13 
In which Frank Swannell eats bean stew, bannock and prune pie in British Columbia (15 November 1901)
How the industrial ration fed those who pushed out the boundaries of empire and processed foods became magical symbols of home
As darkness fell in British Columbia on 15 November 1901, Frank Swannell and his companions tramped back to their camp in the fir woods of Texada Island, where they were surveying mining claims for the Cap Sheaf Copper & Gold Company. They were the advance guard of a short-lived copper boom in the Straits of Georgia. It had been a miserable, drizzling wet day with ‘a leaden sky overhead [and] a bog underneath’.1 Frank had to take sights standing ankle-deep in water and he received a shower from every bush he brushed against. By 3.30 in the afternoon it was too dark to read his instruments without the light of matches, and the team gave up for the day. They fought their way back to their camp through the tangled, soaking hemlock scrub, stumbling over rocks and logs and wading through pools of water on the way, arriving ‘at dark–boots and leggings like soggy blotting paper’.2 Having last eaten some bread and butter with a cup of tea at 11.30 in the morning, the men were hungry. In the meantime the camp cook had been busy. Supper was ‘Beans mixed with Australian rabbit. Bread and prunes pie. (All side orders extra and unobtainable.)’3 Even though it had been a tough day, the men’s spirits lifted once they had eaten, and they had ‘a fine time’ singing ‘every song they could remember from “My Bonnie” to “Clementine”’.4
Frank Swannell cooking venison for his crew at a survey camp in British Columbia.
The supplies Frank and his crew relied on were the same cheap, durable foods that had enabled the sixteenth-century exploration of the oceans: salt meat, hardtack and flour, beans and pulses, and a little grease or butter. This was similar to the industrial ration that fed Britain’s labourers, and the men and women who continued to push outwards the boundaries of empire in the nineteenth century packed the same foods into their ships and canoes, packhorse saddlebags, wheelbarrows and wagons.5 Over time, dried fruit, salt, sugar, tea, coffee and rum were added to the ration, and canned meat and biscuits packed in airtight tins became available. With these supplies Europeans made themselves warm and sustaining meals as they explored, exploited and settled the globe. Over the course of the nineteenth century, explorers, whalers, loggers, cowboys, shepherds and pioneer settlers harvested the world’s marine resources and moved into what they told themselves was virgin territory, encroaching on forests and moving out over grasslands and prairies, continually incorporating peripheral areas into the core regions of white settlement.6
Even on the frontiers of settlement, Europeans went to great lengths to make proper leavened bread. In 1839, Kitturah Belknap and her husband were travelling west from Ohio onto the prairie lands of Iowa. As soon as they made camp, she would prepare ‘salt rising’ by mixing water, cornmeal, sliced potatoes and salt in a bowl. This she would leave on the warm ground to ferment overnight. Early the next morning she added the ‘rising’ to a flour-and-water dough to leaven it. She then baked the bread in a Dutch oven before they broke camp. That way they always had a supply of good bread for their journey.7 In her account of the trek her family made from the Cape to the Hope Mountain mission (in what is now Zimbabwe) in 1874, Jessie Lovemore recalled how her mother had a similar camp routine. Each night she would prepare a leaven sponge and then bake the bread the next morning in her Dutch oven, a ‘heavy cast-iron or wrought-iron flat pot, with a lid, on which one could heap coals. The procedure was to make a good fire and when there were enough hot embers, to put the pot containing bread or cake or meat on them and cover the lid with more.’8
Camp cooks who lacked a yeast substitute made soda breads. Frank Swannell’s ‘jewel’ of a cook was a dab hand at making bannock, or scone bread. In August 1901, Frank wrote to his fiancée ‘against the time when aforesaid mademoiselle will have to make cake for some fellow or other’ to give her the cook’s ‘latest evolved recipe: Cake à la Survey: Musty flour–a sufficiency. Baking powder: a fistful. Raisins galore. Marmalade–as much as will stick to a clasp knife blade: syrup (with sandflies therein)–considerable. “Tin cow”–half tin cupful. Water: ad libitum. Mix. Place before a reflector [oven] with lots of fir bark on fire. Test for doneness with a hemlock sliver.’ But if supplies were running short, at a pinch Frank’s cook could make ‘very iron clad affairs’ out of just flour and snow water.9
Another camp standby was doughboys, or flour and lard dumplings. These were cooked by dropping them into the broth that formed around salt meat as it was cooking. ‘Doughboys’ were a favourite among the gangs of men who pushed into the world’s forests and oceans, hunting for furs, logging timber, mining for minerals and precious metals, and harpooning whales in a frenzy of extraction that despoiled great tracts of land and drove the wildlife to the edge of extinction.10 In Newfoundland, doughboys were known as ‘lassie buns’ as they were made with generous amounts of molasses and ‘fat pork’. These substantial balls of carbohydrate gave lumberjacks and fishermen the energy they needed to fell timber and fish for cod.11
Reduced to its bare bones, however, the ration was severely vitamin-deficient. It needed to be supplemented with fresh meat and, if possible, local fruit and vegetables. Meals of salt beef stew poured over damper, and cups of sweet tea, enabled Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills to cross the Australian continent from south to north in 1860. But they failed to take enough supplies for the return journey, and reduced to surviving on a few sticks of rotten meat and a handful of flour a day, they became too apathetic and weak to hunt the abundant wildlife. By the time they stumbled back into the territory of the Yandruwandha people, they were suffering from such dreadful vitamin B deficiency that their legs were virtually paralysed. Both men died.12
Naval officers understood that scurvy was a dietary disease caused by the shortcomings of the ration. Many thought that the salinity of sailors’ food was the cause of their ill health, and for this reason the Admiralty dropped salt fish from the naval ration in 1733 and replaced it with oatmeal and sugar.13 It was well known that fresh food alleviated scorbutic symptoms, and whenever the ships were in port, fresh meat and vegetables were issued; when they were at sea, lime juice and vinegar were doled out to the sailors. However, although scurvy was not a major cause of death in the eighteenth-century navy, it continued to be a problem and severely restricted naval efficiency, as it limited the amount of time ships could stay at sea.14 The need to find a way of providing fresh food for sailors was pressing, for as the London physician Andrew Wynter described, ‘England, with regard to her dependencies… is like a city situated in the midst of a desert; vast foodless tracts have to be traversed by her ships, the camels of the ocean; and if [their] provisions are not entirely to be depended on, the position of the mariners might be likened to the people of a caravan whose water-bags are liable at any moment, without previous warning to burst, and to discharge the means of preserving life into the thirsting sands.’15 The search for a solution to the problem stimulated the development of new food industries.
In 1804, the French government awarded Nicholas Appert a 12,000-franc prize for his innovative bottling method. This involved heating hermetically sealed glass jars of food to very high temperatures. His technique could be used to preserve virtually anything, from beef bouillon to green beans. The French newspapers praised Appert for having found a way to ‘fix the seasons’. The British inventor Peter Durand learned of this process and patented the idea using tin cans instead of glass bottles. He then sold the patent to Bryan Donkin, a partner in an ironworks who had an eye for new ideas. In 1813, Gamble, Donkin and Hall opened Britain’s first food-canning factory in Blue Anchor Road, Bermondsey. Their canned meat received praise from illustrious celebrities: Joseph Banks tested it on behalf of the Royal Society, Lord Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) recommended it to the navy, and even King George III and Queen Charlotte claimed to have enjoyed their meal of canned beef.16
The commander of the navy’s West India station immediately put in a request to the Admiralty to be sent a sample of Gamble, Donkin and Hall’s ‘patented preserved meats’ for the hospital stores. He had heard that their canned ‘bouilli’ kept fresh even in the hottest climates. In 1815, he reported that it was far superior to the portable soup that had been introduced as a remedy for scorbutic sailors in the mid eighteenth century.17 In 1819, an expedition to search for the Northwest Passage was one of the first to add tins from Gamble & Co. to the usual stores of flour and salt meat. On their return, the expedition surgeon attributed the good health of the men to the preserved meats and soups.18 Only five years after setting up the factory, Gamble, Donkin and Hall were supplying the Admiralty with more than £5,000 worth of canned roast, corned, seasoned and boiled beef, mutton and veal, as well as beef bouillon and vegetable soup.19 As the navy was their main customer, in 1821 John Gamble (now sole proprietor) moved the factory to Cork, the centre for naval beef supplies. Rather than being salted down in barrels to make ‘Irish horse’, Irish cattle were now packed into tin cans and renamed ‘clews and lashing’ (hammock cords), as the overcooked beef tended to form into an unappetising ‘conglomeration of strings’.20 In 1831, the Admiralty made it compulsory for all ships of the line to carry tinned meat as medical provisions for sick and ailing sailors, and in 1847, it was added to the ration scale for the ordinary sailor.21 On alternate beef days they were allotted three quarters of a pound of canned meat along with a quarter of a pound of canned potatoes or rice. Each naval mess was issued with a special lever knife so that they could open the tins.22 In the sailors’ parlance, ‘boeuf bouilli’ became ‘bully beef’, a term still used by the army in the twentieth century.23
Many people were convinced that canned meats were the means of saving sailors from their ‘salt junk’ diet.24 However, faith in the new-fangled preservation method was shaken by the Goldner scandal, when in 1852 inspectors at the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard in Portsmouth discovered that hundreds of tins in the navy store contained putrid meat. As they made their grim discovery they were overcome by nausea, and afterwards the stench could only be removed by coating the storeroom floor with chloride of lime.25 Eventually the navy had to throw away cans to the value of more than £6,000. Stephen Goldner, the navy’s supplier since 1845, had set up a factory in Moldova, where both meat and labour were cheap, but he made the mistake of trying to cut costs further by using larger tins holding 9 and 14 lb of meat. This overstretched the infant canning technology as they were too big to be heated to a sufficient temperature all the way through. The navy cancelled its contract with him and instead set up its own canning factory.26 The hostile, anti-Semitic press coverage of the government enquiry drove Goldner’s London agent, Samuel Sextus Ritchie, into exile in Australia. He arrived in Melbourne in 1857 and set himself up as a wine and spirit merchant, but by the 1870s he had opened a canning operation, which quickly became the largest in Australia. By the turn of the century, Melbourne’s exports of canned meat were virtually all rabbit; this was almost certainly the source of the ‘Australian rabbit’ that Frank Swannell and his men had in their bean stew in British Columbia in 1901.27
The furore did nothing to promote the cause of canned meat among the general public, who now associated canned goods with food poisoning. Joseph Banks’s testimonial was also of limited value, as his description of Gamble’s canned goods as ‘embalmed Provisions’ conjured up images of mummified rather than fresh and nutritious food.28 In a similar vein, because the meat was cut up into small pieces in order to be inserted into the cans through a small stud hole, sailors gave it the grim moniker ‘Fanny Adams’, after an 8-year-old girl who was dismembered by her murderer.29 Advertising emphasised that cans could be opened years later to reveal good meat, but for many this seemed to suggest that the ‘freshness’ of the product was illusory. According to Anthony Trollope, the working man preferred half a pound of fresh meat to even a whole pound of coarse-grained, fatty tinned mutton.30 Besides, canned goods were expensive: Gamble charged the navy between 1s. 8d and 3s. a pound for his products.31 Canned meat made little economic sense except for those such as sailors and explorers who needed to take stores with them on long journeys. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cans had become standard issue on any expedition.
If the domestic response to canned goods was lacklustre, in the colonies their reception was enthusiastic. Tins of pâté de foie gras and truffles joined the jars of pickles and bottles of Indian pale ale on the shelves of grocery stores in India and America.32 In the 1830s, Emma Roberts observed that the ‘delicacies of an entertainment consist of hermetically-sealed salmon… raspberry jam and dried fruits; these articles coming from Europe and being sometimes very difficult to procure in a fresh and palmy state, are prized accordingly’.33 Tinned foods were a boon to those living in isolation. There was no supply of fresh eggs at Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River in the 1870s. Lieutenant Colonel Custer was stationed there with his cavalry unit in order to provide protection from the Sioux for the survey crews and railroad workers who were advancing the Northern Pacific Railroad across the plains of North Dakota. Mrs Custer was able to compensate for the lack by procuring ‘crystallized eggs’ in airtight cans.34
By the 1850s, John Gamble’s canning firm had turned from naval supplies towards the colonial market. When he displayed his wares at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the pyramid of his company’s tins contained preserved ham ‘for use in India, China etc.… soup and boili, for emigrants and troops at sea. Pheasants, partridges etc., preserved… whole… so as to keep in any climate, and for an unlimited length of time.’35 Soon afterwards, Gamble’s firm was bought by Crosse & Blackwell. In the 1830s, Edmund Crosse and Thomas Blackwell reoriented their oilman’s business away from the provision of seal and whale fat towards luxury provisions. In 1840, they sent their first consignment of pickles, fruits, mustard, vinegar and capers to India and began to look towards the empire market. Now, in the mid nineteenth century, the manufacture of provisions began to turn into an industry; by the 1860s, Crosse & Blackwell had three purpose-built factories and two warehouses on the Thames.36
When Henry Mayhew visited one of these factories in 1865, he was struck by the scale of production. In the gas-lit bottling room, hundreds of women, their arms stained as yellow as the legs of game cocks with the pickle juice, stood along a gallery packing the ‘primrose-coloured cauliflower-sprouts… white onions, like so many glass marbles [and]… huge olive-green caterpillar-like gherkins’ into square glass jars.37 He was astonished by the mountains of sugar (a ton a day) and rivers of vinegar (2,500 gallons a week) they used, and the fact that they churned out 350 hogsheads of anchovy sauce a year. He could not imagine ‘where on earth all the fish comes from that has to be eaten with this amount of sauce’.38 The fish was in the colonies, Crosse & Blackwell’s major market. In 1871, Edmund Hull, author of a handbook to India, acknowledged that ‘the Englishman abroad owes a debt of gratitude to the enterprise of such firms as Crosse & Blackwell… whose pickles, preserved fruits, meats, soups, tin hams, tongues, bacon, and indeed oilman’s stores are probably unsurpassed, and for soundness generally to be depended upon’.39
In biscuit factories mechanisation was in full swing. Contemporaries had just become accustomed to the idea that shirts and trousers could be stitched by sewing machines; now they were confronted by the astonishing fact that biscuits could be manufactured in such a way that ‘from the time when the flour and other ingredients are put into the mixers to the time when the biscuits are packed into tins… they are scarcely touched by the hands of the work people’.40 Pioneering bakers Thomas Huntley, William Palmer and J. D. Carr had moved biscuit manufacture out of their baker’s shops and into purpose-built factories where steam-powered machines rolled out the dough and cut the biscuits and ‘travelling ovens’ baked them while they passed through on a conveyor belt on their way to the packing area. ‘Biscuits by machinery!’ exclaimed Mayhew. ‘It strikes on the ear almost as funnily, at first, as chickens produced by steam.’41
The biscuit factories manufactured thousands of tons of biscuits a year.42 Indeed, they produced such large quantities that Mayhew remarked that ‘it seemed as though biscuits constituted the staple article of the food of the entire human race, rather than being the mere toothsome snacks of a small portion of mankind’.43 They were making enough biscuits to supply a mass market, but not at mass-market prices. At 6d for a quarter of a pound, even the most ordinary ginger nuts cost as much as a labourer might earn in a day.44 Their market was the rest of the world. France, Belgium and the Netherlands absorbed 70 per cent of Britain’s biscuit exports in 1870, but the remaining 30 per cent were sent all over the globe.45 Packed into airtight tin boxes, manufactured biscuits remained fresh for months or even years, no matter what the external climatic conditions. This made them excellent provisions for explorers, military men and colonial officials. In the 1880s, a geological survey team in Southern Rhodesia wrote to Carr’s to inform them that a tin of their biscuits kept in the toolbox of a car for two years had recently been opened. To their delight, the biscuits were still crisp and delicious.46
Biscuit tins, unlike cans and bottles, were not thrown away, as they could be used for a variety of purposes even when empty of their original contents. In the 1860s, an English traveller noticed that a nomadic Mongolian chieftainess used a large biscuit tin as a travelling garden in which to grow garlic to flavour her mutton stews.47 In 1879, British troops fought the Zulus at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift from behind barricades constructed out of Carr’s of Carlisle biscuit tins.48 When the British defeated Mahdist forces near Khartoum in 1898, they retrieved from the battlefield a scabbard held together with strips of metal cut from a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin. In the twentieth century, a Christian congregation in Uganda used 2 lb biscuit tins as containers for their Bibles to protect them from the ravages of white ants.49 And in the 1940s, there was a craze in Nubia, on the River Nile, for decorating mud houses with relief work of flowers and art deco designs inspired by the ‘Bouquet Assorted’ and ‘Wisteria’ Huntley & Palmer Christmas biscuit tins.50
After the Indian Rebellion in 1857, the East India Company was relieved of its territorial possessions and in 1858 India was made a Crown colony. The old-style Company merchant who behaved like an Indian grandee, wore comfortable white pyjamas, smoked a hookah, often had an Indian mistress and socialised easily with the Indian elite had long since been replaced by the burra sahib: the personification of polite middle-class British society. The notion took hold in the 1820s and 1830s that Company officials should act as agents of Western civilisation. Their task was to bring India into the modern age by eradicating disturbing Indian practices such as suttee (widow burning) and promoting the rule of law and justice. In his neat black suit the burra sahib demonstrated that he was prepared to endure any amount of discomfort in order to keep up standards.51 Now that the officers of the Indian civil service were representatives of the British Crown, they were more than ever expected to enact the physical and moral superiority of the British race and maintain national prestige at all times.
Prestige was a concept that in the nineteenth century came to govern the behaviour of British officials throughout the Empire. It found expression in the adoption of an authoritative manner and an air of invincibility. In the colonies, British men and women were permanently on display to the ‘natives’. In all areas of life, no matter how trivial or domestic, they were expected to uphold proper standards of dress, cleanliness and deportment.52 In particular, the colonial dining room was seen as a stage where the official put on a performance of civilisation. Handbooks such as The Englishwoman in India (1864) offering advice to ‘ladies proceeding to… the East Indies’ recommended shipping out crates of table linen and Wedgwood china, silver cruets, cutlery and crystal glasses so that their dining tables would mirror those of the ‘best regulated establishments’ at ‘home’.53 When in February 1900 Isabella Russel found herself entertaining the Roman Catholic Bishop of Senegambia while he was on a visit to Bathurst in British Gambia, she relied heavily on the town’s collective stock of tableware to create the desired effect. In a letter home to her sister, she described the table covered with pink silk and laid with pretty dishes and silver spoons, borrowed sherry glasses and her good Wedgwood grey, white and gold dinner service.54
Colonial officials in India putting on a performance of Britishness at their dining table.
The ideal menu was of ‘dishes approved by the taste of polite society at home’.55 But this could be difficult to achieve. Market gardens growing European vegetables did spring up around European cantonments in India, but more often than not colonial memsahibs were forced to resort to tinned foods in order to create a semblance of a European meal. At dinner parties in India, often ‘the fish would be tinned, the bacon, the pâté de foie gras, asparagus and cheese’.56 Isabella Russel enclosed the menu for the bishop’s dinner in her letter to her sister. ‘It may interest you to know what West Africa can produce’, she wrote with pride, even though ‘we have tinned things and no ice or such luxuries’. The basis of the meal was the local fare of groundnuts made into a soup, boiled mutton (‘too poor to roast here’) and roast pigeon, transformed into the more elegant-sounding ‘Potage d’arrachides’, ‘Gigot de Mouton’ and ‘Pigeon rotis’. Tinned peas, marrons glacé and bottled almonds and raisins added a touch of finesse.57
Wherever they were, the men and women who made the Empire tried to create moments of Britishness in their unfamiliar surroundings. European provisions took on magical qualities in these distant settings. In 1914, Laura Boyle and her husband were entertained by the outgoing district officer in their Gold Coast posting deep in the West African bush. ‘Anyone looking from the dark African night into the lighted rest-house dining-room across the wide verandah’ would have witnessed the enactment of an ‘almost European dinner party’, she wrote. ‘The men in white mess jackets with bright yellow cummerbunds and I in a cool white dress… records of Wagner and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing as an accompaniment.’59 Tinned food played an essential part in this re-creation of ‘home’. As the Boyles set off on the ten-day journey to Wenchi from the railhead at Kumasi, the carriers hoisted onto their heads box after box containing tins of tomato and turtle soup; asparagus and mushrooms; sardines, bacon and kidneys; cherries, pears, plums and strawberries.60
Not every colonial officer could afford to rely on tins to re-create Britain in their patch of empire. When in 1943 Margery Hall moved into her new home in the remote town of Phutipura, near Jacobabad in British India’s Sind Desert, she was horrified by what she found. The compound was overrun by rats, and on inspecting the kitchen, she discovered that it was ‘black all over… obviously scrubbing was not in the cook’s schedule’.61 Isolated and unbearably hot, she thought Phutipura ‘a vile and horrible place’.62 She could not believe that her husband, a member of the Indian Political Service, had been posted there with a young family. At night she was tortured by the heat and a terrible stench seeping into their bedroom. It was coming from the servants’ latrine, which she discovered was overflowing and crawling with maggots.
The Halls could not afford to eat tinned food on a daily basis. For most of the year the only vegetables available in the local bazaar were potatoes, pumpkins and ‘some green attenuated things like desiccated cucumbers’, probably bitter gourds.63 Their cook made these into simple curries and the family ate them with rice and chapattis, as yeast to make leavened bread was unobtainable. Then, in the cold weather, they were told that a number of senior officials would be passing through on their district tour: Margery and her husband, Henry, would be expected to entertain them. The requirements of prestige sent her to her store cupboard. On the evening in question, the small party sat down to a simulacrum of a British meal. The centrepiece was cold roast pigeon. Little did Margery’s guests know that the bird had, only that morning, been cooing contentedly on the walls that surrounded their compound. Henry had shot it and then Margery had plucked and roasted it in the freshly scrubbed, but still primitive, kitchen. It was accompanied by ‘tinned vegetables topped by home-made salad-dressing’. Dessert was ‘tinned fruit topped by meringue and served with cream from my own pasteurized milk’. Margery had prepared everything herself before the guests arrived and then joined the party ‘as hostess, pretending I had a cook’. In order to complete the charade, she even dug out her husband’s dinner jacket and put on a ‘rather nice sort of rayon dress… Rather chic at home; now clinging in a great soaking wet patch to my back and waist. Not at all chic in the tropics.’64
It was, as Margery herself pointed out, ‘all very silly, really’, but the conventions of the Empire meant that it was always of paramount importance to keep up appearances. Margery would have been mortified if her guests had discovered the reason why she was without a cook. Only a few weeks before, he had bolted when she discovered the brothel he had been running in a spare hut in the compound. She had ‘flung open the door’ and her eyes had fallen on ‘familiar objects. My spare bed, my mattress, my lamps… All, no doubt, crawling with syphilis and goodness knows what other filthy germs from the filthy bazaar.’65 It was one of the few times in her life that Margery completely lost her temper.
This insistence on maintaining British standards was not just about an apparently relentless demonstration of racial superiority. The colonial imitation of British meals was an attempt to cling to the familiar in unfamiliar and often threatening surroundings. In Phutipura, Margery felt besieged by filth and disease. Years later, she was able to see the incident with her brothel-keeping cook as amusing, but at the time, she was angry because she was frightened. ‘Everything revolved around the safety of the family,’ she explained, and ‘everything that threatened that safety was very important’.66 Cheshire cheese, Huntley & Palmer biscuits and tins of Crosse & Blackwell mushroom soup helped to construct safe British oases in the wilds of the Empire. A peculiar by-product of this was that, regardless of their actual place of origin, preserved, processed, tinned and industrial foods were transmogrified in the British colonies into emblems of ‘home’. Scandinavian reindeer tongues, sardines caught off the coast of Brittany, soup made from West Indian turtles, marmalade made with Spanish oranges–all acted as potent triggers for nostalgic memories and thus carried with them an aura of Britishness.67 So important was the association of these products with ‘home’ that William Underwood, who opened a bottling and canning factory in America, sold his pickles, ketchups, bottled tomatoes, tinned lobster and tinned milk in India, Batavia, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Manila, the West Indies and South America under a label on which was clearly printed, ‘Made in England’.68
The contribution of the food sector to Britain’s industrial growth is easily overlooked. The sorting, peeling, chopping, brining and cooking was still largely done by calloused hands, and therefore the emergence of food-processing factories does not naturally fit into the dominant narrative of mechanisation.70 However, food processing made a significant contribution to the foundation of Britain’s industrial might.71 In the same way that the Newfoundland fisheries and London sugar refineries stimulated the growth of supplementary industries in the seventeenth century, the canning, pickle and biscuit factories of the nineteenth century were supported by a host of flour mills, vinegar breweries and market gardens.72 The Maling pottery in Newcastle, producing the stoneware jars used by the preserves and pickles industry, became the biggest pottery in the world. T. T. Vicars, run by William Palmer’s cousins with whom he invented the coal-fired travelling oven in 1856, went on to become one of the country’s foremost engineering firms.73
Moreover, the growth and success of the British food-processing industry relied on the worldwide market of Britain’s commercial empire.74 Given that they manufactured foods that barely featured in the diets of most of the population, it was impressive that Huntley & Palmer’s production represented one thousandth of Britain’s total industrial production; by 1905, they were the country’s thirty-eighth largest company by value.75 In the 1870s, Britain’s top three food exports were refined sugar, fish, and pickles and table sauces. Every year, Crosse & Blackwell sent to India, Australia and China more than 30,000 one-pound tins of Oxford sausages, 34,000 half-pint cans of oysters, more than 3,000 dried ox tongues, 17,000 cans of Cheddar and Berkeley cheese, and over a thousand plum puddings.76 The company’s slogan, ‘The name that is known to the ends of the earth’, said it all.