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.

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As with crisps we have a very clear story for the origin of the fry. In 1984 the Belgium journalist and historian Jo Gérard published an article describing how he had found a family manuscript dating back to 1781 which described how, in winter, the good people of Namur would fry up potatoes in the absence of fish:

Les habitants de Namur, Andenne et Dinant ont l’usage de pêcher dans la Meuse du menu fretin et de le frire pour en améliorer leur ordinaire, surtout chez les pauvres gens. Mais lorsque le gel saisit les cours d’eau et que la pêche y devient hasardeuse, les habitants découpent les pommes de terre en forme de petits poissons et les passent à la friture comme ceux-ci. Il me revient que cette pratique remonte déjà à plus de cent années

The inhabitants of Namur, Andenne and Dinant are accustomed to catching small fish in the Meuse and frying them to improve their ordinary fare, especially among poor people. But when frost seizes the waterways and fishing there becomes hazardous, the inhabitants cut potatoes in the shape of little fish and fry them like that. It comes back to me that this practice already goes back more than a hundred years.

How lovely, my life is made so much easier when something has a clear origin story! Except no one else seems to have ever seen this manuscript and it remains unfindable to this day. Many people, particularly French writers on the matter, suspect that he made it up as a means of establishing Belgium primacy for a dish which has become inexorably linked to their national culture.

So what is the real story? Well, it turns out that actually fries were invented by Teresa of Ávila (better known as Saint Teresa, 1515-1582) or at least that is one of the myths that one might stumble across online. It seems pretty clear that she was eating potatoes (at a fairly early date in Europe) but we can’t say for sure if they were fried, nor what shape they took had such frying occurred. There is the text of a letter that she sent on the 19th of December 1577 to María de San José which includes the passage:

Jesús sea con vuestra reverencia siempre, mi hija. La suya recibí, y con ella las patatas y el pipote y siete limones. Todo vino muy bueno; mas cuesta tanto el traer, que no hay para qué me envíe vuestra reverencia más cosa ninguna, que es conciencia.

Jesus be with you always, my daughter. I received your letter, and with it the potatoes, the barrel, and seven lemons. All the wine was very good; but it costs so much to bring it, that there’s no need for you to send me anything else, for that is conscience.

And an earlier letter, from 26th of January of the same year, shows that she both ate and enjoyed potatoes, but, alas, still has no description of how they were cooked:

Dios se lo pague, mi hija, amén, amén, amén; y las patatas, que vinieron a un tiempo, que tengo harto mala gana de comer, y muy buenas llegaron; y las naranjas, que regocijaron a algunas enfermas.

May God recompense you for it all, my daughter. Amen, amen, amen. Also for the potatoes which came at a time when I had no appetite, but arrived in good condition, and the oranges, which were a treat to some of the sisters who were out of health.

I have to confess that I have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole attempting to find the earliest reference to fried potatoes. A possible contender is a passage from Cautiverio feliz, y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del reino de Chile (Happy Captivity, and Particular Account of the Protracted Wars of the Kingdom of Chile) which was written by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán (1607–1682) sometime in the late 17th century, but not published until 1863. There is no mention of fries in the original edition, but a 2001 critical edition of the book contains the following passage, relating to an event that took place in 1629:

…porque las mujeres casadas del presidio y sus maridos, cual envió la sopa todavía con muchos huevos fritos por encima, cual el guisado de pescado seco, y otros, el marisco de choros secos machas ostiones y otros géneros; unas enviaban las papas fritas y guisados, otras los porotos y garbanzos, y el capitán y cabo que tenían dispuestos otros cinco o seis potajes, y por postre unos buñuelos bien sazonados con azúcar y canela.

…because the married women of the garrison and their husbands sent various dishes: one sent soup still topped with many fried eggs, another a stew of dried fish, and others shellfish of dried mussels, clams, oysters, and other kinds; some sent fried potatoes and stews, others beans and chickpeas, and the captain and the corporal had another five or six dishes prepared, and for dessert some fritters well seasoned with sugar and cinnamon.

If this is correct, then Chile can lay claim to being the earliest known location of fried potatoes, but they were unlikely to be the fries that we know today. Early fried potatoes were cut into slices, partly because it enabled them to be cooked faster and more significantly it used a lot less fat or oil. It is easy to forget, living in the time that we do where vegetable oil is probably the cheapest available foodstuff in terms of cost per calorie, that fat and oil used to be much scarcer and more expensive. Poor people would have cooked with animal fats, for sure, but only in small quantities. It would have been highly unusual to have a sufficient amount to fill a pot large enough to cook fries in, and even if you could there was no real reason to do so when you could sauté slices instead.

Recipes such as this one from 1811’s Le Cuisinier impérial, ou l’art de faire la cuisine et la pâtisserie pour toutes les fortunes by A. T. Raimbault are typical of the period:

Pommes de terre frites : Vous les pelez toutes crues et les coupez en tranches

Fried potatoes: Peel them all while raw and cut them into slices

It certainly didn’t make a lot of sense to have a large pot of oil that was used at home only to cook dinner for your family. If you were into mass catering however, things were a little bit different. While oil was relatively costly, potatoes were cheap, took little preparation, and could be swiftly fried en-masse. Towards the end of the 18th century fried potatoes became a popular street food in France, most notably in Paris in the theatre districts and around the Pont Neuf. The earliest written references I can find about the practice come from the 1830s, such as this one from Le Gastronome, 28 November 1830:

C’est admirable ! à voir le peuple de Paris et ses pommes de terre frites au soleil, et ses marchandes de harengs tous chauds, et ses poires cuites au four, on croirait qu’il vit pour manger, et cependant c’est tout au plus s’il mange pour vivre

It’s admirable! Seeing the people of Paris with their sun-fried potatoes, their vendors selling piping hot herring, and their baked pears, you’d think they lived to eat, and yet, at best, they eat to live

And it is from the same publication, less than a year later (28th April 1831), that we crucially find a description of potatoes being cut into batons, rather than simply slices:

Nobles pommes de terre frites, chères au comité de salut public, j’admire vos diverses métamorphoses ! D’abord, c’est l’enveloppe terreuse que râcle un couteau ébrêché... ce ne sont pas des beignets : on coupe les longues dans leur longueur, les rondes dans leur rondeur, puis dans cet état de crudité elles vont pêle-mêle au fond de la tôle noircie changer de goût et de couleur.

Noble fried potatoes, beloved of the Committee of Public Safety, how I admire your many transformations! First, your earthy covering is scraped away with a nicked knife… these are no fritters: the long potatoes are cut lengthwise, the round ones cut into rounds, and then, still raw, they are thrown together into the bottom of a blackened metal pan, where they change both flavour and colour.

Why, almost 200 years ago, was there a movement away from frying sliced potatoes to the batons that we now consider to be French fries? After all, as noted above, thin slices cook more rapidly and in less oil than thicker sticks? There are probably two factors that came into play. The first is that sliced potatoes are, due to their large surface area, much more likely to stick both to each other and to the base of the pan in which they are being cooked. As a result they required more attention and stirring. The second is that it is, as we have all doubtless experienced, very easy to pick up and eat a rectangular stick of fried potato with one’s fingers.

We have a lovely demonstration of this in a lithograph by Honoré Daumier printed in Le Charivari from the 19th February 1842 showing an an actor from the Funambules theatre hustling to the stage door eating what are clearly fries:

The text underneath reads:

... there is a moment that fills you with passion! and in a little while you must be ablaze with love ... and say, Zaphisa [?], share my treasures and my throne; come, come and lose yourself in pleasure and abundance!’ — all while your stomach sounds like fried potatoes!”

So by the mid-19th century we clearly had French fries, as we would consider them, being eaten in France, but what about the Anglophone world? In Part 2 I will be exploring that history, including the claim that Thomas Jefferson introduced French fries to America and the development of that oh-so-British dish,1 fish and chips.

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By the early 19th century clocks were pretty good at keeping time, but not perfect. A number of institutions, such as business in the City of London, law offices, et cetera were keen to ensure that their time was perfect with “perfect” in this context meaning being exactly the same as the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) measured at the Royal Observatory. Whether such accuracy was strictly necessary is somewhat open to question as a good clock would only drift by a few seconds each week, but people believed that it was, and so they took steps to ensure that they were in sync. These businesses would generally rely on the clockmakers of London having the correct time, and so would send their clerks over to get regular updates. The clockmakers themselves would send each someone up to the Royal Observatory a few times a week, where they would knock on the door, ask to see the clock, then set their watch by it.

So many people ended up doing this that it began to seriously interrupt the work of the Astronomer Royal, George Airy (1801-1892)1 that he imposed a restriction. Soon after taking up the post in 1835 he limited people to only coming to check the time on Monday mornings. By 1840 even this was too much of a hassle and he moved to block all access. The Observatory’s second assistant John Henry Belville (1795-1856) saw the opportunity for a nice little side-hustle. As people couldn’t come to see the time, he would take the time to them. And so with Airy’s blessing he did just that. Setting his pocket watch from the observatory clock he would go around London and let people look at it each week, provided they paid an annual subscription. This worked very well, and soon he had 200 clients signed up to his service.

Clearly the watch he used had to be very accurate, and it was. It was a 1794 John Arnold pocket chronometer (No. 485/786) which had originally been made for the Duke of Sussex, who refused to take it on the basis that it “looked like a bedpan”! I think that is somewhat unfair, but you can judge for yourselves:

John Henry continued this operation for 20 years until his death in 1856. This was obviously a tragic event personally for his widow, Marie, but it was also devastating for her financially. She was not entitled to his civil service pension, and as she wasn’t an employee of the Royal Observatory she had no access to the precious time that was the foundation of their side business. In desperation she wrote to George Airy, requesting that she be allowed access to the clock and be able to continue her husband’s business:

I am encouraged by your goodness to advance another petition. Being engaged to take the Greenwich time to 67 of the principal chronometer makers in London I have to request admission once a week to the clocks in the observatory in order to test my own regulator – it would inspire those who have taken up the widow of their esteemed friend with additional confidence if you could accord me this favour.

Airy, being by all accounts a pretty decent human being,2 agreed to this, and Marie continued selling time for another 36 years before retiring. Her rights of access were then passed down to their daughter Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (1854-1953) who carried on the family business.

By this point, however, there was some competition in the world of time-selling. The General Post Office had for some time been offering a service that was the bleeding edge of chronological technology at the time. This was a telegraphic subscription by which the Greenwich Time Signal was sent to devices within the client businesses which would automatically ensure that their clock was perfectly correct. You may think that would have spelled the end for the hand-delivered time service, but it didn’t. For at start it was much more expensive – in 1881 it cost £14 a year for companies within half a mile of the post office (and they needed to buy the appropriate kit), whilst the Belvilles were charging a mere £4 a year. I also suspect that some people simply liked the tradition of in-person timekeeping.

So Ruth Belville continued her daily routine of collecting the time and sharing it around London to her happy customers. Then, on the 8th of January 1908 a letter appeared in The Times claiming the the clocks of London were “lying” and, by extension, slandering the work of Ruth:

LYING CLOCKS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.

Sir,—Surely there should be some censorship as to the time kept by clocks exposed to public view in the streets of London. It is not unusual within a hundred yards to find clocks three or four minutes at variance with each other. Highly desirable as individualism is in many respects, it is out of place in horology. A lying time-keeper is an abomination, and should not be tolerated. A by-law might well be framed requiring clocks in public places to be synchronised with standard time; the penalty for repeated disregard to be removal of the offending dial.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,
JOHN A. COCKBURN.
10, Gatestone-road, Upper Norwood, S.E., Jan. 6.

Who was this John A. Cockburn? Was he just a “concerned citizen”? No, far from it. He was a director of the Standard Time Company (and also a “Sir”) that, surprise, surprise, offered just such a time synchronisation service as the one he suggested be mandated in his letter. The company had started out as Barruad and Lund making clocks and watches, but they branched out into electrical time synchronisation from around 1868. They had one of the Post Office time subscriptions which ensured their central clock was correct, and then over rented telegraph wires they would send out hourly signals to specialist clocks in their clients’ premises which would synchronise to this time. Crucially they undercut the £14 fee charged by the GPO (I have seen references to their service costing £4 and £5 5s 0d a year at different points).

The business did well, particularly gaining a new client base in the form of pubs with the introduction of the Licensing Act of 1872 (which required a precise closing time)3 but nonetheless John thought that it wouldn’t hurt trying to raise a bit of a stir. And stir he did create. An editorial appeared in the paper the following day, which whilst broadly supportive of his take on the issue felt that he went a little far in suggesting a legal remedy:

“A by-law,” says Sir John Cockburn, “might well be framed requiring clocks in public places to be synchronised with standard time; the penalty for repeated disregard to be the removal of the offending dial.” We are not sure that this is the right way to go to work. It is quite true that individualism is, as our correspondent says, “out of place in horology.” But perhaps the remedy rather lies in co-operation than in compulsion. Many of the clocks exhibited in public places in London are exhibited by private persons who probably believe they are doing a public service, and undoubtedly are doing it, if they only take reasonable care to keep their clocks reasonably accurate.

The paper published a slew of letters on the issue in the weeks that followed, some being very much on his side, whilst others took issue with his claims about the accuracy of public time:

We note with pleasure your memorandum announcing the great clock at Westminster as being the “nearest approach to a standard timekeeper that we have in London.” Might we add a record of its performance from the last official report of the Astronomer-Royal based upon automatic signals received at Greenwich?

“Its apparent error was not greater than 0.5 sec. on 39 per cent. of the days of observation, not greater than 1 sec. on 67 per cent., not greater than 2 sec. on 89 per cent., not greater than 3 sec. on 99 per cent., and exceeded 4 sec. on only two occasions.

This is surely entitled it to be London’s standard time-keeper.

We are, Sir, yours respectfully,
E. DENT AND CO. (Ltd.)
(W. A. PYALL, Secretary,

Makers of the Standard Clock (the Great Standard Timekeeper) of the United Kingdom to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, also makers of the Great Westminster Clock, “Big Ben.”4
61, Strand, W.C., Jan. 13.

What really made things personal for Ruth Belville happened a few months later on the 4th March 1908. That evening another director of the Standard Time Company, St John Winne,5 delivered a lecture at the United Wards Club entitled “The Time of a Great City: A Plea for Uniformity”. This was essentially an extended version of the case made by his colleague’s letter to The Times but he went out of his way to single out – and ridicule – poor Ruth:

It may be interesting and amusing to some of you to learn how Greenwich mean time was distributed amongst the clock and watch trade in London before the present arrangements came into vogue… A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the astronomer royal of the time to call at the observatory and have it corrected as often as she pleased. She then made it the business of her life, until she reached a great age, to call upon her customers with the correct time, and on her retirement this useful work was, and even today is, carried on by her successor, still a female, I think.

A fair few people in the audience were clockmakers, and took some umbrage at Winne’s comments about the quality of their products. That didn’t, however, stop them piling in on Ruth. One person doing so was Daniel Buckley, who worked for Dent and Co., as the minutes recorded:

…it is quite true, a lady did do it [delivered Greenwich time], and another took her place, but I may say that that lady calls at our establishment to see whether she has the correct time (laughter)

Having attacked the quality of her product, Winne went on to attack Ruth’s character, suggesting that she had used her feminine wiles to gain access to the observatory:

A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the Astronomer Royal at the time (perhaps no mere man could have been successful) to call at the Observatory and have it corrected as often as she pleased.

Winne’s attempt to destroy his competitor backfired on him. The press got wind of the lecture, and though Winne had been careful not to name Ruth directly, it was very clear who he was talking about, and reporters tracked her down. The public, it turned out, loved the idea of a woman going around London selling the time and Ruth acquired new customers as a result. Amongst the wealthy there was a certain cachet to having your time delivered each week by a real person. And not just any person, she was the “Greenwich Clock Lady” (newspapers such as the Kentish Mercury dubbed her thusly in their case using the headline “Greenwich Clock Lady: Romance of a Regular Visitor to the Observatory.”) And as for Winne’s service people were quick to point out that it could be described as “second-hand time”. His customers were not getting the time directly from the source at the Observatory, rather it went from there to the Standard Time Company before then being passed on. Of course this didn’t make any technical difference, but it still felt as though it was somehow less pure.

As for Ruth Belville herself she, astonishingly, went on selling the time until 1940 (albeit to perhaps 50 customers at that point) when a combination of her age, and the fact that the country was in the midst of World War Two, caused her to retire. She died three years later, and even though she had long drifted from the public consciousness she still merited an obituary in The Times, the very paper that had started the Lying Clocks debate some 35 years earlier:

Miss Elizabeth Ruth Belville, who has died at Wallington, Surrey, at the age of 89, devoted half a century to taking the correct Greenwich time to business houses in London on a watch 100 years old. Three times a week6 she went to Greenwich where she obtained a certificate of accuracy for her watch.

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In my first piece on time I explained how the duodecimal (base 12) system was probably an obvious choice for ancient peoples, rather than the base ten that we might otherwise think is instinctual. The three joints on each of our four fingers allowed for easy tallying up to the number 12, through the tapping of the thumb on the appropriate juncture. This twelve, when splitting both day and night, then logically led to the system of 24 hours with which we are all too familiar. That makes sense, or at least it makes a kind of sense – we can see how it came about. But having done so, what would then have motivated people to break those hours into a collection of sixty minutes? And then, further divide those each of those minutes into sixty seconds? Put simply, where the hell did the number sixty come into all of this?

To answer this question we have to go back a long way. A very long way, more than 5,000 years. The sexagesimal (base 60) system was first used in ancient Mesopotamia in accounting and calculation before, it seems likely, even the first cuneiform writing systems were developed. Quite why the number 60 was chosen is unclear, but it seems as though there are a couple of factors that come into play. The number 60 can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30 – in other words one can easily make useful factors from it. Another possible reason is that prior to its adoption both base 10 and base 12 were in use. Rather than select one over the other using base 60 is something of a compromise, being the lowest number that has each of them as a factor.

The system employed wasn’t a pure base 60 system (there were not 60 distinct symbols for the numbers) but to all intents and purposes it was used as one. The numbers were made up of a collection of different cuneiform marks:

Now it may seem to you that this was a cumbersome number system to use, but the Babylonians were incredibly adept at employing it. A clay tablet (with the catchy name YBC-7289) dating back an incredible 3,600-3,800 years shows it being deployed to calculate the square root of 2, accurately, to six decimal places. This has been described as “the greatest known computational accuracy… in the ancient world.” Furthermore the tablet is fairly small and round, and it is thought that it is something a student would have held in their hand – basically the equivalent of a notebook to be used in a lecture. Now without wishing to sound arrogant, I am pretty good at maths (“math” for our American readers) and I could work the same thing out with a pencil and paper, but I wouldn’t find it particularly easy and it would take me some time.

How though did we get from gifted mathematicians using clay tablets to having 60 minutes in an hour today? A key link in this chain is the Greco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – 160s/170s). He used the ancient Babylonian system of base 60 (likely because of its easy divisibility)1 to subdivide degrees into 60 parts, and thence 60 smaller parts. He describes this in his work Almagest which was translated into Arabic in the 9th century (for use by Arabic astronomers) before being translated into Latin in the 12th century. We know that a Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona existed by about 1175, and in it we have (amongst others) this line:

…ergo, quia iam ostensum est quod chorda AB est cifre et 47 minuta et 8 secunda secundum quantitatem qua diameter est 120, erit chorda AG minus parte una et duobus minutis et 50 secundis secundum quantitatem illam, tertiis pretermissis…

…therefore, since it has already been shown that chord AB is zero and 47 minutes and 8 seconds, according to the scale in which the diameter is 120, chord AG will be less by one part and 2 minutes and 50 seconds on that same scale, the thirds being omitted…

The “minutes” and seconds come from the Latin “partes minutae primae” and “partes minutae secundae” meaning “first diminished parts” and “second diminished parts”. Each of those original phrases got shortened in a different way over time. The first to “minutae” giving us “minutes” and the second, to, you guessed it “secundae” giving us “seconds”. Okay, so Ptolemy was using minutes and seconds, but that was to divide angles and suchlike, not time – who first decided to split up hours in the same manner?

The earliest known person doing so was the Khwarazmian Iranic scholar and polymath Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (c. 973 – c. 1050). We find evidence of this in The Chronology of Ancient Nations (al-Āthār al-bāqiya), written around the year 1,000:

He takes that portion of hours, minutes, seconds, etc. which corresponds in the tables to each of these numbers of great and small cycles

It would, however, be another 400 or so years before such divisions could be practically used in timekeeping because, as we learned in the last piece, early mechanical clocks were simply not that accurate. Not only were they not very good at keeping time, they were also big - they consisted of a drum from which a weight on a rope would hang, that would slowly turn as the weight descended. The game-changer in both clock size and accuracy came with the invention of the spring clock.

We don’t know exactly when this development took place, nor who was responsible for it, but it probably happened around the year 1400, inspired by crossbow-winding technology. The way these new clocks worked is as follows:

• A long strip of steel, the mainspring, would be coiled inside a drum called the barrel

• Winding the clock tightens the spring and stores energy in it

• Stop winding and the spring tries to relax, releasing energy, and turning the barrel

• The barrel then drives the gear train, escapement, and regulator, thus driving the clock hands.

This alone is not enough though: the mainspring doesn’t pull with the same force all of the time. It is at its strongest when it is fully wound, and weakens as it runs down. The earliest spring clocks were inaccurate as a result, but this was resolved with the addition of the fusee. The fusee is a cone-shaped, grooved pulley that is connected to the barrel with a length of chain. When fully wound the chain is at the top of the cone, with the smallest radius, As it gradually winds down the chain descends down the cone on what are effectively larger and larger wheels. The lower pull of the weakened spring is offset by the increased torque multiplier of the larger wheels – think of gears on a bike. It is probably easiest to show this rather than try to explain it further:

And here is another one in a spring-driven machine designed by Leonardo Da Vinci in around 1490:2

The difference that this made to the size of clocks can easily be seen in what is thought to be the oldest surviving spring-clock. This glorious contraption was made for Philip the Good,3 Duke of Burgundy, in around 1430:

The sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this clock still only had an hour hand; whilst minutes were known about at this point, the clocks lacked the accuracy to measure them properly. It also didn’t really matter as such measurements had no real utility value – people were not using time measured that accurately to order their lives. The earliest reference we have to a clock with minutes shown on a dial is from an illustration of one in a manuscript by Paulus Almanus in 1475 but this still lacked the all-important hand. The generally accepted first instance of this is a clock made in 1577 by Jost Bürgi to allow for precise astronomical observations. Such devices were rarities however; well into the 17th century town clocks in England would only have an hour hand.

Weirdly the second hand may have come first, as one can be found on a clock dating from 1560, but rather than being a meaningful indicator of time, it would simply spin around the dial as a ready way of seeing if the clock was actually working or not. Again, even with these innovations the clocks were not accurate enough to meaningfully display such small divisions of time. Really accurate time measurement came with the invention of the pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695) which happened on Christmas Day 1656.4 Galileo had come up with the idea of using a swinging bob to measure time some years earlier, but it was Huygens who came up with the mathematical formula that related pendulum length to the duration of the swing. Specifically he calculated that for a one-second movement the pendulum had to be 39.1 inches (approximately 99.4 cm) long.

In the centuries that followed numerous inventions drove both the accuracy and miniaturisation of clocks, with both things famously combining to allow for the correct calculation of longitude. There was however still something about the way people measured time that was very different from today. Okay, perhaps “measured” is the wrong term; “set” would be better. Until very recently in historical terms, time would vary from one town to the next. The reason for this was simple – each would set their clocks to the solar noon of their location. People wanted to know what the accurate time was for where they lived, they operated by local time. Time shifts by around four minutes per degree of longitude, so in my home town of Oxford, roughly 1.25° west of London, the solar time is around five minutes behind that of our capital city. To this day the bell “Great Tom” in Christ Church college (which you may remember was cast from the bronze of the Osney Abbey bell) chimes each evening at 9:05, respecting the original local time.

The fact that different towns, even ones fairly short distances apart, had different times didn’t really matter until the middle of the 19th century. If you were to meet someone at noon, then obviously it would be noon where they lived, and the fact that this might have been a few minutes earlier or later than the place you had come from was a trivial concern. What changed things was the introduction of both the telegraph and particularly the railways. If you were writing the timetable, would you set the time of a train’s arrival to the time from the place it had come from or the place that it had arrived at? Choose the first and people would be confused by the arrival time being out of kilter with the local clocks; choose the second and the duration of the train journey would be wrong. In Britain in the 1840s the railway companies began using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard across their networks (my local train company, Great Western Railway, did so in November 1840, for example).

This standardisation of time was very much a thing driven by private enterprise, the railway networks and telegraph companies, rather than the government. Just because they were all using GMT didn’t mean that the locals were. This meant that there were decades where one had to think for a moment when deciding when to leave the house to catch a train. The time on the timetable would of course be GMT but that of the one on your mantelpiece could be showing the local time. Gradually convenience led to increasing adoption of GMT across the board, but it wasn’t until 1880, with the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 which required that expressions of time in Acts, deeds, and legal instruments were to be read as Greenwich Mean Time across all of Great Britain, that standard time was required by law.

The next challenge was international in nature. Standardising time within one country was hard enough, but global navigation, telegraphy, and commerce required agreement on a prime meridian and on a shared system for counting time. This culminated in the International Meridian Conference held in Washington in October 1884 where delegates were gathered specifically to consider a common prime meridian and a universal day. The conference adopted the meridian of Greenwich as the prime meridian for longitude and recommended a universal day beginning at midnight at Greenwich. Why Greenwich? Well in part it was due to Britain’s global power at the time, but also because of its maritime and scientific clout. The majority of the world’s shipping already reckoned longitude from Greenwich so this approach was pretty much the de facto standard before it was formally agreed.

The final piece of standardisation concerned the units of time themselves. For a long time, the second was effectively tied to the Earth’s rotation via the mean solar day: 1 second was treated as 1/86,400 of a day. But astronomers and physicists discovered that the Earth’s rotation is not perfectly uniform – basically not all days are quite the same length. Before 1960 the second had been defined as a fraction of the mean solar day, but irregularities in Earth rotation made this unsatisfactory. In 1960 the second was redefined astronomically using the tropical year 1900, however this was still not accurate enough for the modern age. In 1967, the General Conference on Weights and Measures redefined the second in atomic terms, as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation corresponding to the hyperfine transition of caesium-133.

There was still a final problem to solve. Civil time still needed to stay reasonably aligned with day and night, which depend on the Earth’s actual rotation. But atomic time runs uniformly, whereas Earth rotation drifts slightly. The compromise was Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC runs at the same rate as International Atomic Time but differs from it by an integral number of seconds. What that practically means is the insertion of leap seconds, the first of which was inserted on 30 June 1972 to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1, a form of time based on the Earth’s rotation.

When I started researching this series, I didn’t think that I would cover history all the way from clay tablets to atomic clocks. But I absolutely love the fact that some of the most precise devices in existence today are measuring something whose definition can be traced back to 5,000-year-old cuneiform characters!

It is a singular coincidence that the murder was committed during Bank Holiday night, and is almost identical with another murder which was perpetrated near the same spot on the night of the previous Bank Holiday.

Those words were printed in London’s Pall Mall Gazette on 24th August 1888. Given the year, you might well connect them with the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. But… this was printed a whole week before the first of the five ‘canonical’ murders attributed to him, that of Mary Ann Nichols. Wait, what?

So the murder the report discusses is that of Martha Tabram, aka Turner:

Mr. George Collier, coroner, resumed his inquiry yesterday, at the Working Lads’ Institute, into the circumstances attending the death of a woman, supposed to be Martha Turner, aged thirty five, a hawker, lately living off Commercial road, E., who was discovered early on the morning of Tuesday, the 7th inst., lying dead on the first floor landing of some model dwellings known as George yard buildings, Commercial street, Spitalfields. The woman when found presented a shocking appearance, her body being covered with stab wounds to the number of thirty nine, some of which had been done with a bayonet.

And the previous one is that of Emma Elizabeth Smith – she was attacked in Whitechapel early on the morning of Tuesday 3rd April. Emma actually survived the attack (which was by two or three men rather than one) but then died in hospital the next day. The earliest news story (syndicated across the country) I can find is this:

MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL

A widow named Emma Elizabeth Smith, aged 45, of Spitalfields, was returning home late on Easter Monday, and when in Whitechapel Road, she was set upon and brutally maltreated by some men at present unknown. She was taken to the London Hospital, where she died this morning from the injuries.

I’m certainly not the first to discuss these women in the context of ‘Jack’ – they and another case, Annie Millwood (she was stabbed on 25th February by someone demanding money, survived but then died of natural causes three days before Emma) have often been discussed by ‘Ripperologists’, some saying they were Jack’s victims too, most saying they weren’t. But what interests me here is the history of an idea, the idea of this being a serial killer, as well as the idea of ‘Jack’ (and I certainly don’t intend to add to the endless speculation about who ‘he’ was, nor dwell on the gory details).

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The origin of the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ is well known, the phrase first being used by the author of the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter, sent to the Central News Agency of London on 25th September, after the deaths of the first two canonical victims, Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman.1 The letter is widely regarded as a hoax, possibly perpetrated by a journalist.

‘Jack’ of course had a many-centuries-long history of being used to refer to an otherwise unspecified man. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that ‘ripper’ in this violent context appears to originate with this letter – though a more specialist use of the term for ‘one who rips things’ seems to go back to the 17th century.

As is often the case, though, the slow-moving OED isn’t always right. Here’s a report from the Manchester Courier of 7th February 1887, for example, a whole year before any of the Whitechapel events (and there are earlier examples):

LIVERPOOL HIGH RIPPERS

At the Liverpool Police-court, on Saturday, before Mr. Raffles, stipendiary magistrate, three youths named John Baker, George Baker, and Francis M’Tavey were charged with stabbing several people in Scotland-road, on Friday night.

And indeed the ‘High Rippers’ were well known in the 1880s specifically, as the Liverpool equivalent of Birmingham’s well-known Peaky Blinders. It’s not a wild linguistic leap to connect their activities with the London stabbings (especially for a journalist).

Going back to London in 1888, as well as that report linking Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, on 1st September we have this report from the Evening News a day after Mary Ann Nichols was killed: “The theory that the murder is the work of a lunatic, who is also the perpetrator of the other two murders of women which have occurred in Whitechapel during the last six months, meets with very general acceptance amongst the inhabitants of the district…” (The report goes on to offer its own take: “The more probable theory is that the murder has been committed by one or more of a gang of men…” – and later on references the High Rippers, in fact.)

On the same day, the New York Times was also quick to join the dots: “All three victims have been women of the lowest class; all three murders have taken place in the same district, at about the same hour, and have been characterized by the same inhuman and ghoul-like brutality.” And two days later, the Daily News made even more explicit the hypothesis “that all three sanguinary deeds are by one and the same hand”.2

So what’s my point? Simply that the whole Whitechapel community was very early on primed to envisage the same perpetrator for each new killing, without necessarily looking into all the detailed, varying circumstances of each. People rush to make connections.

Someone who has studied all this in much more detail than me is Richard Walker, who runs one of London’s best-rated Jack the Ripper tours. And now he has written a book, Yours Truly Jack the Ripper, which draws on his own painstaking research, combined with his experience of the geography of Whitechapel – which turns out to make a big difference to how you might interpret the events. Full disclosure: I published the book for him, and I want you to buy it! It’s refreshing because it’s about the victims (like Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five) as much as the perpetrator, and about the circumstances rather than the wild obsession with identifying ‘Jack’ (though Richard does offer some reasoned arguments on that). What Richard reveals so clearly is that Victorian society – particularly from a mixture of the sensationalist press and cultural prejudice against poor women – in many ways created its own monster.

If that doesn’t convince you to check it out, readers of Histories can get an exclusive 25% off by using the code DYA25 in the checkout here until the end of April:

25% off here

(Or you can pay full price at Amazon if you insist!)

I’ll be back again soon – and not trying to sell you something :)

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We have a lovely example of just how foreign hours were to most people at that time (and thanks to Mary Catelli for bringing this to my attention!) from a fragment of a lost play Boeotia (The Boeotian Woman) which was probably written by Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC):

Par ut illum di perdant, primus qui horas repperitquique adeo primus statuit hic solarium;qui mihi comminuit misero articulatim Diem!nam <unum> me puero Venter erat solarium,multo omnium istorum optumum et uerissumum.ubi is te monebat, esses, nisi quom nil erat.nunc etiam quom est non estur, nisi Soli lubet.itaque adeo iam oppletum oppidum est solariis, maior pars populi aridi reptant fame.

May the gods ruin the fellow who first invented hours, and moreover the one who first set up a sundial here; poor me, he tore Day to pieces for me, limb by limb! When I was a boy, Belly was your only sundial, and by far the best and truest of them all. When he reminded you, you’d eat, unless there was nothing there. Now even when there is something there one doesn’t eat, unless Sun sees fit. What’s more, the town is now so full of sundials, the majority of the population creep around dry from hunger.

Move on a thousand years, to the start of the second millennium, and things have not really changed very much at all. In researching this piece I have been surprised (though upon reflection probably shouldn’t have been) to discover quite how relatively recent “our” form of timekeeping really is. Unequal hours still persisted, and work was driven by light, rather than a clock. One thing that was different was that more people would have at least been aware of which (unequal) hour it was, even if that did nothing to modify their behaviours. Christian institutions, such as the Benedictines, had very structured days, with activities taking place at specific times. Monks and nuns would have been frequently made aware of what the hour was by the ringing of bells, and these aural time-signals would have been heard by the people living outside the institutions’ walls.

In the Rule of St Benedict we see clearly how, due to unequal hours, the time of, for example, dining, varied over the course of the year:

From holy Easter until Pentecost
let the brothers take dinner at the sixth hour
and supper in the evening.

From Pentecost throughout the summer,
unless the monks have work in the fields
let them fast on Wednesdays and Fridays until the ninth hour;
on the other days let them dine at the sixth hour.
This dinner at the sixth hour shall be the daily schedule
if they have work in the fields
or the heat of summer is extreme;
the Abbot’s foresight shall decide on this.

Thus it is that he should adapt and arrange everything
in such a way that souls may be saved
and that the brethren may do their work
without just cause for murmuring.

From the Ides of September until the beginning of Lent
let them always take their dinner at the ninth hour.

In Lent until Easter let them dine in the evening.
But this evening hour shall be so determined
that they will not need the light of a lamp while eating,
Indeed at all seasons
let the hour, whether for supper or for dinner, be so arranged
that everything will be done by daylight.

The notion of splitting the day into 24 equal hours had actually been around for more than a thousand years in Europe by that time (and longer in China, as we saw in my last piece). And whilst it wasn’t being used in day-to-day life we know that people like the Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus (c.190 - c.120 BCE) were using it in their work. In his Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus he wrote about using equal hours for astronomical observation:

Χωρὶς δὲ τῆς ἐν ταῖς συνανατολαῖς καὶ ⟨συγκατα-⟩ δύσεσι θεωρίας εὔχρηστον εἶναι νομίζω καὶ τὸ παρακολουθεῖν ἡμᾶς, τίνες τῶν ἀπλανῶν ἀστέρων ἀπέχουσιν ἀπʼ ἀλλήλων κατὰ τὸ ἑξῆς ὡριαῖα ἰσημερινὰ διαστήματα. τοῦτο γὰρ ἡμῖν εὔχρηστόν ἐστι πρός τε τὸ τὴν ὥραν τῆς νυκτὸς ἀκριβῶς συλλογίζεσθαι καὶ πρὸς τὸ τοὺς ἐκλειπτικοὺς τῆς σελήνης χρόνους καὶ ἕτερα πλείονα κατανοεῖν τῶν ἐν ἀστρολογίᾳ θεωρημάτων.

But apart from the theory of the East and the West, I think it is useful to observe which fixed stars are separated from one another by successive equinoctial hourly intervals. For this is useful for us both for determining accurately the hour of the night and for understanding the times of lunar eclipses and many other astronomical matters

We also have a nice example from Ptolemy’s Geography (c. 150CE) where he notes the length of the longest day in equal, rather than seasonal, hours:

Paphos has its longest day of 14,25' equinoctial hours, and varies eastwards from Alexandria one quarter of an equinoctial hour.

In terms of actually using “modern” hours to organise one’s whole day the first European of note that we know did so was none other than the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great (849-899). The Welsh monk Asser describes him doing so in his The Life of King Alfred (written in 893 and is a rare, detailed example of a first-hand account of a notable person from that period):

After long reflection on these things, he at length, by a useful and shrewd invention, commanded his clerks to supply wax in sufficient quantity, and to weigh it in a balance against pennies. When enough wax was measured out to equal the weight of seventy-two pence, he caused the clerks to make six candles thereof, all of equal weight, and to mark off twelve inches as the length of each candle. By this plan, therefore, those six candles burned for twenty-four hours, a night and a day, without fail, before the sacred relics of many of God’s elect, which always accompanied him wherever he went.

Sometimes, however, the candles could not continue burning a whole day and night, till the same hour when they were lighted the preceding evening, by reason of the violence of the winds, which at times blew day and night without intermission through the doors and windows of the churches, the sheathing, and the wainscot, the numerous chinks in the walls, or the thin material of the tents; on such occasions it was unavoidable that they should burn out and finish their course before the appointed hour.

The king, therefore, set himself to consider by what means he might shut out the wind, and by a skilful and cunning invention ordered a lantern to be beautifully constructed of wood and ox-horn, since white ox-horns, when shaved thin, are as transparent as a vessel of glass. Into this lantern, then, wonderfully made of wood and horn, as I before said, a candle was put at night, which shone as brightly without as within, and was not disturbed by the wind, since he had also ordered a door of horn to be made for the opening of the lantern. By this contrivance, then, six candles, lighted in succession, lasted twenty-four hours, neither more nor less. When these were burned out, others were lighted.

The use of what were then very expensive candles for accurate timekeeping was pretty much the preserve of kings. In order for equal hours to take hold in the general population you needed to come up with better ways of measuring time. The Chinese had been already using equal hours (or equal double hours, to be more precise) for more than a thousand years at this point. To measure and report these hours they developed water1 clocks of the most astonishing complexity. The Chinese polymath Su Song (蘇頌, 1020-1101) built a clocktower which, though water driven, used both an escarpment and a chain-drive. This enabled a highly regulated clock to be constructed, as Su Song himself explained:

The chain drive is 19.5 ft long (5.9 m). The system is as follows: an iron chain with its links joined together to form an endless circuit hangs down from the upper chain-wheel which is concealed by the tortoise-and-cloud (column supporting the armillary sphere centrally), and passes also round the lower chain-wheel which is mounted on the main driving-shaft. Whenever one link moves, it moves forward one tooth of the diurnal motion gear-ring and rotates the Component of the Three Arrangers of Time, thus following the motion of the heavens.

He later wrote in his memorial:

According to your servant's opinion there have been many systems and designs for astronomical instruments during past dynasties all differing from one another in minor respects. But the principle of the use of water-power for the driving mechanism has always been the same. The heavens move without ceasing but so also does water flow (and fall). Thus if the water is made to pour with perfect evenness, then the comparison of the rotary movements (of the heavens and the machine) will show no discrepancy or contradiction; for the unresting follows the unceasing.

The motion gear rings and upper drive wheel each had 600 teeth, which broke the day into increments of 2 minutes and 24 seconds (which, as we learned in my previous piece, allowed the 12 shí and 100 kè that they day was broken down into to be meshed mathematically). The resulting device was a thing of both mechanical and aesthetic beauty and contained 133 different clock jacks to indicate and sound the hours.

Water clocks similar to, but less elaborate than, the Chinese ones were in use in medieval Europe. For example, according to Jocelyn de Brakelond, in 1198, during a fire at the abbey of St Edmundsbury (now Bury St Edmunds), the monks “ran to the clock” to fetch water (so it must have held enough of the stuff to be useful in fire-fighting). But the real game-changer was the invention of the fully mechanical clock. For a device that would achieve such ubiquity it may come as a surprise to learn that we know neither who invented it nor even roughly when it was invented. What we do know is that between 1280 and 1320 there was an increase in the number of references to clocks and horologes in church literature, which suggests that there were more of these devices being installed in religious institutions. What we don’t know for sure is whether this was an expansion of water clocks or if perhaps a new invention, the fully mechanical clock, had entered the scene. In 1283, for example, a large clock was installed in Dunstable Priory, and whilst no trace of it now remains, the location, behind the rood screen, would have been too small for it to have been a water clock, so it was probably a mechanical one.

A decade earlier in Norwich Cathedral there is a reference to a payment for a mechanical clock in what was then the priory but it turned out to be not that great at keeping regular time, so in 1308 a new one was commissioned. The costs of the replacement device (sadly destroyed in a fire in the 17th century) we have recorded in wonderful detail:

Clock – For one plate of metal bought, 4½d. Sounds purchased, 16d; for making five images, 20s. Item, boys making heads, 3s. In wages of Master Robert, 30s. Andrew and Roger, carpenters, are also mentioned as employed at this period. The total of the expenditure, between Michaelmas and Christmas, amounted to £4. 19s 8¼d.

In the Compotus for 1323, several entries occur under the head Orologium. Payments of wages to Andrew the carpenter, to Robert, to Roger de Stoke; with the following payment for the latter for carriage of his clothes and tools, 8s. For a hose of Latoun, 4s. 7½d.

Also to Master Adam, the sculptor, for making twenty-four little images, 11s. Also for 200 Caen stones, 22s. Also to John, blacksmith, for ironwork for the clock, 3s. 9d, Also delivered to Robert of the Tower, for making of the great dial, 10s; and so much in danger of being lost, because from his poverty he was unable to perfect the work, nor was any thing to be obtained from him. Total, £6. 13s. 9¼.

The oldest surviving mechanical clock is probably the one in Salisbury Cathedral which dates from 1386 (though this title is somewhat disputed and fought over!).

What was the innovation that enabled these clocks to be constructed? I am not particularly mechanically minded so I am going to explain this in fairly simplistic terms. These early mechanical clocks worked like this:

• A drum or barrel around which a rope or chain was wound

• A heavy weight was attached to the end of the rope/chain

• As the weight descends, so it would turn the drum

• The turning of the drum would drive a set of gears inside the clock, which would process the time.

There was, however, a problem. If there was nothing to restrain them the gears would spin freely. In order to prevent this there was the key invention, the verge escarpment which worked like this:

• The last toothed wheel in the gear train was called the crown wheel

• As the wheel turned a tooth of the wheel presses on one pallet

• That push rotates the verge and foilot

• As they rotate, the first pallet moves clear

• The tooth of the crown wheel escapes

• The wheel advances until a tooth on the opposite side

• The second tooth now pushes the verge out of the way

• The cycle then repeats

This means that the rotation of the crown wheel progresses in consistent, uniform steps. Now I realise that this description may not make much sense (it didn’t to me until I saw it)2 so here is a little animation showing how it worked:

Or if this helps more, here is a one of the earliest existing drawings of a verge escapement, in Giovanni de Dondi's astronomical clock, the Astrarium, built 1364:

Whilst these clocks kept time, they didn’t necessarily keep good time (as the replacement of the one in Norwich shows). In part this was because they were hard to accurately construct and configure, and in part due to their design. The speed of the rotation of the drum was dependent upon the force of the weight pulling down on it, and the radius of the drum itself. When freshly wound all of the rope (or chain) would be wrapped around the drum.As time went on, and the rope descended, there would be less and less of it so the radius of the drum would diminish.

A surprising feature of many of these early clocks is that they lacked a face. They signalled the time by ringing bells upon the hour. For most people back then a clock wasn’t something that one looked at, it was something one heard. Those that did have faces would only have a single hand, showing the slow progression of the hours. Indicating minutes was simply not a thing. In my final piece I will (at last!) explain how we started using minutes and also look at how time became standardised around the world.

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If you are American you may have been taught that the concept was invented by Benjamin Franklin whilst living in France and well, err, that isn’t really true. What he did do is write an amusing, satirical, letter to The Journal of Paris in 1784 which was more a comment upon what he perceived as the slothfulness of French (specifically the late-rising Parisians) and how the result of spending more hours conscious during the hours of darkness than strictly necessary led to the wasteful consumption of candles.1 He begins his letter by expressing astonishment at how early the sun arose:

I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light; and I imagined at first, that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.

I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but six o’clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for his rising on that day. I looked forward, too, and found he was to rise still earlier every day till towards the end of June; and that at no time in the year he retarded his rising so long as till eight o’clock. Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon,2 and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.

He then turns his brilliantly analytical brain to the challenge of calculating quite how much this cost the city, should all other residents follow his behaviours:

This event has given rise in my mind to several serious and important reflections. I considered that, if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light; and, the latter being a much more expensive light than the former, my love of economy induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was master of, and to make some calculations, which I shall give you, after observing that utility is, in my opinion the test of value in matters of invention, and that a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.

I took for the basis of my calculation the supposition that there are one hundred thousand families in Paris, and that these families consume in the night half a pound of bougies, or candles, per hour. I think this is a moderate allowance, taking one family with another; for though I believe some consume less, I know that many consume a great deal more. Then estimating seven hours per day as the medium quantity between the time of the sun’s rising and ours, he rising during the six following months from six to eight hours before noon, and there being seven hours of course per night in which we burn candles, the account will stand thus; [calculations excluded for brevity] …makes the sum ninety-six millions and seventy-five thousand livres tournois. An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.

Knowing his fellow Parisians well, he then suggests some somewhat absurdist measures to ensure that they got out of bed at daybreak:

I believe all who have common sense, as soon as they have learnt from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises, will contrive to rise with him; and, to compel the rest, I would propose the following regulations;

First. Let a tax be laid of a louis per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun.

Second. Let the same salutary operation of police be made use of, to prevent our burning candles, that inclined us last winter to be more economical in burning wood; that is, let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, and no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week.

Third. Let guards also be posted to stop all the coaches, &c. that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives.

Fourth. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient?, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.

This was all very much tongue-in-cheek but he was hinting at something he considered important beneath the wit (after all this is the man who coined the phrase “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”.3 But there is nothing in his letter that involved changing the actual time. In Europe at the end of the 18th century, much like the Roman Empire two thousand years earlier, people didn’t tend to follow the times shown on clocks, rather they would order their days by the passage of the sun, there wasn’t yet standardised time that was religiously followed.

An early hint at DST came 26 years later in 1810 when the Spanish National Assembly enacted a resolution to move some meetings forward by an hour between the 1st of May and the 30th of September – but this was a behaviour change, not a temporal one. It was only at the end of the 19th century when we see the first real proposal to change the clocks. George Hudson (1867–1946) was a New Zealand entomologist who did shift work in order to free up time to catch bugs in his off-hours. Irked at the lack of daylight hours in summer evenings he proposed pushing the time forwards by two hours at a meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. It think that it is fair to say this was not received with rapturous enthusiasm:

The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and, by utilising the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin4, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.

Hudson persevered, presenting another paper on the matter in 1898 but it was the English builder and outdoorsman William Willett (1856–1915) who really helped to bring the matter to the attention of the political establishment. He independently came up with the idea in 1907 after becoming annoyed that he had to cut his evening’s golfing short when dusk fell.

Willett published a pamphlet entitled “The Waste of Daylight” laying out his ideas and his cause was taken up by the Liberal MP Robert Pearce who put a bill before Parliament in 1908, alas to no success. What Willet proposed is essentially the system we have today:

Everyone appreciates the long light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as Autumn approaches, and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the clear bright light of early morning, during Spring and Summer months, is so seldom seen or used.

Nevertheless, Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.

NOW, if one of the hours of sunlight wasted in the morning could be added to the end of the day, many advantages would be gained by all, and especially by those who would spend in the open air, whatever time they might have at their disposal after the duties of the day have been discharged.

By a simple expedient, these advantages can be secured. If we will reduce the length of one Sunday, in the Spring, by 60 minutes, a loss of which no one would be conscious, we shall have 60 minutes more daylight after 6 o’clock, on each succeeding day, until the Autumn.

I therefore propose, that at 2 o’clock in the morning of the third Sunday in April, Standard time shall advance 60 minutes, and on the third Sunday in September, shall recede 60 minutes. We should then have one Sunday in April 23 hours long, and one Sunday in September 25 hours long. Having made up our minds to be satisfied, on one occasion, with a Sunday of 23 hours, tile advantages aimed at would follow automatically ; everything would go on just as it does now, except that the later hours of the day would bring more light with them.

Those who have travelled by sea, will remember how easily they accommodated themselves to the alterations of time on board ship, how they adjusted their watches, attended to the engagements of the day in correspondence therewith, and dismissed from their minds all recollection of the alterations that had been made. If this can take place at sea, day after day, without discomfort, may not a similar operation be possible on land. twice in the year?

The measure was adopted by some parts of Canada in 1908, but it was the First World War that really caused things to change. Austria-Hungry adopted DST in 1916, and Britain and most of its allies swiftly joined them, with the USA following the trend in 1918. Despite Hudson’s efforts New Zealand was a laggard, only enacting the Summer Time Act in 1927.

During WW2 the UK adopted “Double Summer Time” meaning that it was BST from October to March with the clocks advanced an additional hour in April to September. In the USA they simply stuck to DST the whole year around during the war, but returned to normal after the end of the conflict. In January 1974 Richard Nixon signed a law resurrecting this war-time change and making it permanent to much consternation, and his successor, Gerald Ford, repealed it in October of the same year.

It is usually said that the group most benefitting from DST is farmers, but this really doesn’t seem to be the case. Very much like the agricultural workers of two thousand years ago, their working days are driven by the sun, not clocks (it isn’t as though the cows have another meeting to go to at 11am).

A meta-analysis in 2007 found that DST resulted in electricity savings of 0.3% during the days on which it was applied, but these benefits seem likely to be offset by other costs. The change to circadian rhythms by the changing of the clocks has, for example, been estimated to cause 30 deaths a year in the USA and increase the incidence of heart attacks and obesity. Traffic collisions seem to increase in the UK and the USA, but not so much elsewhere. On the plus side DST does seem to increase participation in sport and other outdoors activities. The issue remains politically charged, with some advocating for its abolition and others its year-round enactment. I am more of a night-owl than I am a morning person, so personally I am happy to trade an hour’s lost sleep for more light to go walking in the evenings, though I realise that many readers of this piece will have opposing views!

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The concept of breaking up the day into 24 segments probably arose in Ancient Egypt probably around the start of the New Kingdom 3,500 years ago. As you might have guessed there is some uncertainty about this but we know that they were doing so at this point due to the discovery of an ancient sundial. This shows the day being divided into 12 sections, and the night was similarly divided into 12. You may be wondering, why 12? After all, we have ten fingers and ten toes and now pretty much everyone uses base-10 in their day-to-day lives. One long-held theory is that each of your four fingers has three joints, so you can easily count up to 12 on one hand by tapping them with your thumb. 12 is also easily divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6.

When it comes to specifically measuring time there is another explanation. The Egyptians defined a set of 36 stars which could be used to segment the heavens into equal slices. Of these 18 were used to track the passage of time, and of those 3 each were assigned to dawn and dusk leaving the appearance of 12 stars to break the night into “hours”. Having broken the night up into 12 chunks it then seemed pretty logical to do the same for the day, hence 24 hours.2

These hours were, however, very different to the ones that we use today. The day (meaning period of light) was separated into 12 equal parts however the length of the day, and hence the hours, would vary significantly by season.3 This means that the ancient concept of time was very different to the one that we are familiar with today. The “time” of, for example, the third hour would be radically different in December when compared to June (though obviously noon and midnight would be the same).4 The timings of the hours in Ancient Rome would have looked something broadly like this:5

It may seem strange to us that time was measured, but inconsistent over the year, and could still be of use, but it was quite straightforward. If you arranged with someone to meet at “the third hour tomorrow” they would know exactly when you meant. People would use measured hours to organise their days to an extent, but which hours they chose would vary over the course of the year. We have a nice example of this from a letter Pliny wrote, describing how the bathing time of one of his friends varied:

When he is told that the bathing hour has come – which is the ninth hour in winter and the eighth in summer – he takes a walk naked in the sun, if there is no wind. Then he plays at ball for a long spell, throwing himself heartily into the game, for it is by means of this kind of active exercise that he battles with old age. After his bath he lies down and waits a little while before taking food, listening in the meantime to the reading of some light and pleasant book.6

One of the most common means of measuring time, as already mentioned, was something we are doubtless all very familiar with – the sundial. As you know they consist of a flat plate (or dish) and a gnomon7 which casts a shadow upon it. As the sun moves over the course of the day, so the shadow moves across hour lines, enabling the time to be easily read. For a sundial to measure time correctly, it has to be configured to the location of its use. A sundial’s geometry has to match the latitude of the place, because the Sun’s daily path across the sky changes with latitude. The gnomon is typically set parallel to Earth’s axis, so its angle to the horizontal depends directly on local latitude. Sometimes though people, err, forgot about this point, as Pliny once again records:

Marcus Varro records that the first public sundial was set up on a column along by the Rostra during the First Punic War after Catina in Sicily had been taken by the consul Manius Valerius Messala [263 BC], and that it was brought from Sicily thirty years later than the traditional date of Papirius's sundial. The lines of this sundial did not agree with the hours, but all the same they followed it for 99 years, till Quintus Marcius Philippus who was censor with Lucius Paulus [164 BC] placed a more carefully designed one next to it, and this gift was received as one of the most welcome of the censor's undertakings. Even then however the hours were uncertain in cloudy weather.

As Pliny noted, sundials are great so long as the sun is shining so what did people do when it was cloudy, or nighttime? The answer is through the use of waterclocks, the oldest known example of which is the approximately 3,400-year-old Karnak clepsydra. This is a stone vessel with a hole at the bottom through which water dripped out, with tapered sides to ensure that the rate of dripping would be constant as it emptied out. Down the sides is a series of 12 marks or “false holes” – to tell the time you just had to look where the water level was in relation to those holes. Ah, but hang on, how would that work given that the length of each hour would vary over the course of the year? Simple, there were 12 columns of marks, one for each month of the year (Egyptians had been dividing the year into 12, 30-day months and five feast days since around 4,500 years ago).8

Obviously there would be some variation within a month, but this was deemed accurate enough for ensuring that religious rites took place at the correct time. Suffice to say it was no small challenge to accurately taper the clock and calibrate for it to be of use, but devices such as this seem to have worked exceptionally well. We also have a good idea of who the person was with the smarts to invent this as the tomb of an Egyptian court official, Amenemhet, dating back more than 3,500 years has an inscription upon it reading:

I was the one who devised the water-clock (clepsydra) for the measurement of the hours of the night.9

Water clocks of this nature were also used to measure precise intervals of time, such as in Roman courts of law, where the advocates had strict limits placed upon the extent to which they could speak, though it turns out that one could haggle for more time as Pliny (yet again!) explains:

However, as soon as I had pulled myself together and collected my thoughts, I began my address, and though I was nervous I was on the best of terms with my audience. I spoke for nearly five hours, for, in addition to the twelve water-clocks — the largest I could get — which had been assigned to me, I obtained four others.

The technology of water clocks soon developed far beyond simple clay jars, floats were used that could more directly indicate the time or even play sounds as Vitruvius recorded in his Ten Books on Architecture (late 1st century BCE):

Hence, Ctesibius, observing that sounds and tones were produced by the contact between the free air and that which was forced from the pipe, made use of this principle in the construction of the first water organs. He also devised methods of raising water, automatic contrivances, and amusing things of many kinds, including among them the construction of water clocks. He began by making an orifice in a piece of gold, or by perforating a gem, because these substances are not worn by the action of water, and do not collect dirt so as to get stopped up.

Water clock innovation was also taking place in China. Around the year 200 BCE they moved away from vessels that had water flowing out of them, and replaced them with ones that filled with water, with a float indicating the time. Measuring time with water could be problematic though. It would evaporate, would expand and contract with temperature and even freeze if the temperatures fell sufficiently low in the winter. This latter problem was addressed by keeping the water heated with burning torches, until the year 976 when the engineer Zhang Sixun hit upon the idea of replacing the water with mercury. Some clocks were thus designed to work with water in the summer, and mercury in the winter.

The Chinese were also doing something that the European’s weren’t – they were dividing their days into consistently equal, rather than seasonal, hours. More than two thousand years ago they divided their days into 12 double hours called shí (時) that were named with the Twelve Earthly Branches: zǐ, chǒu, yín, mǎo, chén, sì, wǔ, wèi, shēn, yǒu, xū, hài. Alongside shí, the day was also divided into kè (刻), literally “marks,” probably referring to marks on a clepsydra or sundial. For long stretches of imperial history, a day was treated as 100 kè, so one kè was 1/100 of a day: about 14 minutes 24 seconds. Because 12 shí and 100 kè do not divide neatly into one another, traditional Chinese systems often used smaller intermediate fractions. One important one was a subdivision equivalent to 1/600 of a day, about 2 minutes 24 seconds which let the 12-shí and 100-kè systems mesh mathematically.

So there were several pretty good ways of measuring time two thousand years ago, but they weren’t exactly portable were they? What did people do when they were out and about, or did they simply not worry about time too much? You may have seen a scene in a historical comedy where someone is asked the time and they pull up their sleeve revealing a sundial strapped to their wrist. This is obviously a gag, but interestingly it isn’t that far from the truth! Vitruvius, writing in the late 1st century BCE describes in the context of many sundial innovators how they left instructions for making “portable pendulous dials”:

Berosus the Chaldean, was the inventor of the semicircle, hollowed in a square, and inclined according to the climate. Aristarchus the Samian, of the Scaphe or Hemisphere, as also of the discus on a plane. The Arachne was the invention of Eudoxus the astrologer, although some attribute it to Apollonius. The Plinthium or Lacunar, an example of which is to be seen in the Circus Flaminius, was invented by Scopas the Syracusan. The sort called Πρὸς τὰ ἱστορούμενα, by Parmenio. That called Πρὸς πᾶν κλίμα,º by Theodosius and Andrias. The Pelicinon by Patrocles. The Cone by Dionysodorus. The Quiver by Apollonius. The persons above mentioned not only invented other sorts; but the inventions of others have come down to us, such as the Gonarche, the Engonatos, and the Antiboreus. Many also have left instructions for constructing the portable pendulous dials.

And one dating from around the year 250CE can be seen in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. For sure, it wasn’t something to be worn on the wrist, but it was basically the ancient equivalent of a pocket watch:

“Hang on a minute!”10 you may be thinking “why hasn’t he mentioned hourglasses yet?” Surely they are one of the oldest means of measuring time?” So that is what I assumed as well before researching this piece, but what I learned was quite surprising. It seems that hourglasses are actually not really that old at all. There is a relief on a sarcophagus from Villa Albani in Rome dating from around 350 CE (or perhaps 120-130 CE) which shows something that looks a bit like an hourglass but beyond that possibility the earliest visual representation we have can be seen in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government, painted in 1338–1339, where the figure of Temperance holds an hourglass.

Obviously they must have been invented prior to that point, but it seems unlikely that they had been in use for a thousand years without any other mention of in literature or representation in art. The earliest written reference we have dates from around the year 1345, mentioned in a receipt of Thomas de Stetesham who was the clerk of the King’s ship La George:

The same Thomas accounts to have paid at Lescluse, in Flanders, for twelve glass horologes (" pro xii. orlogiis vitreis "), price of each 4¹⁄₂ gross', in sterling 9s. Item, For four horologes of the same sort (" de eadem secta "), bought there, price of each five gross', making in sterling 3s. 4d.

Despite having numerous ways to measure it, ancient peoples clearly had a very different relationship with time than the one we have today. You were very unlikely to have many set events at specific times of the day, arrangements would be much more general, other than in formal legal, government and military situations (and even then, as we have learned, the clock in Rome was wrong for nearly a century). The standardised measurement of time was also very unevenly distributed. Only a handful of incised sundials survive from the Roman era,11 for example. If you lived outside of a significant urban centre you simply would have had no access to the measuring of time. People in rural villages would probably have known about the division of time into hours, but they would not have used that system. Rather their days would have been structured around natural indicators of time – sunrise, noon, sunset etcetera. They didn’t have access to time, but they also had no need to know what the time was, their lives were ordered by nature rather than a clock.12

In my next piece I’ll explore some other ways of measuring time, including the use of scent, as well as digging into how we ended up with minutes and seconds.