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The book also examines the pioneering work in breaking Enigma by the Polish cryptographers, and the building of Colossus, the world's first digital, programmable computer, which helped unravel the secret orders of Hitler and the German High Command. It also tells the story of the American successes in breaking Japanese signals, known as Magic. The vital role of the intercept stations which took down the enemy messages, providing the raw material for the cryptographers to break, is also explored.
The book shows how the code breakers were able to shorten the war by as much as two years and bring Signals Intelligence, in the postwar years, into a new era of military intelligence gathering.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781844683987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 441,904 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Early Days for the Food of the Gods
Chocolate (or theobroma cacao – 'food of the gods' – to give it its botanical name) is derived from cocoa powder from the beans of the cacao tree. A temperamental plant, it grows mainly in Central America and eastern South America, West Africa and Indonesia – but only within 20 degrees of the Equator, below 1,000 feet and where temperatures above 16C are normal.
It was the Mayans who probably first cultivated chocolate from about AD600. They called it xocoatle and drank it unsweetened and spiced with vanilla or chilli. Cocoa beans were valuable and were used as currency. For example, a rabbit cost eight beans, a prostitute around ten (depending on the service required), and a slave 100 beans.
The Aztecs from around 1500 AD also enjoyed and valued chocolate; they called it cacahuatl. Montezuma II established a bean bank, accepted cacao beans as tribute and regularly traded with beans. It was around this time that chocolate's alleged medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities originated. Montezuma himself reputedly drank fifty cups a day in the belief that it was an aphrodisiac, and Bernal Diaz, the conquistador, noted that the Aztecs 'took it for success with women.' The successful wooing of women is a theme we will see time and time again in the advertising and marketing of chocolate products. Hernan Cortes and the Conquistadores had come looking for El Dorado – but they also found chocolate. It was Cortes, the Jesuits, and missionary Dominican monks, who between them were responsible for introducing chocolate to Europe via the Spanish court around 1528, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip III.
One of the first recorded associations with England came in 1648 when Thomas Gage, the English traveller, observed in his New Survey of the West Indies that 'all, rich and poor, loved to drink plain chocolate without sugar or other ingredients.'
In Europe, chocolate's reputation with the medical and the erotic continued to grow. For the socialite and letter-writing gossip Marquise de Sévigné, chocolate had an important role to play in embryology. One of her missives in 1671 tells us that 'The Marquise de Coëtlogon took so much chocolate during her pregnancy last year that she produced a small boy as black as the devil, who died,' thus neatly, if not outrageously, combining sexual and diabolical associations. She probably epitomised French society generally, blowing hot and cold over chocolate. One day in 1671 she saw it as an ideal soporific, two months' later, 'it is cursed.....the source of vapours and palpitations ... suddenly lights a continuous fever in you that leads to death.' Louis XV's mistresses, Mesdames du Barry and Pompadour played their parts in sexing up chocolate. Du Barry was scurrilously accused of using chocolate to excite her lovers in order to satisfy her own lust. Pompadour, on the other hand, was frigid apparently and, according to Stanley Loomis, used hot chocolate along with 'aphrodisiacs, truffle and celery soup to stir a sensuality that was at best sluggish.'
Voltaire's Candide learns that the transmission of syphilis to Europe by Columbus's explorers was a fair price to pay in return for the simultaneous introduction of chocolate and cochineal to the old world. The works of the Marquis de Sade have frequent references to chocolate, consumed before and after sex, and it features regularly in his orgies. His petulant letters from prison to Mme de Sade (Rénee de Montreuil) demonstrate a genuine personal craving. This from 16 May 1779: 'The sponge cake is not at all what I asked for. 1st, I wanted it iced all over; 2nd I wanted it to have chocolate inside as black as the devil's arse is black from smoke, and there isn't even the least trace of chocolate. I beg you to have it sent to me at the first opportunity. The cakes must smell of it, as if you're biting into a bar of chocolate.' De Sade's greatest chocolate moment, possibly fabricated – certainly exaggerated – is told by Louis Petit de Bachaumont in his Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des Lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu'à nos jours. At a ball given by de Sade the host laced chocolate pastilles with Spanish fly, an aphrodisiac. 'It proved to be so potent that those who ate the pastilles began to burn with unchaste ardour and to carry on as if in the grip of the most amorous frenzy. Even the most respectable of women were unable to resist the uterine rage that stirred within them. And so it was that M. de Sade enjoyed the favours of his sister-in-law, several persons died of their frightful priapic excesses, and others are still quite sick.' To Giacomo Casanova it was as good an icebreaker as champagne and, like Samuel Pepys, he enjoyed a morning draft to set the day off.
CHAPTER 2Chocolate Reaches England
By the mid Seventeenth Century chocolate houses had begun to emerge throughout Europe alongside the already well-established coffee houses. But where chocolate was concerned, England had got off to an inauspicious start. Thomas Gage records in 1579 how, 'When we have taken a good prize, a ship laden with cocoa, in anger and wrath we have hurled overboard this good commodity not regarding the worth and goodness of it, but calling it in bad Spanish cagarutta de carnero or "sheep dung" in good English.' José de Acosta in his 1590 Natural and Moral History tells how an English corsair burnt 100,000 loads of cacao in Huatulco, New Spain, the equivalent of 2.4 billion beans. Its arrival in England was nevertheless hastened by our capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 where cacao walks, or plantations, were already well established.
It took a Parisian shopkeeper to open the first English chocolate shop in London, in June 1657. The 23 June 1659 edition of Needham's Mercurius Politicus ran the following advertisement: 'An excellent West India drink called chocolate, in Bishopsgate Street, in Queen's Head Alley, at a Frenchman's house being the first man who did sell it in England. Ready at any time, and also unmade at reasonable rates, it cures and preserves the body of many diseases.' M. Sury's chocolate house pamphlet in Oxford in 1660 describes chocolate as a marvellous cure-all. 'By this pleasing drink health is preserved, sickness diverted. It cures consumptions and Coughs of the Lungs; it expels poison, cleanseth the teeth, and sweetneth the Breath; provoketh Urine; cureth the stone and strangury, maketh Fatt and Corpulent, faire and aimeable.' He also claims fertility benefits. 'Nor need the Women longer grieve, Who spend their oyle yet not Conceive, For 'tis a Help Immediate, If such but Lick of Chocolate.'
For the British these medical benefits were complemented by apparent aphrodisiacal qualities. Dr Henry Stubbs notes, 'The great Use of Chocolate in Venery, and for supplying the Testicles with a Balsam, or a Sap is well known' and 'if Rachel had known [about chocolate] she would not have purchased Mandrakes for Jacob. If the amorous and martial Turk should ever taste it, he would despise his Opium. If the Grecians and Arabians had ever tried it, they would have thrown away their Wake-robins and Cuckow pintles; and I do not doubt that you London Gentlemen, do value it above your Cullises and Jellies; your Anchovies, Bononia Sausages, Soys, your Ketchups and Caveares, your Cantharides [Spanish fly] and your Whites of Eggs.' James Wadsworth adds to the 'evidence' in his Curious History of the Nature and Quality of Chocolate. 'Twill make Old Women Young and Fresh, Create New Motion of the Flesh, And cause them Long for you know what, If they but taste of Chocolate.'
Samuel Pepys' diary entries clearly demonstrate that 'Jocolatte' was very much part of his life and society, thus elevating chocolate to one of the drinks of choice among men of influence and affluence. He received an anonymous gift of chocolate in 1660 and on the morning of 24 April 1661, used it as a cure for a hangover and 'imbecility of the stomach' after a night out celebrating Charles II's Coronation, waking up, 'with my head in a sad taking through last night's drink which I am sorry for. So rose and went out with Mr Creede to drink our morning draft, which he did give me, chocolate to settle my stomach.' In October 1662 he and Mr Creede drank it with Captain Ferrers in Westminster Hall. The day of 3 May 1664 dawns to find Pepys 'Up, and being ready went by agreement to Mr Blands and then drank my morning draft in good Chocolatte, and slabbering my band, sent home for another.' Likewise, on 24 November 1664, he tells us, 'Up and to the office, where all the morning busy answering of people. About noon out with Commissioner Pett, and he and I to a coffee house to drink Jocolatte, very good.'
But Pepys was not alone. Hester Thrale Piozzi records how Samuel Johnson used chocolate as a substitute for alcohol. 'He took his chocolate liberally, pouring in large quantities of cream, or even melted butter.' And over the years chocolate begins to feature more in literary circles. Cecilia, in Frances Burney's eponymous novel, is presented with chocolate as a sign of prosperity. Jane Austen's affluent General Tilney is a chocolate-drinker in Northanger Abbey. Arthur Parker, a sham invalid in Sanditon, is nearly found out through his love of it, and Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, tells us how chocolate competed for glory with the wedding cake at her stepsister Anna Austen's wedding in 1814. In his 1859 A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes Monseigneur's prodigious morning chocolate consumption which took four men and the cook to administer. From the Eighteenth Century chocolate appears in the cookery books of the day. The Accomplished Female Instructor of 1704 shows how to make the best chocolate. Chocolate puffs are included in Mary Kettilby's 1719 pithily-titled A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic and Surgery; For the Use of all Good Wives, Tender Mothers and Careful Nurses.
London chocolate houses were mostly concentrated around Covent Garden, Pall Mall and St James's. Lorenzo Magolotti, a London resident from 1668 to 1688, tells us they competed with the ubiquitous and established coffee houses as somewhere else to eat, play cards and dice, gamble, drink cider, sherbet (a drink then), tea and cock ale (beer with bits of fowl floating in it), and to converse and discuss the burning issues of the day.
White's opened at 4 Chesterfield Street in 1693 under the management of the Italian Francis White (Francesco Bianco) who called it 'Mrs. White's Chocolate House'. At this time, chocolate was still of course, a luxury beverage for the wealthy.
By 1709 White's had built up such a reputation for fashionability that Richard Steele wrote his pieces for The Tatler there. 'All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure and Entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate House. Poetry under that of. ...' In Alexander Pope's Dunciad it was where you went to 'teach oaths to youngsters and to nobles wit.' In 1733 it was still the place to be and to be seen at when William Hogarth set his gambling scene there in The Rake's Progress just before it was destroyed by fire. By the mid 1700s White's had moved to St James's Street and had become, in effect, a gentleman's club taking its notoriety for gambling with it.
But not everybody was convinced. To some, chocolate was 'the invention of the Evil One' and in 1624 Johan Franciscus Rauch, an Austrian professor, wrote a thesis in an attempt to ban chocolate from monasteries and urged monks not to drink chocolate as he said it 'inflamed passions'. The lawyer Roger North, writing at the dawn of the Eighteenth Century, was somewhat guarded when he said that the emerging chocolate houses were 'rooks and rullies of quality, where gaming is added to all the rest and where plots against the state were hatched by idle fellows.' Jonathan Swift was less than impressed, describing White's Chocolate House as a place to be 'fleeced and corrupted by fashionable gamblers and profligates.'
Swift preferred the other famous chocolate house, The Cocoa Tree, which opened around 1698 in Pall Mall before moving to St James's Street. It also enjoyed Steele's patronage; this time with Joseph Addison who wrote articles for The Spectator from there when it was launched in 1711. Addison ranked chocolate alongside 'romances' and 'novels' as one of life's great 'inflamers'. Gibbon, Sheridan and Byron were members. The Cocoa Tree had other functions, not least as a useful ticket agency for such events as animal baiting in Marylebone Fields, as reported in the Daily Post one day in June 1721: '... will be baited a large panther to fight several bull and bear dogs for 200 guineas ... likewise is a green bull to be baited to death and a large bear.' The Cocoa Tree was not without its casualties too, as Captain Lloyd of Sackville Street was to discover. '... as he was drinking a dish of chocolate at the Cocoa Tree [he] fell down and died.' A Mrs Pilkington confirms the tradition for sedition when reporting the words of some young man: 'I dress and at about 12 o'clock go to the Cocoa Tree where I talk treason.'
The Scottish spy, James Macky, who exposed James II's intended invasion of England in 1692, on his journey through England in 1722, noted that Pall Mall was the natural habitat of strangers, partly on account of coffee and chocolate houses concentrated there 'where the best company frequent ... at twelve o'clock the Beau Monde assembles in several coffee and chocolate houses, the best of which are the Cocoa Tree, White's Chocolate House, St James's, the Smyrna and the British Coffee House, and all these are so near to one another that in less than an hour you can see the company of them all.' The generalization of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, formed after his 1745 visit to London, is interesting, echoing as it does Mrs Pilkington, 'The average Englishman starts his day with a walk in the park, afterwards he saunters to some coffee or chocolate house frequented by persons he would see where they talk business or news, read the newspapers and often look at each other without opening their mouths.'
Other chocolate houses included Saunders's at 85 St James's Street, and Ozinda's on the north side of St James's Palace.
Chocolate, as we have seen, became politically charged. Charles II tried to close down the chocolate houses in 1675 in an attempt to quell the sedition and radical sentiments they nurtured. The Cocoa Tree was known as the 'Tory Cocoa Tree Club' and by the Battle of Culloden in 1746, it was the chocolate house of choice for Jacobites and their Parliamentary headquarters. From 1783 White's acted as the headquarters of the Tory party. Ozinda's was another Tory stronghold. In his diary William Byrd of Virginia tells us that drinking chocolate, betting and reading the newspapers were the main attractions there. Jonathan Swift records that one of the meetings of his dining club was held at Ozinda's, and that the meal was brought in from the Palace. 'Dinner was dressed in the Queen's kitchen and was mighty fine. We eat it at Ozinda's Chocolate-house, just by St. James's. We were never merrier, nor better company, and did not part till after eleven.'
By now chocolate house owners were starting to realise the wider opportunities their establishments offered; so they rewrote their business plans to convert them into proprietary clubs for the rich, the privileged and the male and, in doing so, created the English gentleman's club.
This was the situation in England which saw the dawn of the chocolate-manufacturing industry, when in 1728, Walter Churchman opened a successful drinking chocolate shop in Bristol and was granted Letters Patent in 1729 by George II, allowing him to produce and sell chocolate. This was the shop which the Quaker and chemist Joseph Fry bought in 1761. Churchman was one of many 'cottage industry' manufacturers supplying chocolate to meet growing local markets up and down the country. Another pioneering couple were Messrs Berry and Bayldon who established their business in York in 1767 and eventually joined up with Joseph Terry, another chemist. In 1824 John Cadbury opened his tea, coffee and cocoa shop in Bull Street, Birmingham, while in 1862 Henry Rowntree acquired William Tuke and Son, a chocolate and cocoa business run by the Quaker Mary Tuke in York. The same year in another part of the city, Mary Craven took on the family confectionery business.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A History of Chocolate in York"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Paul Chrystal and Joe Dickinson.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Early Days for the Food of the Gods,
Chocolate Reaches England,
Fry of Bristol,
Cadbury of Bournville,
Other Early Chocolate Manufacturers in Britain,
The Quakers and the English Chocolate Industry,
York in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,
Rowntree: 1865–1900,
Cocoa Works Magazine,
Rowntree: 1901–1914,
New Earswick,
Chocolate in the First World War,
Rowntree Between the Wars,
Chocolate in the Second World War,
Rowntree: 1946–1969,
Caley of Norwich,
Mackintosh of Halifax,
Rowntree: 1970–1999,
Collecting Rowntrees by Joe Dickinson,
Terry: 1767–1890,
Terry and St Helen's Square – the Early Days,
Terry: 1891–1939,
Terry in the Second World War,
St Helen's Square After the War,
Terry: 1946–2005,
M.A. Craven and Son Ltd,
Marketing Chocolate,
The Confectionery Industry in Twenty-First Century York,
Epilogue,
Further Reading,
A Chronology of Chocolate,
Index,