The Genteel Age

With the increase in daily noise people often yearn for yesteryear. The combination of air and road noise plus unruly neighbours, which generated six million official complaints last year, engenders nostalgia as people look back to a previous generation to recapture, what they feel would have been a time of noiseless bliss. How wrong they would have been, for at the turn of the 19th century there were 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles and cabs in London, 500,000 trade vehicles and 500,000 private carriages: smells and bells indeed!

"The Towns of England" observes medical historian Irvine Loudon, "had to deal with an estimated 10 million tons of manure a year, and the traffic was so noisy, straw had to be placed on roads to muffle the rattle of iron wheels on the cobble stones."

At that time, often two families lived in a terraced house, cheek by jowl, which made for our modern noisy neighborhoods of today.

Six Easter Fridays ago both my neighbours complained about noise from my builder, as his men got to work with their pneumatic hammer to break out concrete flooring which needed to be cleared before rebuilding. Their main concern was that it was a holiday and there should be quiet on that day. It wasn't that they were meditating on the cross and Calvary, but it was they could sleep an extra hour, or hoped they could!

Also at the turn of the century there appeared a new product that is now a household word - Marmite - it is a vegetarian product whose taste you either love or loathe. It is made from spent brewers yeast, whose original purpose was to ferment sugars into alcohol. Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast cells were living organisms and further investigation by a German chemist, Justus von Lieberg (1803 - 73) showed that yeast could be made into a concentrated food product.

In 1902 the Marmite Food Company Limited was formed in Burton-on-Trent, the beer capital of England. The product was originally sold in earthenware pots and the distinctive red and yellow label has been sold in glass jars since the 1920s. Tampering with the packaging has caused furor amongst consumers.

Spent brewers yeast from all over Britain is used and broken down to release soluble amino acids and proteins which are then concentrated and filtered before a unique (and secret) flavouring process. It matures for several weeks before being released into the distribution chain. It was added to soldiers' ration packs in the First and Second World Wars. An eight-ounce jar was sold in Nazi occupied Jersey in May 1941 for £8 (now £350) because it was so scarce.

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