The File from the Vestry
The Bureau’s home counties desk has kept a file open since Candlemas on a village fever that no county record office has heard of. Our correspondent, a gentleman of Northamptonshire who signs himself Clerk to the Vestry of Fotheringbridge, sent four papers and asked nothing in return except that we print them. There is a leaf torn from a household account, entering the arrival at Pumphrey Manor, in the summer of 1773, of one pine of the Indies. There is a day-book kept by Charles Grimbly, apothecary, running to ninety-four entries in eleven days. There is a churchwarden’s memorandum of a crowd standing at the manor gates for three days with pitchforks and cabbages. And there is a note of the fruit’s disposal, onto a heap, and of the name the parish afterwards fastened on its owner.
The Bureau prints all four in summary below and sets each against the record, as is its practice. It should be said at the outset that the difficulty with this file is not the panic. Panics of exactly this shape are among the best-attested events in the historical record, and the Bureau will come to three of them, one of which killed nineteen people. The difficulty is the window.
What a Pineapple Was Actually For
A pineapple in Georgian England was not a fruit. It was a capital asset with leaves on it, and the correspondent’s account opens by standing one in a window where the whole parish could get at it, and leaving it there. The craze for the thing ran about a hundred and fifty years, and it was a craze about heat rather than about taste. Nothing in the English climate will bring a pineapple to fruit. It has to be held at tropical temperature the whole year round, which the eighteenth century managed by bedding the plants in spent tanners’ bark — oak bark soaked out in the leather pits, which ferments slowly and holds 25 to 30 °C for two months at a stretch, and two more if a man turns it. Around it ran hot-air flues in cavity walls stoked with coal day and night; the gardeners called them fire walls, because the soot in them caught.
The bill came to something like eighty pounds a fruit, near nineteen hundred in modern money, and men were proud of it. Henry Telende, a Dutch gardener working for the merchant Matthew Decker at Richmond, got the first reliable British crop between 1714 and 1716 — thirty to forty fruits a year — and Decker had a painting made of it. The 4th Earl of Dunmore built the thing in stone: a hothouse in his walled garden at Airth in 1761, and some years afterwards a carved pineapple on the roof of it, the whole standing about fourteen metres to the apex, with the four chimneys of the furnace dressed as Grecian urns so the smoke would not spoil the effect.
What one did with such an object was set it on a plinth in the middle of a dining table, where every guest could see it and nobody could eat it, and take it away again when they had gone. A great many were not even owned. They were hired, at a guinea for the evening — two, if eaten. What nobody did, so far as the Bureau can establish, was leave one in a window overnight.
The Tour That Went the Wrong Way
The household leaf states that Sir Reginald Pumphrey III brought the fruit home from his Grand Tour of the West Indies. The Bureau has read that sentence a number of times. The Grand Tour was a fixed European circuit, taken by the nobility and landed gentry at about twenty-one, running from roughly 1660 until the railways finished it in the 1840s: England to France, usually by way of Paris, then Switzerland, then over the Alps into Italy for Turin, Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples, and home again sometimes through Vienna and Berlin. Italy was the entire purpose. The West Indies is not a stage of that itinerary, nor a detour from it. It is an ocean in the opposite direction.
Allow the account its own terms and say he sailed anyway. The fruit then stops being a horticultural problem and becomes a shipping one, because a pineapple is non-climacteric: it never becomes any riper than it was at the moment it was cut. Cut it green and it lands green. Cut it ripe and it has six weeks of Atlantic to get through before anybody in Northamptonshire sees it, in a hold, in summer. West Indian fruit did reach England by ship, and it reached it in the condition that description implies. That is precisely why the eighty pounds went on the hothouse. The prize was never a pineapple; it was a pineapple grown here, in this weather, at that cost, by your own man.
Invited to name the port, the correspondent answered Bristol. Invited to name the ship, he answered that the account does not say. Invited to state what the fruit had cost, he answered that a gentleman does not enter such a thing in a book.
Mrs Potts, and the Fever That Travelled by Eye
Here the file is at its strongest, and the Bureau says so plainly. Mrs Edwina Potts, described in the memorandum as the most determined invalid in the parish, took a fever after looking at the fruit for above a quarter of an hour, and within four days Grimbly’s day-book is logging headache, giddiness and, in three cases, things seen that were not in the room. That is mass psychogenic illness, set out in the clinical literature almost line for line: symptoms moving through a close group by sight, sound and word of mouth rather than by any agent; rapid onset, equally rapid recovery; an index case at the head of it; headache in about two-thirds of those affected.
The transmission figures are the part worth having. Ninety-three girls at a school in Gopalganj went to hospital in April 2013 after a tiffin cake most of them thought smelled wrong, and the follow-up study timed the mean interval from cake to symptom at 151.5 minutes. Two of its figures matter here: a fifth fell ill after seeing another girl fall ill, and sixty-three per cent of those who handled the sick became sick themselves.
The record is thick with it. Salem began in February 1692 with four afflicted girls, two of them in the minister’s own house, and ran to more than two hundred accused across some twenty-five communities, nineteen hanged and one pressed to death under stones. At Strasbourg in July 1518 a woman named Troffea began dancing in the street on the fourteenth; thirty had joined her within days and somewhere between fifty and four hundred by August, and the city’s first official act was to hire musicians and lend out the guild halls, on the theory that they should be helped to dance it out.
In all of them the vector is other people. The cake, the spectral shape, the saint’s day — the object at the centre does nothing whatever. Mrs Potts did not take anything from the pineapple. She took it from Fotheringbridge, and Fotheringbridge took it back from her. As for the fruit, the one complaint it is genuinely able to produce runs the other way: its flesh carries bromelain, which digests protein, and which is why raw pineapple juice is used to tenderise meat. It acts on the mouth of whoever eats it. Nobody in this file ate anything.
The Apothecary’s Second Trade
The most valuable paper in the bundle is the one the correspondent thinks least of. Grimbly’s day-book covers eleven days and ninety-four sales of a preparation entered as Antidote agt the Pine, and the Bureau, having no better use for an afternoon, added it up. At sixpence the bottle — the figure the day-book gives — the whole terror of Fotheringbridge is worth two pounds, seven shillings. Set against the eighty pounds a pineapple cost to raise, the apothecary cleared about a thirty-fourth of the object that had frightened his customers.
Chalk and water sold under a name was not a swindle invented in Northamptonshire. It was one of the great growth industries of the century. The patent medicine trade took its name from the letters patent that allowed a seller to put a royal endorsement in his advertising, and the advertising is what filled and paid for the early newspapers. Daffy’s Elixir dates from about 1647 and was still selling in two countries in the late nineteenth century. A patent for Dr Bateman’s Pectoral Drops was granted in 1726, and there was no Dr Bateman: the drops were the work of a promoter named Benjamin Okell and his partners. Actually taking out the patent obliged a man to publish what was in the bottle, which is exactly why most of them never did.
The Bureau notes one omission from the day-book, and leaves the reader to make of it what he will. In eleven days of tropical plague, Grimbly recorded ninety-four sales and not one visit to a bedside.
The Summer the Money Actually Failed
The file’s own phrase is that the village stood on the brink of ruin. The Bureau allows the phrase and disputes only the address. In the twelve months before the correspondent’s summer, ruin was general across Britain, and it had nothing whatever to do with fruit.
On Monday 8 June 1772 the failure of the banker Alexander Fordyce became public. He had lost £300,000 shorting East India Company stock, left his partners at Neale, James, Fordyce and Down answerable for some £243,000, and was in France the following day. What followed took a fortnight to bring down eight London banks and a month to bring down twenty, with roughly twenty more across Europe behind them. The Ayr Bank — Douglas, Heron and Company, three years old and got up by half the great names in Scotland — shut on 25 June, or the 24th depending which account one takes, with £1.2 million of advances and bills outstanding, near two thirds of the currency of the country. Its hundred and thirty-one partners had signed a co-partnery with no limited liability in it. Estates were sold, partners who could not pay went to prison, and the winding-up ran twenty years. Adam Smith, whose patron the Duke of Buccleuch had signed as one of them, put the affair into the Wealth of Nations.
The comparison everybody reaches for at this point is tulips, and everybody reaches for it wrongly. The Dutch bulb market did break in February 1637, and a Semper Augustus bulb did touch ƒ10,000 against a skilled artisan’s ƒ300 a year. But Anne Goldgar’s work in the archives found the trade confined to a small circle of wealthy merchants and craftsmen, fewer than half a dozen prominent players in any later difficulty, and most contracts simply never honoured — so that remarkably little money moved at all, and the Republic carried on as the richest place on earth per head. The ruin is the part everyone remembers and the part that did not happen.
Fotheringbridge is that error stood on its head. Here is a ruin that certainly did occur, in the right months, in the right country, on a scale that put men in gaol — and the file has tied it to a pineapple.
The Ledger of That Summer
What was actually failing in Britain while, on the correspondent's account, a village fought over a fruit.
Alexander Fordyce’s failure becomes public in London. £300,000 lost shorting East India stock; his partners are left answerable for £243,000. He is in France the next day.
Black Monday. Eight London banks have gone inside a fortnight; twenty banking houses in the city by the end of the month.
Douglas, Heron and Company — the Ayr Bank — shuts its doors. £1.2 million outstanding, about two thirds of the currency of Scotland, against 131 partners with no limited liability.
Clifford and Co of Amsterdam fails. Turnover with the Amsterdam Exchange Bank falls from over 50 million guilders in 1772 to 30 million in 1773.
The Bank of England resumes paying out specie. The worst of it passes.
The Tea Act. The East India Company, sitting on eighteen million pounds of unsold tea, is handed the American market.
Fotheringbridge, Northamptonshire, is brought to the brink of ruin by a pineapple.
The tea goes into Boston harbour.
The Hour the Law Allows
The churchwarden’s memorandum is a short document and it describes a serious crime. A crowd of parishioners with pitchforks came up to the gates of Pumphrey Manor and stood there for three days demanding that the fruit be destroyed, and the owner barricaded himself inside with it. The correspondent offers this as a piece of rustic comedy that everyone was later embarrassed about. In 1773 it was a capital matter.
The Riot Act had been in force since 1 August 1715. Twelve or more persons unlawfully assembled, who did not disperse within one hour of a magistrate reading the proclamation to them, committed a felony without benefit of clergy — which is to say they could hang for it. A crowd of that size in front of a gentleman’s house was not something a parish shrugged off on the fourth day. It was an information laid, a magistrate fetched, recognizances taken, an indictment drawn, a name on a gaol calendar at the next quarter sessions. It produces paper the way a fire produces smoke. The Bureau has asked Northampton for any of it and has been sent nothing.
One detail survives inspection, and the Bureau records it in fairness to the correspondent. The cabbages are convincing. A crowd got up in a hurry carries whatever is standing about, and in an English village in July what is standing about is the hayfork and the kitchen garden. Nobody inventing a riot invents cabbages. It is also, the Bureau observes, the only particular in the whole memorandum that costs a man nothing to be right about.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that a pineapple in 1773 cost more to raise than a labouring man earned in several years, and was displayed rather than eaten; that the hothouses and fire walls required to raise one were real, expensive and inclined to burn down; that whole schools, villages and cities do fall ill by looking at one another, and always have; that money failed comprehensively across Britain in the summers on either side of this one; and that a tropical fruit left in a south-facing window through an English July will rot, and will smell, and will do so on schedule. It is not able to certify that any of these things met at Fotheringbridge, or that Fotheringbridge is a place.
The fourth paper is one line long. It enters the fruit’s disposal — onto the garden heap — and it enters the name the parish settled on afterwards: Reginald the Rotten. Ninety-four bottles had been sold, three days had been lost standing in front of a gentleman’s gates, and nobody had died. A parish in that position does not apologise to the man at the top of the drive. It gives him a name, and keeps it.
We wrote to the Clerk once more and asked for the only document that would settle the matter: a leaf of the burial register, or the baptisms, or the bishop’s transcript — every English parish has kept these since 1538, and the county record offices hold what survives. The reply came by return and contained no register. It contained a receipt: one pine, hired for the evening, one guinea, two if eaten. The Clerk sends it as proof that the fruit was never eaten.
It is the one paper in the bundle the Bureau believes without reservation, and it disposes of the first sentence of the account, since a pineapple hired for an evening did not come home across the Atlantic in a gentleman’s sea chest and did not belong to Sir Reginald at all. Put to the Clerk, he replied that the receipt is for the second pineapple. Asked about the first, he replied that the first is the one in the window.
The file remains open.
