Going For A Burton Again

Burton upon Trent’s remarkable expansion to become the acknowledged beer capital of the world in the 1880s was due to its remarkably mineral-rich water and its proximity, initially, to the canal system and then the railway system, enabling it to move its products, famed for keeping its taste after enduring long journeys, to the nation’s ports and beyond, principally India. Even though the railways offered a quicker form of transport than canals and the network was expanding as quickly as it could to meet demand, the railway companies struggled to cope with the volume of beer that the town’s brewers were producing.

To ease the problem, brewers started buying up or renting premises dotted around the country in which to store their barrels. Some still exist, one belonging to Bass Breweries is located in the undercroft of the Forth Banks Goods, south of Newcastle city centre. Travellers using the Eurostar service from London’s St Pancras may spot some iron columns in the waiting area which belonged to a beer storage area opened in 1868.

However, the problems associated with success were soon to be overshadowed by an almost existential threat. The water that had made Burton’s beer so distinctive had a particular whiff about it, known as the “Burton snatch”, which clearly indicated the presence of sulphur. The chemist, C W Vincent, after analysing the town’s water, concluded that its calcium sulphate was responsible for accentuating the bitterness of the hops which made Burton’s Indian Pale Ale so characteristic.

This discovery opened the door for other brewers not based in the environs of Burton to emulate the hoppy bitterness of the town’s ale by a process known as Burtonisation. By adding mineral salts, particularly calcium sulphate or gypsum to brewing water accentuated the hop bitterness, lowered the mash pH, and added clarity to the brew, enabling brewers anywhere in the world to replicate the quality and keeping properties of Burton’s beers.       

By the early 20^th century Burton’s pre-eminence as the brewing capital of the world was under threat. By 1911 the number of brewers in the town had shrunk to 17 and the First World War, with its drain on men to fight on the front line, the shortage of raw materials and the onerous regulations imposed on the wartime drink trade added to the strain, even though women were drafted in to make up the labour shortage. The decline continued and by 1950 only five brewers were left.

Even the brewers who had withstood the competition had to adapt quickly, introducing more automation and moving from wood to steel, resulting in the need for fewer labourers and skilled craftsmen. Ancillary business that fed the brewing industry were also affected. Perhaps the quickest and steepest decline was experience by the town’s coopers because within the space of five years breweries had switched from wooden to steel-lined wood to steel barrels. Many buildings were demolished, although the Bass water tower in the centre of the town still remains, and others were converted into industrial premises.

Burton, though, still remains a significant brewing centre, the Canadian-American conglomerate, Molson Coors, operating their producing beers such as Carling, Grolsch, and Coors, while a healthy number of microbreweries have sprung up in recent years, operating out of heritage brewing premises, such as Burton Bridge, Black Hole, Tower, Thornbridge, and Outwoods amongst others.

Burton beer also made its mark in another way. The phrase “gone for a Burton”, popularized by World War Two pilots to refer to a colleague who had gone on a mission but had failed to return, referred to the town’s ale. The poor unfortunate went for a pint but failed to return, making light of something that was, sadly, all too commonplace.

Deadly Yellow

It first made its way to Europe in the early 17^th century, courtesy of the East India Company. Taking its name from Camboia, the old name given to Cambodia, gamboge is a sunny, deep-yellow resin, produced from trees in the Garcinia genus, found primarily in South East Asia. It also was known as rattan, wisteria yellow, gummi gatti, and drop gum.

Collecting the pigment was a painstaking business, requiring the tree’s sap to flow slowly through bamboo shoots inserted into the middle layer of its bark and allowing it to drip into a mould. After it has hardened, it was either pulverized into a fine yellow dust or mixed with water to produce a pretty, slightly golden paint. Used in traditional Chinese painting and a favourite of Flemish painters including Rembrandt, it is not very lightfast ie it does not last long and as a result in modern art it has been replaced by synthetic, lightfast “gamboge hue” pigments.

Gamboge has been described as “one of the most efficient diuretics that nature knows—put it accidentally in your mouth and you’ll be in the bathroom all day”, a characteristic that it shares with other plants resonating with a yellow brilliance, such as gourds, unripe pineapple, yellow dock root and yellow flag irises. Clearly it is not something to be trifled with, but even worse it is toxic as the deadly case of Morison’s Vegetable Pills was to show.

James Morison vehemently criticised orthodox medicine, believing that “all maladies arise from impurity of the blood, though they may show themselves under various forms” and that the only successful course of treatment was by purgation of the system. Of course, he had his very own solution, Morison Vegetable Pills, a laxative whose principal ingredient was gamboge along with aloes, jalap, colocynth, cream of tartar, myrrh, and rhubarb, which he began selling in 1825, at the age of 51, claiming that they had cured 35 years of his own “inexpressible suffering”. The system could not be purged enough and it was not uncommon for Morison’s adherents, known as “Hygeists” to prescribe between 15 and twenty pills at the start of an illness.

In the spring of 1836, one of Morison’s adherents was found guilty of manslaughter after he had advised Captain Mackenzie, described as formerly a “stout, healthy man”, to ingest 35 pills to treat a dodgy knee. Of course, the pills were Morison’s Vegetable Pills, the panacea for all known ailments. Mackenzie’s demise was just the tip of the iceberg. According to The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published in 1838 nearly a dozen people had died after ingesting large doses of Morison’s pills, several cases, like Mackenzie’s ending up in court. The writer noted that “even in the extraordinary annals of quackery it would be difficult to find an instance in which the boldness of ignorance was carried further than in this case.”

Art supply shops continued selling resin-derived gamboge well into the 1980s, that is until it revealed another gruesome secret. An employee of Winsor & Newton was breaking up chunks of the material to sell when he discovered a bullet lodged in one. Soon he and his colleagues found dozens of bullets. This particular batch, it was concluded, must have come from a Khmer Rouge killing ground and the bullets would have sped through the grove and stuck in the gummy substance. It was a discovery that put off even the most determined artist.

Brilliant and vibrant a colour as gamboge might be, it comes with a deadly legacy.

Framed For Hanging

A review of Framed for Hanging by Guy Cullingford – 251214

Although originally published in 1956, the setting for Guy Cullingford’s fifth novel is in the early twentieth century when Victorian sensibilities still abound and there is a clear class distinction between the servant classes and their betters, typified by her sardonic observation of the maid, Green, who can speak two languages, “kitchen and dining room”.

Cullingford, Constance Taylor’s nom de plume, has chosen to set her story in the quiet cathedral city of Cattminster to which Richard Groom has returned after a long and successful trip to the Amazon with his two companions, Dolly Thorne and Charles Hearst. The conquering hero returns to the abode of his three maiden aunts, Sarah who is the epitome of practicality, Ruth whose sense of religion has given her the reputation of a local saint, and Essie, who is viewed as being a tad simple.

It is not long before there is a sharp shower on Richard’s parade. He is prevailed upon to visit his ex-fiancée, Hester, now married unhappily to the local doctor, Morby. Hester tells Richard of her suspicions that her husband is poisoning her and urges him to have it out with the doctor. Richard accedes and shortly after the pair are heard arguing, the doctor is found poisoned with prussic acid after drinking a glass of rum. Richard is arrested and accused of Morby’s murder.

The three aunts are convinced that their golden boy is innocent as do is travelling companions and, in their different ways, all try to help with differing results. Dolly and Charles first give Richard a transparently false alibi and then confuse matters by buying their own poison while the aunts, whose relationship with Hester had been frosty since the split, try a charm initiative, the saintly Ruth appealing to her better nature and inviting her to tea at which Essie has made an orange cake with a slice cut especially for their guest and Sarah sends her off with a pot of damson cheese. Shortly afterwards, Hester is found dead, also poisoned although this time with arsenic. Were the sisters complicit in her death?

Inspector Yeald’s task is made more awkward as, as a boy, he was in Sarah’s Sunday school but eventually he steels himself to view the sisters as he would any other potential suspect. Richard too spends a lot of time considering the circumstances of Dr Morby’s death and he comes to a radical solution, which concurs with Yeald’s developing thoughts on the two murders.

It is a story that revolves around an attempt to break free with Richard’s return providing the catalyst and an innocent stooge, someone framed for hanging, that expedites a plan that was already maturing and what happens when a worm, sensing an imminent betrayal, suddenly turns. The solution involves two missing items, a decanter and a copy of a book entitled Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story, and finishes with a nice if minor twist in its tail.       

The strength of the book lies in the strength of Cullingford’s characterisation and her interest in developing the reader’s understanding of their psychology while dressing up her tale in a style that is both witty and easy-going and well-paced. That there is no single focus in the investigation also gives the story more interest. In all, this is an enjoyable read. Those damn servants indeed.

Super Glue

War also, although more indirectly, gave birth to an adhesive that was easy to apply and immensely strong, a substance that offers its user a game of Russian roulette with the distinct possibility that you will get your fingers stuck together. Yes, it is what we now know of as super glue.

While working in the laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company in 1942 trying to make clear plastic gun sights for Allied soldiers, Dr Harry Coover accidentally created a new compound. Called cyanoacrylate and very sticky, it worked well bonding things together but was of little use in creating the all-important sights. So Coover and his team put it on one side as they concentrated on their war effort.

Fast forward to 1951 and Coover was working as a supervisor on a project to create heat-resistant jet canopies. One of his assistants was Fred Joyner who stumbled across the compound that Coover had previously discovered. Spreading a layer of ethyl cyanoacrylate between two refractor prisms, which, as cyanoacrylate adhesives did not require any heat or pressure to stick items together and hold them permanently, quickly became permanently bonded.

Coover quickly recognised the practical and commercial possibilities that were opened up by this new type of adhesive. In 1954 he applied for a patent for Alcohol-catalysed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Compositions which was granted on October 23, 1956. Coover and the Eastman team took the patent and repackaged it for commercial sale, calling it “Eastman 910” initially before coining the name “Super Glue” shortly afterwards, a name that stuck you might say.

The product was then licensed to Loctite who sold it under the name of “Loctite Quick set 404” which was then followed by a slightly altered version which they branded as “super bonder”. By the 1970s there were many manufacturers selling their own versions of super glue using Coover’s cyanoacrylic formula.      

Born in a time of warfare, super glue did find a military application, used to close the wounds of soldiers on the battlefields of Vietnam. In an interview he gave to the Kingsport Times-News on July 11, 2004 Coover said “the compound demonstrated an excellent capacity to stop bleeding, and during the Vietnam War, he developed disposal cyanoacrylate sprays for use in the battle field.” It saved many lives. “That’s something I’m very proud of”, he said.

Indeed, the medical grade glue that is used in place of or in conjunction with stitches was born out of Coover’s invention.

We have much to thank Harry Coover for.