Fermenting revolution
The Victorian fight against bad bread and its role in women’s liberation
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Poor quality bread was a serious and widespread problem in Victorian England. This was particularly the case in cities, where people were frequently sold bread adulterated by commercial bakeries with unappetising additions, including chalk and ash.
In addition to ripping off consumers with illegally contaminated products, commercial bakeries were also unpleasant places to work. After a series of complaints, Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, a barrister, was commissioned in 1862 by Parliament to investigate their conditions.
The resulting ‘Report on the Grievances of Journeymen Bakers’ found that, not only did bakers work extremely long hours in very hot bakeries, including overnight, but they also inhaled a great deal of flour dust that gave them lung problems. Tremenheere blamed these conditions for the low average lifespans of these bakers, a mere 42 years old.
One of the Commission’s witnesses also testified that “I have known many bakehouses in a shocking state…so infested with rats, beetles, and cockroaches…that it must infect the bread”. We can also imagine Tremenheere’s lip curling as he himself wrote, "a batch of dough is rarely made without having more or less of the perspiration...of the men who make it mixed up in it”. Tremenheere found it “impossible” to believe that the public were aware of the disgusting places this staple of their diets was being produced.
Adulteration of bread with what Tremenheere’s report called “deleterious” substances was an enduring practice that the authorities had attempted and failed to end. In the Making of Bread Act of 1757, Parliament had banned the practice of adding alum to bread. Alum, a cheap derivative of aluminium that is today used as an ingredient in deodorant and fire extinguishers, was a popular adulterant because it made bread look whiter and bulked it out. But in the 1850s, nearly a hundred years later, chemical analysis on twenty-four samples of bread purchased from various London bakeries, including in Covent Garden, Marylebone, and Whitechapel, discovered that every single sample contained alum.
Unimpressed with this state of affairs, a Scottish medical graduate called John Dauglish decided that he would be the one to save the public from this floury scourge. Drawing on his knowledge of chemistry, he sought to invent a completely new method for leavening bread that would give consumers a superior alternative and so compel the old bakeries to change their ways.
And he discovered one. By forcing carbonated, ‘aerated’ water into dough under high pressure, Dauglish found bread could be made to rise without the need for yeast, fermentation, or traditional kneading. Placed in a “strong iron vessel” along with the carbonated water, the dough was instead pounded by machine for only eight minutes, the gas in the water expanding the dough into “five or six times its previous bulk”. He patented this method in 1856 and in 1862, the same year that Tremenheere reported his queasy conclusions to Parliament, founded the Aerated Bread Company to distribute the new product.
Dauglish’s method removed the need for over-strained, sweating journeymen bakers to work late into the night kneading dough with unclean hands, and sometimes even their feet. As the method saved both time and labour (and therefore reduced costs), it had a swift and disruptive effect on the commercial baking industry. The Aerated Bread Company could sell its wares at a cheaper price than the more traditional commercial bakeries. The Dauglish method spread widely. In 1866, an Australian newspaper praised the Aerated Bread Company for benefiting the public not only by selling its bread cheaply, but also by thus pressuring other businesses to cut prices, reporting: “Bakers who a fortnight ago were charging six pence for the two-pound loaf, are now advertising it as five pence.”
The Aerated Bread Company’s products were also lauded by health and hygiene experts over those produced via the “old, dirty, foul and laborious system of bread-making". Indeed, Dauglish was praised both for the purity of his bread and for saving the men who worked in the gruelling commercial bakeries from untimely deaths. Writing against the “wretched state” of journeymen bakers and the “disgusting mysteries” of the old commercial bakeries, Karl Marx credited Dauglish as having “revolutionised the entire process of making bread”.
A mere four years after founding the Aerated Bread Company, Dauglish himself died at the age of only 42, the same as the journeymen bakers who had toiled in the pre-Dauglish method bakeries. His death was attributed to over-work and the “excitement of introducing his invention”. But this was not to be the end of the business. Instead, the company diversified by setting up tea rooms that became known colloquially as ABC tea rooms or ABC shops.
With a cheap menu – including smoked ham and tongue sandwiches, poached eggs, tea scones and ginger pound cake – the ABC tea rooms became the Starbucks of their day, peaking in 1923 with 250 tea rooms in London and branches in America and Australia.
Importantly, ABC tea rooms were one of the first public places Victorian women could go alone or to socialise with other women. This was in large part because of their status as “temperance refreshment rooms”, with no alcohol being served. By creating a respectable public forum where women could gather, ABC tea rooms became crucial meeting places for both Suffragists and their violent counterparts, the Suffragettes. This led Margery Corbett Ashby, suffragist and Liberal politician, to call the advent of the ABC shops “an enormous move to freedom”. The printed event programme created for the International Council of Women’s Congress held in London in 1899, specifically recommends ABC shops to visiting delegates.
Utterly ubiquitous, ABC tea rooms became an unremarkable part of city life. They found their way into the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the novels of Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and Agatha Christie. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the doomed Jonathan Harker stops at an ABC shop for a cup of tea. My own research in the history of the company was sparked when a character in one of Algernon Blackwood’s excellent Edwardian horror stories “dined at an ABC Shop”.
The Aerated Bread Company was not universally loved. George Orwell hated the industrialised approach to food the ABC tea rooms represented and called them a “sinister strand in English catering” that “rolled out 10 miles of swiss roll a day”. Certainly, by excising the fermentation process that increases the flavour of bread – sourdough’s taste is in part the result of lengthy fermentation – the Dauglish method paved the way for the bland breads produced by the Chorleywood process today.
Indeed, it was the invention of the Chorleywood method in the 1960s that made Dauglish’s process redundant. The Chorleywood process uses more yeast than traditional methods and chemical additives that make flour easier to work with, allowing higher speed mixing and short fermentation times, and importantly the use of lower protein flour made from cheaper domestic wheat. The Aerated Bread Company was taken over in 1955 and ceased trade in the early 1980s.
Despite their former ubiquity, perhaps the only visible reminder of the ABC tea rooms in London now is some faded lettering above the Tesco Express on Fleet Street that reads ‘Aerated Bread’. In the two years I worked on Fleet Street, I never noticed it. The ABC-branded crockery used in the tea rooms is still occasionally found by mud larkers, people who scavenge along the Thames foreshore in search of Roman coins, Tudor bones, and garnets dropped by Anglo-Saxon women.
Though Dauglish and his company are now almost entirely forgotten, his legacy of progress endures and is both dietary and political. Their inventions freed untold numbers of consumers from the unwilling, daily consumption of unwholesome and illegal additives that had lurked in their loaves since urbanisation and the move away from home baking. The tea rooms that followed provided citizens with a new sort of space. A humble space that because of affordability and respectability became a crucible of change, where ordinary women could plot their enfranchisement and enjoy poached egg on toast for only three pence.
Phoebe Arslanagic-Little is co-founder of Boom and Chair of the Women in Think Tanks Forum. You can follow her on Twitter here.