, Chunee’s temper got worse. And Chunee, being an intelligent animal, was quick to spot when Cross and his staff were trying to dose him.

Things escalated.

On 1st November 1825, Chunee killed one of his keepers, one Johann Tietjen – although this was in fact an accident, impaling the keeper when turning round quickly. But the damage was done – not least when early the following year Chunee began charging the entrance to his cage. Bribery began to fail:

In order to soothe him, some oranges, to which fruit he had great liking, were repeatedly proffered; but though these were in a pure state, he took them, one after the other, as they were presented to him, and dropping each on the floor of his den instantly squelched it with his foot, and having thus disposed of a few he refused to take another.

And Cross’s narrative describes the drama coming to a head:

The keepers faced him with long pikes or spears, to deter him as much as possible from efforts to liberate himself from the confinement, which at ordinary periods he had submitted to without restraint. When he lunged furiously at the bars, they assailed him with great bravery, and their threats and menaces prevented the frequency of his attacks.

Eventually, on 1st March 1826, soldiers with muskets were summoned to destroy the elephant. In Cross’s words:

he instantly received two bullets aimed from the rifles towards the heart; they entered immediately behind the shoulder blade, at the distance of about three inches from each other. The moment the balls had perforated his body he made a fierce and heavy rush at the front, which further weakened the gates, shivered the side bar next to the dislodged story-post, and drove it out into the menagerie. The fury of the animal’s assault was terrific, the crash of the timbers, the hallooing of the keepers in their retreat, the calls for “rifles! rifles!” and the confusion and noise incident to the scene, rendered it indescribably terrific. The assailants rallied in a few seconds, and came pointing their spears with threats. Mr. Tyler having handed two other rifles, they were discharged as before; and, as before, produced a similar desperate lunge from the enraged beast at the front of his den… The maddened animal turned round in his den incessantly, apparently with the design of keeping his head from the riflemen, who after the first two discharges could only obtain single shots at him. The shutter inside of a small grated window, which stood in a projection into the den, at one of the back corners, was now unshipped, and from this position Mr. Herring fired several shots through the grating. The elephant thus attacked in the rear as well as the front, flew round the den with the speed of a race-horse, uttering frightful yells and screams, and stopping at intervals to bound from the back against the front. The force of these rushes shook the entire building…

After the discharge of about thirty balls, he stooped and sunk deliberately on his haunches. Mr. Herring, conceiving that a shot had struck him in a vital part, cried out—“He’s down, boys! he’s down!” and so he was, but it was only for a moment: he leapt up with renewed vigour, and at least eighty balls were successively discharged at him from different positions before he fell a second time.

It goes on – but in the end it took around 150 shots to kill poor Chunee, like some sort of pachydermatous Rasputin. Soon afterwards, his body was dissected at the Royal College of Surgeons (watched by a crowd of the paying public),5 where his skeleton, after a brief tour, was then exhibited. But even this was finally destroyed when the museum was hit by a bomb in 1941. So it goes.

Chunee was a cultural phenomenon in death as well as life: plays, poems and pamphlets abounded as all of London discussed the drama. And there were some better outcomes, at least: within three years, Exeter ’Change was demolished (by decline, not by animal rage). Only a month after the death of Chunee, the Zoological Society of London was founded, and its new London Zoo in Regent’s Park opened in 1828, absorbing some of Cross’s collection (others went to his new Surrey Zoological Gardens) and at least giving them a better quality of life. London Zoo remains there to this day.

Perhaps, 200 years on, we have a better way of treating such amazing animals. Or perhaps we don’t.

(With thanks to Phil Wood, whose recent article in one of the magazines I edit sent me down this elephantine rabbit hole.)

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People have known for thousands of years that evaporating water (and, indeed, other liquids) has a cooling effect, but it wasn’t until really very recently that someone thought to actually study it. In 1755 the Scottish physician and scientist William Cullen (1710-1790) carried out the earliest known series of experiments into this phenomenon, as he reported in the 1756 paper Of the Cold produced by evaporating Fluids, and of some other Means of producing Cold:

A Young gentleman, one of my pupils, whom I had employed to examine the heat or cold that might be produced by the solution of certain substances in spirit of wine, observed to me, That, when a thermometer had been immersed in spirit of wine, tho’ the spirit was exactly of the temperature of the surrounding air, or somewhat colder; yet, upon taking the thermometer out of the spirit, and suspending it in the air, the mercury in the thermometer, which was of Fahrenheit’s construction, always sunk two or three degrees. This recalled to my mind some experiments and observations of M. de Mairan, to the same purpose; which I had read some time before… When I first read the experiments of M. de Mairan in the place referred to, I suspected that water, and perhaps other fluids, in evaporating, produced, or, as the phrase is, generated some degree of cold. The above experiment of my pupil confirmed my suspicion, and engaged me to verify it by a variety of new trials.

Inspired by the findings of his assistant, he then conducts a series of experiments himself:

I began by repeating the experiment with spirit of wine, and found, when I had taken the utmost care to have the spirit exactly of the temperature of the air, that constantly however, upon taking the thermometer out of the spirit, the mercury sunk several degrees, and indeed continued to sink so long as the ball of the thermometer continued wet with the spirit of wine. I found also, when the ball began to dry, and the mercury to rise again in the stem of the thermometer, that, if the ball was again dipped into the spirit, and immediately taken out, the mercury in the thermometer might be again observed to sink; and that thus, by repeated dippings, the cold produced might be rendered very remarkable. The cold produced was also observed to be still greater, when, between each dipping, the thermometer was moved very nimbly to and fro in the air; or if, while the ball was wet with spirit of wine, it was blown upon by a pair of bellows, or indeed if the air about the ball was otherwise any how put in motion… By taking these methods, I have, by spirit of wine, made the mercury in the thermometer sink from 44 degrees to below the freezing point; and, by employing some other fluids to be mentioned by and by, I have produced a sinking of the thermometer much more considerable.

The cause of the cooling effect is the phase change from a fluid to a gas: in a liquid molecules are held together by intermolecular attractions, to escape into the gas phase a molecule needs enough energy to overcome these attractions, what is called the latent heat of vaporisation. Put simply, when something evaporates it sucks heat out of its surroundings and uses that energy to separate the molecules. Cullen learned this through a series of experiments in which he discovered that more volatile liquids had a greater cooling effect, and that carrying out the test in a partial vacuum (created through the use of an air-pump) which lowers the boiling point of liquids and hence increases the speed of evaporation also resulted in more significant temperature reductions.

From the above enumeration I imagine it will appear, that the power of evaporating fluids in producing cold, is nearly according to the degree of volatility in each. If to this we join the consideration, that the cold is made greater by whatever hastens the evaporation, and particularly, that the sinking of the thermometer is greater as the air in which the experiment is made is warmer, if dry at the same time; I think we may now conclude, that the cold produced is the effect of evaporation.

Finally, he was able to create ice, the first recorded time this was done so with such a method:

In one experiment, before exhausting the receiver, the thermometer had stood at 50 degrees, and, after exhausting, we could judge very certainly that it sunk below 20. In another experiment made with the nitrous aether, when the heat of the air was about 53 degrees, we set the vessel containing the aether in another a little larger, containing water. Upon exhausting the receiver, and the vessels remaining for a few minutes in vacuo, we found the most part of the water frozen, and the vessel containing the aether surrounded with a thick and firm crust of ice.

A couple of years later, in 1757 and 1758, these experiments were repeated by none other than friend of Histories Benjamin Franklin! Franklin had heard about the discoveries from a Scottish scientist and carried out the work in Cambridge with the mathematician John Hadley:

By dipping first the ball of the thermometer into the ether, it appeared that the ether was precisely of the same temperament with the thermometer, which stood then at 65; for it made no alteration in the height of the little column of mercury. But when the thermometer was taken out of the ether, and the ether, with which the ball was wet, began to evaporate, the mercury sunk several degrees. The wetting was then repeated by a feather that had been dipped into the ether, when the mercury sunk still lower. We continued this operation, one of us wetting the ball, and another of the company blowing on it with the bellows, to quicken the evaporation, the mercury sinking all the time, till it came down to 7, which is 25 degrees below the freezing point, when we left off. Soon after it passed the freezing point, a thin coat of ice began to cover the ball. Whether this was water collected and condensed by the coldness of the ball, from the moisture in the air, or from our breath; or whether the feather, when dipped into the ether, might not sometimes go through it, and bring up some of the water that was under it, I am not certain; perhaps all might contribute. The ice continued increasing till we ended the experiment, when it appeared near a quarter of an inch thick all over the ball, with a number of small spicula, pointing outwards. From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day, if he were to stand in a passage through which the wind blew briskly, and to be wet frequently with ether, a spirit that is more inflammable than brandy, or common spirits of wine.

Being the polymath that he was, Franklin then realised that sweating cooled people down due to its evaporation. As far as I have been able to discover, he was the first person to reach this conclusion:1

May not several phaenomena, hitherto unconsidered, or unaccounted for, be explained by this property? During the hot Sunday at Philadelphia, in June 1750,1 when the thermometer was up at 100 in the shade, I sat in my chamber without exercise, only reading or writing, with no other cloaths on than a shirt, and a pair of long linen drawers, the windows all open, and a brisk wind blowing through the house, the sweat ran off the backs of my hands, and my shirt was often so wet, as to induce me to call for dry ones to put on; in this situation, one might have expected, that the natural heat of the body 96, added to the heat of the air 100, should jointly have created or produced a much greater degree of heat in the body; but the fact was, that my body never grew so hot as the air that surrounded it, or the inanimate bodies immers’d in the same air. For I remember well, that the desk, when I laid my arm upon it; a chair, when I sat down in it; and a dry shirt out of the drawer, when I put it on, all felt exceeding warm to me, as if they had been warmed before a fire. And I suppose a dead body would have acquired the temperature of the air, though a living one, by continual sweating, and by the evaporation of that sweat, was kept cold.

Once it had been discovered that it was possible to create ice using mechanical means, one might have thought that this discovery would soon be utilised to produce the stuff on demand. In fact it took the best part of a century before artificial ice production took off in earnest. In part this was down to simple engineering. Sure, you could use a bucket of evaporating ether to freeze some water, but this would rapidly use a load of (fairly expensive) ether. In order for the approach to be commercially viable a closed-loop system was needed whereby the gaseous ether (or similar substance) was captured and recompressed back into a liquid. High-quality seals and pumps were required, and, additionally, a means of dispersing the heat released from the liquefaction of the vapours.

The other factor was that while harvested ice was expensive, it wasn’t that expensive and so it was commercially challenging to build and run the machines required (even if the engineering challenges had been overcome). At the turn of the 19th century, you could buy a pound (0.5 kg) of ice in London for 1d wholesale or 2d delivered to your door (£7-14 or $10-20 in today’s terms). For sure it was something of a luxury, but nothing like the extent to which, say, a pineapple was.

In 1805 the American engineer Oliver Evans (1755–1819) was the first person to describe how vapour compression refrigeration could work, but his designs were purely theoretical. It wasn’t until nearly 30 years later, in 1833, that someone actually built a machine that could make ice. The person to do so was Jacob Perkins (1766-1849), sometimes known as “The Father of the Refrigerator", who both patented and built a working ice-machine. Except while he was undoubtedly the brains behind the invention, it was his associate, John Hague, who had the engineering skills to turn it into a reality. They were assisted by an apprentice engineer, John Bramwell, who wrote about their creation almost 50 years after the events, in 1883:

A small machine of this kind was made for Mr. Perkins by Mr. John Hague, the engineer, and Mr. T. R. Crampton (now, like Mr. Loftus Perkins, a member of your Council) and myself, who were apprentices at that time to Mr. Hague, assisted in its manufacture.

It was intended to use sulphuric ether in the machine, but as a matter of fact, it was put to work with the volatile liquid arising from the destructive distillation of caoutchouc, and it succeeded in producing ice, and in doing so in the height of summer. The apparatus was a small one, carried on a wooden base—according to my recollection, some five feet long by two feet or two feet six inches wide.

At one end there was a jacketed copper pan, the interior of which held the water to be frozen, while in the jacket was the volatile liquid and its vapor. The pan was inclosed in a wooden box, containing powdered charcoal as a non-conductor. From the top of the jacket a pipe was led away to the suction valve of an air pump, fixed in the middle of the wooden base.

From the delivery valve of this pump a pipe proceeded to the top of a worm, contained in a worm tub, supported on the wooden base, at the end opposite to that where the jacketed pan was. The worm tub was supplied with water, from an inlet at the bottom, and the escape was by an overflow at the top.

A pipe, in continuation of the lower end of the worm, was connected to the under side of a valve box, in which was a valve loaded to about fifteen pounds to the inch, so that the vapor in the worm was subjected to this pressure, as well as to the cooling influence of the water, and by these means was brought back to a liquid condition. From the upper side of the valve box a pipe proceeded to the bottom of the jacketed pan, to convey the liquid to it, thus completing the circuit.

This machine didn’t, however, herald the age of mechanical cooling. Only a single device was constructed, the seals and the pump remained challenging, and the refrigerants used were highly inflammable. It took the Scottish-born, Australia-based publisher James Harrison (1816–1893) to make commercial ice-making a reality. In 1851 he developed a machine that used a compressor to force the refrigeration gas through a condenser and thus liquifying it (and releasing heat in the process) – the same approach that we use today. His machine could produce three tonnes of ice a day, and was patented and sold around the world.2

Okay, so we have machines making ice, but this is supposed to be a history of air conditioning; how do the two connect? Well, the ice the machines produced was used for air conditioning. The first approach was very simple, and initially suggested by Dr. John Gorrie3 in Florida in the 1840s as a means of cooling fever patients – hang a large basin of ice from the ceiling of a room and let the cool air disperse down. This then advanced to having a load of ice in front of mechanical fans which would blow the cold to the desired location. Ice-cooling became a big deal, with theatres and auditoria using it widely in the second half of the 19th century. The 1,400-capacity auditorium of Scranton High School, for example, could get through six and a half tonnes of ice in a single evening.

This had the downsides of having to schlep tonnes of ice around, and having to deal with the resultant meltwater, so it wasn’t long before people began to experiment with the idea of cutting out the middleman (middle-ice?) and simply cooling the air directly. This would both be clearly more efficient, and also it would help address another problem: humidity. The extent to which the temperature of the air feels hot depends upon the amount of water it contains. I have felt cooler in a desert at 40 degrees C (104F) with very low humidity than I have in a rain forest at 30 C (86F) where the air is literally dripping.

In 1903 the new New York Stock Exchange building opened with a system developed by Alfred R. Wolff which worked to both cool and dehumidify the air in the building. By cooling brine and pumping it through coils in the ventilation system it was able to drop the temperature by ten degrees Fahrenheit and reduce the relative humidity by thirty percentage points. A year earlier, however, saw the development of not only the first electrical air conditioning unit, but also the formulation of cooling as an engineering discipline. Willis Carrier (1876–1950) was an engineer at Sackett & Wilhelms, a Brooklyn printing plant when he was tasked to solve a problem. It wasn’t that the workers were too hot (I mean, they likely were, but the management weren’t that bothered) rather the air was too humid, causing paper to expand and contract which threw multi-colour printing out of register.

Carrier approached this challenge not from thinking “how cool do we want this room to be” but rather “What condition do we want this air to have, and how do we maintain it?”. In 1911 he presented his “Rational Psychrometric Formulae” which gave engineers the tools to calculate what happened when air is heated, cooled, humidified and dehumidified. In 1915, he and several colleagues founded the Carrier Engineering Corporation4 specifically to design and sell systems for industrial air conditioning.

In 1922 he made a further breakthrough with the centrifugal chiller. Previously refrigeration plants used reciprocating piston compressors but were large and relatively inefficient. Carrier’s solution, a rapidly rotating centrifugal compressor, made cooling much more economical, and soon shops, cinemas, and theatres could advertise themselves as “places to escape the heat”. One such system was introduced at New York’s Rivoli Theatre and 1925 and they reported that it increased their box office take by $5,000 (over $100,000 today) a week.

We are still not quite at the air-conditioning that we see today. The next major step was made by Frigidaire (“Frigid Air”, geddit?) in 1929 when they introduced a split-system room cooler for home and small shops. The large, noisy condenser unit was separated from the in-room device and placed outside where it could dump the exhaust heat. These units were however both heavy and expensive and didn’t really take off. 1932 saw the launch of window units, developed by engineers such as H. H. Schultz and J. Q. Sherman. You will almost certainly be familiar with these, they handily sit on the window ledge and pump the heat outside. They were (and still are) both ugly and fairly noisy.

Finally, in 1968, Mitsubishi introduced a system in Japan where a small compressor/condenser unit was mounted on the outside wall of the house and refrigerant was run through pipes to long, shallow units that could nestle just under the ceilings in rooms – very much what I picture5 today when I think about air conditioning. The heat has abated in the UK since I started writing this series, but I am sure it is bound to return, if not later this year then next. Sometime in the winter (when demand is likely to be lower) I am going to get someone round to quote me for air conditioning…

A highlight of my trip was visiting the Isle of Lewis and Harris1 in the Outer Hebrides for the first time. It rained. A lot. But was magical. I’ll probably write about some of this elsewhere, but on the shelves of my Airbnb in Stornoway there was a book which caught my eye and I’m going to talk about this time. The book in question was Travels in the Western Hebrides from 1782 to 1790 by the Rev John Lanne Buchanan, published in 1793.

In his prefatory ‘advertisement’ to the book, Buchanan intriguingly notes,:

What I have written, I well know, will give offence to many petty tyrants: but I am actuated by motives of humanity, and of duty to the common Parent and Lord of all mankind. And I thank God, who has given me grace to speak the truth with boldness, notwithstanding the menaces of certain unprincipled oppressors.

And thereby hangs a tale…

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Full details of Buchanan’s life are elusive but we know he came from Menteith in Perthshire, was schooled in Callander and then studied at Glasgow University. On joining the (Anglican) Church of Scotland, he became the minister’s assistant at Comrie2 in his native county.

After that, he became the Church’s missionary to the Western Isles (aka the Outer Hebrides) – his observations on life there being recorded in his book. He was perhaps sent because of his knowledge of Scots Gaelic – even today, Lewis is the part of Scotland with the highest percentage of Gaelic speakers.3 In later life he lived in London, and the trail of his life goes cold in 1816.

In his Travels, Buchanan provides many details of life in the islands: what they wore, what they ate (“Potatoes and fish generally make up their first meal, and the whole family commonly eat out of one dish called the claar.” And cormorant broth) and where they lived:

The huts of the oppressed tenants are remarkably naked and open; quite destitute of furniture, except logs of timber collected from the wrecks of the sea, to sit on about the fire, which is placed in the middle of the house… These huts, being thus without locks to their doors, and without separate apartments, we need not be surprised to find the virtue of their women severely tried…

Oppressed tenants? And so we come to a big theme in his book. He describes in detail the hierarchical society of the islands, and particularly how some of the ‘tacksmen’ (who rented from the landowners, often their relatives, and held considerable power) treated the ‘scallags’ – peasant land labourers who were often little more than slaves. Buchanan even mentions other travel writers – including Thomas Pennant and Samuel Johnson – noting “none of them ever touched on the horrid island of Harris”.

In fact, in the book Buchanan claims “There is not, perhaps, any part of the world, where the good things of this life are more unequally distributed”. And extraordinarily, in the book he presents a long comparison between the lives of these scallags and those of black slaves in the West Indies. Here is an extract showing his numbered points:4

First, then, with regard to the respective conditions of their life, in general, it is none of their own chusing. The African, when he is not sold on account of some crime, is bereft of his freedom, and forced into slavery by fraud or violence. The Hebridean slave is neither, indeed, trepanned into slavery by guile, nor compelled by physical compulsion; but he is drawn into it by a moral necessity, equally invincible; by a train of circumstances which are beyond his power to control; and leave him no option, but either to serve some master as a scallag, or often to protract a miserable existence for some time, in the forest, and near the uninhabited seashores, where he may pick up some shell-fish, to perish, with his wife, perhaps, and little ones, through cold and hunger.

Second. With regard to labour. The negroe works only from six o’clock in the morning to six in the evening: and out of that time he has two complete hours for rest and refreshment. The scallag is at work from four o’clock in the morning to eight, nine, and sometimes ten in the evening.

Third. With regard to respite from labour. The negroe is allowed only one day in the week for himself. And this, too, is the portion of time allowed to the scallag.

Fourth. With regard to food. The negroe has a plentiful allowance of such common fare as is sufficient to nourish him; besides his little property in land, or peculium, which he cultivates for himself, on the evenings, after he is done his master’s work; and on Sundays, and other holidays. The scallag is fed only twice a day, when at hard labour for his master, with water-gruel, or as they call it, brochan; or kail, or coleworts; with the addition of a barley cake; or potatoes: and all this without salt. But, for his family, and for himself, on Sundays, or when unable to work through bodily indisposition, he has no other means of subsistence than what he can raise for himself by the labour of one day out of seven, from a scanty portion of cold and moorish soil… The negroe, if he be tolerably industrious, can afford, on Saturdays, and other holidays, with pepper-pot, a pig, or a turkey, and a can of grog. Nay, many a negroe, I am well assured, has been known to clear, besides many comforts for his own family, by the produce of his little property, from twenty to thirty, and even forty pounds a year: so that there is a fair probability, that any negroe would soon be enabled to gain the price of his liberty, if he desired and deserved it. Of relief from bondage, and woe, the scallag has not a single ray of hope on this side of the grave.

Fifth. With regard to lodging and clothing. The negroe is comfortably lodged and fed in a warm climate: the scallag is very poorly clothed, and still more wretchedly lodged, in a cold one. And, as the negroe is provided by his master with bedding and body clothes, so he is also furnished by him with the implements of husbandry. The scallag, with sticks and sods, rears his own hut; procures for himself a few rags, either by what little flax or wool he can raise; or by the refuse or coarser parts of these articles furnished by his master: and provides his own working tools…

Sixth. With regard to usage or treatment. The slave is driven on to labour by stripes, so also is the scallag; who is even, as we have seen, formally tied up, on some occasions, as well as the negroe, to a stake, and scourged on his bare back. The owner of the slave, it may farther be observed, has a strong interest in his welfare: for if he should become sick, or infirm, he must maintain him; or if he should die, he must supply his place at a considerable expence. There is no such restraint on the peevish humours, or angry passions of a Hebridean laird or tacksman…

Wow. Now, let’s straight off acknowledge that Buchanan clearly didn’t have a very accurate picture of the reality of African slavery. As a contemporary reviewer (in The Analytical Review, 1793) noted tartly: “This very flattering account must have been suggested to the reverend missionary by some person interested in the slave trade”.

But it turns out that Buchanan had a very personal axe to grind, and not one that puts him in a very good light. And he even tried to blame someone else.

In a postscript to his 1794 book A General View of the Fishery of Great Britain, Buchanan noted of the Travels that his “veracity… is questioned”, particularly over negative remarks about the clergy (some of whom were tacksmen) on Harris. Buchanan claims he was “unguardedly advised” by one Rev William Thomson, who offered to help prepare the book for press. Buchanan complains:

But that Rev. gentleman abused the confidence placed in him, and discharged his whole wrath against part of the clergy and others, under the said author’s name; though he durst not attack his adversaries under his own. These scurrilities the author disclaims, and he has since resented the indignity severely; and shall purge out all his dirty eructations from his second edition.

Strong words – but it seems a bit unlikely that the many pages of text railing against the tacksmen came from Thomson rather than Buchanan himself, who must have signed off the book for press.5

And thanks to some detective work by Dr Alasdair Maclean, who published an edition of the Travels in 1997, we have the answer.

Maclean reveals that Buchanan “was not provided with a manse, and he was obliged to accept the hospitality of Dr. William Macleod, the tacksman of Luskintyre, which hospitality he allegedly repaid in 1788 by being found in bed with one of the Luskintyre maid-servants.”

Buchanan was brought before a Church committee (the minutes of which provide all the juicy details over several years) and his denials were believed because he was a priest. But in November 1790, bed-hopping Buchanan was at it again, and this time got another woman pregnant. Then a month later, he was accused of the attempted rape of another woman – the wife of a tacksman – some years earlier. So the ‘severely tried’ virtue of local women… was being severely tried by him.

Buchanan offered bribes to be let off by the Kirk Session, but was found guilty and deposed. And suddenly it all becomes a bit clearer. Maclean writes:

The principal witnesses called for the prosecution included Dr. and Mrs. Macleod of Luskentyre. Dr. Macleod is the chief object of the charges levelled against tacksmen in his Travels.

Ah.6

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In the days before mechanical refrigeration many of the methods of keeping homes cool were architectural. Across the ancient world dwellings were constructed around a central courtyard, with thick exterior walls that lacked windows or other openings apart from an entry door. While such a design was clearly defensive, it also helped to beat the heat. The rooms would face a shaded, often colonnaded, courtyard that would frequently have a pool of water in the centre.

In Persian architecture there is a more ingenious feature that dates back more than three thousand years. The bādgīr (بادگیر, usually transliterated badgir, bādgīr or baadgir) takes it name from the words bād, meaning “wind”, and gīr, meaning “catcher” — it is, you might have already guessed, a “wind-catcher.”2 It is a tower built above a building with openings that catch the wind and funnel it down into the rooms below.

This would produce a nice breeze, and shift the stultifying air from the home, but when combined with a qanat it could really create something akin to air conditioning. Everyone is familiar with the idea of a well – you dig a hole down until it hits the water table, it fills with water, and you then haul the water to the surface. There is obviously a lot of work involved in lifting all of that water up, and there is another potential problem – the water table may not be accessible in a place where you want to use the water.

One solution to this would be to use windmills or animals to pump the water up, and then have it flow down channels to where it is needed. But this still takes a lot of work and you are likely to lose a lot of your precious fluid through evaporation. The brilliant solution devised by the Persians was to find an aquifer on relatively high ground then dig a gently descending tunnel from it towards lower ground where it will eventually emerge. This means that your water will be moved simply by gravity, and it will arrive cool and without loss at the point it will actually be used. It took incredible feats of engineering to create these qanats – one near Yazd was reported to be almost 50 kilometres (30 miles) long.3 If you were wealthy enough then you could have a pool of cold qanat water in your home that was constantly refreshed. Construct your bādgīr in a sufficiently cunning way then the air it delivers would blow across the water, cooled both by its temperature and the evaporation of the liquid, and chill your home in the heat of the summer’s sun.

Just as one could build up into the sky as a means of cooling a house, one could also dig into the ground. As anyone who has walked into a cave on a summer’s day will know, the surrounding earth and rock will take a long time to warm up,4 even in the harshest of heat, and so will naturally be cooler than the surface. I saw some perfect examples of this when I visited the Roman ruins in Bulla Regia, an ancient city in what is today north-western Tunisia, earlier this year.5 Wealthy houses had an entire second set of reception and living rooms built underground in a style known as subterranean domus. You might be thinking that these were crude cellars, but they were nothing of the kind. They had columns, courtyards, frescos, and some of the most beautiful mosaics I have ever seen. Combined with ingeniously constructed light wells they would have been very salubrious places to spend an August afternoon.

I remember reading, as a child, about how ancient Egyptians kept their homes and palaces cool by hanging up large mats of rushes, soaking them with water, and having slaves waft air through them, creating a pleasant breeze. I was excited6 to include this little historical detail here, only to discover, to my great disappointment, that there isn’t robust evidence to support it. In south Asia, however, we find Khus mats – traditional cooling screens made from the fragrant roots of vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides). They were hung over doors, windows and verandas and repeatedly wetted with water. Hot, dry air passing through the damp mat was cooled by evaporation, while the vetiver roots released a distinctive earthy, woody fragrance. Servants might splash the screens throughout the day, or things could be so arranged as to allow water to drip over them continuously.

Of course if you want to be really cool during the hot summer months what you really need is some ice. The Persians, once again, displayed incredible ingenuity thousands of years ago to ensure they could have access to this precious commodity year-round. They achieved this through building yakhchālhā (یخچال‌ها, literally “ice houses/refrigerators.”) for perhaps as long as 2,400 years.7 You may be familiar with ice-houses that survive in the grounds of British stately homes, but a yakhchāl was not simply some kind of cold cellar; it was usually part of an integrated ice-making and storage system. A classic yakhchāl complex had three main elements:

1. A long, high shade wall, usually running roughly east–west.

2. Shallow freezing pools on the shaded northern side of that wall.

3. A deep insulated ice store, often covered an enormous mud-brick dome.

During winter, water – often supplied from a qanat – was allowed into the shallow pools in the evening. The wall prevented the low winter sun from warming the water during much of the day. On sufficiently cold, clear, nights8 a layer of ice would form on the pool, and it would then be broken up and transferred into the yakhchāl's underground chamber. Straw would often be packed around the ice to provide additional insulation and this, in concert with the very thick walls, and holding the majority of the ice below ground, meant that it could survive through the summer.

As I mentioned earlier, ice houses were common features in the grounds of grand houses across Europe and beyond. They were also to be found in most towns and cities, with the ice being either harvested locally during the winter months, or transported there from colder climes. The harvesting and shipping of ice was for a long time a fairly ad-hoc business. Farmers and labours would cut the stuff from local ponds, it would be put on the back of horse carts, often packed with straw, and it would slowly make its way to where it was needed. Suffice to say there was little standardisation to the resulting product – the cutters would judge the ice by eye, and hack it out using whatever axes, saws, chisels and crowbars they might have to hand – it was very much a cottage industry.

The problem with this approach was one of packing efficiency. The owner of an icehouse would want as much ice and as few gaps of empty space in their precious building as possible. Similarly, if one wanted to transport ice by cart, or railcar, or even by ship every inch of wasted space was costing you money. Furthermore, the more gaps you had between the ice blocks you had, the greater the surface area exposed to the air, and the faster the ice would melt. Finally, irregularly shaped blocks were difficult to stack safely. Ice-cutting was ripe for industrialisation, and the man to do it was Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth (1802–1856). Wyeth grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where his father operated the Fresh Pond Hotel, close to, unsurprisingly given the name, Fresh Pond, a substantial body of clean water a few miles from Boston. By 1825 he was managing the ice-cutting operations of Frederic Tudor (of whom we will learn more shortly).

Frustrated by the lack of efficiency and poor quality of the traditional processes he devised a horse-drawn ice cutter (also known as an ice plough). Initially this consisted of two parallel iron runners or beams, spaced approximately the intended width of an ice block apart attached to which was a succession of steel cutting teeth. The teeth did not all project to the same depth; each successive tooth extended a little farther downward than the preceding one. As a result, rather than requiring one blade to gouge a deep trench through hard ice, the first tooth scratched a shallow groove, the next deepened it slightly, the next went deeper still, and so forth. While the cuts were deep, they didn’t go all of the way through the ice. After one pass had produced two straight parallel grooves, the cutter could be repositioned so that one part of the machine ran in an existing groove. That groove now acted as a guide rail, ensuring that the next cut was precisely parallel to the previous one. Once this had been completed across the whole ice field, the apparatus was turned by ninety degrees and the process repeated. The result was a perfect checkerboard of scored ice, from which rafts would be broken off, floated to the shore, and individual blocks separated using a crowbar, just as in the illustration above.

While Wyeth was clearly the engineering innovator, Frederic Tudor (aka Boston’s “Ice King”, 1783-1864) was the commercial visionary. At an early age he realised that a market for ice extended far beyond New England, and that far greater prices could be achieved if it were possible to ship it to tropical climes. In 1806 he purchased the brig Favorite and sent it off one the 1,500 mile (2,400 kilometre) voyage from Charleston, South Carolina to Martinique in the Caribbean, packed with ice from his father’s farm. The Boston Gazette reported at the time, “No joke. A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.” Sadly for Tudor, it did turn out to be fairly slippery – most of the ice melted on the voyage and he made a loss on the venture. Undeterred, he sent his brother and cousin out to secure ice monopolies across the various Caribbean islands, offering terms like these:

We wish you to procure from the gov' of Cuba a grant exclusive in which we offer you either to take a conces' of half or procure the privilege for us & we engage to pay you one thousand dollars with reasonable charges, in obtaining it you, however, to determine which you will do & write to that effect as early as possible.

The early years of Tudor’s business were, to put it mildly, challenging, but by 1810 he made his first profit (only to make losses in a number of the subsequent years).9 One thing in his favour was that it was ships returning to the West Indies, having disgorged their cargos of fruit and sugar in the US, were often empty, so filling them with ice was fairly cheap. Wyeth’s10 invention of the ice plough was a game-changer, for the reasons detailed above, and enabled Tudor to triple his ice production. In September of 1833 when one of his ships sailed up the Ganges in India few of the locals believed that it really contained ice, yet of the 180 tonnes that had started the long voyage 100 had survived. India would become his most lucrative market, and Tudor constructed elaborate ice houses there to store his product. One of these survives to this day, as the Vivekanandar Illam in Chennai.

Ultimately however Tudor’s business collapsed, due to the rise of the subject of my next piece: mechanical refrigeration.

Soon after Grahame’s first article was published in 1888, he got his first real break as a writer thanks to William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), a poet who was also the editor of the National Observer, a short-lived newspaper (1888–97) which published a number of major literary names of the era, among them Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. This was one of a series of editorships which, along with his own poetry, established Henley as a major literary figure of the late Victorian era (there’s even a sculpture of him by his friend Auguste Rodin, and it sits in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral).

But today, Henley is little known – remembered most, if at all, for his 1875 poem ‘Invictus’,1 which arguably became the anthem for the legendary ‘stuff upper lip’ of the British in his era. This stanza (there are only four) gives its core message:

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

… and it famously ends, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

This poem has echoed through history: Winston Churchill referenced it in a speech to Parliament during the Second World War; Nelson Mandela used to recite it to his fellow prisoners at Robben Island; and political prisoners and campaigners across the globe have referred to it.2

But the key thing I want to explore here is why Henley wrote this appeal to resilience in the face of adversity in the first place – and it was certainly not born purely of the imagination.

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Henley was born in Gloucester, eldest son of a poverty-stricken bookseller and stationer. He started school there, but his education was soon interrupted by bouts of both poverty and ill health – from age 12, tuberculosis infected his bones, and he had to walk on crutches. A determination not to let this beat him was apparent event then – “he hopped along blithe and gay on his two crutches,” his brother Joseph would later recall. Joseph also remembered an occasion when a local bully jeered at the pair, and William cast aside his crutches to engage in a fight.

By 1867, he had left school to seek work in London, but 1868 was his first annus horribilis: his father died in February and then William had to be admitted to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He would spend ten months there, and at some point during this period his left leg was amputated below the knee, replaced with a wooden leg – he was still only 16 years old. After his discharge from hospital, he lived in a variety of lodgings across London, and began writing for periodicals. But his health troubles persisted, and by 1872 the infection had spread to his other leg.

In this period, he had befriended an East End coffee house owner called Harry Nichols – when Henley was able, they would drink and walk the streets of London into the night, and thanks to the survival of William’s letters to Harry,3 we can get a first-hand insight into William’s life as his affliction began to dominate his life once again.

In 1872, William moved to Margate in Kent in the hope of benefiting from the sea air. From his lodgings, he wrote to Harry:

… there can no longer be a doubt that I have, literally, put my foot in it, and deeply too. I am afeard my marching days are over. The Bohemian you wot of lies a-dying: what sort of a monster will spring from his ashes I don’t care to anticipate. Something very different from the vagabond of old time, I doubt not… Mr Treves4 tells me that if it suppurates I shall have a devil of a time with it, for that indubitably the mischief will affect the bones. And you know what that means… No more walking between tavern and tavern in the night…

He is not immune to a young man’s interests, though:

And there are so many nice girls here. Or, rather, the girls look nicer here than elsewhere, and not without reason. Fresh and rosy, with loosened hair and all the brilliance of the summer sea in their eyes, my soul goes forth and embraces them all.

In early 1873 he was admitted to the Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary in the town. He wrote to Harry:

Here I am at last, my boy! With a straw bed, half a dozen meals a day, a superintendent to look after me, a parson to pray for me, and an agreeable young woman to tuck me in. So far, so good. Here I am and I intend making the best of it.

He was worrying about money (“I am indeed woefully impecunious”) but always optimistic: “My foot is decidedly better: I am inclined to discredit the necrosed bone hypothesis. On the whole I do not see any reason to doubt of my ultimate recovery.”

That was not to be – by the summer, his foot was worse again, and after hearing in London of a surgeon whose work was being famed, he travelled to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary to see him. That man was Joseph Lister (1827–1912) – the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. William wrote to Harry, “[I] am informed by Mr Lister that probably my foot’ll have to come off”. He was only just turning 24.

In the end, Lister was able to save his foot after all, but William would spend the best part of two years in hospital. In a letter to Harry, he gives us a close-up insight into the patient experience (look away if you’re squeamish!):

There was a long cut across the foot, from ankle to ankle, dividing vessels, tendons and everything, and laying open the affected bone, which in its turn was scooped out (gouge and pliers) so that a large triangular cavity was the result, the apex of which pointed to the toes. This cavity was filled with strips of lint steeped in carbolic oil; changed first of all every four hours, then every eight hours, then twice a day, then once a day, the leg itself being bandaged onto a long iron splint and the foot pulled out so as to expose every part of the internal surface of the cavity to the action of the oil. In this position it was left to granulate… to bring the lips of the wound together and leave them to unite and heal…

After his main operation, William would write to Harry:

Out of chloroform, I find my foot is still all there. Saturday, 30th August, the Professor says, ‘You can write and tell your friends that I have done what I could and that I am perfectly satisfied.’ Since then, going on as well as possible. For the present, therefore, my foot is SAVED!!!

(He also has high praise for Lister: “He is a great surgeon, my boy! Antiseptic surgery, his theory and practice, will have to fight its way, to fight for life. I think I am justified in saying that, next to the use of anesthetics, it is the most beneficent discovery of the century.”)

By May 1874, William’s spirits were as high as ever, and he is able to delight in the little things of life:

I am close to the window and through it I can see the grass-plat in the quad, the sweet sun shining on the daisies and dandelions, chasing the shadows slowly from point to point along the windows and flashing on the skylights, like the amiable tyrant he is. I can see the quick, bright sparrows fighting over the crumbs I throw them, the corpulent crows wandering about, breast-high in the grass, after belated worms, the hospital terrier, a jolly, ugly, lively, kindly dog, with the most intelligent tail I ever saw, larking with his friends, barking at the birds and flying (in fun) after the cats who come to sun themselves and snooze on the window-sills after their nocturnal philanderings.5

The boredom of being stuck in hospital also led to a literary flowering for William. He read widely, and wrote too, beginning his poetry collection In Hospital.6

It was in hospital that William met his wife-to-be, Hannah Boyle, whose brother was a fellow patient. He made lifelong literary friends, too: notably Leslie Stephen, whose daughter born a few years later would become best known as Virginia Woolf, and a young Scotsman, whose own life had been dogged by ill health of a different kind. He was the son of a lighthouse engineer, native to Edinburgh, and another aspiring writer: Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson wrote of this first encounter in a letter to his close friend Fanny Sitwell in 1875:

Yesterday Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a sort of poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed… Stephen and I sat in a couple of chairs and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace… He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there.

And who became the most famous character in Stevenson’s first major success, the 1883 Treasure Island? Long John Silver – the man with the wooden leg.7

Henley’s fortitude was exemplary – not just stoicism in the face of difficulties, but great cheer too. Tragically, his resilience would be tested yet further – his daughter Margaret died in 1894 at the age of five. She too left a strange literary legacy – as a lisping toddler she called another family friend, the writer J.M. Barrie, her ‘fwendy-wendy’, and this inspired him to give the name Wendy to the pal of his Peter Pan.

Without Henley’s influence, would we have had The Wind in the Willows or Treasure Island, or indeed some of the most famous works of Rudyard Kipling or W.B. Yeats, both of whom he gave literary breaks to by publishing them?

William’s own last published work was ‘A Song of Speed’ (1903), an enthusiastic hymn to the new motor car, an embodiment of his optimistic world view (“There be good things, Good things innumerable”). But alas, the world of speed would be his end – in 1902, he had fallen from a railway carriage,8 and this rekindled his TB, which finally killed him at home in Woking, Surrey, on 11th July 1903. So it goes.

Let’s end with the final poem of In Hospital, though – ‘Discharged’, the epitome of William’s sunny philosophy:

Carry me out
Into the wind and the sunshine,
Into the beautiful world.

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!
The stature and strength of the horses,
The rustle and echo of footfalls,
The flat roar and rattle of wheels!
A swift tram floats huge on us…
It’s a dream?
The smell of the mud in my nostrils
Blows brave—like a breath of the sea!

As of old,
Ambulant, undulant drapery,
Vaguery and strangely provocative,
Fluttered and beckons. O, yonder—
Is it?—the gleam of a stocking!
Sudden, a spire
Wedged in the mist! O, the houses,
The long lines of lofty, grey houses,
Cross-hatched with shadow and light!
These are the streets…
Each is an avenue leading
Whither I will!

Free…!
Dizzy, hysterical, faint,
I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me
Into the wonderful world.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

On the 15th of August 1977 Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope detected a radio signal, arguably the most intriguing one in all of human history. But no one at the time noticed.It wasn’t until a couple of days later when astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was reviewing the data captured during that observation window that it was noticed. He saw the alphanumeric code indicating the signal’s strength on the printout – 6EQUJ5 – and circled it. But this signal was so interesting, so potentially significant, that highlighting it in this way was not enough for him. He wrote a single word next to it to convey his reaction: Wow!

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What was so special about 6EQUJ5 that it should elicit such a response? First I’ll need to talk a bit about the Big Ear. The telescope could survey a single point in the sky for 72 seconds. If there was a steady signal transmitting from that point then, as the rotation of the earth swung the receiver through the signal, you would expect to see the power of that signal increase and then diminish as the scope entered the edge of the beam, then faced it full on, then slide out of it the other side. 6EQUJ5 was a record of that signal strength, and it perfectly represented just such a rise and fall. Or as the SETI Institute puts it:

The signal rose and fell as one would expect from a cosmic source fixed on the sky – moving into and out of the telescope beam as the Earth rotated.

SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” – wait, so am I saying that this signal came from aliens? We’ll come on to that. Even more interesting than the power of the signal was its frequency – in 1998 Ehman gave a value for it of 1420.4556±0.005 MHz, which is incredibly close to the 1420.4058 MHz of the hydrogen line. What’s the hydrogen line? It is the radio emission produced when a neutral hydrogen atom undergoes a tiny change in the relative alignment of the proton’s and electron’s spins. It is something that any civilisation sufficiently advanced to create such a signal would know, and had previously been proposed as a plausible “hailing frequency” between different civilisations who know nothing about each other other than the fact that they are able to send or receive just such a signal.

The signal was not perfectly on the hydrogen line, but had the source been moving towards the earth at around 10km/s then the Doppler shift could have explained the variance. As to where the signal came from, the possible location is in Sagittarius (roughly northwest of the globular cluster M55). A 2022 paper identified a particularly interesting sun-like star within the possible beam area some 1,800 light years away, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that this was the origin.

The Big Ear had two feed horns, and having been picked up by one, it should have been picked up by the other some three minutes later (or earlier). But it wasn’t. Also, because of the computer systems at the time, we don’t actually know which of the horns detected it (hence the two possible source locations). Despite repeated attempts, it was never detected again. In a 1994 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer Ehman said:

We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris.

Oh, so it was simply a signal from Earth bounced off something? That theory has more or less been ruled out now, including by Ehman himself. The consensus is that it came from somewhere in space. As to what might have created it, we will get onto that, but first we need to visit the lunchroom of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950. The physicist Enrico Fermi was sitting with his colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, when he blurted out “But where is everybody?” As Teller later recalled:

The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that, in spite of Fermi’s question coming out of the blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life.

The question framed what is now called “The Fermi Paradox”, which asks, given the vast number of stars and potentially habitable planets in our observable universe, why is there no clear evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations? A number of explanations have been proposed, and I will share a few of them now:

1. Life is rare, and intelligent life is exceptionally rare. There simply aren’t any other civilisations even vaguely close to us in astronomical terms. This is often called the “Rare Earth Hypothesis”.

2. Civilisations screw up before they can cross the stars, or broadcast strongly enough to them. Resources are drained, wars break out, diseases flourish.

3. The “Zoo hypothesis” – civilisations are aware of us, but are not revealing themselves so as to avoid messing with our development. Think Star Trek first contact principles. Related to that, there are already probes in our solar system, but we just can’t detect them.

4. The “Dark Forest” hypothesis – civilisations are out there, but they are not travelling, or transmitting, so as not to draw the attention of an even more advanced race which might destroy them.

5. Interstellar travel is simply much harder than we have previously presumed. This is the one that I am going to focus upon and suggest how it potentially might connect with the Wow! signal.

As a child I loved reading science fiction, and still do today as an adult. So many of these stories are predicated upon the concept that species can cross between the stars that to me, at least, growing up, it seemed that it would be inevitable that a suitable advanced civilisation would be able to do so – and if so, then where is everybody?

I don’t think that now, and the reason all comes down to energy. If you want to accelerate a mass of one tonne to 10% of the speed of light (enough to get you to the nearest star in about 50 years) then you would need to apply around 1.4 gigawatts of propulsive force to it for a decade (and then spend another decade slowing it down). In other words, you would need a propulsion system that has the energy output of a reasonably sized nuclear power station, and sufficient fuel to run it for 20 years, all weighing less than a mid-sized family car. And that would only be sufficient to get the engine to the star, it wouldn’t be carrying any payload, because more mass would require more energy, which would require a more powerful engine, and more fuel.

To say that this way beyond the scope of any technology that we currently possess is something of an understatement. Ah, but what about creating anti-matter drives? In theory such a thing is physically possible but currently wildly technically impossible (let’s not even get into wormholes through space and teleportation). One particularly detailed solution to this challenge was proposed in the 1970s, Project Daedalus. It theorised that a fusion engine on a ship weighing 54,000 tonnes could get a payload of 450 tonnes to Barnard’s star in around 50 years. It would achieve this by creating around 250 deuterium-helium-3 explosions every second for four years and would use magnetic nozzles to point the charged particles created in such a way as to drive the ship.

There are some problems with this. We have yet to create wholly net fusion energy (the reaction producing more energy than the whole facility consumes). Then there is the fuel, helium-31 is exceptionally rare on Earth (and, indeed, likely so on all rocky planets). There is a bit more on the moon, but you’d have to mine and process more than 100 trillion tonnes of lunar soil to extract enough for the ship (the original proposal suggested mining it from the atmosphere of Jupiter, which sounds pretty non-trivial to me).

But perhaps you don’t need an engine at all to power your ship? How about you have a solar sail in space, attach a probe to it, and fire a load of lasers at it from Earth and the photons bouncing off the reflective sail quickly accelerate the ship? That is the core concept of Breakthrough Starshot, which proposed accelerating a thousand 1 gramme probes to 20% of the speed of light using just a 4 metre diameter sail. There are a couple of problems with this idea though. To achieve it you’d have to fire 100 gigawatts (roughly the power consumption of a mid-sized country) of lasers at each sail for ten minutes. The sails would have to be essentially perfectly reflective to stop them vaporizing immediately. And if you could overcome all of that then you would have a one gramme probe, which couldn’t slow down on arrival, zipping past the star you are interested in at an incredible speed.

Perhaps I am fixating too much on speed. Maybe aliens would be happy to travel really, really, slowly across the stars, so instead of aiming for 10% of the speed of light, they are happy to settle for 0.1% of it. That would mean that for a close star the voyage time would be perhaps 5,000 years, and it could be that the nearest thing of interest would be 100,000 years away. We have no idea what alien psychology might be like, should it even exist at all, and they may well be happy to consign themselves to such vessels for generations – or freeze themselves or something – but that doesn’t alleviate all of the challenges. Put simply, things break down. The ship would be exposed to cosmic radiation and dust impacts. In the darkest of the void between the stars one cannot rely upon solar; you would need a power supply.2 None of this, again, is physically impossible, just very, very, technically challenging.

Okay, so they don’t send living beings at all, they send small, slow-moving, probes that have that common sci-fi trait, the ability to self-replicate. When self-replicating machines are proposed as a solution to a problem like this I think it useful to consider the following thought experiment. Imagine we have to send an autonomous probe to a pre-Anthropocene Earth and it has one task, to create a single iron nail from the resources of the planet. It would have to map likely landing sites from orbit, find, mine, and process the ore, then smelt it into a nail. This is probably not beyond our current technology level, but materially more challenging than, say, deploying the Mars Rover.

Now repeat that experiment, but this time the probe has to make an iPhone. Instead of sourcing one3 chemical element, you have to get hold of around seventy different ones, and honestly that isn’t the hardest part. You need to make the chips4 for it, which we do on Earth in fab plants that are among the most complex industrial facilities ever built. Hundreds of machines, upwards of a thousand processes, insane levels of precision and purity. But let’s say you can fit all of that on your probe. For it to be self-replicating it now has to be able to build a new fab plant (and so much more besides). And for it to spread to other planets, it then needs to be able to build and launch a new starship. Complexity begets complexity begets complexity begets complexity.5 The notion that such probes could be small is, with our existing understanding of technology, absurd.

None of this suggests that interstellar travel is impossible – rather that it is technically astonishingly challenging, and far beyond our current abilities. Ah, but those are our “current” abilities, look at the astonishing rate of technical progress we have made – surely it is likely that we will find better solutions to these challenges in the future?

While we have seen incredible technical developments over the last century, they have not been evenly distributed. Advancements in computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence have been breathtaking. When it comes to moving physical stuff around well, not so much. A jet engine built in 2025 is perhaps 30% more efficient than one built in 1975. The basic principles behind the internal combustion engines that still power the majority of our vehicles are the same as they were when the first such devices were built more than a hundred and fifty years ago. When it comes to space travel we have got materially better at building rockets that can land themselves and be reused, but the core propulsion technology has changed little in 60 years.6 The SLS rocket, for instance, uses RS-25 engines which use the core design of engines developed for the Space Shuttle in the 1970s.

While scientists and authors alike speculate about possible future advances, perhaps there simply isn’t a technical deus ex machina when it comes to space travel. We haven’t encountered another civilisation not because they don’t exist but because such an event would require so much time, so many resources, and so much risk, that it simply doesn’t make sense to even attempt it.

Now let’s return to the Wow! signal. Assuming that it wasn’t some random signal that somehow bounced off Earth, nor that it is a transmission from an alien civilisation, then what could have caused it? A number theories have been proposed. The most likely explanation is that a cold cloud of hydrogen somewhere in Milky Way might have been stimulated by an intense burst from a magnetar7 or soft gamma repeater8 and this briefly turned it into something like a natural radio laser, and that was the signal detected. Alternatively the signal could have been generated by a cloud of hydrogen enveloping a comet. This was once quite popular, but has now generally considered to be somewhat weak. There are other, generally considered less likely, options as well. None has been conclusively proved to have been the cause of the signal, but probably, one day, one of them (or something wholly new) will finally, if banally, provide the explanation that has been sought for almost fifty years.

But perhaps it won’t.

Perhaps the signal is artificial.9 Perhaps it was created by a civilisation that had reached the same conclusion that I have. That even though there might be other intelligent life-forms in the universe, they would never get to meet them. So instead they decided to dedicate their resources to sending a signal out into the cosmos. A signal that conveyed a single, simple, message:

You are not alone.

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Kenneth was born in Edinburgh in 1859. As I mentioned, his early life was touched with tragedy, with the death of his mother when he was only five and then estrangement from his father. But his schooldays were among his happiest, at the newly opened St Edward’s in Oxford, then right in the centre of the city (it would later move northward to the edge of town where it is today). There he won prizes, both sporting and academic, and became head boy.

(In 1913 he would be invited to write a piece for the school’s golden jubilee journal, which would be a charming short essay about the joys of solitary walking. I was recently invited to write an introduction to and annotate a new edition of this, and it’s now available to order in the U.S. from the wonderful Fiddler’s Green stable.1)

After school, denied a university education, he became a clerk as we saw last time, eventually promoted to the second most senior role at the Bank of England. But banking did not by any means take up all his time. In the late 1880s – in his thirties – he began writing short stories and essays for magazines.

These did well, and he was encouraged by the poet and editor William Ernest Henley2 to send a collection of his writings to a publisher. These were published in 1893 as Pagan Papers. This was quickly successful, aided no doubt by illustrations from the go-to artist of Decadence, Aubrey Beardsley. The book was soon followed by The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). Across these books Grahame demonstrated a vision of childhood – intensely imaginative and at odds with the dull cares of adults, but also distinct from Victorian schmaltziness by recognising childhood can contain fear and disappointment – and of a quiet mysticism. All the while, of course, developing his own more staid career in the bank.

But becoming a parent himself is what led to his most famous work: The Wind in the Willows.

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In 1897, Kenneth met aspiring writer (with one novella under her belt) Elspeth ‘Elsie’ Thomson.3 By all accounts, their marriage – they got hitched in 1899 – was an awkward one (and Kenneth’s sister Helen had tried to talk him out of it). She was loudly talkative and outgoing; he was solitary, stuffy and reserved. Many of their letters to one another were written in a weird baby language quite cringe-worthy to read today.4 But when they had a baby of their own, Alastair, born prematurely on 12 May 1900, he would become the focus of all attention.

Poor Alastair – soon known as Mouse – was born blind in one eye and with a squint in the other. Kenneth’s chief biographer Peter Green, observed rather bluntly: “He was a sickly, physically handicapped, sensitive but not over-bright child: and throughout his life he had to struggle with the image of himself which his mother created and steadfastly believed. Elspeth managed to convince herself—and did her best to convince everyone else—that Alastair was, in every respect, whether physical or mental, not only normal but brilliant. The boy’s whole life became a struggle to live up to the impossible ideal she set him…”

Alastair is hard to get a handle on, really – both peculiar (Green notes, “he used to lie dreamily in the middle of the road when motor-cars were approaching”) and precocious. In January 1905 (when Alastair was not quite four), Kenneth shared this anecdote about his son with a friend:

The other day when the doctor arrived he cocked his eye at his nurses whom he knew to be modest and shamefaced women beyond the ordinary, & began cheerily: ‘Hullo doctor! Are your bowels open to-day?’ One of the women stupidly begged him not refer to such things—‘it wasn’t nice’. This gave him the opening he wished for. ‘Not nice?’ he said furiously, ‘then what does he say it to me for? I didn’t begin it, he said it first!’

Stories of his personality abound: on one occasion he tried to break the bathroom door down because he wanted to speak to his bathing father; on others, he was known for kicking and hurting girls who were his contemporaries. There would be hints of Alastair in the infamous Toad.

By the time Mouse was four, Kenneth was inventing bedtime stories for him – with characters featuring “moles, giraffes and water-rats”.5 His public writing career had meanwhile largely dried up, a combination perhaps of the time-sink of parenthood and a residual shock from the Robinson incident at the bank.6

But all was not lost. In May 1907, Kenneth started to formalise those bedtime stories in the form of letters to his son. (He and Elise had taken off on holiday without him, and they were read to Alastair by a governess.) They initially began addressed to ‘My Dearest Mouse’ – but in a strange twist, from July seven-year-old Alastair insisted he should be addressed in them as ‘Robinson’, the name of course of Kenneth’s gun-wielding antagonist at the bank. Was this childish parroting of a name he had heard, a need to hurt his father for his absence from home or a more general note of spitefulness? (Mouse, for his part, would sometimes sign off as “thine bad boy”.) There’s a lot going on in these family dynamics, and it’s not my place to psychoanalyse.7

Urged on by Elsie, in 1908 Kenneth wrote these stories up, expanding them into a full-length book, initially intended to be published as The Wind in the Reeds (the name was changed for being too close to The Wind Among the Reeds by W.B. Yeats. The book struggled at first to find a publisher, and owed its success to Scribners in America more than Methuen in Britain. And, in fact, this might have been thanks to US President Theodore Roosevelt. He was already a fan of Kenneth’s works, and the author sent him a typescript of this new one, which Roosevelt said Scribners should publish!

In the same year, Grahame left from the Bank of England at last, though on health grounds. He would spend much of his retirement on walks around the River Thames, where his famous characters messed about in boats, or up on the ancient Ridgeway not far away. He would not write any more books.

As for Alastair, alas, life was not to go well. After happy times at school in Dorset, he was less so at Rugby School, Eton and then Christ Church, Oxford. In 1920, just five days before his 20th birthday, his body was found on a railway line near Oxford – the verdict was accidental death, but there were suspicions he had taken his own life.

After his death, Kenneth and Elsie would spend some years in Italy. J.L.G. Crookston, holidaymaker who encountered the author there on a walk, would reminisce in 1957:

He was a remarkable-looking man, striding across hill and dale, his Inverness cape swirling around him, his hair all swept up by the wind. On and on he went, solitary, absorbed in his own thoughts, until he vanished in the distance. I think he was deeply grieved over the loss of his son and I hesitated to intrude on his self-imposed isolation.

Kenneth and Alastair are now both buried at Holywell Cemetery in Oxford. Elsie, meanwhile, lived 14 more years after Kenneth’s death in 1932, and for all her frustrations with him in life, she would be the strongest advocate of him and his works.

As a final word from Kenneth Grahame himself, let’s finish on a lighter note. In 1919, a Professor Hill at the University of London was motivated to write to the author asking who had looked after Mole End, and fed Mole’s goldfish, while Mole was away on his adventures with Ratty. Grahame replied from his home in rural Blewbury as follows:

DEAR SIR,

The very natural inquiries contained in your kind letter which reached me this morning are probably best answered by a simple reference to the hopelessly careless and slipshod methods of the author whose work you are criticizing. But it may perhaps be pointed out in his defence, that Mole, though unmarried and evidently in rather poor circumstances, as incomes go nowadays, could probably have afforded some outside assistance say twice a week or so, indeed, living as he did, it would be almost a necessity. He probably then had a char-mouse in for a few hours and her dinner on certain days, and the animal would have cleaned up his whitewashing mess in a perfunctory sort of way: then, finding that her weekly pittance was no longer forthcoming, quite naturally and properly would have taken her services elsewhere, though from kindness of heart she might have continued to give an occasional eye to the goldfish.

In support of his theory, I would ask you to observe that our author practises a sort of “character economy” which has the appearance of being deliberate. The presence of certain characters may be indicated in or required by the story, but if the author has no immediate use for them, he simply ignores their existence. Take this very question of domestic service—however narrow poor Mole’s means may have been, it is evident that Rat was comfortably off—indeed I strongly suspect him of a butler-valet and cook-housekeeper. Toad Hall, again, must have been simply crawling with idle servants eating their heads off.

But the author doesn’t happen to want them, so for him they simply don’t exist. He doesn’t say they are not there; he just leaves them alone. To take another instance—the wretched fellow, ignorant as he is, must have known perfectly well that the locomotive on which Toad escaped required the services of a stoker as well as an engine-driver, but he didn’t happen to want a stoker, so he simply ignored him.

I think you will find that this same character-economy runs through all the classic old fairy-tales and our author probably thought that he was sinning (if sinning at all) in very good company. The modern method leaves so little to the imagination of the reader that it describes with insistent particularity the appearance of the taxi-driver who did not say “Thank you” to the heroine when she gave him 3d. above the legal fare from South Audley Street to Waterloo. Our author would have treated a taxi exactly as he would treat a Magic Carpet (which indeed is just what it is) and would not have given the taxi a driver at all. And this is right, for not one passenger in a hundred is ever conscious of the presence of a driver at all. They only see at the end a paw thrust out into which they drop something, and the taxi vanishes with a snort. Probably Magic Carpets had drivers too, but the authors of old saw that they were unessential to their stories, and ignored them.

Yours very truly,

KENNETH GRAHAME

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We need to begin with the games being played in English public schools in the middle of the 19th century. For non-British readers it is worth noting that the world “public” here does not mean state-operated and open to all. These schools were – and are – the antitheses of such establishments: all-male boarding schools that charge significant fees for the privilege of attendance. On the pitches of these schools a variety of games called “football” were being played and in time they began to codify their rules. The earliest surviving “school code” were the Rugby School laws, approved on the 28th of August 1845. The game they describe is, unsurprisingly, very different to football and, err, very much like rugby. The earliest surviving rules for Eton College’s Field Game date from just two years later, and include the crucial clause “Hands may only be used to stop the ball”. They also had an offside rule (which they called “sneaking”)2 in order to prevent attackers simply hanging around their opponent’s goal waiting for a ball to be kicked their way.

Schools including Harrow, Westminster, and Shrewsbury similarly had their own versions of the game, and in concert these educational establishments did much to form the institutional nature of the sports They made football games regular events where matches were attached to the school calendar rather than confined to an occasional festival. With boys representing houses, forms or schools, they encouraged fixed sides, with collective tactics and enduring loyalties. And they also debated, agreed, and recorded, codes for the game and then old boys took their rules to universities, military units, churches, businesses and adult clubs.

There was, however, a problem. It still wasn’t easy for the schools to play against each other because the sides would be familiar with different sets of rules. What was needed was a melting pot to blend all of the variations together, and it turned out that Cambridge University was just the place for this to happen. Old boys of the various schools wanted to play football, and they needed a unified set of rules to do so, and these rules were created. The earliest surviving set dates from 1856, but it drew upon, now lost, codes from earlier decades:

Football wasn’t just the preserve of public school boys though, versions of the game were being played by factory workers and miners and railwaymen across the country. In 1855 in Sheffield the members of the local cricket club started having informal kick-abouts and enjoyed them so much that two members, Nathaniel Creswick and Willian Prest decided to set up a dedicated football club. The first meeting of Sheffield Football Club (the oldest, continuously operating independent football club in the world) took place on the 24th of October 1857 and it was clear that a codified set of rules was needed to govern their play. These were drawn up by Creswick and Prest and approved at the club’s AGM on the 21st of October 1858:

As you can see, this allowed for some handling of the ball and had no offside rule but they proved popular, and other teams soon adopted them. At the code’s height in 1877 there were 27 clubs making up the Sheffield Football association. This was not, however, the only game in town. Okay, it was the only game in Sheffield, but you get what I mean. Many clubs had sprung up in London as well and they too needed an agreed set of rules by which to play. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, captain of Barnes Football Club, argued that football needed an institution comparable to the Marylebone Cricket Club and in 1863 he wrote to the sporting press proposing just such a governing body. Representatives of London and suburban clubs met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street on 26 October 1863 and formed the Football Association. Its stated objective was “establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game”.3

It turned out that this wasn’t that straightforward. Rival factions debated whether “hacking” (deliberately kicking an opponent in the shins) and the use of hands should be allowed over the course of six meetings. The final laws were approved on the 8th of December 1863 and were as follows:

THE LAWS OF FOOTBALL

Drawn up by the London Association

LAWS

1. The maximum length of the ground shall be 200 yards, the maximum breadth shall be 100 yards, the length and breadth shall be marked off with flags; and the goals shall be defined by two upright posts, 8 yards apart, without any tape or bar across them.4

2. The winner of the toss shall have the choice of goals. The game shall be commenced by a place kick from the centre of the ground by the side losing the toss, the other side shall not approach within 10 yards of the ball until it is kicked off.

3. After a goal is won the losing side shall kick off and the goals shall be changed.

4. A goal shall be won when the ball passes between the goal posts or over the space between the goal posts, at whatever height, not being thrown, knocked on, or carried.

5. When the ball is in touch the first player who touches it shall throw it from the point on the boundary line where it left the ground, in a direction at right angles with the boundary line, and it shall not be in play until it has touched the ground.

6. When a player has kicked the ball any one of the same side who is nearer to the opponent’s goal line is out of play, and may not touch the ball himself, nor in any way whatever prevent any other player from doing so, until the ball has been played; but no player is out of play when the ball is kicked from behind the goal line.

7. In case the ball goes behind the goal line, if a player on the side to whom the goal belongs first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick from the goal line, at the point opposite the place where the ball shall be touched.

If a player of the opposite side first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick, but at the goal only, from a point 15 yards from the goal line opposite the place where the ball is touched.

The opposing side shall stand behind their goal line until he has had his kick.

8. If a player makes a fair catch, he shall be entitled to a free kick, provided he claims it by making a mark with his heel at once; and in order to take such a kick he may go back as far as he pleases, and no player on the opposite side shall advance beyond his mark until he has kicked.

9. No player shall carry the ball.

10. Neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push an adversary.

11. A player shall not throw the ball or pass it to another.

12. No player shall take the ball from the ground with his hands while it is in play, under any pretence whatever.

13. No player shall wear projecting nails, iron plates, or gutta-percha on the soles or heels of his boots.

Hang on a second, didn’t I just say that the peak of the Sheffield Code was in 1877, some 14 years later? Does that mean that both football codes were operating at the same time? Yes, and not just these two, there were others, most notably in Scotland. This obviously caused problems when teams from the different associations faced each other. Whose code should they follow, or should they follow an amalgamation of the two?

Despite these challenges the first Football Association Challenge Cup, better known as the FA Cup today, took place in the 1871–2 season, using the FA code, and it remains the oldest association football competition the world. The final took place on the 16th March 1872 where the Wanders beat the Royal Engineers 1:0.

I will spare you too much detail, but eventually a unified code combining parts of the Sheffield, FA codes with input from the Scottish club Clydesdale, was agreed, as reported in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent on the 24th April 1877:

A meeting of the Sheffield Football Association was held last evening at the Imperial Hotel, Castle street; Mr. Dickinson presiding. Mr. W. Peirce Dix, hon. secretary, rendered a report of his recent visit to the London Association meeting in the metropolis, and described the views which guided those present in arriving at the resolution submitted by the Clydesdale Club, and supported by the Sheffield Association. He referred to the excellent speech made by Mr. Alcock in support of the proposal, and said the result was highly gratifying to the Sheffield Association. It was then formally resolved, on the motion of Mr. W. E. Clegg, seconded by Mr. Skinner, that the Sheffield Association accept the Clydesdale amendment and the London Rules.

So we have got to the point where Britain has a single agreed set of football rules, but how then did these get propagated around the world and the game be adopted with such global fervour? In the last quarter of the 19th century, Britain (and its empire) accounted for around a quarter of the world’s GDP, and a similar share of its manufacturing output. British companies and British people were scattered across the globe building railways, running mines, and setting up a host of trading and manufacturing operations. And where they went, they took (often quite literally) football with them. They were also the first and only nation to have a codified, published, set of rules that could be distributed.5

Let’s start by looking at Brazil. For sure people had been kicking balls around there for a while, but the development of the formal game can be traced back to one Charles William Miller (1874-1953).6 He was born in São Paulo to a Scottish railway engineer father and a Brazilian mother of English descent. Educated in England, where he excelled at sports, he returned to the country of his birth in 1894 bringing along two footballs, a pump, some boots, and a set of rules from the Hampshire Football Association. On the 14th April 1895 he arranged the game that is seen as the symbolic beginning of organised football in Brazil. Teams representing employees of the São Paulo Railway Company and the São Paulo Gas Company played under association rules with Miller appearing for the railway side (which won 4–2). Miller went on to form the São Paulo Athletic Club, the first club in the country, and the first football league that survives to this day as Campeonato Paulista Série A1, the top-flight of Brazilian football.

In northern Italy, particularly in the cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan British sailors and merchants introduced their version of the rules of the beautiful game. Edoardo Bosio, a Turin businessman working in textiles encountered the game in Nottingham and in 1887 founded the Torino Football and Cricket Club – the first association football club in the country. A few years later, on the 7th of September 1893 a group of British ex-pats founded Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club which competes in the top-flight of Italian football today as Genoa CFC. And then there is one of the most famous of all Italian teams, AC Milan. Have you ever wondered why the English name of the city is used, rather than the Italian Milano? Well, that is because it was founded by a bunch of Brits and Italians as the Milan Football and Cricket Club.7

The rise of football in Germany turned to be a little bit more challenging. The country prided itself on its physical-culture tradition of Turnen (organised gymnastics). This was seen to promote bodily discipline, collective order, patriotism, and national regeneration. Gymnastic societies – Turnvereine – performed regulated exercises, often in synchronised groups and under formal instruction. Football, however was seen to provoke competition, violence, and individual initiative. The detractors of the game used terms such as Fußlümmelei, approximately “football loutishness”, and referred to the game as an englische Krankheit – an “English disease”. Rules and kit made their way into the country though, usually in the hands of returning German teachers. Arguably the first game of Association Football in the country tool place in Lüneburg in August of 1875, at the Johanneum school, organised by teacher Wilhelm Görges and the Australian-born Richard Ernest Newell Twopenny.8

Now let’s turn to the winners of the first World Cup, in 1930, Uruguay. The country had strong commercial connections to Britain in railways, banking, meat packing, and other industries and as they did everywhere else the ex-pats set up their own sports and social clubs. The Montevideo Cricket Club9 was established in 1861 and whilst cricket was its principal purpose, its members also experimented with rugby and different forms of football. The club records a football match against the crew of a visiting vessel in 1878, while the first generally recognised match between two established Uruguayan clubs was played in 1881, between them and the Montevideo Rowing Club. The person who is considered to be the “Father of Uruguayan Football” comes on the scene a little later, and was the Anglo-Scot William Leslie Poole (1866-1931). He started working as a teacher in the English High School in 1885 an enthusiastically taught the game to his charges. One of them, Henry Candid Lichtenberger founded the first Uruguayan10 football team on 2 June 1886, the Club Albion which plays at to this day at the country’s highest levels. Poole, amongst other things, was the president of the nascent Uruguayan Association Football League (founded 1900) and played for the country itself.

All around the world you will find the echos of the British influence recorded in the names of teams. Wanders, Juniors, Albion, Old Boys and so on. I could write half a dozen more posts delving into the stories behind these, but I will end by considering one final country, Argentina, with whom it is fair to say England has a bit of football history. In seven hours time, as I write this, we will face them in the World Cup Semi Final, but were we responsible for introducing the sport to arguably our greatest nemesis? Obviously yes.

The generally accepted starting point for the official form of the game took place on the 9th May 1867 when two Yorkshire-born members of the British ex-pat community in Buenos Aires, Thomas Hogg and his brother James, convened a meeting to form the “Buenos Ayres Football Club”, with matches to be played at the ground of the local cricket club. An inaugural match was originally intended for 25th May, but bad weather caused its postponement and it was eventually played on 20th June 1867. Only sixteen players could be assembled, so the sides consisted of eight men each rather than eleven. They were distinguished by coloured caps – one side red, the other white – rather than by complete uniforms. The match lasted approximately two hours, and Hogg’s side reportedly won 4–0.

Thomas Hogg was somewhat pessimistic about the enthusiasm for the game, as this statement attributed to him attests:

This game will take a long time to spread even among British residents, but I intend to persist, because I consider it the best, easiest and cheapest pastime for middle-class youth, as well as for the common people.

Hogg was not wrong, the sport continued to be played, for sure, but didn’t really take off until the arrival of the Scottish educator Alexander Watson Hutton who established the Buenos Aires English High School in 1884. This soon became a nursery for football, and the boys who learned there took the game with them as they moved into the world of work. In 1893 Hutton helped establish the Argentine Association Football, the predecessor of the current Argentine Football Association.11 Lest you doubt the extent to which the British helped create the opponent that England will face tonight, a notice telling people about the formation of the body that today runs the national team was published in English:

Before I started researching this piece I have to admit that I would cringe slightly at the whole “football’s coming home” thing.12 Not because of its (till now, at least) misplaced optimism, but rather than it smacked a little of embarrassing jingoism. Was England really the “home” of football? Clearly not alone, as Scotland played a pivotal rule in formalisation and internationalisation of the game that is played today, but it is hard to deny that had it not been for Britain both codifying rules and and spreading the game around the world then things would be very different today.13 Perhaps another country would have created their own code, and popularised it, but more likely it seems multiple codes would have arisen, and no ready winner would have been emerged. Things may have coalesced in time, but it is difficult to believe that the sport would be followed – and played – at quite the same scale that it is today.

Will football “come home” this year? I don’t think so, England has to beat Argentina and then Spain, and the odds look to be against them. Obviously I could re-edit this piece once that I know the result, to create the illusion of foresight, but I promise that I won’t!

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A week or so ago I overcame my disinterest to join my friend Craig down the pub to watch an England World Cup match,4 perhaps only the second5 football game I have watched in its entirety in my 53-odd years, and that inspired me to dig into the history of the sport a bit.

I should start by talking a bit about the name of the game, as I know that it is a point of some contention between nationalities. American readers will doubtless refer to it as “soccer” only to be lambasted by the residents of other countries with words along the lines of “It’s football! You are the only country who thinks that name refers to American football!”. The reality is that the global competition taking place this year is “association football”, there are many other similarly-named sports, such as “rugby football”. It may shock some of you to learn that not only is soccer a valid name for the game, it may actually be more appropriate than the more generic “football”!

In the 19th century British public school boys had a tendency to abbreviate words and add “er” to the ends of them. So rugby became “rugger” and breakfast became “brekkers” – a tradition that continues to this day, most notably with the nicknames of English cricket players.6 Association football was initially shortened to “assoc”, which soon became “soccer”. The earliest reference to it in print comes from a letter from a pupil published in the 25 November 1885 issue of The Marlburian (the magazine of Marlborough College):

I can’t help thinking it a great pity that there has been no ‘Association’ on the Common this term. It must improve the forward play and is certainly a pleasant change occasionally from everlasting Rugby.

Rather than signing it with his own name, the letter was said to have come from “soccer”. Within days, the spelling “Socker” appeared in magazines connected with Radley College and Old Hall School, suggesting that the term was already well known and circulating orally among schoolboys. So please don’t hate on our American friends for using the word (for ease, in the rest of this piece I will use the word “football” to mean “association football”).

Back to the origins of the game itself. Humans have been kicking and throwing balls around with varying degrees of organisation for pretty much as long as the objects have existed. After all, what is the point of a ball is not to play with it? In ancient China there was the game Cuju (or ts‘u-chü) in which players from opposing teams attempted to kick a ball through an opening and into a hoop without using their hands, and also without it touching the ground. In this sense it was rather more akin to hacky sack than modern football. Not only was it popular as a means of recreation, it was also used as a training tool by the military, and it is in this context that we have the earliest reference to it, dating from around 300 BCE in the Zhan Guo Ce (《戰國策》, Strategies of the Warring States), there is a speech attributed to the diplomat Su Qin addressing King Xuan of Qi:

臨淄甚富而實，其民無不吹竽、鼓瑟、擊筑、彈琴、鬥雞、走犬、六博、蹹踘者。

Linzi is exceedingly prosperous and well supplied; among its people there are none who do not play the yu pipes, sound the se, strike the zhu, play the qin, fight cocks, race dogs, play liubo, or kick the ball.

And there is a nearly identical7 passage appears in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), composed in the early first century BCE:

Linzi was very wealthy and full. Its people were all playing the yu flute and the se, plucking the qin and striking the zhu, fighting cocks and racing dogs, playing liubo and kicking the ball. In Linzi’s roads, carriage hubs struck one another, shoulders rubbed together; joined robes made curtains, raised sleeves made canopies, and flung sweat fell like rain. The households were rich, the people sufficient, their wills high and their spirits proud.

We have an even earlier description of people playing with a ball in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 700 BCE):

Then when they had had their joy of food, she and her handmaids, they threw off their head-gear and fell to playing at ball, and white-armed Nausicaa was leader in the song…The princess tossed the ball to one of the handmaids; the maid she missed, and cast it into the deep eddy, whereat they shouted aloud; and goodly Odysseus awoke.

Then there is another Greek description of a more formal type of ball play from Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophists (c. 200 CE) He tells us that the game known in his day as harpastum (also harpaston) had earlier been called phaininda:

The ball-game now called harpastum was formerly called phaininda, which is the kind I like best of all. Great are the exertion and fatigue attendant upon contests of ball-playing, and violent twisting and turning of the neck.

We don’t the specifics of this game but it appears to have involved things akin to the feinting and passing of the modern game as he goes on share a much earlier description by Antiphanes, a comic poet of the fourth century BCE:

He seized the ball and passed it with a laugh to one player, while he dodged another; he pushed it out of the way of a third, and raised another to his feet amid resounding cries of “Out,” “Too far,” “Right beside him,” “Over his head,” “On the ground,” “Up in the air,” “Too short,” and “Pass it back.”

This game was, however, much more like rugby than football. The name harpaston comes from the verb ἁρπάζειν (harpazein), “to seize”, “snatch” or “carry off”, so one could think of it as meaning “the snatched ball” or “the snatching game.” The ball is likely to have been relatively small, the easier to throw and catch, possibly leather stuffed with feathers, or a bladder of some sort. We have a nice description of play during Roman times from the a letter written by Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430 - 481/490) in the 5th century CE:

We soon split into two groups, according to our ages: one shouted for the ball, the other for the board-game, both of which were to be had. I was the leader of the ball-players; you know that book and ball are my twin companions. In the other group, the chief figure was our brother Domnicius, that most engaging and attractive of men: there he was, rattling some dice which he had got hold of, as if he sounded a trumpet-call to play. The rest of us had a great game with a party of students, doing our best at the healthful exercise with limbs which sedentary occupations made much too stiff for running. And now the illustrious Filimatius sturdily flung himself into the squadrons of the players, like Virgil’s hero ‘daring to set his hand to the task of youth’; he had been a splendid player himself in his younger years. But over and over again he was forced from his position among the stationary players by the shock of some runner from the middle, and driven into the midfield where the ball flew past him, or was thrown over his head; and he failed to intercept or parry it. More than once he fell prone, and had to pick himself up from such collapses as best he could; naturally he was the first to withdraw from the stress of the game in a state of internal inflammation, out of breath from exercise and suffering sharp pains in the side from the swollen fibres of his liver.8

It is in Europe of the middle ages that we see a much more football-sized balls being used, but again the games that were played with them were very different from our modern understanding of the game, and furthermore there were a number of different versions of them. The earliest reference we have to a ball being used as play-thing in Britain can be found in Bede’s De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time), completed in 725:

The Earth is truly situated in the midst of the whole universe, not merely circular in breadth like a shield, but rather like a ball, equally rounded in every direction; and in so great a mass, even the enormous differences between mountains and valleys add or subtract no more than a finger’s breadth does from a playing-ball

And a century later, in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum (compiled 829-830) we get the first mention of people actually playing with one:

And, on the advice of his magicians, he sent messengers throughout all Britain to see whether they could find a child without a father. And, after travelling through all the provinces and very many regions, they came to the Field of Elletus, which is in the region called Gleguissing, and some boys were playing a ball game.

By the 12th century ball games were widespread in Britain, and particularly played on Shroventide (Shrove Tuesday) as recorded by William Fitzstephen in his Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae (c. 1174 – 1183):

After lunch, all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree adolescents.

Were these kids throwing the ball to one another like the Romans a thousand or so years earlier? It is hard to be certain, but it seems more likely that they were kicking it around. The earliest robust source for football being a game played, with, well, the feet, comes from a papal dispensation dating from May 1321. It was for Canon William de Spalding from Shouldham in Norfolk, absolving him of blame when one of his mates ran into him during a match and, err, stabbed himself to death in the process:

To William de Spalding, canon of Scoldham [Shouldham] of the order of Sempringham. During the game at ball, as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his, also called William, ran against him and wounded himself on a sheathed knife9 carried by the canon, so severely that he died within six days. Dispensation is granted, as no blame is attached to William de Spalding, who, feeling deeply the death of his friend, and fearing what might be said by his enemies, has applied to the pope.

Pretty much as soon as the nation became football crazy, steps were taken to ban the beautiful game. Those carefree adolescents spilling out across the streets of London made a hell of a racket, so local merchants persuaded King Edward II to ban the sport in the city on 13th April 1314:

…there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.

Edward III10 issued a broader ban in a proclamation on the 12th June 1365, but his had a more serious intent behind it – people were playing football when they should have been practising their archery:

We, wishing to provide an appropriate remedy for this, order you that in all places in your shire, as well within liberties as without, where you shall deem it expedient, you shall cause to be proclaimed that everyone in the shire, on festival days when he has holiday, shall learn and exercise himself in the art of archery, and use for his games bows and arrows, or crossbows or bolts; forbidding all and every one, on our command, to meddle in any way with throwing stones, wood or iron, handball, football, hockey, cock-fighting, or any other such idle games, under pain of imprisonment.

Not wanting to be left out, King James I of Scotland banned the game as well with his Football Act of 1424:

it is statut and the king forbiddis that na man play at the fut ball under the payne of iiij d. to the lorde of the lande als oft as he beis taintit (be the scheref of the land or his ministeris, gif the lordis will nocht punnysh sic trespassouris).

(It is decreed and the king forbids that any man play football under the pain of 4 d. to the lord of the land as often as he is convicted (by the sheriff of the land or his ministers, if the lords will not punish such trespassers))

Perhaps the most famous version of the game played around these times was mob football (also know as folk football). The rules, such as they were, were pretty simple. Two teams of unlimited players had to get an inflated pig’s bladder (or ball) to their team’s marker. These could be at either end of the town, or, when played between two villages, suitably far apart from each other on neutral territory. You could do so by any means necessary, short of murder, and unsurprisingly these games could get very violent indeed.

A version of this which continues to this day is the Atherstone Ball Game which claims to have been played pretty much continuously, every Shrove Tuesday, since 1199. The reality is that it is hard to substantiate the origin anything like that far back; nonetheless, their rules are fun:

• Stay on Long Street

• Don’t kill anyone

Despite claiming to be the “home” of football Britain was still having somewhat chaotic games whilst Italy had an incredibly detailed rule set for their version of the sport. Florence had the game Calcio storico fiorentino which is thought to have started in Piazza Santa Croce. It became known as the giuoco del calcio fiorentino or simply calcio, which is now the Italian word for “football”. The exact origins of the game are unclear, but it is thought to have possibly arisen out of military training exercises. We know that it was well-established by 1530, as on the 17th of February a game was defiantly played whilst the city was under siege.

We have an incredibly comprehensive set of rules and instruction from Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del calcio Fiorentino (1580). An overview of them follows, and whilst lengthy, I think that they are fascinating!

1. The theatre of the game should be a principal city square, suitable for noble women and the people to watch.

2. The field should be fenced: 172 braccia long, 86 braccia wide, and two braccia high.

3. The game is public, played by two sides of young men, on foot and without weapons.

4. The object is to make the inflated ball pass deliberately beyond the opposing end boundary.

5. A successful passage beyond the opponent’s end is a caccia (goal).

6. The side with more cacce wins; falli (fouls) count against the offending side, with the later Capitoli tradition making two falli equal one caccia.

7. After every caccia or fallo, the teams change places.

8. The players number fifty-four: twenty-seven per side.

9. Each side consists of fifteen Innanzi (forwards), five Sconciatori (halfbacks), four Datori innanzi (full backs), and three Datori a dietro (goal keepers).

10. Players should be fit gentlemen, generally eighteen to forty-five, of good reputation and trained in noble exercises.

11. The season runs from early January to March, with Carnival as the most solemn period.

12. The game should be played toward evening and should last only as long as the players can bear the sweat, blows and exertion - roughly one or two hours in Bardi’s phrasing.

13. Dress should be short and free: hose, doublet, cap and thin shoes; in formal games, the two sides wear different liveries.

14. In an ordinary game, two knowledgeable captains choose the sides on the field from the assembled players.11

15. In a liveried game, the sides are chosen privately beforehand, often trialled in two colours, and publicly announced.

16. Six experienced former players sit on a raised seat and judge disputes.

17. A neutral ball-man, dressed in both colours, starts play by striking the ball and keeps spare balls available.

18. The game begins with the ball placed in the centre and the thirty forwards run at it from a circle.

19. The Innanzi must carry the ball softly with their feet, keeping it close and advancing in three squads.

20. Forwards should not hurl the ball; ordinary handling is limited to setting it down to the feet or to special breakaway circumstances.

21. A deliberate throw or hurl of the ball, and deliberate sending of the ball over the ditch-side fence, constitute falli.

22. Forwards should meet blockers with extended arms rather than begin fist-fighting.

23. The Sconciatori must shield the Datori, disrupt enemy forwards, delay rather than simply hold them, and preserve the line’s order.

24. Sconciatori should not usually strike the ball, except in defined circumstances, especially the ditch-side player returning dangerous balls.

25. The Datori innanzi govern the ball by powerful strokes and should not retreat for balls belonging to the rear line.

26. The Datori should not send the ball among the spectators, because that chills the game by stopping play.

27. The Datori a dietro are the last guard and must stand deep enough to move forward to the ball, not so close that they must retreat.

28. When the ball is on a side’s own end fence, the whole side should give common aid, keep the ball low, and stop it being lifted over.

29. When fights break out, the nearest players should separate them, but the rest should not abandon the ball to watch.12

30. Players should not bear grudges after the game; bodily blows received in calcio do not touch honour.13

31. During changes of field, the winning flag should be carried high and spread, the losing flag lowered and wrapped.

32. The flags should not be torn.

33. The highest honour sought through the game is not merely sporting reputation but recognition as men fit for civic and military service.

The game underwent a revival in the 20th century, and is played annually in Florence to this day. In my next piece (which will drop tomorrow, Saturday 18th of July!) I’ll explore how these varied games ultimately resulted in the sport watched today by billions and how perhaps England can claim to be the home of football.

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The barrier of access to coffee doesn’t seem to particularly have been price – in the late 17th century a cup would cost about the same as two pints of beer. In central London today that would be around £151 ($20) which is much higher than a cup of Joe from Starbucks, but beer was relatively a lot cheaper 350 years ago! The lack of coffee drinking was in part due to the limited supply of beans, and also because it wasn’t, unlike tea, a drink that people had the inclination or equipment to brew at home.

When coffee was made, it wasn’t in a manner that we would necessarily find appealing today, basically, boil up the grounds and drink it without milk and unsweetened, as per these approaches described in John Nott’s The cook's and confectioner’s dictionary, or, The accomplish’d housewife’s companion published in 1723:

171. To make Coffee.
TAKE running, or River-water, boil it, and put to a Quart, either one, two, or three Ounces of Coffee, as you like it, and let it boil only so long, as till the Coffee falls down.

172. Another better way.
TAKE running, or River-water,2 put your Coffee in cold; mix it well with the Water, set them over the Fire, and let them warm, heat and scald, and boil together, till the Coffee sinks; then take it off, let it settle, and drink it.

173. Another the best way.3
WHEN you have drank off a Pot of Coffee, put into the Pot to the Grounds, as much Water, as you design to make the next time, and boil them together; then take the Pot off the Fire; and let it stand to settle a quarter of an Hour; then pour off the clear Liquor, cast away the Grounds, wash the Coffee-Pot, then put in the Coffee you would make next time, pour the Liquor in scalding hot, and let them stand to infuse, till you use it; then set it on the Fire, let them warm and heat leisurely, till it boils, till all the Coffee is well boil’d down, then let it settle and drink it.

The coffee this produced was often not great. If boiled too much it would become bitter, and even after allowing it to settle one could get a load of gritty grains in one’s cup. Often egg white or isinglass was added in order to clarify the drink (though I doubt that this improved the taste). A better approach was advocated by Humphrey Broadbent year earlier in The Domestick Coffee Man:

Put the quantity of powder you intend, into your pot (which should be either of stone, or silver, being much better than tin or copper, which takes from it much of its flavour and goodness) then pour boiling-hot water upon the aforesaid powder, and let it stand to infuse five minutes before the fire. This is an excellent way, and far exceeds the common one of boiling, but whether you prepare it by boiling or this way, it will sometimes remain thick and troubled, after it is made, except you pour in a spoonful or two of cold water, which immediately precipitates the more heavy parts at the bottom, and makes it clear enough for drinking.

Some, make coffee with spring water, but it is not so good as river, or Thames-water,4 because the former makes it hard, and distasteful, and the other makes it smooth and pleasant, lying soft on the stomach. If you have a desire to make good coffee in your families, I cannot conceive how you can put less than two ounces of powder to a quart, or one ounce to a pint of water; some put two ounces and a quarter.

In France, however, a decade earlier, a more superior beverage, filtered coffee, was being produced. The grounds were put into a fustian (cloth) bag and boiling water was then poured over the top. This approach, which became popular in France, but never really spread to America or Britain, was not without its own problems. The cloth fabric of the bag would absorb the oils from the coffee and, over time, become greasy and hard to clean. And cleaning was an issue – leave it damp and it could go mouldy, dry it out too much and the coffee oils could go stale and impart a nasty taste – so often the solution was to keep the cleaned bag immersed in water, which sounds like a bit of a faff. Finally, no matter how much care one takes with one’s bag, the rate of flow of fluid through it, and hence the intensity of the coffee, would inevitably change over usage and time.

Towards the end of the 18th century, again in France, we see the next major advance in coffee making. This was a pot, initially made of tin, but later of porcelain, which consisted of two chambers, one above the other. At the join between them sat the coffee chamber: a perforated metal or porcelain grid, sometimes with a second pierced plate or ‘rammer’ above it. Ground coffee was placed on or between the perforated surfaces; hot water was poured into the upper vessel; the water passed slowly through the coffee bed and collected in the lower vessel. These were known as ‘De Belloy’ (or ‘Du Belloy’) pots taking their name from Jean-Baptiste de Belloy de Morangles, Archbishop of Paris and later cardinal. It seems unlikely that he actually invented them, it seems more likely that this honour lay with François-Antoine-Henri Descroizilles, a Rouen chemist and pharmacist, and that De Belloy or someone in his circle popularised the device in Paris. Whatever the precise origin, they were hugely popular, and highly regarded, as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) detailed in The Physiology of Taste:

A few years ago, everyone’s attention turned simultaneously to the best way to make coffee—a trend that stemmed, almost without anyone realizing it, from the fact that the head of government consumed a great deal of it.

Suggestions abounded: brewing it without burning the grounds or grinding them to dust, cold-brewing it,5 boiling it for forty-five minutes, using a pressure cooker, and so on.

Over time, I experimented with all these methods—as well as those proposed since—and, based on experience, settled on the Dubelloy method. This involves pouring boiling water over coffee placed in a porcelain or silver vessel perforated with tiny holes. You take this initial infusion, heat it to a boil, pour it through again, and the result is coffee that is as clear and delicious as possible.6

Among other experiments, I tried making coffee in a high-pressure kettle; the result was a brew heavy with extractive matter and bitterness—fit, at best, to scour a Cossack’s throat.

Savarin goes on to comment upon something I am all-too familiar with, the impact of the drink upon insomnia:

Doctors have expressed various opinions regarding the health properties of coffee and have not always agreed with one another; we shall steer clear of this debate to focus on the most important aspect: its influence on the organs of thought.

There is no doubt that coffee powerfully stimulates the brain’s faculties; indeed, anyone drinking it for the first time is certain to lose some sleep.

Sometimes this effect is mitigated or altered by habituation; yet there are many individuals for whom this stimulation persists, and who are consequently forced to give up coffee entirely.

Similar devices soon became popular in Britain, though they could both use a metal/porcelain filter or, as became more commonly the case, a cloth bag suspended in the top chamber. They revelled in the name ‘Biggins’, seemingly named after one George Biggin (died 1803) and inventor and scientist who, among other adventures, flew in one of Vincenzo Lunardi’s balloons on the 29th of June 1785. This flight is notable because the aeronaut alongside Biggin was Letitia Ann Sage, the first British woman to fly! Oh, and also because they had to be rescued from an angry farmer by a group of Harrow schoolboys upon landing.7

Biggins did a pretty decent job of making coffee, and remained in use for more than century, but in some places the old 17th-century approach to making coffee still persisted. In the USA, even in the mid-19th century, we find coffee being boiled up, as per the recipe in in a cookbook from 1840:

Allow half a pint of ground coffee to three pints of water. If the coffee is not freshly roasted, you should put in more. Put the water into the tin coffee-pot, and set it on hot coals; when it boils, put in the coffee, a spoonful at a time, (stirring it between each spoonful,) and add two or three chips of isinglass, or the white of an egg. Stir it frequently, till it has risen up to the top in boiling; then set it a little farther from the fire, and boil it gently for ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour; after which pour in a tea-cup of cold water, and put it in the corner to settle for ten minutes. Scald your silver or china pot, and transfer the coffee to it; carefully pouring it off from the grounds, so as not to disturb them.

It would seem that some Americans preferred this type of boiled coffee over the more refined European methods of production, most notably Mark Twain, who was very snitty about the continental drink in his 1880 book A Tramp Aboard:

To particularize: the average American’s simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel.8 The milk used for it is what the French call “Christian” milk—milk which has been baptized.9

After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.

Next comes the European bread—fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic;10 and never any change, never any variety—always the same tiresome thing.

The next technical innovation occurred in 1819, when the Paris tinsmith Joseph-Henry-Marie Laurens produced a coffee-making device in which boiling water was raised through a tube and delivered over the coffee, this invention the first coffee peculator. Multiple variations of these pots were in use across the 19th century but their use really took off in the USA with the version patented by Hanson Goodrich 1889 – a pot that could sit on a stove have and have the coffee recirculated:11

Before I get into the developments which led to the machines that we find in the coffee shops that we visit today, a quick digression about the adding of milk to the drink. As mentioned earlier, initially coffee was drunk black, and unsweetened though some experiments with adding milk took place surprisingly early:

About 1660, Nieuhoff, the Dutch ambassador to China, was the first to make a trial of coffee with milk in imitation of tea with milk. In 1685, Sieur Monin, a celebrated doctor of Grenoble, France, first recommended café au lait as a medicine. He prepared it thus: Place on the fire a bowl of milk. When it begins to rise, throw in to it a bowl of powdered coffee, a bowl of moist sugar, and let it boil for some time.

By the mid-18th century, café au lait (coffee with milk) had become commonplace in France, particularly as a breakfast drink, as Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d’Aussy recounts in his Histoire de la vie privée des Français, depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours (1782):

There is no middle-class home where coffee is not offered at dinner. No shop girl, cook, or chambermaid who does not have coffee with milk for breakfast. This taste, believe it or not, has even reached the lowest classes of the common people.12

Arguably the most famous coffee-with-milk drink, the cappuccino has a history that is perhaps older than one may expect, and it certainly long predates the modern version of the drink. The Viennese Kapuziner arose in the 18th century as a dark cup of coffee with cream added to it (and later sugar and spices). It takes its name from the cappuccio, the hood worn by Capuchin friars as, once mixed, it shared the same brown colour.13 For the drink to become the one globally loved today the final major development in coffee technology had to take place, the invention of high-pressure coffee-making which created the espresso.

The Italian coffeemaker Illy describes that acme of the drink as being created in the following manner:

A jet of hot water at 88°-93°C (190°-200°F) passes under a pressure of nine or more atmospheres through a seven-gram (.25 oz) cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. Done right, the result is a concentrate of not more than 30 ml (one oz) of pure sensorial pleasure.

The original version of this brew was, however, a little different from this. In 1884 one Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a machine for the “economic and instantaneous” preparation of coffee. This wasn’t the counter-top device you will be familiar with today, rather it was a large boiler at a pressure of about 1.5 bars that first pushed water through the coffee grounds, before a secondary boiler drove steam through it to finish the job. It produced coffee en-masse for the Turin Expo. It seems to have been a success, but it never really caught on as Moriondo only built a couple of the machines, and they were used solely in establishments that he owned – he basically thought that they were so good, that they would bring customers flooding in.

Next up we have Luigi Bezzera of Milan who, in 1902, created essentially the first modern expresso machine. It would produce individual cups on demand and had the portafilter,14 the little bucket-type thing that the coffee grounds sit in. Again though the pressure in this device was low by modern standards, 1.5-2.0 bars.

It wasn’t until 1938, with Achille Gaggia that we finally got expresso with crema, the foam that sits atop a good expresso. He invented a machine that used hot water, rather than steam, pressure which could achieve 9 bars, and the company that bears his name manufactures coffeemakers to this day. There is more I could add to this history, the invention of instant coffee, the debate over who really invented the flat white, and so on but I fear continuing much further would try your patience. And beside, I could really do with a cup of coffee right now…

The report describes the capture of the assailant very briefly (we’ll get to all that), and hastily pasted at the bottom of the page, just before going to press, was this addition:

The name of [the] assailant is stated to be George Frederick Robinson, aged about thirty years, and he is believed to have come from the East-end. The man, it is understood, has been pronounced insane.

If you’ve heard this story before, you’ll know why I’m suppressing certain details. If not… we’ll get to everything.

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The Secretary at the heart of it all was, at least, unharmed, and fired off a reassuring note to his family the same day:

Darling M.—Just a line to tell you not to be alarmed at any rumours or statements on posters &c. There was a lunatic in here this morning, “shooting free” with a revolver, but nobody got hurt at all, except the lunatic, who was secured after some trouble. Yrs, M.1

By 7pm the same day, an enterprising reporter for The Echo had got hold of many more details.

A man securing admission to one of the private rooms of the Bank of England, drew a revolver and fired four shots in the presence of… the secretary, the bullets narrowly missing that gentleman.

He, however, escaped injury, and the Ben was arrested after a severe struggle.

From inquiries made by an “Echo” representative, there would appear to be some uncertainty as to whether the man in custody fired intentionally at … the secretary of the Bank, or not. The officials themselves maintain considerable reticence as to the actual facts, but, according to the statements of some, the man fired the revolver at random—fired the first shot in the floor, and then turned and and fired three other shots in quick succession…

The struggle with the man is described a having been most fierce and prolonged. According to the statement of one of the officials of the Bank, the man fought like a wild animal, and it was only when the fire-bose had been brought to play upon him for several minutes that he was in any way subdued…

He was still lying on the stretcher on the floor of the police station when our representative called there some time after his arrest.

He is a middle-aged man of good physique, with slightly curly black hair and florid complexion, and was wearing a short, dark, velvet-collared overcoat, slightly frayed at the edges.

He bore several marks of the means adopted to subdue his violence. There were several large pieces of court-plaster it the back of his head, his collar was torn, and there was no mistaking the complete drenching be had received from the fire-hose. He was still unconscious… The man’s whole appearance gave the impression that he was of unbalanced mind.

… The prisoner is stated to have given his name as George Frederick Robinson, of Westbourne-street, Sloane-square…

According to the Exchange Telegraph Company, Robinson is known as a man who held very peculiar ideas as to the distribution of wealth, and his derangement of mind also included some extraordinary notions as to the welfare of the human race.

This is as much a story about how news breaks and gets updated as it is the drama of the moment – I’ve read many inconsistencies in the reports of these events, both then and in more recent times. Both of the on-the-day newspaper reports I have quoted relied specifically upon the Exchange Telegraph Company. This had been set up in 1872 to disseminate commercial news from the London Stock Exchange – picture the classic ticker tape spitting out in gentlemen’s clubs and offices across London (my great-great grandfather would have been reading this output). By 1879, it was also offering a general news service too.2

From then on, news came thick and fast. Two days after the events, the London Times reported that the prisoner was now in Bow Infirmary, having been too distressed to appear at a hearing in Mansion House, where the charge was “wandering at large—deemed a lunatic—in Threadneedle Street” (the home of the Bank of England to this day). A week later, the Times added that further charges were on the sheet: “feloniously discharging a loaded revolver” at the Secretary “with the intent to murder him”; the same charge with George Tombie as the victim – he was the head waiter at the Bank; and for threatening to shoot Inspector Bacon and Detective Digby of the City Police.

The most useful account, however, can be found in the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court from 14th December,3 and the transcript begins with the words of the Secretary himself:

I am the secretary to the Bank of England. On November 24th I went to the waiting room of the Bank about 11 a.m. I saw the prisoner there—I had never seen him before—I said “Mr. Robinson” in a tone of interrogation. He said “Can I see Sir Augustus Prevost?” (he is the late governor).

I said “No”. He said “Can I see Mr. Morley the deputy governor?” (he is now really governor). I said “Mr. Morley has not arrived at the Bank; will you tell me what your business is?” He said “I suppose you are in charge”. I said “Yes”—he then rose to his feet (he was seated when I entered the room). He handed me this roll of paper (Produced) and said, “If you read that you will see what my business is.”

I said, “I have no time to read petitions or unfastened rolls”. I was standing in the doorway holding the door in my hand. The roll was tied up with a bit of black ribbon at one end and a bit of white at the other—when it was afterwards opened it was found to contain nothing except the words “All of them served”.

I did not open it at that time; I handed it back to him… He said “I will read it myself”—he put it on the table and then sprang sideways the whole length of the table and putting his hand into his breast pocket drew out a revolver—when I saw that I retired through the doorway—the last time I saw the revolver it was pointing in my direction.

I closed the door and as I ran into the passage I heard two shots and I heard two more as I went into the lobby—I sent for the police and then recollecting that there were two other approaches to the corridor where the prisoner was standing I ran round to make them fast… I afterwards saw two holes in the ceiling—the visible ceiling is a false one made of plaster; one bullet had stuck in the wood work of the real ceiling and the other had fallen back into the false ceiling. This (Produced) is part of the wood work and this the revolver—the piece of wood has a bullet sticking in it now.

Head waiter George Tombie then explained he heard two further shots:

I saw the prisoner come out of the waiting room and try to open the door of the passage which had been fastened. He called out, “Come on you cowards, you curs”—he had a revolver in his right hand then. I think the police were then on the other side of the door. The prisoner turned round and saw me—he instantly levelled the revolver—I sprang back and heard a report…

He bravely managed to lock Robinson in a room and summon the police – who then gave their own evidence to the court. Inspector Samuel Bacon added further dramatic details:

I opened the door and saw the revolver pointed at me—I clutched hold of the prisoner by his arm; he swung himself round and jumped out of my grasp; he yelled and ran from the door to the middle of the room—he said “If you move I will shoot you; send me that tall man; I want that tall man” [the Secretary]…

I was waiting for the hose to arrive; it came and the first stroke caught him full in the face—he was so dumbfounded that he stooped down. He recovered himself just as Detective Digby and I rushed into the room—the prisoner jumped into the air and threw the revolver with all his might—it just missed me and went through the glass of the library bookcase. I picked it up and rushed at him—as I was doing so he picked up a heavy chair—he lifted it above his head and rushed at two other officers and attempted to deal them a terrific blow—it slightly caught one of the officers on the hand but it practically missed him and caught the edge of the table and broke a piece off—we then secured him. By that time we were nearly drowned by the water from the hose. I examined the revolver and found five empty cartridge cases in it where the cap had been exploded and one where the cap had not been exploded—that one is filled with candle grease and a little bit of gold on top of it.

Bacon then explains that they went to Robinson’s lodgings and found a box with more than 40 further cartridge cases. The weapon was a Colt .45 with six chambers “of military size, double action” as the press reported.

And the strange scroll that Robinson was carrying came up again:

…when he was at the station he was rambling about several things. I said “Supposing that black ribbon had been taken off that petition first, what would have happened?” He said, “He would have had to look out for himself”. I said “Suppose the white had been taken off first”—he smiled and said, “Oh, then he would have been all right.”

Gradually details of Robinson emerged. I have pieced together what I can from a variety of newspaper reports – some written much later – and my own research at family history websites. Born in Stepney, East London to harness manufacturer Joseph Robinson and his wife Lillie (both also Londoners), George grew up in middle-class comfort, attending the City of London School and Margate College in Kent. Then, as the Times reported:

Mr Dwyer [Robinson’s defence counsel] said the prisoner went to the Klondike [this is at the time of the Gold Rush], where he lived a very hard life for some years. He worked a considerable claim, but being bitten by one of his sleigh dogs he was unable to continue to work. He left and went down south, and ultimately joined the second Canadian contingent4 and served with distinction in South Africa. He subsequently went to West Africa, which shattered his health. He came back to London where he had three attacks of malaria and a sunstroke, and received some money which a mining company owed him, and he embarked in a motoring business. Latterly he had been somewhat peculiar in his manner, and caused some anxiety to his parents… The poverty in this metropolis appealed to his better nature, and aggravated his mental condition.

In 1944, the Daily Express added details from his landlady in Westbourne Street: “On arrival in England he tried to get work. Day after day he became more morose, spending most of the time reading in his bedroom.” After the incident, Robinson was reported to have spoken about the contrast between the gold in the Bank and the poverty in the East End, and said “The laws of England want reforming.” Sadly we learn little more of his voice from all these stories – other than one passing remark made to the Secretary in court after the latter had testified about the revolver being pointed at him: “If I pointed the revolver at you, you must have been on the roof.” Is this a sign that Robinson had intended no actual harm? Was the gold and candle grease replacing some of the bullets in the cartridges some sort of symbol of his political statement?

From Bow Infirmary, the unfortunate Robinson was taken to Brixton Prison, and then to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (still a secure psychiatric hospital today) in Berkshire. I think we must assume he spent the rest of his days there. He was certainly still there at the time of the 1921 Census and in 1925 a 49-year-old man called George F. Robinson had his death registered at Easthampstead, Berkshire – just four miles from Broadmoor.5 So it goes.

But what of that Secretary of the Bank of England who came up against Robinson? He was a pillar of society, a deeply conservative man who took his duties seriously. He had started at the Bank as a clerk at the age of only 19 in 1879, after being denied the chance to attend the University of Oxford (the city where he went to school) by his uncle – his mother had died when he was young and he was estranged from his alcoholic father. After 20 years at the Bank, he was appointed its youngest-ever secretary, a role he held for a decade. A friend and colleague there, Sidney Ward, would later reminisce:

He was always helpful and never obstructive, conservative though he was. I can’t imagine anyone who, at that time, was better suited for the position which he held as Secretary of the Bank of England. In all the push and bustle of a great institution, the conflicting interests of different departments, and the personal jealousies, sometimes, of their chiefs, [he] was just the man to hold the balance—always there, always wise, never too busy to see any one, a sound adviser of the Governor, never rattled and universally respected—he was a far greater force than most men imagined at the time. And, as all those who have lived the best part of our lives know, it is the silent forces, not the noisy ones, which guide the world.

After the drama at gunpoint, the Secretary was inundated with letters from the public. Because… he had another life.6 Alongside his banking career, he had developed one as a writer, mainly for children. And he was soon to become the author of one of the most famous children’s books ever written.

And yup, you guessed it… we’ll talk about that next time!

The story of European coffee begins with the capture of Constantinople but the Ottomans in 1453 because this turned the city into their imperial capital: a huge administrative, commercial, diplomatic, and cultural hub linking the Balkans, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Egypt, and eventually Yemen. This was followed by the conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516–1517, which brought Syria, Egypt, the Hijaz connection, and much of the Red Sea commercial world into the Ottoman sphere. As we learned in my last piece, coffee drinking was well-established in Egypt at that point, particularly in Cairo and it wasn’t that long before the drink spread to Constantinople itself.

We can date very precisely when this great beverage arrived in the city, from a history written by İbrahim Peçevi (aka Peçevî İbrahim Efendi) – Tārīḫ-i Peçevī (“Peçevi’s History.”) which was probably written in the early 1640s, and is a history of the Ottoman Empire, with good details on the period from 1520-1640:

Before the year 1554, no coffee was seen, much less sold, at Constantinople. If ever it was so much as heard of, it was only when the Sultaness obtained an order to prohibit the use of it at Mecca, as we have already mentioned, from the accounts she had received from pilgrims or other travellers into Arabia, Egypt, or Syria. But in that year, which was near a hundred years from the time it was discovered by the Mufti of Aden, in the reign of Soliman the Great, son to Selim the First, two men, named Schems and Hekim, the one from Damascus, the other from Aleppo, set up each of them a coffee-house in that quarter of Constantinople called Takhtacalah, furnished with very neat couches and carpets, on which they received their company, which at first consisted mostly of studious persons, lovers of chess, trictrac, and other sedentary diversions.

And as the generality of the Turks soon came to relish this sort of meeting-place, called in their language Cahveh Kaneh, the number of them multiplied insensibly. They looked upon them as very proper places to make acquaintances in, as well as to refresh and entertain themselves at an easy charge, a dish of coffee costing but an aspre, which is not a halfpenny of English money. Young people near the end of their public studies, such as were ready to enter upon public posts; cadhis out of place, who were at Constantinople making interest to be restored, or asking for new employments; the muderis, or professors of law and other sciences; and, in fine, persons of all ranks flocked to them. At length even the officers of the seraglio, the pashas, and others of the first quality were seen to go openly to the coffee-house; and as this served to increase their reputation, so it multiplied the number of them to too great an excess.

These final lines are particularly important in showing just how socially transformational these coffee houses were. To use the terminology of the 21st century they were a novel urban space – non-domestic, non-religious, conversational, and comparatively open to men from different social ranks. For cultures where alcohol consumption was permissible taverns had served this function for centuries, but in those where it was banned there previously had been no such places.

Less than 20 years later we get the first Western European account of coffee by the German physician Leonhard Rauwolf who encountered coffee in Aleppo in 1573 (and published his account in 1582):

Among other things they have a good drink, which they hold in high esteem, called by them Chaube. It is almost as black as ink and is very useful in ailments, especially of the stomach. They are accustomed to drink this early in the morning, also in open places, before… before everyone publicly, without any hesitation, from deep earthenware and porcelain bowls, as hot as they can bear it. They often raise it to their lips, but take only small sips, and then pass it on, as they sit beside one another in a circle.

For this drink they use a fruit called Bunnu by the inhabitants. On the outside, in size and color, it looks almost like laurel berries, and is enclosed in two thin little shells. According to their old reports, it is brought from India. But since the fruit itself is light, and inside has two yellowish kernels separately enclosed in two little husks; and since, in its effect, name, and appearance, it is very similar to the Buncho of Avicenna and the Bunca of Rhazes in the Almansor, I shall consider it to be that, until I receive better information from learned men. This drink is very common among them.

For that reason there are many people in the bazaar who pour it out for sale, as well as many merchants who sell the fruit. Moreover, they also regard it as just as valuable and healthful as we among ourselves regard wormwood wine, or other herbal wines. Nevertheless, they would still prefer wine, if they were permitted it by their law, as was clearly seen under Emperor Selim, when he granted and allowed them wine: how they drank it, namely, that they came together daily, and when they sat together drinking, one did not merely drink one or two glasses of unmixed strong wine to another, but four or five little cups at once, of the kind that come to them from Venice; and they drank these down one after another so quickly and with such eagerness that, as I saw many times, they did not take enough time between them even to eat a bite or a few morsels.

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As to when coffee made its way into Western Europe, let’s just say that one can go down lots of rabbit holes attempting to answer that question! It probably arrived in Venice in or shortly after 1615 because that is when Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle (1586–1652), a well known Italian traveler and author of Travels in India and Persia, wrote a letter from Constantinople to his friend Mario Schipano in Venice:

The Turks have a drink of black colour, which during the summer is very cooling, whereas in the winter it heats and warms the body, remaining always the same beverage and not changing its substance. They swallow it hot as it comes from the fire and they drink it in long draughts, not at dinner time, but as a kind of dainty and sipped slowly while talking with one's friends. One cannot find any meetings among them where they drink it not.... With this drink, which they call cahue, they divert themselves in their conversations.... It is made with the grain or fruit of a certain tree called cahue.... When I return I will bring some with me and I will impart the knowledge to the Italians.

We don’t know for sure if he carried through with this promise, but it seems likely that coffee was low-key drunk in the city for medicinal reasons not long after that. If we want a good, dated, account of coffee being drunk in Western Europe then we can do worse than look to my home town of Oxford. In a note added to his diary entry for the 10th of May 1637 (when he was admitted to the college), John Evelyn wrote that the following took place in Balliol:

There came in my time to the College one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the patriarch of Constantinople, who, returning many years after, was made (as I understand) Bishop of Smyrna. He was the first I ever saw drink coffee; which custom came not into England till thirty years after.

The best guess for when this coffee-drinking took place is 1638–1639, possibly 1639, if Conopios came to Oxford as a refugee after the death of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris in June 1638. It was also Oxford that saw the first recoded coffee house in Western Europe1 opening, as the city’s greatest antiquarian, Anthony Wood, wrote about it in the year 1650:

This yeare Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter, in the East Oxon; and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank. When he left Oxon he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London, and was living 1671.

And that coffee shop is still there today! Okay, it isn’t, but there is a later building on the site which is now a cafe which trades upon this history:2

Four years later he writes about another establishment, just across the road from the first:

Coffey, which had been drank by some persons in Oxon 1650, was this yeare publickly sold at or neare the Angel within the east gate of Oxon; as also chocolate, by an outlander or a Jew.

And his coffee shop is still there too! Except whilst coffee has be sold very close to that site for more than 370 years, it seems that it has moved around a bit over that time. What we do know is that it is the location where, in 1768, Jeremy Bentham encountered the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” in a pamphlet and helped inspire his development of utilitarianism:

Somehow or other, shortly after its publication, a copy of this pamphlet found its way into the little circulating library belonging to a little coffee-house, called Harper’s coffee-house, attached, as it were, to Queen’s College, Oxford, and deriving, from the popularity of that college, the whole of its subsistence. It was a corner house, having one front towards the High Street, another towards a narrow lane, which on that side skirts Queen’s College, and loses itself in a lane issuing from one of the gates of New College.

This year, 1768, was the latest of all the years in which this pamphlet could have come into my hands. Be this as it may, it was by that pamphlet, and this phrase in it, that my principles on the subject of morality, public and private together, were determined.

Two years after the first coffee shop opened in Oxford, one did in London, and it was advertised with this brilliant hand-bill:3

In the decades that followed the number of such establishments exploded across the city, with their number likely in excess of 1,000 by the end of the 17th century. At the same time they spread all across the continent, most famously, perhaps, in Vienna which is noted for its coffee house culture to this day. According to legend, after they liberated the city from the second Turkish siege in 1683 a group of Polish-Habsburg soldiers found some sacks full of strange beans in a cellar. They initially thought it was camel feed, and wanted to burn them however the Polish king Jan III Sobieski gave them to one of his officers, Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki. Kulczycki, realising what they were (and conning the king out of a valuable product) brewed them up with some milk and sugar, and open the first coffee house in the city. Except the first coffee house in the city was actually opened in 1685 by an Armenian businessman named Johannes Theodat. Which is not such a good story…

As in Constantinople these houses provided a wholly novel space for people (well, men) to interact, gossip, read the latest newspapers and broadsides, and so on. As Henri Misson described the London coffee houses in 1698:

“You have all Manner of News there: You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you do not care to spend more.

So noted were they for these kind of interactions that they became known as “penny universities” though some writers, such as the one who wrote this satirical verse in a 1667 broadside, felt that was perhaps overstating their function a little:

At Coffee-House when they are plac’d,
you’d scarce believe it true.

They know all that is Good or Hurt,
To bless ye, or to save ye;
There is the Colledge and the Court,
the Countrie, Camp and Navie;
So great a Universitie,
I think, there ne’re was any:
In which you may a Scholar be
for spending of a Penny.

A Merchant’s ‘Prentice there shall show
you all and every thing,
What hath been done, and is to do,
‘twixt Holland and the King;
What Articles of Peace will be,
he can precisely show;
What will be good for Them or We,
he perfectly doth know.

Here men do talk of every thing,
with large and liberal Lungs,
Like women at a Gossipping,
with double tyre of Tongues;
They’l give a Broadside presently,
soon as you are in view,
With Stories that you’l wonder at,
which they will swear are true.

The drinking there of Chockalat
can make a Fool a Sophie:
‘Tis thought the Turkish Mahomet
was first Inspir’d by Coffee,
By which his Powers did over-flow
the Land of Palestine:
Then let us to the Coffee-house go!
‘tis cheaper far than Wine.

You shall know, there, what Fashions are;
How Perrywiggs are curl’d;
And for a Penny you shall heare
all Novells in the world;
Both Old and Young, and Great and Small,
and Rich and Poore you’ll see:
Therefore, let’s to the Coffee all,
Come all away with me.

Exaggerated though the quality of eduction one might receive there might be, these were definitely places for the exchanging of ideas, and particularly political ideas. We have an example of this from the diary of Samuel Pepys, from the 23rd January 1663 where there is talk of a rising in the north:

Thence to Mr. Grant, to bid him come for money for Mr. Barlow, and he and I to a coffee-house, where Sir J. Cutler was; and in discourse, among other things, he did fully make it out that the trade of England is as great as ever it was, only in more hands; and that of all trades there is a greater number than ever there was, by reason of men taking more ‘prentices, because of their having more money than heretofore. His discourse was well worth hearing. Coming by Temple Bar I bought “Audley’s Way to be Rich,” a serious pamphlett and some good things worth my minding. Thence homewards, and meeting Sir W. Batten, turned back again to a coffee-house, and there drunk more till I was almost sick, and here much discourse, but little to be learned, but of a design in the north of a rising, which is discovered, among some men of condition, and they sent for up.

Not everyone was thrilled about such activities, chief amongst them King Charles the Second who was trying to main a somewhat rickety restoration monarchy. In order to reduce the risk of people scheming against him over a cup of Java on the 29th of December 1675 he issued “A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses” requiring them to be shut down on the 10th of January, a scant two weeks later. He argued that he wasn’t doing so just because of people coming up with nefarious plots but also because tradespeople were chillaxing there when they should have been working!

Whereas it is most apparent, that the Multitude of Coffee-houses of late
years set up and kept within this Kingdom, the Dominion of Wales, and the
Town of Berwick upon Tweed, and the great resort of Idle and disaffected
persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well
for that many Tradesmen and others, do therein mis-spend much of their time,
which might and probably would otherwise be imployed in and about their
Lawful Callings and Affairs; but also, for that in such Houses, and by
occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, divers False, Malitious
and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defama-
tion of His Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; His Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, That the said Coffee-houses be (for the future) Put down and Suppressed, and doth (with the Advice of His Privy Council) by this His Royal Proclamation, Strictly Charge and Command all manner of persons, That they or any of them do not presume from and after the Tenth day of January next ensuing, to keep any Publick Coffee-house, or to Utter or Sell by retail, in his, her or their house or houses (to be spent or consumed within the same) any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea, as they will answer the contrary at their utmost perils.

And for the better accomplishment of this his Majesties Royal Pleasure, His Majesty doth hereby Will and require the Justices of Peace within their several Counties, and the Chief Magistrates in all Cities and Towns Corporate, that they do at their next respective General Sessions of the peace (to be holden within their several and respective Counties, Divisions and Precincts) recall and make void all Licenses at any time heretofore Granted, for the Selling or Retailing of any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea. And that they or any of them do not (for the
future) make or grant any such License or Licenses, to any person or persons Whatsoever. And his Majesty doth further hereby declare, that if any person or persons shall take upon them, him or her, after his, her or their License or Licenses recalled, or otherwise without License, to sell by retail (as aforesaid) any of the Liquors aforesaid, that then the person or persons so Offending, shall not only be proceeded against, upon the Statute made in the Fifteenth year of His Majesties
Reign (which gives the forfeiture of five pounds for every moneth wherein he, she or they shall offend therein) but shall (in case they persevere to Offend) receive the severest punishments that may by Law be inflicted.

Given at Our Court at Whitehall, this Nine and twentieth day of December 1675. in the Seven and twentieth year of Our Reign.

God save the King.

However he quickly back-tracked somewhat, due to pressure from business owners, and two days before the ban was due to come into effect the proclamation was watered down. The coffee shop owners said that they were very sorry that people had been saying nasty things about him in their premises, and that it would never happen again. Oh, and they would all swear oaths of allegiance to him. This seems to have done the trick:

Whereas His Majesty by His Royal Proclamation bearing date the 29th day of December last, upon the Reasons therein contained, did Command and Require all manner of persons, from and after the Tenth day of this instant January, to forbear to Sell or Vtter by Retail (to be spent within their respective Houses) any Coffee, Chocolate, Tea or Sherbett, and did give Directions to His Justices of the Peace, and the Chief Magistrates (within their respective Counties, Cities and Towns Corporate) not to grant any new Licences to that purpose, and to revoke Licences formerly granted.

And whereas since the issuing forth of the said Proclamation, several Retailers of the said Liquors, by their humble Petition on the behalf of them­selves and other Retaylers, did humbly Represent to His Majesty, That there are great quantities of Coffee and Tea at present in their hands, for which the Duties are already paid; besides what are already Shipped in parts beyond the Seas for England, and cannot be Remanded without great loss to the Owners thereof. And further, thereby, (confessing the former Miscarriages and Abuses committed in such Coffee-Houses, and expressing their true Sorrow for the same, and promising their utmost Care and Endeavour to prevent the like, for such time as they shall be permitted to Retail the said Liquors in their respective Houses) did humbly Beseech His Majesty, That He would be Graciously pleased to give them some further time for the Vending of the said Commodities, which would otherwise lie upon their hands.

And did further Offer, That if they might be permitted to continue to Retail the said Liquors (within their respective Houses) they would not onely take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, but also enter into Recognizances to His Majesty respectively, at the Sessions of the Peace to be holden in the respective Counties, Cities and Liberties where their Houses are to be.

It wasn’t just King Charles who had it in for coffee houses. As noted above, these were essentially male preserves that both helped strengthen even further the “old boys networks” and also took them away from their wives and partners. One (or possibly several, the authorship is unknown, just stated as “A well-willer”) woman was sufficiently irked by this that in 1674 she published The Women’s Petition Against Coffee.4 In it she satirically attempts to get men to shun coffee largely on the basis that it, ahem, impairs their performance:

That since ’tis Reckon’d amongst the Glories of our Native Country, To be A Paradise for Women: The same in our Apprehensions can consist in nothing more than the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome; But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us. Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.

There was a glorious Dispensation, ’twas surely in the Golden Age, when Lusty Ladds of seven or eight hundred years old, Got Sons and Daughters; and we have read, how a Prince of Spain was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times in a night: But Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone, The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a Bridle: being so far from doing any works of Supererregation that we find them not capable of performing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expectations Exact.

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts [sic] whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

For the continual sipping of this pittiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpice-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend ’twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it.

A Betrothed Queen might trust her self a bed with one of them, without the nice Caution of a Sword between them: nor can all the Art we use revive them from this Lethargy, so unfit they are for Action, that like young Train-band-men when called upon Duty, their Amunition [sic] is wanting; peradventure they Present, but cannot give Fire, or at least do but flash in the pan, instead of doing Execution.

Despite these challenges coffee houses survived, and not only survived, they thrived. One could write a book (or several) about their impact upon society, but just in England alone they helped lead to the creation of the Royal Society and the modern insurance industry though Lloyds of London, which began life in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house. Jonathan’s Coffee House performed a similar service for securities. Brokers excluded from the Royal Exchange gathered in coffeehouses; John Castaing posted prices of stocks and commodities there in 1698. Eventually the activity helped form the London Stock Exchange.

In my final piece I will explore how coffee grew over the centuries that follow to become a daily staple in our homes and on our high streets.

If all this is making you thirsty, here’s a previous piece we’ve had on making the perfect brew – well, 17th-century style anyway:

Pennant spent his entire life residing at his family’s estate, Downing Hall near Whitford,3 not far from the north coast of Wales. That estate had been built by his great-great-grandfather John in 1627. Many of Pennant’s writings related to natural history – his first love was ornithology, then palaeontology, later broadening to zoology in general, his British Zoology (1776) being a particular landmark.

I say ‘entire life’ – but although Downing Hall was always his home, he spent much of his life travelling across Britain (and Europe), and it is his accounts of his tours which have particularly ensured his name passed down to posterity.

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His first known trip was as an undergraduate, from Oxford to Cornwall in around 1746–7. In 1754, he went to Ireland, where he kept a short journal but this was never published. We can blame the craic, for in his words: “Such was the conviviality of the country, that my journal proved as maigre as my entertainment was gras, so it never was a dish fit to be offered to the public.”4 And in 1765, he undertook a Grand Tour of northern Europe – this was written up but not published until 1948 As A Tour of the Continent, 1765.

But it was his 1769 tour of Scotland which made his name when it was published two years later, and it is still in print to this day. His account was a popular success, and in fact was the inspiration for our old friend Samuel Johnson touring Scotland with James Boswell. Johnson was rare to praise people, but said of Pennant: “He’s the best traveller I ever read; he observes things more than anyone else does.”

And here’s Pennant’s own modest description of his own methodology in a letter to George Ashby: “I beg to be considered not as a Topographer but as a curious traveller willing to collect all that a traveller may be supposed to do in his voyage; I am the first that attempted travels at home, therefore earnestly wish for accuracy.”5

Pennant sets off from Chester and heads east to begin with. He gives us an interesting mixture of personal opinions, historical details from his research, notes on industry and social commentary. For example…

The road from this place to Macclesfield is thro’ a flat, rich, but unpleasant country. That town is in a very flourishing state; is possessed of a great manufacture of mohair and twist buttons; has between twenty and thirty silk mills, and a very considerable copper smelting house, and brass work…

After leaving this town, the country almost instantly changes and becomes very mountainous and barren, at least on the surface; but the bowels compensate for the external sterility, by yielding sufficient quantity of coal for the use of the neighboring parts of Chesbire…

The celebrated warm bath of Buxton is seated in a bottom, amidst these hills, in a most cheerless spot, and would be little frequented, did not Hygeia often reside here, and dispense to her votaries the chief blessings of life, ease and health. With joy and gratitude I this moment reflect on the efficacious qualities of the waters; I recollect with rapture the return of spirits, the flight of pain, and re-animation of my long, long crippled rheumatic limbs. But how unfortunate is it, that what Providence designed for the general good, should be rendered only a partial one, and denied to all, except the opulent; or I may say to the (comparatively) few that can get admittance into the house where these waters are imprisoned?

He continues all the way to the east coast and follows that northward to Scotland.6 Eventually, after taking in Edinburgh, he heads through Perth to Aberdeenshire, north as far as Caithness and then back down towards Glasgow via Fort William. Here’s another extract, where Pennant describes the Highlanders and their entertainments:

The manners of the native Highlanders may justly be expressed in these words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or to any animating amusement; or I may say, from experience, to lend any disinterested assistance to the distressed traveller, either in directing him on his way, or affording their aid in passing the dangerous torrents of the Highlands: hospitable to the highest degree, and full of generosity:7 are much affected with the civility of strangers, and have in themselves a natural politeness and address, which often flows from the meanest when least expected… [They] are excessively inquisitive after your business, your name, and other particulars of little consequence to them: most curious after the politicks of the world, and when they can procure an old newspaper, will listen to it with all the avidity of Shakespear’s blacksmith. Have much pride, and consequently are impatient of affronts, and revengeful of injuries…

Most of the ancient sports of the Highlanders, such as archery, hunting, fowling and fishing, are now disused: those retained are, throwing the putting-stone, or stone of strength, as they call it, which occasions an emulation who can throw a weighty one the farthest. Throwing the penny-stone, which answer to our quoits. The shinty, or the striking of a ball of wood or of hair: this game is played between two parties in a large plain, and furnished with clubs; whichever side strikes it first to their own goal wins the match.

The amusements by their fire-sides were, the telling of tales, the wildest and most extravagant imaginable: musick was another: in former times, the harp was the favorite instrument, covered with leather and strung with wire, but at present is quite lost. Bag-pipes are supposed to have been introduced by the Danes… the oldest are played with the mouth, the loudest and most earpiercing of any wind musick; the other, played with the fingers only, are of Irish origin; the first suited the genius of this warlike people, roused their courage to battle, alarmed them when secure, and collected them when scattered. This instrument is become scarce since the abolition of the power of the chieftains, and the more industrious turn of the common people.

Many more tours would follow:

• 1772: To Scotland again, from Chester through the Lake District, Dumfries and Glasgow, then beyond, published in 1774 as A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772.

• 1773: Mopping up more of Cumbria and Yorkshire, published posthumously in 1801 as A Tour from Downing to Alston Moor. There was also a 1777 follow-up, again published by his son David after Thomas’s death.

• 1773–76: Three journeys across his native Wales, published in various forms and gathered together in an omnibus edition of 1784.

• 1774: Northamptonshire and then the Isle of Man (only fragments of details survive).

• 1776: He later recalled visits to Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire in this year, recalling a moment of jeopardy:

  At Buckingham I narrowly escaped a death suited to an antiquary; I visited the old church at 8 o’clock in the morning of March the 26th. It fell before 6 in the afternoon, and I escaped being buried in its ruins.”

• 1777: Kent – London to Canterbury, Sandwich, Deal and Dover.

• 1780s: Published as The Journey from Chester to London in 1782, bringing together details from different trips, because every time he visited the capital, he tried to take a different route to maximise his experiences (“digressing to the right or to the left, as the places which merit notice happened to lie”)! He also published Of London in 1790.

• 1787: a tour of the West Country, unpublished. Also, journeys from London to Dover and thence to the Isle of Wight, with his son David, and published posthumously in 1801.

As if all that wasn’t enough (when was he ever actually at the home where he spent his ‘entire life’?), he also penned Outlines of the Globe, 18 volumes (some published, some not) of “imaginary tours… to climes more suited to my years, more genial than that to the frozen north”. All this plus numerous works of natural history and contributions to the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society,8 as well as a multitude of letters to luminaries of the day such as Carl Linnaeus, Gilbert White and Joseph Banks. When he died in 1798, at the age of 72, he must have been exhausted!

Pennant’s life was not untouched by tragedy – his first wife, Elizabeth Falconer, died in 1764 when his son David was still a baby; and in 1794 he lost a daughter by his second wife, Ann Mostyn. An injury to his knee in the same year “confined him long to his room” (as another writer on North Wales, William Bingley, recorded) “but he recovered from it in a wonderful manner”. And the impression I have is that he was a charming optimist.

Five years before he died, he wrote a brief autobiographical account, published whimsically as The Literary Life of the Late Thomas Pennant, Esq and mostly focusing on the history of his written works and what led to them. He begins: “The title page announces the termination of my authorial existence, which took place on March 1st, 1791.” He means the date of his last publication (Account of London) – though of course he kept going anyway. “May I remain possessed with the same passions till the great Exorcist lays me for ever,” he wrote. And a little later on:

My body may have abated of its wonted vigour; but my mind still retains its powers, its longing after improvements, its wish to receive new lights through chinks which time hath made.

And this is how his Literary Life ends, reflecting on his imaginary tours from his desk:

Happy is the age that could thus beguile its fleeting hours, without injury to any one, and, with the addition of years, continue to rise in its pursuits. But more interesting, and still more exalted subjects, must employ my future span.

What better way to approach the autumn of life?

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It is often the case when I write these pieces that I discover that incredibly familiar things are either much older than I expected (for instance, drinking straws) or much younger (French fries). Coffee falls into that latter category, somewhat to my surprise, as it has basically always been potentially available in the West, and didn’t need the Colombian Exchange to happen before we could start pouring it down our throats.

Coffee was, it seems, wholly unknown to the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. Or was it? We have this line from Plutarch, writing about the Spartans:

τῶν δὲ σιτίων ἐνδοξότατος ἦν ὁ μέλας ζωμός

Among their foods, the black broth was the most renowned

The English traveller and writer Sir Henry Blount (1602 - 1682) suggested that this broth could indeed be coffee:

They have another drink not good at meat,2 called Cauphe, made of a Berry as big as a small Bean, dried in a Furnace, and beat to Pouder [sic], of a Soot-colour, in taste a little bitterish, that they seeth and drink as hot as may be endured … it is thought to be the old black broth used so much by the Lacedemonians…

I have to say I find Sir Henry’s suggestion wholly fanciful. I can’t believe that the Spartans started their day with a cup of Joe and there aren’t more obvious, tangible, records of them doing so. Similarly given how coffee tends to enmesh itself into every society it encounters then why were the Greeks and Romans not sipping on Java? The general consensus is that this “black broth” was probably some kind of concoction made from pig’s blood, not the kind of thing that I would like to face first thing in the morning.

Besides (handily for me) we know exactly how coffee was discovered and it took place nearly a thousand years after Plutarch was writing. The story takes place in Ethiopia in the 9th century and brilliantly it involves dancing goats:

A young goatherd named Kaldi noticed one day that his goats, whose deportment up to that time had been irreproachable, were abandoning themselves to the most extravagant prancings. The venerable buck, ordinarily so dignified and solemn, bounded about like a young kid. Kaldi attributed this foolish gaiety to certain fruits of which the goats had been eating with delight.

The story goes that the poor fellow had a heavy heart; and in the hope of cheering himself up a little, he thought he would pick and eat of the fruit. The experiment succeeded marvelously. He forgot his troubles and became the happiest herder in happy Arabia. When the goats danced, he gaily made himself one of the party, and entered into their fun with admirable spirit.

One day, a monk chanced to pass by and stopped in surprise to find a ball going on. A score of goats were executing lively pirouettes like a ladies’ chain,3 while the buck solemnly balanced, and the herder went through the figures of an eccentric pastoral dance.

The astonished monk inquired the cause of this saltatorial madness; and Kaldi told him of his precious discovery.

Now, this poor monk had a great sorrow; he always went to sleep in the middle of his prayers; and he reasoned that Mohammed without doubt was revealing this marvelous fruit to him to overcome his sleepiness.

Piety does not exclude gastronomic instincts. Those of our good monk were more than ordinary; because he thought of drying and boiling the fruit of the herder. This ingenious concoction gave us coffee. Immediately all the monks of the realm made use of the drink, because it encouraged them to pray and, perhaps, also because it was not disagreeable.

I read a version of this story more than 45 years ago as a kid and I absolutely loved it4 – people drink coffee today because of a bunch of dancing goats! The younger me would have been saddened to learn, however, that it is not true at all. The first mention of Kaldi’s name occurs in the passage that I quoted above, which comes from William H. Ukers’s 1922 book All About Coffee which claims that it has been taken from an earlier French source (though I have not been able to track that down, and fear that he might simply have made this up).

It seems that this is a late 19th or early 20th century version of a similar story from 1671 in the book Discorso della salutifera beuanda cahue, ò vero Cafe’ del sig. D. Fausto Nairone Banesio maronita trasportato dalla latina, alla lingua italiana da Er. Frederic. Vegilin di Claerbergen Leouardiense Frisone (Discourse on the healthy drink of the Cahue, or true Cafe, by Mr. D. Fausto Nairone Banesio, Maronite, translated from Latin into Italian by Er. Frederic. Vegilin of Claerbergen, Leouardiense Frisian.):

…it must be said that this drink called Cahue, or Cafè, was discovered by accidental experience, as will be clear from what is about to be narrated.

For, according to the common tradition of the Orientals, a certain keeper of camels — or, as others say, of goats — complained to the monks of a certain monastery in the region of Ayaman, which is Arabia Felix, that his herds, not merely once in the week but throughout the whole night, were staying awake and leaping about beyond their usual habit. The prior of that monastery, led by curiosity, judged that this must come from the pastures. Carefully examining, together with his companion, the place where the goats or camels had been feeding on the night when they were leaping about, he found there certain little shrubs, on whose fruits, or rather berries, they had been feeding.

He wished to test for himself the powers of this fruit, and so, boiling them in water, he soon found by experience that the drink made from them aroused wakefulness at night. From this it came about that he ordered it to be used daily by the monks for their night vigils, so that they might be readier to attend the prayers of the night. And because, from this daily drink, they experienced day by day various and very healthful effects for human well-being and good bodily condition, this new kind of drink, by chance and by the marvelous providence of God, gradually spread through that whole region, then in the course of time through other provinces and kingdoms of the East, with such wholesomeness that it reached even western regions, and especially European lands.

Therefore they say that the first discoverers of this drink were the aforementioned Christian monks, having learned it from the keepers — so to speak, the nurses — of goats or camels. The Turks themselves, as they are generally accustomed to do, admit this; and in gratitude to them, and from devotion of spirit, they pour out prayers for them, especially those Turks who are the preparers and distributors of this drink. For these men have their own daily prayers for Sciadli and Aidhrous, because they assert that these were the names of the aforementioned monks.

A great abundance of these little shrubs is found in Arabia Felix. They bear fruits like cacao, but split lengthwise like the stone of a date, and they are divided two by two within the same husk.

Interestingly this version changes the monks from being Muslims to Christians (possibly due to the biases of the author) however it seems that this tale is a version of an even older one. عمدة الصفوة في حل القهوة (which transliterates to ʿUmdat al-ṣafwa fī ḥill al-qahwa and roughly means “The mainstay of the elite concerning the permissibility of coffee.”) was written by Zayn al-Dīn al-Jazīrī (also Abd al-Qādir al-Jazīrī) around 1558 (but likely drawing on earlier works) and here the story is as follows:

Other accounts of coffee’s origin exist, but they are not equally reliable. One such account, reported by Nairon, says that a camel driver - or, according to others, a goatherd - complained to monks in Arabia that his camels or goats remained awake all night on certain days of the week and leaped about contrary to their usual behaviour.5 The prior or abbot of the monastery, curious to know why these animals were so wakeful and lively, observed them with a companion at the place where this happened. Finding that they had been eating the fruit of certain shrubs, he boiled the fruit in water and discovered that the drink excited wakefulness. He ordered his monks to drink it so that they might more easily attend the divine office at night. Then, when the monks found from daily use that the beverage had several good effects on health, it spread gradually through the country and then through the provinces of the East.

al-Jazīrī is very skeptical of this story (and also notes that it has been appropriated by the Christians):

The author gives little credit to this story. Nairon cites no authority for it; he merely calls it the common tradition of the Orientals. In plain terms, that means that it is a tale current among common people, not a report on which sensible persons should rely. Moreover, it is easy to see that the tale is a fable based on the true origin already reported by Abd al-Qadir from earlier authorities. Eastern Christians appear to have been pleased to claim honor from it. The prior or abbot and his companion are, in this interpretation, Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani and Muhammad al-Hadrami; the monks are the dervishes who spent the night in prayer with them.

There is another reason to reject the monastery version. Nairon cannot sustain the claim that such monks existed in Arabia Felix at the relevant time. There may have been monks there before Muhammad, for history teaches that there were Christians as well as idolaters in Arabia in that earlier period. But after Muhammad, Arabia Felix became Muslim. Nor can the monks in question be the monks of Mount Sinai, for Mount Sinai lies in Arabia Petraea, not in Arabia Felix. If coffee had been introduced in the age of such monks, ancient Arab and Persian historians and poets would surely have mentioned it.

So where does coffee come from? The beans that are ground for us each day come from two species of plant – Coffea arabica (better known as arabica) and Coffea canephora, (aka robusta). Recent genomic work has found that arabica is the result of an ancient (between 350,000 and 610,000 years ago), natural, hybridisation between C. canephora and C. eugenioides in or near Ethiopian forests and it seems likely that the first humans to consume coffee dwelt in the same woods. Due to a lack of written records it seems likely that people were partaking of the black stuff (or, more likely, chewing on the berries) for hundreds or even thousands of years before the first accounts that we can find today.

For the earliest history of coffee embedding itself in society we turn once again to al-Jazīrī who in the following passages is talking about the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s:

The first great spread of coffee, according to the report the author transmits, took place in Yemen. Its early appearance is connected with the shaykh, the imam, the learned and saintly man Jamal al-Din Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Said, known as al-Dhabhani [died around 1470], so called from Dhabhan, a town in Yemen. He was attached to Aden, where he held a significant legal office and gave fatwas. At some point he travelled to Persia. There he saw men from his own country drinking coffee. At first he did not inquire closely into the reason for their practice or the benefit they drew from it.

When he returned to Aden, his health was disturbed. Remembering what he had seen, he tried coffee and found benefit in it. Beyond the restoration of health, he noticed certain special properties: it dispelled heaviness caused by vapors rising to the head; it gladdened and enlivened the spirit; it brought joy; it helped loosen the bowels; and above all it prevented sleep without causing the discomfort that often accompanies sleeplessness. This last property was of special importance to him. He had turned to devotion, and he associated with Sufis or dervishes. He and they took coffee together at the beginning of the night and spent the night until morning in prayer, remembrance, and other exercises of strict devotion. It gave them freedom of mind and alertness of spirit in exercises that others had not been able to sustain in the same way.

Because Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani was a man of position and reputation, his example gave coffee credit in Aden. Soon he and his dervishes were not the only ones who used it. Men of the law who loved reading adopted it; artisans who needed to gain time for their work adopted it; travellers who had to journey by night in order to avoid the heat of the day adopted it; and finally the whole city of Aden adopted it. Those who did not need to keep vigil, or who did not seek wakefulness, drank it by day in order to profit from its other benefits.

If this account is accurate, then we can date the start of the spread of coffee in the Yemen (from where it would then expand across the Islamic world, into Western Europe and across the globe) fairly accurately, as the accounts relating to Jamāl al-Dīn al-Dhabḥānī are generally agreed to be relating to the 1450s, and it would seem that he was pivotal in the development of the drink:

This, then, is the first origin of the widespread public use of coffee. It had existed before, for there were people who drank it without ill effect, and perhaps without clearly understanding its advantages. But it remained obscure until Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani - a discerning man capable of recognising the excellence of a precious drink - brought it into public favour. He was joined in this by Muhammad al-Hadrami, another weighty doctor from Hadramawt, who drank it and supported its use.

Coffee then spread to Mecca, but it wasn’t long before it ran into a few problems as (once again)6 al-Jazīrī recounts:

In the year 917 AH, corresponding to 1511 CE, coffee suffered a fierce blow at Mecca. Khayr Beg, governor of Mecca under Qansuh, the sultan of Egypt, was leaving the sanctuary after evening prayer when he saw a circle of men seated there with a lantern, drinking coffee in preparation for keeping vigil through the night and reciting praises connected with the birth of Muhammad. He was surprised to see people drinking in that form in the very sanctuary, which Muslims so greatly venerate. Since he had not yet heard of coffee or of the way it was taken, he first believed that they were drinking wine.

When the coffee-drinkers noticed that the governor was observing them, they put out their light, which increased his curiosity. He sent some of his men to them and had them brought before him to account for their action. His astonishment grew when he saw that they had a pot and cups. What they told him - that the drink was common in Mecca and publicly sold in places where people gathered to take it - did not satisfy him, especially when he learned that in such places people also played, sang, and danced. All this led him to suspect that coffee intoxicated; and even if it did not intoxicate, he judged that it gave occasion for actions intolerable in Islam. He therefore forbade the men to drink it further, ordered them to disperse to their homes, and commanded that such assemblies should not be held again.

Khayr Beg didn’t want to be seen to be banning the drink simply on a whim, so he took steps to ensure that there was a formal basis for its prohibition:

Early the next morning Khayr Beg summoned the officers of justice, the most famous doctors of the law from the orthodox schools, several devout men, and many notables of Mecca. When they had assembled, he related what he had seen and the disorder that he had learned coffee was causing in the city. He added that he was resolved to interrupt its course, but that he did not wish to act without consulting them. He had called them in order to communicate his design and ask their opinion.

In order for the drink to be banned, it had to be proved harmful to health. Luckily there were some people on hand willing to make that case:

There were then at Mecca two Persian brothers, both doctors, learned in logic and Muslim scholastic theology, and also practicing medicine. They were not, however, very skilled in medicine, and one of them had already written against coffee, perhaps because it took away from them many patients. Since they were considered the leading physicians of Mecca, Khayr Beg, urged also by his imam and disposed to suppress coffee entirely, called them and explained the matter.

The two physicians gave the same opinion. They asserted that the bunn of the husks, from which the Meccans prepared coffee, was cold and dry, and that by these two qualities it was very harmful to health.

Most of the doctors, through weakness or complaisance toward the governor, gave their opinion orally in conformity with that of the two physicians and their supporters. Only one defended coffee with warmth. Although he was a professor of theology and jurisprudence and had the authority of mufti, the false zealots, unable to answer his arguments, heaped insults upon him and treated him as unfaithful to his religion because of his firmness.

The condemnation of coffee therefore passed. It was declared a drink forbidden by the law. The sentence was drawn up at length, in emphatic terms, to express the triumph supposedly won by extirpating the abuse that had slipped in. It was signed by several doctors, and the governor made it into a dispatch and sent it to Sultan Qansuh. At the same time, Khayr Beg had proclaimed in the public squares and crossroads of Mecca not only the prohibition of selling coffee, but the prohibition of drinking it, whether in public or in private, under penalty of the punishment incurred by those who violate the Muslim religion.

The crackdown then began:

In execution of this prohibition, the officers of justice forced the coffeehouses to close and searched out all the coffee they could find - especially the husk coffee used there - both in the coffeehouses and in the merchants’ stores, and burned it. Authority prevented coffee from being taken in public, and some were punished for contravening the ban. But Khayr Beg could not prevent private use. Many who drank it did not believe they were violating the law, because the condemnation had not passed unanimously in the assembly. They said that the doctor who opposed the condemnation had no weaker reasons for approving coffee than the others had for condemning it. Nevertheless, when one Muslim was caught drinking it at home, he was severely punished and paraded through the public squares on an ass as an ignominious example.

Luckily for morning routines of billions of people today, it didn’t hold:7

The governor’s rigorous prohibition did not last long. Sultan Qansuh received his dispatch and did not approve his indiscreet zeal. On the contrary, he was astonished that Khayr Beg had dared to have coffee condemned in Mecca while people in Cairo found it beneficial and while Cairo had doctors more capable than those of Mecca of deciding whether Muslims might use it. He therefore ordered him to revoke the ban. As for the disorders, he should use his authority to prevent them. The sultan added that if a thing were to be forbidden merely because it was used in a manner offensive to religion, then one would have to include among forbidden things even the water of the well of Zamzam if someone drank it in an irreligious way.

And things didn’t end well for the governor either:

Khayr Beg had the displeasure of seeing his high-handed undertaking fail. The people of Mecca even believed themselves avenged, for the following year his successor arrived with orders to make him account for his extortions. He was beaten to death while being forced to reveal where his money was; and his brother, to avoid the torture, killed him himself.

Nor for those two doctors:

The two Persian physicians who had contributed most to the prohibition of coffee also came to a bad end. Seeing that they had lost their credit in Mecca and were regarded only with contempt and indignation, they banished themselves and withdrew to Cairo. Some time afterward Sultan Selim I, emperor of the Turks, entered Cairo after the conquest of Egypt. The two men were convicted of making imprecations against him and were put to death.

Coffee was now firmly established in the Islamic world, and in my next piece I’ll explore how it spread into Europe, and what happened when it did.

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The history of…

Paul began this series two years ago. Here are the first five that you might have missed…

• A history of… shampoo – from saponification to antimacassars!

• A history of… drinking straws – 6,000 years of, well, sucking

• A history of… the gin and tonic (plus Part 2) – jenever, malaria and more

• A history of… crisps (potato chips) – at last! Something with a precise origin story. Or not.

• A history of… ancient elections – the origins of democracy (of a kind)

In their own words…

Andrew’s pieces began in 2020, closely based around first-hand sources. Here are some of the very earliest…

• A Night in an Opium Den, 1891 – an original Victorian account. Who was its writer?

• The dread of the Thames Police, 1841 – an early account of mudlarking

• Nights out in New York, 1744 – an engaging travel diarist visits this small town!

• Frolics on the frozen river, 1684 – back to the Thames for some frosty fun

• The British burn Washington, 1814 – a previous assault on the Capitol

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The answer may surprise you – it could be argued that, astonishingly, we had the fax machine1 before we had the French fry – but let’s start by delving into some of the myths about their origin, before trying to get to the truth of the matter. It is often said that Thomas Jefferson, who lived in Paris between 1784 and 1789, introduced the fry to the Americas sometime around the start of the 19th century. Indeed some people claim that he actually invented this famous dish.2 Jefferson loved his food, and brought back many French recipes upon his return to the USA, written in that language, some in his own hand. It is believed that some, or possibly all, of these recipes were dictated by Adrien Petit, Jefferson’s maître d’hôtel (which negates the idea that Jefferson was the inventor of them). The one that is of significance to us refers to “pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches” – definitely fried potatoes, but, crucially “en petites tranches”, in little slices. These were not fries, but rather the earlier form of fried potato which could be cooked more quickly and in less oil (but also had a greater tendency to both stick to themselves and the surface of the pan).

There is stronger evidence that this is how Jefferson ate his fried potatoes from The Virginia House-wife, a recipe book published in 1824 by Mary Randolph, kinswoman to the great man:

Peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peal a lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping. Take care that your fat and frying-pan are quite clean; put it on a quick fire, watch it, and as soon as the lard boils and is still, put in the slices of potatoes, and keep moving them till they are crisp; take them up and lay them to drain on a sieve; send them up with very little salt sprinkled on them.

Where then can we find the first reference to fries being served in England or America? Some might suggest that the answer might lie with great friend of Histories Charles Dickens! In The Tale of Two Cities (1859) we have the following line:

Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil…

Given that ‘chips’ is the British word for ‘fries’ this seems pretty compelling perhaps, but the words that follow it belie this theory. These potatoes were cooked in “...some reluctant drops of oil” – this was not a vat of fat in which batons were cooked, rather a shallow pan where slices could be fried in the bare minimum of that expensive oil. There is further evidence that chips at this time didn’t mean fries, but rather something more akin to crisps (aka potato chips) from a recipe entitled ‘Potato Chips’ in The English Cookery Book: uniting a good style with economy...,3 edited by J.H. Walsh and published in the same year:

Wash and peel some potatoes, then pare them, ribbon-like, into long lengths; put them into cold water to remove the strong potatoe [sic] flavour; drain them, and throw them into a pan with a little butter, and fry them a light brown. Take them out of the pan, and place them close to the fire on a sieve lined with clean writing paper to dry, before they are served up. A little salt may be sprinkled over them.

Trying to find the first reference to proper baton fries in English has been a surprisingly lengthy task, and I do not claim that my findings are wholly robust, but nonetheless, here we go. I started by going back further in time, to The Cook’s Oracle4 published in 1817, where there are numerous fried potato recipes, but, sadly, none that are fry-like:

Cold Potatoes fried.—(No. 102.)

Put a bit of clean dripping into a frying-pan: when it is melted, slice in your potatoes with a little pepper and salt; put them on the fire; keep stirring them: when they are quite hot, they are ready.

Obs.—This is a very good way of re-dressing potatoes

Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings.—(No. 104.)

Peel large potatoes; slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping. Take care that your fat and frying-pan are quite clean; put it on a quick fire, watch it, and as soon as the lard boils, and is still, put in the slices of potato, and keep moving them till they are crisp. Take them up, and lay them to drain on a sieve: send them up with a very little salt sprinkled over them.

There is even a recipe for whole fried potatoes:

Potatoes fried whole.—(No. 105.)

When nearly boiled enough, as directed in No. 102, put them into a stew-pan with a bit of butter, or some nice clean beef-drippings; shake them about often (for fear of burning them), till they are brown and crisp; drain them from the fat.

Obs.—It will be an elegant improvement to the last three receipts, previous to frying or broiling the potatoes, to flour them and dip them in the yelk [sic] of an egg, and then roll them in fine-sifted bread-crumbs; they will then deserve to be called POTATOES FULL DRESSED.5

As a bit of a change from all of those fried slices of potato, I also found an early recipe for what I think is best described as a potato hash:6

To Fry Potatoes for Breakfast or Supper.—No meat or bacon is required to be eaten with these; in Somersetshire it forms the only breakfast dish of the peasantry, many of the middle classes, and is frequently seen at the tables of the wealthy, throughout the year. If potatoes are left from dinner, these will do; if not, boil some the day before frying, but if overboiled [sic] they will not be good; when cold, chop them very fine, as fine as for suet, but not mash them; sprinkle a little salt over; for a vegetable-dish full of potatoes, have in a frying-pan about two tablespoonfuls of dripping or bacon-fat, made boiling hot; put in the potatoes, stir them about well; when hot through, put them together with the knife or spoon (but not press them) into about the size of the dish they are to be served on; now let them brown for ten minutes; then, when brown, place the dish on the top, and turn them over; serve them hot, with hot plates.

Eventually I found this in an 1883 recipe book published by the Chicago Herald Cooking School:

Could these be modern French fries? The description is a bit unclear, it may be that these are simply another iteration of the thin sliced strips previously described. Not good enough, I fear. A bit later, in 1894’s Practical Gastronomy7 by Charles Herman Senn we get a recipe for straw fries:

Very thin strips of potato, shape and size of matches, fried a light brown colour in clarified butter

At last, in Auguste Mario’s 1910 book Easy French Cookery: Containing over 300 Economical and Attractive Recipes from a Celebrated Chef’s Note-Book we have the following which is unequivocally a description of fries as we know them!

234. FRENCH FRIED POTATOES (Pommes frites). Cut some potatoes in strips of about 1½ inch long and ½ inch thick, and cook as for Straw Potatoes.

But this does seem shockingly late; could we go earlier?8 We could, and we can, and we shall, because in Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book from 18809 we have this:

Pare small uncooked potatoes. Divide them in halves, and each half in three pieces. Put in the frying basket and cook in boiling fat for ten minutes. Drain, and dredge with salt. Serve hot with chops or beefsteak. Two dozen pieces can be fried at one time.

Finally, definitively French fries in an 19th-century English-language source! There may well be earlier references that I have been unable to track down, and, of course, people were certainly eating fries in the Anglophone world before anyone thought to capture that fact in writing, but it seems pretty certain that they are something that has only been around there for less than 200 years. Today global consumption is in the ranges of 20-30 million tonnes of the things with the average American eating around 58 pounds (26 kilos) of fries. You may expect me to say that I will be having chips for tea tonight, but honestly, after all this research, I think that I am going to take a break from them for a while…

This week we begin at an ending – which would become a strange new beginning:

His head reposed on my bosom. It was an imperceptible dying. He became gradually colder, and his muscular powers were deprived of action. After he had ceased to speak, he smiled, and grasped my hand. He looked at me affectionately, and closed his eyes. There was no struggle,—no suffering,—life faded into death—as the twilight blends the day with darkness.

Those are the words of John Bowring (1792–1872), who we met recently as the interviewer of arsonist Jonathan Martin. He was a man of many parts: acquaintance of Charles Dickens, Lord Byron and many other luminaries of the age; herring merchant, wine trader and journalist; governor of Hong Kong; polyglot, hymn-writer and industrialist; and survivor of a shipwreck. And the man whose death he describes up close is the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

The two men were first introduced by Edward Blaquiere – an Irishman with Huguenot roots, officer under Nelson, fan of progressive politics and another friend of Byron – in August 1820. At this point Bentham was 72 and Bowring 27. Bowring rapidly became Bentham’s disciple, and the two men would remain intimate (“He and I are son and father”, wrote the unmarried Bentham) for the last decade of Bentham’s life. In 1823 Bentham founded the political and philosophical journal The Westminster Review, soon appointing Bowring its editor and his own literary executor.1

Here’s how Bowring described his hero:

Though closely resembling Franklin, his face expresses a profounder wisdom and a more marked benevolence than the bust of the American printer. Mingled with a serene contemplative cast, there is something of playful humour in the countenance. The high forehead is wrinkled, but is without sternness, and is contemplative but complacent. The neatly-combed long white hair hangs over the neck, but moves at every breath…

But look, interesting as Bentham’s life was – yes, he was the ground-breaking philosopher of utilitarianism;2 yes, he was a pioneer of animal rights;3 and yes, he did have a pet cat which he liked to call ‘The Reverend Sir John Langbourne D.D.’4 – we’re really here to talk about his death and ‘afterlife’. Some of you will no doubt know about this, but many won’t, and it’s a story worth the telling.

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Even back in 1769, when he was only 21, Bentham had made a will which left his body to a doctor friend so it could be dissected for science. In 1824, his friend Thomas Southwood Smith, a physician and public health campaigner, wrote an article in the Westminster Review on ‘Use of the Dead to the Living’5 which prompted Bentham to ponder a future public dissection of his own body (after his death, obviously). Bowring noted that Bentham was also…

…full of the notion of having his head preserved in the style of the New Zealanders… Experiments are to be made, and Armstrong is to get a human head from Grainger, the anatomist, which is to be slowly dried in a stove in Bentham’s house.6

Sometime in 1831, Bentham wrote his own paper: ‘Auto-Icon or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, expanding on all this.7 By ‘Auto-Icon’ he meant “a man who is his own image”. He was definitely very keen on these:

Our churches are ready-provided receptacles for Auto-Icons,—provided for all classes,—for rich and poor. There would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble,—there would be no danger to health from the accumulating of corpses,—and the use of churchyards would gradually be done away.

There’s a lot more in this vein. Sounds like a recipe for the zombie apocalypse!

On 30th May 1832 – just a week before he died – Bentham wrote the final version of his will, and fully committed to the idea. In it we read…

I appoint John Bowring Doctor of Laws who for these twelve years or thereabouts has been my most intimate and confidential friend my Executor…

my body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in manner hereinafter mentioned and I direct that as soon as it appears to any one that my life is at an end my executor or any other person by whom on the opening of this paper the contents thereof shall have been observed shall send an express with information of my decease to Doctor Southwood Smith requesting [him] to repair to the place where my body is lying and after ascertaining by appropriate experiment that no life remains it is my request that he will take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal & preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame in the manner expressed in the paper annexed to this my will and at the top of which I have written ‘Auto Icon’—the Skeleton he will cause to be put together in such manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of the time employed in writing.

I direct that the body thus prepared shall be transferred to my executor – he will cause the Skeleton to be clad in one of the Suits of Black occasionally worn by me – the body so clothed together with the Chair and the Staff in my later years borne by me he will take charge of and for containing the whole apparatus he will cause to be prepared an appropriate box or case and will cause to be engraved in Conspicuous Characters on a plate to be affixed thereon and also on the labels on the Glass cases in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained as for example as in the manner used in the case of wine decanters my name at length with the letters ob: [i.e. ‘obiit’, Latin for ‘he died’] followed by the day of my decease.

If it should so happen that my personal friends and other disciples should be disposed to meet together on some day or days of the year for the purpose of Commemorating the founder of the Greatest happiness System of Morals and legislation my [executor] will from time to time cause to be conveyed to the room in which they meet the said box or case with the contents there to be stationed in some part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet…8

His will also lists several people9 to whom a ring and a lock of his hair should be given, including Bowring. A note entitled ‘Auto-Icon’ – written a few weeks earlier – was indeed annexed to this, giving further details such as “the body is to be used as the means of illustrating a series of lectures to which scientific & literary men are to be invited”.

Three days after Bentham’s death, at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine in London, Southwood Smith gave a lecture (more a eulogy, really) to a packed room of 300 people “delivered over the remains of Jeremy Bentham, Esq.”, the text of which was soon published:

There lie before us the mortal remains of one of the most illustrious men of our country and of our age. And that body, once animated by the master-spirit that now animates it no more, why is it here? Why, instead of being committed to the tomb, is it in this school of science?

Rather pleasingly, this was interrupted by a violent thunderstorm. The Dictionary of National Biography provides us with the grisly details that followed: “Following dissection, the skeleton was wired together, and the head was preserved by placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid and simply drawing off the fluids.”

Unfortunately his “face had lost all expression and was deemed unsuitable for display”. A wax replacement head was then made and attached via an iron spike. It had some of Bentham’s real hair stuck onto it, and the skeleton was padded out with straw before being clothed and seated in a glass and mahogany case pretty much as Bentham had directed.

The Auto-Icon’s whereabouts go a bit vague for a while. It stayed in Southwood Smith’s possession for some time, primarily at his consulting rooms in Finsbury Square. One of Charles Dickens’ biographers, Una Pope-Hennessy, noted “everyone who dined with the doctor had to face this memento mori. Dickens used to dine with him…”.

But when Southwood Smith offered it to University College London (UCL) around 1850, it seems to have been at 36 Percy Street, the home of his lover, the artist Margaret Gillies. Let’s hope Bentham’s corpse didn’t have to witness any… shenanigans.

The Auto-Icon was tucked away in UCL for many years.10 During the Second World War it was sent to Stanstead Bury in Hertfordshire for safe keeping, and then placed in UCL’s South Cloister, where it remained until 2020 (though it went on a trip to Germany in 2002).

His shrunken real head was placed at the feet of the Auto-Icon, then later in a box on top of the main case. The head was briefly stolen (and ransomed) by students in 1975.11 I’m not sure when it moved but the head is now in a safe at London’s Institute of Archaeology, though it did reappear at UCL for an exhibition in 2017:12

After 2020, the Auto-Icon was put in a shiny new glass box to replace the old wooden one, and it sits there today at the main entrance of the UCL Student Centre in Gordon Square.

PS

Strangely enough, John Bowring was – possibly – involved with the body of another great figure of the 19th century. In his autobiographical recollections, he notes of Byron, “After his death, his body was consigned to me in a puncheon of rum, which came from Missolonghi, whence it was transferred to a leaden coffin…” (though elsewhere he said it was brandy).

I say ‘possibly’ because another account says it was packed in a case and sent to Byron’s executors, John Hobhouse and John Hanson, then exhibited for a while at Sir Edward Knatchbull’s house in Great George Street, which 1824 newspaper accounts confirm.13 But surely Bowring would know, wouldn’t he? And we can trust these narrations of his that we’ve been following…

…can’t we?

I had been haunted by strange visions during my unquiet slumbers on the reef. On one occasion a handsome Italian lady—a companion of our misfortune—appeared, in my dreams,—her face was close to mine; its beauty was gradually changed into deformity; the hair was loosened from its roots; the features were extinguished; it became a naked skull, and then slowly moved away. It was followed by the visage of a bearded man, which looked searchingly upon and into me. Then the beard fell off; the eyes dropped from their sockets; the countenance became a hideous and offensive mass—which was also slowly transformed to a skull and disappeared; to be followed by another head, which, after glaring at me, became discoloured by pustules and tumours which rent the skin; the flesh was loosened, it detached itself from the bones, leaving nothing but a skull, which, like its predecessors, then departed. There were, at least, twenty such visitations—unlike one another—each looking intensely into my face; and, after undergoing frightful transformations, all assumed the appearance of crania, and like Banquo’s ghost, glided away from sight.

Two weeks ago, we met the arsonist Jonathan Martin, who had previously tried to assassinate the Bishop of Oxford. In an interview he shared his feverish imaginings of angelic commandments to do this. Perhaps the above words were another of these visions? But no: they are almost certainly the words of his anonymous interviewer, written nearly 30 years after Martin’s death. This week we’ll unveil their identity.

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The full report of the interview opens with these words…

Accident brought before me, the other day, an extraordinary picture, which I received from the hands of Jonathan Martin, at the time of his confinement in York City Jail. It represents the vision which he assured me had induced him to set fire to the Minster, and has recalled to my mind—what may not be unworthy of record—some of the extraordinary hallucinations associated with Jonathan Martin’s history. He died in Bedlam, where, as also during his incarceration in the Castle at York, I had opportunities of conversing with him.

And the writer returns to this “extraordinary picture” at the end…

In a moment of confidence Jonathan told me he would paint for me a picture of the vision which had induced him to set fire to the Minster—which he did, and presented it to me. It is drawn in Indian ink, and, though rude, it is a “fine imagining.” The base is a dark rolling cloud, pierced through by a fiery sword; on the sword a sort of circular shield is placed, in whose centre is the head of God the Father. The expression is of terrible majesty; the eyes are fierce, the mouth is open, as if issuing a divine command. Beneath it is the inscription:

That’s the Sord I am the Hand,
That’s the Clud that God command;
This is the Sord I saw in a vishion at nounday,
This is the Clud I saw on the Minestra.
– Jonathan Martin. York, C.G., Aper the 15, 1829, his two vishons.

The original has lost much of its distinctness. In the wreck of the Alma it lay for some days in the bituminous waters of the Red Sea; but I have a copy, made at the time, which is a tolerably fair reproduction of the drawing.

And this passing reference to “wreck of the Alma” is what unlocked the interviewer’s identity. The story of the wreck itself is dramatic enough to be worth telling in its own right.

A quick bit of research established that the Alma was a steam-powered passenger liner owned by P&O which plied the waters between Suez and Calcutta (Kolkata), originally launched under a different name in 1854. Before its commercial service it had taken troops to the Crimean War, hence being renamed after one of the war’s chief battles.

It was not the luckiest of vessels – in 1857 it suffered a broken propeller shaft en route to Suez, but managed to limp to Aden. But the real disaster came on 12th June 1859, when it struck a reef off the island of Haruish in the Red Sea. A contemporary report in the Annual Register noted: “There were about 140 passengers…The India and China mails were also on board, and a cargo worth £200,000.”

The ship’s captain had been bedridden with illness, and the blame was therefore laid at the door of his chief officer W H Davis (or Davies). The ship filled with water rapidly and “All the females and many of the male passengers were in bed, and the suddenness of the accident and the position of the vessel, placed them in the greatest jeopardy.”1 As it happens, a first-hand account of the events survives, published in a new magazine called Once a Week in December of the same year, ‘The Wreck of the Alma’, by ‘A Passenger’, signing themselves ‘J.B.’ at the end of the piece.

J.B. gives us a very detailed report. Here’s how the incident began:

The moon had just gone down, the night was perfectly serene, and the waves of the Arabian gulf tranquil as a lake in summer. It was three o’clock a.m., and except a few who remained on deck to escape from the intolerable heat below, we had retired to our cabins to seek that repose which is not easily found when the thermometer ranges at or above 90 degrees of Fahrenheit. No dream of danger molested us for a moment…

There were three fearful crashes, and in a few seconds the vessel heeled over, and floods of water rushed in at the port-holes. We heard the orders given to drive on—to go a-head—in the hope, no doubt, that the reef might be got over, but with fear that if a hole had been made in her bottom, her backing would have taken us into deep water, when she would have gone down perpendicularly, and all must have perished. Everybody rushed forth from their cabins. There were many screams and cries, especially from mothers who were seeking their children,—many supplications for deliverance, many prayers for forgiveness of sins, many commendations of souls to God. Those who were able, made their way to the door of the saloon and up the staircase to the sloping deck. But the rising of the waters soon closed that means of retreat. From the cabins on the port-side, which was under water, the passengers were rescued by those who were on the starboard side, which was high and nearly dry; but the slope of the deck made it difficult to maintain a footing. Planting our heels against anything that offered resistance, and holding on by whatever we could seize as a means of support, we watched the waters rising, rising, rising—extinguishing the lights as they rose, till we were left in utter darkness, waiting the moment when we should be overwhelmed, or, wholly exhausted, drop into the engulfing waves…

Our little group consisted of six persons—three males, three females. We discussed our chances of redemption, and abandoned hope.

Rescue from their immediate situation came quickly, though:

Ropes and friendly hands came down through the skylight… Every energy was exerted for our rescue, and rescued we all were, though many were wounded and bruised while dragged over the waters amidst the floating furniture, the broken planks, and through the apertures of escape. We had no garments on but our night dresses; we were nearly naked and barefooted… One by one we were pulled out of our watery prison, and lowered over the side of the Alma into boats below.

There are touching scenes, too:

Among those who had been aided down into the boat was an old lady who had lived more than fifty married years in India, and was returning with her husband, whose age exceeded fourscore, to end their long pilgrimage in their native land. Most touching was the anxiety they exhibited not to be “separated,” whether for life or death. “O! let us two be preserved together, or together die.”

This was far from the end of their ordeal, however – the lifeboats were insufficient to take them to the mainland, and thus began several days marooned on the reef. “Having neither shoes nor stockings, our feet were cruelly cut by the sharp and jagged coral, and we often fell on our hands, elbows and knees from the extreme pain of the wounds,” the narrator explains, using a nightcap to protect one foot at least.

In the main, the account reports on great cooperation and mutual kindness in their plight – other than some of the crew who looted the passengers’ baggage. And almost everyone survived, though not without many suffering sun exposure from four days on the reef (from which the poor ship’s purser died).

And presumably, somewhere among all the mail and effects lost… was Jonathan Martin’s visionary painting that had led to disaster at York Minster. Perhaps it was cursed?

‘J.B.’ was enough of a clue to track down the name of this author at last: Sir John Bowring, no less. Born in 1792, he was a serial traveller, writer and linguist who became the fourth Governor of Hong Kong, a role he held until the year of the shipwreck but one coloured by a series of scandals. (Also, two years before that he and his wife fell victim to arsenic poisoning during the Second Opium War,2 and she sadly died from it. So it goes.)

Further research revealed that Bowring was a friend of Charles Dickens, in whose journal All the Year Round the Martin interview had been published.3 Another anonymous piece in the same journal, ‘To China in a Gunboat’ (1865), is known to have been by Bowring.4 We also know that Bowring lost some of his work to the Alma wreck.5 All of this joins up to make it pretty certain that he was the interviewer of Martin early in his career – at a time when he was also editor of the Westminster Review, a publication created by Bowring’s great mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.6

So there we have it. But a few things certainly intrigue me. If Bowring owned the painting of the vision that inspired Jonathan Martin to arson, a painting which must have been made between 1829 and 1838, it seems surprising that it would be with him on this voyage more than 20 years later – why not leave it at home? Did it hold some ongoing fascination? Also, he says it “has lost much of its distinctness” from the shipwreck – suggesting he must have gone to some effort (or had some luck) in retrieving it from those “bituminous waters”. And why take the trouble to make a copy? (“Made at the time” – how?)

Part of me wants to imagine this painting somehow cast a curse on Bowring’s affairs – the loss of his wife to arsenic, the shipwreck… and more?7 But of course, I’m being fanciful. Though here’s another question: where is it now?8

As a final note, here’s Bowring’s sober rationale for those multiple dreams of skulls:

The dream was but the uncovering of the passing scene, on which the shadows of death were so adjacent to the business of life.

Edit: part 3 of this mini-series is here.

PS. If you’re anywhere near Oxford on Friday 22nd May, I’m compering this event at 7pm! Do say hello:

Last year, I went even deeper down the Dickensian rabbit hole for a long essay about the strange confluences between his life and that of the murderous artist Richard Dadd. (The essay was published in the always enjoyable Undefinable Boundary journal, available here.)1

Part of my research for that involved my trying to establish if and when Dickens had ever visited the famous Bethlem hospital for the insane (also known as Bedlam), and whether he could have met Dadd in person. That story is told in my essay – but my delvings led me to an intriguing article published in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round in December 1866, based around an interview with another famous Bedlam inmate, the arsonist Jonathan Martin.

Let’s backtrack a bit.

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Jonathan Martin was born in Northumberland in 1782, one of 13 children (only five surviving until adulthood). Like Richard Dadd, Jonathan was artistically talented, although he was somewhat overshadowed by his brothers John and William – John went on to become a very successful artist, William an inventor and philosopher. Jonathan’s life was more troubled from early on – as a child he had a speech impediment from being tongue-tied, and he witnessed his sister being murdered by a neighbour, who threw her down some stairs. After employment on his uncle’s farm and then at a tannery, he went to London in his early twenties, where he was seized by a press gang for the navy. This led to six tough years on board HMS Hercules.

Alongside these troubles, Jonathan was influenced by his aunt’s fiery Protestantism. In the navy he was renowned for his religious extremism (he also began having violent dreams), and in his thirties he became a Wesleyan preacher known for disrupting traditional church services.

All this came to a head in 1817 when Jonathan – now married and with a son of his own – threatened to kill the Bishop of Oxford. This saw him tried and committed to an asylum. There followed a series of escapes and committals. Meanwhile he had also returned to painting, and a witness at one of his trials described his works as “extraordinary marks of uninstructed talent, mixed with frenzy and wildness”. Jonathan even dictated his own autobiography, published in multiple editions between 1826 and 1830, and packed with lively incidents from his wayward life.

In 1828, he married his second wife2 – 20 years younger than him – and they moved to York. This was where his erratic life (preacher, tanner, writer) reached its climax. His focus became the magnificent York Minster, where he began by hanging threatening placards on the railings. On 1st February 1829, things escalated on a sudden whim – hiding inside the Minster, he was angered by a buzzing noise from the organ and late at night he set fire to woodwork in the choir area. It would take two days for the fire to be fully put out, by which time most of the woodwork inside, the bishop’s throne, the pulpit – and the offending organ – were destroyed. The Dictionary of National Biography notes: “It was one of the most spectacular consequences of arson in modern British history.”3

It didn’t take long for him to be caught, especially given that he had put his name and address on those placards. He was tried at York Castle – amid resulting media fame and the publication of an account of the trial – and initially declared guilty by the jury but then the judge reversed it to not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was then sent to Bethlem, where he stayed until he died in May 1838. So it goes. Like Dadd (but decades earlier), he continued to draw and paint during his confinement – one notable work being a picture of London being destroyed.

So now we march forward to 1866 again, where an anonymous writer in Dickens’s journal has penned a piece under the title ‘Jonathan Martin’. They set the scene with Jonathan’s religious obsession: “Not a shadow of doubt troubled Jonathan’s mind as to his right to denounce, and his mission to punish, ecclesiastical wickedness. If ever there were a reasoning lunatic, it was he.” Here’s part of the interview relating to Jonathan’s original fixation on the Bishop of Oxford:

All that I am about to record I received from the lips of Jonathan Martin. His mode of expression was vehement, his language rude and unpolished—I think it had the Northumbrian twang—he was dogmatical and peremptory, as if he spoke with authority; indeed, if there were anything of which he was truly convinced, it was that he was a special instrument appointed by God to do great works—works too great to be committed to any but the most highly privileged exponents of the Divine will. He once said to me in prison, “Is there any one, from the king on his throne to the lowest of the people, who is not thinking of and speaking of Jonathan Martin; and would this be so, unless Jonathan Martin had to do what can be done by nobody but myself?” …

One of the earliest and most remarkable observations of Jonathan’s intellect was the reasoning unreason… with which he persuaded himself that for the purpose of promoting church reform he was called upon to murder a bishop. He told me that a succession of heavenly visitors had appeared to him at night, and communicated a mandate from God the Father that he should destroy some right reverend prelate. He had no personal resentments to indulge, and therefore his conscience freed him from the charge of malice prepense. He had been offended by the intrusive and imposing character of the cathedral, as it towers over the Lincolnshire flats, and determined that the bishop of that see should be the first example of the Divine judgment.

“I was asleep,” he said, “when an angel appeared to me—a smiling angel—he had a bow in his hand, a quiver with arrows on his back. He looked kindly and tenderly towards me, and having said, ‘Jonathan! shoot the bishop!’ he disappeared. I was a good deal perplexed and embarrassed. I did not like the suggestion. I thought I might be deceived. I did nothing, and I said nothing to anybody, but I still felt that the angel had been instructed to point out my duty to me… when I fell asleep at night, after much restlessness and many tossings and turnings on my bed, the angel again appeared, but he did not smile—he looked melancholy and disappointed. I fancied he had come to reproach me for my hesitations and doubts. He shook his head mournfully; he held his bow in his left hand, took an arrow from his quiver, and, in a voice that had more in it of sorrow than of anger, said, ‘Jonathan! Jonathan! Shoot the bishop!’ and then quitted my presence…

“I took out a pistol which I had in my room, and loaded it; but I resolved upon nothing then. I passed another miserable day…

“On the third night, however, the angel’s visitation took quite another character. There was no smile of satisfaction, there was no expression of sorrow; but the angel appeared with terrible frowns on his countenance, and looked at me with indignant anger and displeasure… ‘Jonathan! Shoot the bishop!’ was again repeated, and the angel, amidst a crash which seemed to shake my bed and make the whole building totter to its foundations, vanished out of my sight. This seemed so manifest and irresistible an announcement from above, that most of my scruples were removed, and I then confided to my wife that it was my purpose to obey the Lord’s commands…”

“But, Jonathan,” said I, interrupting him here, “you are familiar with the Scriptures. You know the commandments. Did you not find this: ‘Thou shalt do no murder’?”

“Yes! I did, and that commandment somewhat perplexed me. Was it not given by Moses? But don’t you know, and does not everybody know, that more is to be learnt from men’s works than from their words? And I studied the history of Moses, attending less to what he said than to what he did. And did he not slay the Egyptian? And was not this my warrant for slaying the bishop?”

The interviewer then relates how Jonathan’s wife alerted a magistrate, hence her husband’s arrest and imprisonment. His escape is worth noting in passing:

He was placed in a cell with a brick floor, which had been lately scrubbed with pumice-stone, a fragment of which had been scraped down to a sharp edge, and was left in one of the corners. The door was strongly bolted and locked; the windows had iron frames; even the funnel of the chimney was protected by bars of iron. Yet with that small unnoticed piece of pumice-stone Jonathan managed to cut through the bars placed across the chimney,4 and with the dexterity of a sweep made his way up to the top, whence he descended to the ground… He knelt down outside the jail, thanked God for his deliverance, confirmed in his conviction that he was a special instrument in the hands of Providence to accomplish some great design.

The interviewer then tells the story of Jonathan’s assault on York Minster, which I’ll skip repeating here (his escape makes one think somehow of Quasimodo at Notre-Dame or the Phantom of the Opera: “when Jonathan had satisfied himself that the work was done, he went into the belfry, seized one of the bell-ropes, and by its aid escaped into the open country, through a window of the cathedral which had been left open”).

The tale continues…

I then visited Jonathan in his prison cell. He was not serene, but triumphant. He was certain that all would work together for good—for his own good and for that of his country and of mankind. He was as vain of his exploits as if he had redeemed a race from slavery, or won the most glorious of victories. “I was nobody, and am now more talked about than anybody. Who is there in the land who is not occupied with the name and the deeds of Jonathan Martin? His name was known to nobody; it is now known to everybody. The king is now speaking about me.” And he rubbed his hands with delight, and his eyes sparkled with fire, and then he talked of his coming trial.

But who was this interviewer? It was easy enough to rule out Dickens himself – he would only have been a teenager when Jonathan Martin was brought to trial. But there were clues to be found. And that’s where we’ll stop for now, as I’ll tell the next part of the story (which definitely involves a shipwreck – and some might say involves a cursed painting!) in two weeks’ time…

Edit: part 2 is here, part 3 is here.