The people of Bradford briefly develop a taste for arsenic

‘Bah! Humbug!’ was famously a favourite expression of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser who stomped grumpily about the novel A Christmas Carol. Back in 1843, when Charles Dickens was creating one of his most celebrated characters, he could not have known just how appropriate it would be to have put the word ‘humbug’ into such a poisonous character’s mouth.

Just 15 years later, a simple misunderstanding brought about one of the worst cases of mass poisoning in Britain and it was all caused by a single batch of humbugs.

Arsenic was the poison involved. It occurs naturally in a large range of minerals, and although nowadays the substance tends to be associated with the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, its toxic properties have been known since time immemorial. Many is the tale of an ancient Greek or Roman being done away with by an unscrupulous rival with a grudge and access to a pinch of arsenic.

Sugary sweets, of course, are far more recent victuals. In Victorian times, sugar beet had yet to make its arrival on the flat fields of the Fens, and Britain had to import every last teaspoonful of the sugar it ate, as it had always done. When the new and exciting foodstuff first came to Britain, probably in the mid-13th century, it was so expensive that it was the preserve of royalty alone. It was the capture, transportation and enslavement of Africans in the 17th century that really began to bring the price of sugar down. Large plantations, worked by slaves, were established in the West Indies, with the cane sent to Britain to be refined.

Huge fortunes could be made from the sale of ‘white gold’. Keenly aware of this, successive governments set high taxes on the commodity. So it was that, come 1858, the price of sugar made it a treat for a special occasion rather than the staple it has become in modern times. It would not be until 1874 and the abolition of the sugar tax that molasses became affordable to the masses.

Much in the same way that Class A drugs today are often cut with talcum powder or some other such matter in order to maximise profits, in the 19th century, unprincipled sugar dealers would covertly bulk up their merchandise by adding something that looked like sugar but was much cheaper. A common additive – known as ‘daft’ – typically consisted of powdered limestone and/or gypsum (as used in plaster casts). The resulting product could then be sold at a price more within the budget of the working classes, thus opening a huge market to the sugar merchants.

In October 1858, William Hardaker was working at his confectionery stall at the Green Market in Bradford. Well known in the area, he had been nicknamed ‘Humbug Billy’ by the locals. His humbugs were styled ‘lozenges’ because they were believed to have some mild medicinal effect on account of the peppermint they contained. He did not make the boiled sweets himself but procured them from a spice dealer called Joseph Neal. He in turn sourced his daft (gypsum in this case) from a pharmacist named Charles Hodgson in Shipley, three miles away. On 18 October, Neal sent out an employee, John Archer, to pick up some gypsum from Hodgson.

In the days following the poisoning, the police pieced together what had happened next. Archer had evidently travelled to the pharmacy as he was told. Hodgson was on the premises but was feeling unwell, so his assistant, William Goddard, had attended to the customer. Unsure of the location of the gypsum, the young Goddard had sought out Hodgson, who had informed him that he would find it in a cask in a certain corner of the attic. Goddard had served Archer and the latter had returned to his employer with 12lb of white powder. This was handed to a man called James Appleton, who was to make up a batch of humbugs. He used 40lb of sugar, 12lb of daft, 4lb of gum and some peppermint oil and soon had a large quantity of confectionery ready for distribution. The sweets had turned out a slightly different colour than usual but not so dramatically as to drive Appleton to any great speculation as to why. The confectioner, who appears not to have been a very inquiring soul, was poorly for a few days afterwards but had put it down to a cold and had thought no more about it. Hardaker came by on the Saturday to buy some humbugs for his stall. He, too, queried the humbugs’ change of hue but Neal put it down to a new batch of gum that Appleton had used. To mollify Hardaker, the spice dealer knocked a ha’penny per pound off the price.

That same weekend, a Bradford man named Mark Burran had stopped by at Humbug Bill’s stall to purchase some of the sweets. He went home and gave one each to his two sons, five-year-old Orlando and John, a toddler. It wasn’t long before he was obliged to call John Bell, a local doctor, to the family home. Both boys had become extremely ill and, despite the physician’s efforts, they died on the Sunday evening. Although it was suggested that the cause might have been cholera, the doctor suspected that they had been poisoned and the police were called in.

Before long, the local constabulary was overwhelmed with accounts of mysterious illnesses and deaths occurring all over Bradford. It didn’t take the deductive power of a Sherlock Holmes to work out that the one element tying the victims together was that they had all eaten humbugs bought at Hardaker’s stall in the Green Market. Officers learnt the sweet-seller’s address and called round. They were surprised to find that he, too, was unwell.

Having questioned Hardaker as to his supplier – and taken some of his humbugs for analysis – they spoke next to Joseph Neal. The spice dealer was the first person to point the finger of suspicion at the daft that had been used in the mix. Moving on to Charles Hodgson’s pharmacy in Shipley, the police quite naturally followed up on this hypothesis. One can only imagine the horror-stricken look on the pharmacist’s face when it became apparent that Goddard had misunderstood his instructions and had taken the powder not from a cask that contained gypsum but from one that held arsenic trioxide. Aside from sharing a colour, the two powders are both odourless and tasteless, making the error only too easy to commit.

The good citizens of Bradford buried their dead. In all, 20 people – mostly children – had perished from eating the corrupted humbugs while around 200 others suffered the lesser but still very unpleasant effects of arsenical poisoning – stomach cramps, convulsions, vomiting of bile and blood, diarrhoea, delirium and shock. Despite this, the survivors could count themselves very lucky indeed, because it was estimated that a single humbug contained over one-and-a-half times the dose necessary to finish a person off in ordinary circumstances.

Three arrests were made. First, William Goddard was seized and brought before the local magistrates on 1 November 1858. Pharmacist Charles Hodgson and spice-dealer Joseph Neal were then charged with manslaughter alongside the hapless assistant. Charges against Goddard and Neal were subsequently dropped and Hodgson was acquitted at York Assizes in December.

Dickens had A Christmas Carol end happily, with Scrooge seeing the error of his ways and finding redemption. Likewise, there is a silver lining to the sorry tale of the Bradford humbug poisonings. The hullaballoo that ensued contributed in no small measure to the passing in 1860 of The Adulteration of Food and Drink Act, which regulated what could be added to foodstuffs. This was followed in 1868 by The Pharmacy Act, which tightened up the procedures that pharmacists had to follow regarding poisons. This included a requirement for the purchaser of a poison to sign for it in a pharmacist’s register – a stipulation beloved of crime writers of a certain era.

These laws are the forerunners of modern-day legislation designed to shield us from adulterated food and drink. Progress on this front is not a given, however, for such protections may well find themselves watered down by transatlantic trade deals and Britain’s planned departure of the European Union, an organisation that has very strict food regulations in place. In the meantime, with Britain beset by an obesity crisis, the government has announced the introduction of the first sugar tax in nearly 150 years, albeit one that applies only to soft drinks. It’s ironic, given the tragedy that occurred in Bradford when all eyes were on the arsenical content of the humbugs, that sugar is now recognised as something of a poison itself.