What Is The Origin Of (233)?…

A nation of shopkeepers

This phrase is a description of England with rather negative connotations, suggesting that the inhabitants are small-minded. Surely not?

Be that as it may, is it true these days? Wandering along the high street of our local village, as I do from time to time, there is very little in the way of what I would call real shops. Yes, we have charity shops, hairdressers, nail bars, betting shops, cafes, estate agents, and solicitors but what may be termed as a real retail experience is limited to a supermarket and a newsagent. I’m sure the Frimley retail experience is replicated the country over.

Of course, this sad state of affairs, the consequence of the development of mega-superstores, on-line retailing and ever rising rates, was not always thus. Casting my mind back no more than twenty years ago, the high street had a wide range of shops. The heydays of small, specialist retail shops, though, is to be found earlier, reaching its acme in the 19^th century and first half of the 20^th century. Then a reverse in the fortunes of small shops set in, one, I’m afraid, is unlikely to be reversed.

I had originally thought that our phrase was originated by Napoleon Bonaparte but it just shows how wrong I can be. The plaudits, if that is what the remark deserves, belong to Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith.

Welshman Tucker was the Dean of Gloucester who, as well as attending to his religious duties, was a prolific pamphleteer, holding strong anti-American sentiments and hostile to Methodism, as well as being a supporter of free trade. In 1766, he wrote, “and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.” Interestingly, he is thought to have had a profound influence on the development of Adam Smith’s economic and political thought.

The Navigation Acts of 1651 gave a monopoly to merchants and shopkeepers in England over the produce that came from its colonies. Half way through his influential book, The Wealth of Nations, the Scottish economist, Adam Smith, focused his guns on the Acts, writing “to found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”

The phrase was born, although its sense is hardly pejorative. This is where the French came in, possibly.

A View of Universal History by John Adams, published in 1794, attributes to the French revolutionary, Bertrand Barere de Viuezac, in a speech to the National Convention on June 11, 1794, the phrase “let Pitt then boast of his victory to his nation of shopkeepers.” Whether Napoleon, who was more of an army man than a politician at the time, was at the meeting to hear Barere is far from clear. Barry Edward O’Meara, Napoleon’s surgeon while he was in exile in St Helena, though attributes his patient as saying, “you were greatly offended with me for having called you a nation of shopkeepers.”

If O’Meara’s testimony is to be relied upon, it suggests that Boney did call England a nation of shopkeepers, that he did so earlier than his exile, that the English got to hear of it, and were miffed. But there is no other attestation that Napoleon uttered the phrase, “une nation de boutiquiers.”

Perhaps betraying the little English attitude that one Frenchman looks very much like another and that Napoleon was more (in)famous than Barrere, the insult was attributed to Boney, despite attempts to set the record straight. The Morning Post of May 28, 1832 was one such, fulminating that “This complimentary term, for so we must consider it, as applied to a Nation which has derived its principal prosperity from its commercial greatness, has been erroneously attributed, from time to time, to all the leading Revolutionists of France. To our astonishment we now find it applied exclusively to Bonaparte. Than this nothing can be further from the fact.” They ascribed its pejorative use to Barrere.

But, hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The Meaning Of Life – Part Thirty One Of Forty Two

Why do the British drive on the left?

As today is my 60^th birthday I thought I would celebrate by pondering one of those really fundamental questions, why do we in Britain drive on the left when so many of our continental brethren drive on the right?

In the good old days there were only two ways of getting around – Shanks’ pony or on horseback. If you were a knight and were on horseback (and right-handed) you would want to ensure that your sword hand was unencumbered to enable you to defend yourself against attackers. It was also easier to get off your mount on the left, particularly if you had a sword in the way. This meant that horseriders naturally preferred to ride on the left hand side of the pathway, a practice which had been enshrined in legislation by 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII.

Things became a bit more complicated around the 18^th century when horse-drawn waggons were used to convey heavy loads, drawn by teams of horses. The driver didn’t have a seat but rode the left rear horse, leaving his right arm free to wield the whip. What it meant was that the driver sitting on the left, was happier if everyone passing him did so on the left. In other words, they adopted a preference for driving on the right hand side.

What gave a real impetus to the driving on the right movement was the French revolution of 1789 and subsequent events. The French aristocracy had traditionally ridden on the left, forcing the peasants to travel on the right. When the sans culottes gained the ascendancy in 1789 they made driving on the right de rigueur. Napoleon’s rampages across Europe introduced the trend of driving on the right to many of our European friends.

Naturally in Britain we eschewed everything that smacked of foreign ways and steadfastly stuck to our guns, ploughing our furrows on the left. The practice was enshrined in legislation here in 1835 and just as Boney had done, we introduced the custom of driving on the left to those parts of the world that had the good fortune to come under the yoke of enlightenment, otherwise known as the British empire. That is why some 35% of the world’s population including countries such as India, Australia and New Zealand and some African countries drive on the left to this day. Showing the laissez-faire for which we are famed some countries such as Egypt which moved from French to British control were allowed to retain their French customs.

The Japanese, who were never British subjects, still drive on the left. This is due to their Samurai heritage – they too needed to have their sword hand free – but it wasn’t until 1872 that this unwritten custom became official, a year which coincided with the Brits helping the Japanese build their railways. It became enshrined in law in 1924.

The Americans, of course, drive on the right. Initially, when it was a British colony the inhabitants drove on the left but following their rebellion in 1776 they eschewed all practices they associated with their colonial masters. Of course, the influx of settlers from European countries who had been subjected to the dread influence of the French also helped. The state of Pennsylvania was the first to pass legislation that required people to drive on the right (in 1792), followed by New York (1804) and New Jersey (1813).

The answer then is due to knights, Napoleon and British perversity. So now we know!

Canned History

 

The can is a common source of many of our drinks and foodstuffs and I’m sure like me you haven’t given much thought as to how it came to be invented.

It all started with Napoleon Bonaparte and the logistical problems he encountered in keeping his troops supplied with fresh food. Boney offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who cracked the problem. By 1810 Nicholas Appert had discovered that food stayed fresh if you sealed it tightly in a container and then heated it up. Appert’s container was a glass jar.

That same year a Brit, Peter Durand, received a patent from King George III for the world’s first can which was made of iron and tin. This robust structure coupled with Appert’s sterilisation method made the use of cans as a form of food preservation possible.

Three years later in 1813 John Hall and Bryan Donkin opened the first commercial canning factory in England, in Bermondsey, knocking out a stately six cans an hour. The slowness of the production process meant that the end product was too expensive for most folks and the main buyers were the Army and the Navy. Notwithstanding that, by 1817 Donkin was reporting that he had sold £3,000 of canned meat in the last six months.

This rate of production was only improved upon in 1846 when Henry Evans invented a machine that could produce a can a minute using a die that made a can from a single motion – a revolutionary improvement. In 1847 Allen Taylor patented his machined stamped method of producing tin cans which paved the way for thinner and more rapidly produced cans.

The next problem was how to open the can to get at the food. Of course, with the can being used almost exclusively for the use of troops, you can imagine that nothing would get in the way of a hungry soldier and his tucker and so they were opened by the application of brute force. I’m not sure quite what that did to the taste of the contents but it achieved its objective.

Bizarrely, it was not until 1855, some 45 years after the can was invented, that the first tin opener was developed – a delay caused largely by the thickness of the material initially used to manufacture the can. Robert Yeates, a cutlery and surgical instrument manufacturer from Middlesex, devised the first claw-ended can opener with a hand-operated tool that worked its way around the top of the can. This was followed shortly afterwards in 1858 by Ezra Warner’s bayonet and sickle opener which punctured the can with the bayonet and then using the sickle part the lid was removed. The problem was that Warner’s tool left a serrated edge and so it never really caught on.

In 1866 J Osterhoudt came up with a can that came with its own opener, rather like the sardine tin and an early forerunner of the now ubiquitous ring pull.

The can opener that we know and love wasn’t invented until 1870. William Lynam’s design featured a wheel which cut the can open as it went along. The serrated edges to the wheel were added by the Star Can Company and hey presto – a fully functioning can opener was born. An electric version didn’t appear until 1931 and it was only in 1935 that the first beer, Kreuger Cream Ale, was served in a can.

The rest, as they say, is history.