2. The Cultivation of Opium in Britain

1790-1820

The bulk of the opium used in England at this time was thus imported. But there were also small-scale attempts at domestic cultivation of the drug in the early years of the nineteenth century. Opium was a very minor, if surprising, part of the move towards agricultural `improvement' in Britain at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Although much of the fundamental transformation of landownership and farming was already established by the middle of that century, the later eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century was a time of increasing output and productivity, when changes in crops and crop-rotation, new methods of stock-breeding and an increase in the size of farms consolidated the move to commercial farming techniques.' Opium's inclusion with turnips and rhubarb in the agricultural discussions of the period was one sidelight on the content of agricultural innovation. It was an indication, too, of the drug's acceptability; the `home-grown' product bore witness to the place of opium in society at the time.
`I make no doubt it may be brought to the greatest perfection in this country, and rendered at one half the price at which we have it from the East, and without the least adulteration...' John Ball, who wrote this letter in 1796 to the Society of Arts, was referring to his cultivation of opium. In a letter two years previously, he had written
I think amazing quantities are consumed every year; and am of opinion, that there is twenty times more opium used now in England only, than there was fifteen or twenty years since, as great quantities are used in outward applications, and it is continually advancing in price ...2
Ball was a small farmer from Williton in Somerset, and was among the first seriously to consider the commercial possibilities of cultivating opium.
The beginnings of experimentation had a lengthier history, for the white opium poppy was indigenous in certain areas of the country, most notably in the Fen ditches in parts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Poppy-head tea and fomentations made from poppy capsules had long been widely used in domestic remedies,
in particular in that area. One of the first to produce opium rather than poppy capsules was Dr Alston, Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century. Alston had begun his experiments in the 1730s, although he did not write them up until 1742. He used primarily the white
poppy, taking little account of debates on which variety was the best to use. He thought that there was little difference, it was simply that the white had the biggest head and so gave the most opium.3
Other eighteenth-century experimenters followed Alston's example and used methods of collection adapted from Far Eastern experience. Mr J. Kerr, Surgeon to the Civil Hospital in Bengal, estimated in 1776 that one acre harvested in this way in Britain could yield sixty pounds of opium.4 Woodville, in his Medical Botany (1793), held out very favourable hopes of the possibilities of domestic opium cultivation. He himself had `appropriated a part of the garden at the Small-pox Hospital'. It was, he thought, `highly probable that the White Poppy might be cultivated for the purpose of obtaining opium to great advantage in Britain'.5
Such hopes were the forerunner to the main period of experimentation and discussion. This lasted for roughly thirty years, from the late I790s until the mid-1820s, although individual attempts at cultivation continued later in the century. The Society of Arts, which had taken an interest in the introduction of new medicinal plants, was the agency which encouraged extensive experimentation. Its interest in the general area of drug cultivation dated back to 1763, when it had appointed a committee to encourage the introduction of rhubarb cultivation, offering a gold medal as inducement. At the end of the century it began to take an interest in opium as well, primarily after the approach by John Ball, to whom the Society eventually awarded fifty guineas for his home-grown opium. Fifty guineas or a gold medal were also offered in general for those producing considerable quantities (at least twenty pounds) of the drug. Another experimenter, Thomas Jones, used five acres of ground near Enfield after an initial experiment in 1794. He managed, despite numerous setbacks when seeds were strangled by weeds, and cold and dry weather in May was nearly fatal to the growing plants, to produce twenty-one pounds of opium. In 1800 he was the next recipient of the financial prize."
Other learned societies began to take an interest. The Caledonian Horticultural Society aimed primarily to encourage the production of lettuce opium, which it hoped might lack the 'distressing consequences' which sometimes resulted from the medical use of opium. In 1810 it offered two prizes. One was for the best method of preparing `soporific medicine' from the juice of the common garden lettuce, the other for the best method of preparing opium in Britain and the most advantageous manner of cultivating poppies for that purpose. One of the first to claim the opium prize was Dr Howison, ex-Inspector of Opium in Bengal, who, in 1813, described how he had found the double red garden poppy the best plant for use in Scotland. He had experimented with the white poppy in a plot about ten miles from London and had found that he could collect milk better both in quality and in quantity from it there. But the size of the plant was a disadvantage for cultivation in Scotland, where strong winds were likely to break it down. Dr Howison received the Society's prize medal .7 But no further successes were reported until 1820, when John Young, who had described his collection of lettuce opium to the Caledonian Society, also received the Society of Arts' gold medal. Young, an Edinburgh surgeon, aimed to demonstrate that opium could be successfully cultivated in a cold wet climate. This he amply did, for his experiments in cultivating poppies not just for opium but for oil as well had given a profit of £50-£80 an acre. A yield per acre of fifty-six pounds of opium, several hundred pounds of oil and oil cakes, and a quantity of early potatoes prudently planted in addition produced the handsome sum of £110 7s. 6d. profit.8
Perhaps the most successful opium cultivators were Dr John Cowley and Mr Staines of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, who, in 1823, received thirty guineas from the Society for `143 Pounds of opium, of excellent quality, collected by them from about eleven Acres of Land, planted with the Papaver Somniferum'.9
Opium cultivation did not end with their efforts. Isolated experiments continued in various parts of the country. But the main period of competition to produce the most and best of the domestic variety was over. Opium cultivation, with reports coming in from places as far apart as Edinburgh and Somerset, appears not to have concentrated in any particular area of the country, although cultivation was obviously more successful in southern England. There was no generally agreed method of cultivation and each experimenter tried to improve on that used by his predecessor. Mr Arnot in 1742 was the first to describe cultivation:

What I have found most successful is to trench a spot of new  rich ground, where Poppies had not grown the preceding year; for if they are continued several years on the same Ground they degenerate. A chusing the ripest and whitest Seed of the great single-flowered Turkey Poppy, I sow it in the month of March very thin and superficially in Drills at two Foot Distance each, to allow Place for Weeding, etc. As soon as the young Plants spring up, I take most of them away, leaving only the strongest most thriving Plants at about a Foot distant from each other.

The opium was collected by roughly the same method as it generally was in the Far East - incisions were made into the poppy capsule and the milky juice allowed to run out. This was then scraped from the poppy head into a tin or other container and evaporated to obtain the pure opium. Dr Alston had `collected
the pure Milk with a little Silver Spoon and my Finger into a China Tea-cup'.
This was an age of cheap and exploitable labour. The harvesting of opium was still costly in man-hours and ways of circumventing this cost were much discussed. Ball, Jones and Jeston explained the possibilities of child labour. As Ball pointed out, with children making the incisions and taking off the opium, `the expence [sic] will be found exceedingly trifling'. Jones and Jeston both carried the possibilities of child labour to greater lengths, establishing a clear pay structure with financial inducements. Jones, employing seven or eight boys between eight and twelve years old with a man as superintendent, based his pay scale on age and behaviour. `To the youngest, I gave threepence a day, and, if tractable and well disposed, an additional penny for every additional year.' Jeston favoured a productivity deal, with a rate of eightpence a day and a penny for every extra bottle of opium collected.
Cheap labour was the main requirement. Cowley and Staines employed two women for nine days in 1819, paying them a shilling a day. They commented that `a general cultivation of opium would certainly be beneficial by calling into action a description of persons not calculated for common agricultural labour, and that
between hay-time and harvest'. A later experiment used unemployed lace-makers from the Winslow neighbourhood. They had also employed six `peaceable and industrious' Irish migrant labourers (also paid a shilling a day for eleven hours' work) and noted that if cultivation was expanded beyond their present fifteen acres of land then: `We must do it by the Irish, great numbers of whom are every year seeking employment during the Opium Season." One commentator even suggested that opium cultivation might be a means of rejuvenating Irish economic life - `the cultivation of poppies ... might be very profitably undertaken in IRELAND, where labourers ... are abundant...'." Opium could even provide the solution to the Irish problem.
The growers of opium experienced little difficulty in finding profitable outlets for their produce. Druggists were very ready to buy a variety of the drug which was pure and unadulterated. John Young, in his 1820 schedule of cash and profits, estimated the selling price of his opium variously at between 17s. 6d. and thirty-
six shillings a pound, roughly equivalent to variations in the current price of best Turkey opium.12
Home-grown opium found ready acceptance in medical circles. Thomas Jones's opium was used by a hospital physician in cases of acute rheumatism, disease of the bowels and a case of hysteria. An apothecary at the Middlesex Hospital used the home-grown product on Elizabeth Spraughton with a `diseased state of the stomach', giving her a grain of opium every four to six hours. Dr Latham of Bedford Row tried a one-grain soap and opium pill made with John Ball's opium and found it relieved his tickling cough.13 Experiments were made with regular consumers of the drug, who were asked to try British opium to see if it produced the same effect. British opium was found more efficacious than the Turkey variety.''
There was glowing testimony to the efficacy and purity of English opium. Some observers even thought that local cultivation could supply domestic medical needs. But British opium did not live up to such expectations. The cultivation of the opium poppy never became widespread. The existence of a domestic variety of the drug was quite widely known in the first half of the century; and the various experiments obviously made some public impact. ls It was unlikely that production continued on any great scale. But some growers did continue the experimentation of the early years of the century. Sir Roger Martin of Burnham Westgate in Norfolk collected English opium there in the 1 840s. As late as the 1870s a Mr Dymond of Birmingham and Mr Sutton of Norwich were describing experiments in its cultivation to fellow pharmacists. 16 Clearly many such small-scale attempts could have been made, particularly in Norfolk, where the white opium poppy grew wild. At a time when attempts were being made to produce opium on a commercial scale in Western Europe, most notably in France and Germany, where trials were made in the 1820s and again later in the century, it was very likely that further attempts were madein England too. 17
The only successful commercial production was not of opium, but of poppy heads. This was well-established in the neighbourhood of Mitcham as early as the 1830s. The London drug market obtained the bulk of its supplies from the Mitcham growers. The poppy heads yielded an extract known as `English opium' which contained 5 per cent morphia, a lower proportion than in either the imported or home-grown variety. An average bag of three thousand poppy capsules sold for about E4 Ms. in the 1830s.18 There were attempts to use the obviously congenial Mitcham climate for the production of cannabis, too.

But British opium and British cannabis never became large-scale commercial propositions to rival the pre-eminence of the imported drug in the early decades of the century. The `precariousness of our climate', problems with `marauding hares', the attractions of more easily grown and harvested crops were all reasons for failure. The short-lived domestic experiment in cultivation was an interesting, if very minor, facet of the general move towards agricultural innovation and change in this period, the establishment of a capitalist agricultural structure to parallel that of industry. The calm discussion of its medical and agricultural possibilities, the use of child labour, the balance sheets of profits and losses which were drawn up, were in another sense interesting. For the experiments, like the import of the drug, emphasized society's acceptance of opium use in any form at this time.

references

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969) pp. 98-9.
2. J. Ball, `English opium', Transactions of the Society ... of Arts, 14 (1796), Pp. 253-70.
3. C. Alston, `A dissertation on opium', Medical Essays and Observations, 5, part 1 (1742), pp. 11o-76. See also T. Arnot, `A method of preparing the extract and syrup of poppies', Medical Essays and Observations, 5, Part 1 (1742) Pp. 105-9.
4. J. Kerr, `The culture of the white poppy and preparation of opium in the province of Bahar', Medical Observations and Inquiries, 5 (1776), PP. 317-22
5. W. Woodville, Medical Botany (London, James Phillips, 1793), vol. 3, P. 506. See also S. Crumpe, An Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium (London, G. G. and J. Robinson, 1793), p. 18.
6. T. Jones, `English opium', Transactions of the Society ... of Arts, 18 (1800), pp. 161-94; see also J. Burnby, `Medals for British rhubarb', Pharmaceutical History, 2 (1971), pp. 6-7; and John Sherwen and Drug Cultivation in Enfield: A Re-examination, Edmonton Hundred Historical Society occasional paper, n.s. No. 23, 1973
7. A. Duncan, `Observations on the preparation of soporific medicines from common garden lettuce', Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society, 1(1814), p. 160; J. Howison, `Essay on the preparation of opium in Britain', ibid., p. 365.
8. J. Young, `English opium', Transactions of the Society ... of Arts, 37 (1820), pp. 23-39; `The Winslow opium', Pharmaceutical Journal, 4th set. 16o (1948), pp. 106, 151. See also, for other experiments, G. Swayne, `On the manufacture of British opium', Quarterly Journal of Science,
Literature and the Arts, 8 (1820), pp. 234-40; 9 (182o), pp. 69-80; and J. W. Jeston, `English opium', Transactions of the Society ... of Arts, 41 (1823), PP. 17-31.
9. J. Cowley and Mr Staines, `English opium', Transactions of the Society ... of Arts, 40 (1823), PP. 9-29; 41 (1823) PP. 15-16, and `On the cultivation of the white poppy and on the preparation of English opium', Technical Repository, 7 (1825), p. 145.
10. J. Cowley and Mr Staines (1825), op. cit.
11. `Cultivation of opium in England', London Medical Repository, 24 (1825) P• 93.
12. J. Young, op. cit., pp. 23-39
13. J. Ball, op. cit., pp. 267-70; T. Jones, op. cit., pp. 190-93.
14. J. Cowley and Mr Staines, op. cit., 40 (1823), pp. 9-29.
15. As, for example, in the comments made on its production in `The narcotics we indulge in', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 74 (1853), pp. 605-28; `Opium', Penny Magazine, 3 (1834) P. 397; `Poppy oil and opium', ibid., 13 (1844), pp. 46-8; J. Pereira, Elements of Materia Medica (London, Longman, Orme, Browne, Green and Longmans, 1839-40), vol. z, p. 1276; A. Ure, `Observations on opium and its tests', London Medical Gazette, 6 (1830), pp. 73-6.
16. F. Fluckiger, `What is opium?', Pharmaceutical Journal, n.s. 10 (18689), pp. 208-11; J. Hood, `Notes on the cultivation of the opium poppy in Australia', ibid., 3rd ser. 2 (1871-2), pp. 272-4.
17. The Western European trials are described in, for instance, `Opium from French poppies', Pharmaceutical Journal, 17 (1857-8), p. 28; C. Harz, `Opium production in Europe', ibid., 3rd ser. 2 (1871-2), pp. 223
18. The Mitcham market is described in A. S. Taylor, On Poisons in Relation to Medical Jurisprudence and Medicine (London, John Churchill, 1848), p. 607; and J. Stephenson and J. Churchill, Medical Botany (London, John Churchill, 1831).