When we get children onboard LV50 an essential part of the tour is life on board a lightship. The discussion will always wind around to what did they eat. We’ll tell them that LV50 had no electricity so couldn’t have a fridge or freezer, they had to do their own cooking and more importantly, bring their own food on to last up to 2 months. So what food could they bring? Once they’ve got over horror of life without pizza, no chicken nuggets and absolutely no ‘pop’, the conversation often come around to tin cans.
We’ve generally pooh poohed the idea. ‘Tin cans weren’t around then’, ‘nobody had them’ or ‘they weren’t really around until WW1’ we’d dismissively comment. Not because we’d ever really looked at the question, just that we’d never heard anyone talk about tin cans in the1890’s. Is this true or is it one of those lies we’ve been telling small children?
We thought it was about time to find out.
The story turned out to be much more interesting than we thought. The humble tin can was central to British naval dominance of the world, an essential part of the dark web of colonialism and one of the technologies that enabled the mass destruction of the world wars. Was the tin can responsible for the death of millions of soldiers?
Read on. It might not change your mind, but you’ll never look at a tin of beans again in the same way.
The Idea
The story of the can is all about sterilizing food with heat and sealing it to prevent bacteria and fungus getting in and rotting it. Then it could be opened much later and still be edible.
With canning you can have tomatoes all your round, milk miles away from a cow and you then also have food you can take with you to any corner of the world.
It all began in France in 1795. Nicholas Appert from Macy, south of Paris, preserved food by partly cooking it, sealing it in a glass bottle before immersing it in boiling water to complete the cooking. This was 50 years before Louis Pasteur discovered bacteria, Appert had seen that wine spoiled when exposed to air and discovered that food was preserved in an airtight container once the air was expelled by the boiling process.
Britain and France were at war at this time and the military potential of this was seen straightaway by the French Emperor Napoleon who awarded him a prize for the invention.
A good idea knows no boundaries, especially between countries at war, and in 1810 Peter Durand in London was granted a patent for the idea of preserving food in vessels of glass, pottery, tin or other material. He saw that containers could be made from iron coated with tin to prevent rusting, they could be sealed and made airtight and also they were not breakable like glass. This looks very like Appert’s idea? It seems likely that a Frenchman called Philippe de Giraud saw the potential of tin but since the two countries were at war couldn’t apply for a British patent himself so sold the idea to Durand.
Making the Idea Work
From the initial idea to sellable tin can is a big step and takes innovation and engineering skill. Bryan Donkin from Sandhoe, Northumberland was such a man. He made his money commercializing another French idea, the Fourdrinier machine for continuous paper manufacturing.
Bryan Donkin
He then used the profits from this to make the first commercial cannery in a corner of his Bermondsey paper factory in 1812. It took him and his partners, John Hall and John Gamble, 2 years to refine the Giraud method.
Royal Approval
The enterprise was boosted by the support of the Duke of Wellington, who, like his arch enemy Napoleon, saw the military application of the idea. However, it was the support of the royal family that sealed the success. On 30 June 1813, he was sent a letter from four members of the Royal Family, including Queen Charlotte, saying they had tasted and enjoyed Donkin’s canned beef.
Straight away the pragmatic Donkin set up a network of agents based at key seaports to tout for business from the Royal and merchant navies.
Donkin had invented a sure-fire method. He put the food into cans, sealed them and put them into cold water. The water was then gradually bought to the boil, opened slightly to relieve excess pressure before being sealed again. The cans then spent one month in water at between 90 and 100 degrees C and individually numbered to ensure traceability in case of problems.
The oldest surviving can is in the Science Museum in London; it is 14 cm (5.5”) tall and 18 cm (7”) wide. Bigger that the current day standard of 10.5 cm x 7.5 cm.
Donkin’s original tin cans
Praise, and presumably sales, rolled in. Sir John Banks, on behalf of The Royal Society, opened a can of veal that had been sealed for 2 ½ years. He declared it in a perfect state of preservation.
In Chile there is a cove called Caleta Donkin, named by a Captain Fitzroy and his crew who were delighted with their canned foods.
Tin cans made by Donkin were produced at a rate of 6 an hour and sold well. In 1814 they sold 2,939 lb (1333 Kg) of tinned goods, rising to 9,000 lb (4082 Kg) by 1821. However, they weren’t cheap at 8 d/lb (equivalent to £3.17 today) for carrots and 30 d/lb (£11.89 today) for roast beef.
Donkin left the company in 1821; for him canning had been an engineering challenge rather than a passion. He moved on the other things and was involved with Babbage and the difference engine, a very early mechanical computer.
The Royal Navy was an early adopter of Donkin’s canned goods. It solved the problem of how to feed thousands of men far away from a suitable food supply. Tinned vegetable helped fight the blight of scurvy (caused by vitamin C deficiency) and tinned meat provided a much more palatable food than the traditional salt beef or pork. The can played an important part, for good or bad, in the dominance of the Royal Navy and the expansion of the British Empire across the world but it wasn’t all plain sailing.
Bad Times
In 1851 Gamble exhibited canned goods at the Great Exhibition. It looked like the switch from being a military necessity to a household must have was only a question of time. BUT.
In January 1852 a group of meat inspector gathered in Portsmouth to open 306 cans of meat destined for the Navy. It wasn’t until they had opened 19 cans that they found one with meat fit to eat. They found putrid meat, so rotten that the stone floors of the warehouse needed to be treated with chloride of lime afterwards to mask the smell. Sometimes the odour was so bad had to stop and go outside for fresh air. They condemned 264 of the cans throwing them in the sea. The remaining 42 cans were given to the poor. There’s no record of what the poor thought of this though.
This story was repeated across the country after the Admiralty ordered a nationwide inspection. A letter to The Times newspaper in 1853 reported that the officers of ‘The Plover’ threw 1,570 lb of canned meat overboard in the Bering Strait because ‘they found it in a pulpy and putrid state and totally unfit for men’s food.’
The bad meat was all from one supplier who had won an Admiralty contract by undercutting the bids of his rival by using cheap labour at his factory in what is now Romania. He was banned from ever supplying meat to the Navy again.
This made many people nervous of canned food. They were reluctant to eat it as they believed that it caused food poisoning.
Milk to the Rescue
The first canned food to make it into the family shopping basket was condensed milk (milk with about 60% of the water removed, often with sugar added). This enabled milk to be kept for much longer and changed the face of cities. Urban farms, close to or in the cities, disappeared as people turned from fresh to canned milk.
A Taste of Home
One of the early adopters of tinning was the high-end grocers, Fortnum and Mason of Picadilly, London. In the 1850’s they became one of the leading providers of tinned food in the UK. Established in 1707, they were well known for sending their food hampers all over the world. They offered wealthy expatriate brits, the Empire Builders, a ‘taste of home’.
Making life easier, at a cost, for the rulers of the empire. Starting off as a tool of colonialism, the tin can would with time become the symbol of capitalism.
War Time
Canning hit the big time with the American Civil War (1861- 66). Tinned food output in the USA increased 5-fold, from 6 to 30 million cans a year during the war years. Could the war have carried on so long at the same ferocity without canned food to feed the troops.
Tinned corned beef, the famous ‘Bully Beef’ of the British Army was introduced as an emergency ration, during the Boer War (1899 – 1902). This staple, and other tinned goods, went on to feed the armies on both sides through World War 1 (1914 – 1918) and World War 2 (1939 – 1945). Could so many men have been sustained for so long without cans? Could they have remained in the trenches or landed on the beaches of Normandy without this reliable source of food?
About 700,000 troops died in the American Civil War, 9 – 11 million in the WW1 and 21 – 25 million in WW2; and that’s without the civilian casualties that died as a direct result of the wars (more than 100 million).
It’s unfair to blame the tin can for all the death and destruction over the last 160 years but without the tin can would death on this scale have been possible?
The Home Front
Trust of canned goods returned home with the soldiers and the tin can became an essential part of life. By 1880, the UK was importing 16 million lb of canned meat. Ernest Heinz’s baked beans were first made in 1895; they were introduced to the UK in 1901 (Fortnum and Mason).
The tin can had arrived. Food supplied in high volume provided lower prices so that canned goods helped to reduce the percentage of its income the average family spent on groceries. Food became cheaper for all.
Can’t open the D***ed Thing
So far, we’ve talked about getting food into cans but what about getting it out again?
The first tin cans were very robust and needed a hammer and chisel to open them. Later they had to be hacked open with a knife. It wasn’t until 1870 that William Lyman invented the can opener we know today. The patent talks of a wheel that that rolls and cuts around the rim of the can. A serrated edge was added in 1925, and it’s remained essentially unchanged since. An electric version was first sold in 1931.
Patent application for William Lyman’s can opener
The pop top or pull-tab can, used initially mainly for drinks, was invented in 1959 by Ermal Fraze. The first tabs came off when you opened the tin and could be found littered all over the place. The stay on tab solved this and now they’re everywhere and it’s rare to need to take out a can opener.
So, What About Life Onboard LV50
LV50 was built by Trinity House and launched in 1879. Tin cans were in mass production by then so were they an essential item of a lightship man’s larder? The answer depends if they were easily available and reasonably cheap for a lightship man on a not very good wage. Were canned good commonly and cheaply available in seaports around the UK or were they only to be found in the big ports and were they too expensive for the crew of a lightship who had to buy their own provisions.
The answer is probably a bit of both. It’s likely some selected items, condensed milk, for example made their way onboard. However, cheaper root vegetable and salted meat most likely continued to provide the bulk of their calories.
Of course, over time, tins did become an essential source of food but only when they dropped in price and became commonly available throughout the country.
In summary, it’s reassuring we’ve not been too misleading to our visitors. At the beginning, canned food was around but most likely didn’t form a major part of the crew’s diet.
Sources:
Thanks to the following sources that have provided much of the information for this article:
https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/a-brief-history-of-food-the-humble-tin-can
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21689069
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Donkin
Afterthought
Apart from baked beans, two of the staple canned foods are tinned tomatoes and tinned sardines.
Tinned tomatoes were another early invention. The renowned French chef Escoffier played an important part on the creation of the tinned tomato industry. In 1870, he had the idea of preserving tomatoes in such a way that they would replace fresh ones and be available at any season.
The French also perfected preserving sardines in clay jars and by 1829 there was a sardine tinning factory operational in Nantes. The French maintained a monopoly on sardine canning until the 1880’s when they were undercut by cheaper, and often of inferior quality, products from Spain, Portugal and the USA.
According to the French canners, sardines are best preserved in olive oil, after a short flash frying. At least a year should then pass before they were sold and were at their best two years after canning. I’ve not tried this yet myself so I can’t comment.
Source: Elizabeth David – Omelette and a Glass of Wine