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The CRASH that bankrupted Britain | Everything you wanted to know about the South Sea Bubble
In 1720, would-be speculators were in a frenzy over an irresistible new investment opportunity
In 1720, everyone from bankers and barons to ordinary housewives rushed to buy South Sea Company stock, sold on the idea that this was a get-rich-quick scheme that couldn’t go wrong. But, before long, the bubble burst. In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne uncover a story of greed, risk and delusion in the world’s first major financial crash. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
What centuries of cost-of-living crises can reveal
As prices have soared in recent months, living costs have outstripped many incomes in the UK. But as Victoria Bateman explains, this is not a new state of affairs
Life seems less affordable with each passing month. Over the past two years, energy prices in the UK have risen faster than at any time since 1973. The last time food seemed this expensive was in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. With the cost of everyday items having risen faster than wages for the past couple of years, families are facing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began. One in 14 households in the UK have used emergency food aid in the past year and, globally, 51 million people have been plunged into extreme poverty as a result of the rising cost of living. Having come to assume that living standards would rise year on year, and having boasted confidently that economic policy would prevent a repeat of the inflation of the 1970s, economists are learning to be more humble. While the cost-of-living crisis might now be starting to ease, history still warns against hubris. Until the 20th century, rising food prices caused by factors including harvest failure, trade disruption and war frequently sparked riots. In the middle of 1347, for example, Bordeaux wine merchant William Casse had just finished loading his ship with grain in Bristol ready for his return trip to France when a crowd “carried the grain away”. Exports of wheat to support Edward III’s siege of Calais at a time of harvest failure at home also led to altercations in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Kent, prompting what would become a common policy response to rising food prices: a ban on food exports. As feudalism gave way to market forces, buying and selling rapidly became common. Whenever prices became unaffordable, market forces and morality came into conflict, with a distinction made between the ‘market price’ and the ‘just price’. In periods of hunger, a droit de subsistence – the law of necessity – took precedence over private property rights, with those in need seeing it as their right to seize food and force its sale at rates below the market price. Rather than the desperate poor, rioters were typically members of the artisanal class – people who, in normal times, were able to keep their heads above water. They were not ‘anti-capitalists’ as we might think of them today, and some even had trade links with local elites to whom they could appeal. They believed in a social contract between the ruled and the rulers. At a time when democracy was reserved for the wealthy, the quid pro quo was that ‘gentlemen’ would rule with the public good in mind. This meant that either rulers had to keep their ear to the ground and offer relief when needed – keeping an eye on the price of wheat and intervening in the market if it rose too high became a task of the English crown in the 16th century – or rioters would send a signal by taking things into their own hands. Repression and remedy Witnessing some 700 clashes across a dozen cost-of-living crises, the 18th century marked the apogee of food riots in Britain. As the economy transitioned from agriculture to industry, and green and pleasant land was replaced with ‘dark satanic mills’, growing numbers of people were reliant on purchasing food on the market. Farmers rose to the challenge, and merchants shipped their grain far and wide, but the situation was precarious and unpredictable; good times could easily turn bad, leaving people who would normally have no need for relief demanding action. In 1783, in response to a harvest failure the previous year, a scuffle broke out not far from the Wedgwood Potteries in Staffordshire. A hungry and frustrated mob seized a canal boat laden with flour and cheese that was being redirected to Manchester, where prices were even higher. After selling the contents to locals for what they considered to be ‘just’ prices, the mob seized a second boatload. The militia were sent in and, after much negotiation, the mob agreed to disperse if local elites clubbed together for a fund to help those struggling with the cost of living. Josiah Wedgwood contributed £20. The social contract had been fulfilled. This combination of repression and remedy was the usual response to uprisings fuelled by the rising cost of living, but there were also times when rioters were brutally crushed. In the ‘hunger riots’ of 1766, which followed widespread crop failure across Europe, the War Office supplied troops on demand to country estates and market towns requesting protection from rioters, and even suggested that the gentry arm their own servants. By the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, barracks were springing up across the large northern towns. Local yeomanry – volunteer cavalry comprising farmers and the sons of gentry – also formed, providing more ways to repress disturbances. As rapidly growing industrial cities demanded increasing amounts of food from an ever-expanding agricultural catchment area, even the sniff of a riot would cause those transporting food to divert their supplies to avoid them being seized. Rather than helping, therefore, riots could actually hinder the cause, making cost-of-living crises worse. By 1820, with Napoleon’s attempt to starve Britain into submission having been defeated, and the industrial revolution surging full steam ahead, cotton cloth was rolling off factory production lines and being exchanged on international markets for plentiful supplies of foreign grain. This sparked an age of falling prices, welcomed by workers and industrialists alike – albeit not by agricultural landowners, who successfully lobbied for a tax on imported grain in the form of the Corn Laws (1815–46). This restricted access to cheap foreign grain, cushioning the price fall. People power By the ‘hungry forties’, food shortages and escalating food prices had returned to Britain and Ireland. Nowhere suffered more than Ireland where, in the summer of 1847, a peak of 3 million people were being fed by soup kitchens each day – until the British government declared that “Irish property must pay for Irish poverty”. Little in the way of a social contract existed between the English parliament and the colonised and, when the potato crops on which most Irish people relied failed over successive years from 1845 – and much Irish-grown grain continued to be exported to Britain, despite the devastating famine – a million people starved and more than a million emigrated. Read more | Q&A: Why do some people call the Irish famine ‘the Great Hunger’? In Rochdale, where food shortages were less severe but where people struggled with rising prices, a group of cotton-mill workers devised a plan. They pooled together their grocery money so that they could bulk buy everyday necessities more cheaply. Hearing about the scheme, other mill workers wanted to join. For a small fee, members were entitled to buy cheaper bulk-bought groceries in the group’s shop, and also reaped a share of any profits. Founded in 1844, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was the first successful retail cooperative in England – and inspired similar cooperatives around the nation. As the 19th century wore on, the twin processes of industrialisation and globalisation resulted in rising wages and fewer food shortages. The railway and steamship meant that importing food in return for cloth, steel and financial services was easier than ever, but also increased the nation’s vulnerability to global events. The collective energy of working people was increasingly channelled through the cooperative movement and ‘friendly societies’, improving resilience to periods of hardship. As democracy spread in the 20th century, people expected their elected representatives to do all they could to avert cost-of-living crises. Food riots became a phenomenon not of the western world but of the global south and, after the beast of inflation so rife in the 1970s and 1980s was defeated, many economists felt that Britain would never again succumb to a serious cost-of-living crisis. Read more | The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? They were wrong. War in Europe, trade disruptions related to Brexit, faltering economic and wage growth and vulnerability to climate patterns have all had an impact on our ability to afford food and other necessities. Our current situation shows just how little has changed – and how little can be taken for granted. This article was first published in the Christmas 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain
Never was the chasm between rich and poor more stark than in the Regency era. Ian Mortimer chronicles a period in which the wealthiest gorged themselves on the fruits of Britain’s industrial might, while the working classes endured lives that were often nasty, brutish and short
Listen to this article: Every historical age sees extraordinary inequalities of wealth. Whether we are talking about ancient Rome or 20th-century Britain, the pattern is commonly described as a pyramid, with a small number of exceedingly rich individuals at the apex and a large number of poor people at the base. As we all know, the differences between the top and the bottom are extreme – to the extent that some of the super-wealthy have incomes more than a thousand times greater than the national average. But what about the variance in their basic standards of living? Aside from the glitz and the glamour, are the lifestyles of the rich and poor always poles apart? You might assume that the only possible answer to that question is yes. Peasants and slaves never live like lords and kings. But consider it in terms of life expectancy. In the Middle Ages, a lord’s sons and daughters could expect to live into their mid-thirties and the peasantry about five years less, so the poor lived around 85 per cent as long as the rich. The modern world is only a little more equal: children growing up today in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect to live between 85 per cent and 90 per cent as long as those in the least-deprived areas. It looks as if that proportion is more or less a constant. But one period stands out as different: the early 19th century. In the 1830s, middle-class Londoners could expect to live to 44 but working-class ones only 22, just 50 per cent as long. Working-class people in towns like Liverpool, Preston and Manchester were lucky if they reached 19, at a time when average life expectancy from birth in the UK was more than 40. In the unsewered streets of Ashton-under-Lyne, artisans’ life expectancy at birth was just 13, less than a third of that of their more prosperous fellow citizens. Listen | Historian Ian Mortimer discusses how a vast chasm between rich and poor marked society in the early 19th century Extremes of opulence Why was the early 19th century so unusual? As you can imagine, there were several reasons. The industrial revolution obviously led to the worsening of the living conditions of the poor. At the same time it had an impact on the wealthy, too, enriching them to an unprecedented degree. The result was a greater variance in living standards than probably ever before or since. As the American ambassador to Great Britain, John Quincy Adams, put it in his diary while in London in 1816: “The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other I ever saw.” Anyone who has even so much as glanced at a gentleman’s country house built before 1830 will be aware that the wealthy were surrounded by uplifting, refined architecture and design, in which comfort was combined with a fabulous sense of style. In the grandest houses of all, such as the Prince Regent’s Carlton House on Pall Mall, the internal fittings were a wealth of silk damask and gold. The decorative features were covered in gold leaf, as was the furniture; the huge glass chandeliers were trimmed with gold; golden clocks and ornaments were exhibited on gold-leaf-covered plinths; the paintings were framed in gold. The prince spent vast sums on the place – by 1795 he was £630,000 in debt – and in 1826, as king (George IV), he could afford to have it demolished. Even an ordinary gentleman with an income of about £2,000 per year from his country estate could afford a London house as well as a country seat stuffed with mahogany furniture designed by the likes of Hepplewhite and Sheraton, and decorated with art by Reynolds, Gainsborough and many more great British artists of the time. By the 1820s most gentlemen’s residences had water closets and provisions for washing. Some even had dedicated bathrooms with hot and cold running water. In marked contrast, the workmen who physically built the houses of the gentry could consider themselves well paid in the 1820s if they received 15 shillings a week. Factory workers and labourers would receive less than this, and servants less still. Hundreds of thousands of men and women lacked regular employment altogether. Their accommodation was truly appalling, especially in the rapidly growing industrial towns. In the parish of St Giles in London, a surveyor visited a slum terrace and found the yard “covered with night soil from the overflowing of the privy, to the depth of nearly six inches, and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry shod”. Inspectors frequently reported similar conditions in the northern towns. In parts of Liverpool, people were crammed into court houses at a density of more than 1,000 people per acre. Liquid from cesspits and the foetid rubbish strewn across the ground outside oozed through the cellar walls where many were forced to sleep. The communal cesspits in the courts had no doors as the landlords claimed they would have been used for firewood. Those without homes had to cram together in boarding houses, often on the floors, or find a place in a communal barn at 2 pence per night, where every imaginable disease spread quickly among the unwashed bodies, including such killers as smallpox, tuberculosis and, from the 1830s, cholera. Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period Life-threatening labour While the poorest Britons lived in squalor, the upper classes managed their estates and indulged themselves in their enthusiasms. Most didn’t work. Younger sons and those who opted for employment chose a well-paid and dignified patriotic service, such as a commission in the army or navy, an ambassadorial role, parliament or the church. The middle classes similarly selected how they wanted to make a living. The working classes, who made up more than 70 per cent of the population, had no such choice. Those who were lucky enough to work as agricultural labourers could expect to live for 36 years – approximately twice as long as their cousins in the industrial towns. But agricultural opportunities were on the decline as more machines were employed, more arable land was given over to sheep farming, and more food was imported. For the remainder, the options were to go into service or to work in a factory or mill. Robert Blincoe’s career is illuminating in this respect. He was born in London in 1792, orphaned at the age of four, and placed in a workhouse. From there he was sold at the age of seven to the owner of a mill near Nottingham. For the next 14 years he was required to work without pay for 14 hours a day, six days a week, on the spinning frames, in dusty conditions. His clothing was minimal; he was not given soap to wash nor was he fed properly. He started stealing doughballs from the mill’s pigsties but the pigs soon became wise to his pilfering and threw them in the mud when they saw him coming. He suffered from constant diarrhoea, was regularly beaten, and like all his young colleagues, he lost parts of limbs in the unguarded machines. One day he watched in horror as a girl his age was dragged into a spinning machine by her skirts. He heard her bones all snapped by the whirling mechanism and then her blood “thrown around like water twirled from a mop”. Later, he tried to run away from the mill but was quickly caught and returned, with a reward being paid to the man who found him. Those who had such a start in life, with no education and nothing else to offer, were generally doomed to a short existence of hard labour. Blincoe left the mill as soon as he was old enough but many stayed there for their whole lives, and died either from the dust or their injuries. Huge numbers of men, women, boys and girls worked as labourers in the mines. In 1813 in Cumberland, 630ft underground, the author Richard Ayton raised his lantern to see lines of wagons driven by young girls in the pitch-black tunnels. He described all the people down there as being “distinguished by an extraordinary wretchedness. Immoderate labour and a noxious atmosphere had marked their countenances with the signs of disease and decay; they were mostly half-naked, blackened all over with dirt, and altogether so miserably disfigured and abused that they looked like a race fallen from the common rank of men and doomed, as in a kind of purgatory, to wear away their lives in these dismal shades.” Whatever the industrial process, it was likely to contribute to the workers’ ill health and premature deaths. Painters and glaze dippers developed lead poisoning. Tailors developed chronic heart and stomach problems. Chimney-cleaning boys developed scrotal cancer. Arguably the worst working conditions of all were those to be found in the grinding industries, especially in Sheffield. The work was carried out in poorly ventilated cellars and generated a lot of dust. Most fork-grinders in Sheffield were dead by the age of 28. Ninety per cent did not make it to 40. For the rich, the Regency period was one of haute cuisine and epicurean variety. As the poet Robert Southey wrote in 1807: “All parts of the world are ransacked for an Englishman’s table. Turtle are brought alive from the West Indies… India supplies sauces and curry powder… hams [are imported] from Portugal and Westphalia; reindeers’ tongues from Lapland; caviar from Russia; sausages from Bologna; macaroni from Naples; oil from Florence; olives from France, Italy or Spain; cheese from Parma and Switzerland.” Over-indulgence was common. Several ‘ordinaries’ or standard menus in the finest London hotels at this time cost 3 guineas (£3 3s) per head, with an extra guinea for a bottle of fine wine. The earliest restaurants in London were established at this time; there was even an Indian curry house in the 1810s catering to returning nabobs. Escaping the workhouse: the Victorian war on child poverty Tea-stained water The poorest sectors of society found themselves eating as their medieval ancestors had done, with very little protein in their diet. Many examples were quoted by the Revd David Davies in his examination of the living standards of agricultural labourers in the 1790s. A typical case was that of a Berkshire couple and their five children, who bought 7½ gallons of flour each week for their daily bread, plus 1lb of bacon. They also purchased a little tea, salt, sugar and butter. And that was it. No fish, no cheese and no vegetables other than what they grew for themselves. No beer, even. Of their total income of 8s 6d per week, 8s 3d went on food. Most meals were simply bread and butter. So when the price of flour in Berkshire trebled, as it did in 1800, their lives became wretched. As for tea, people talked about it being a great leveller, but there was a world of difference between the fine teas drunk by the wealthy and the water stained with a few re-used tea leaves consumed by the poor. An agricultural labourer’s family could at least use the garden that probably went with their cottage. It was precisely for this reason that the growing of potatoes spread across the whole of the British Isles over the course of the 18th century. In short, gardens saved lives. Those living in the over-populated urban slums had no such opportunities to grow their own. For them, it was not so much a matter of having a balanced diet as obtaining anything to eat. Among the lower classes, the difficulties faced by mothers and newborn babies were particularly challenging. For a start, the mothers were malnourished. The children of those transported to Australia grew about 2 inches taller than their parents, due to food shortages having stunted their parents’ growth in England. When it came to the birth, well-heeled families could afford their own accoucheurs, midwives and doctors, equipped with forceps and good medical knowledge. Some private doctors saw maternal mortality rates of just 0.2 per cent over the course of their careers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/01/GettyImages-108214907_cmyk-1-f24b9ed.jpg" width="812" height="1069" alt="A woman breastfeeds her child, c1830" title="A woman breastfeeds her child, c1830. In industrial towns like Liverpool, more than half of all infants died before they were five, often due to malnourishment passed down from their mothers. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The poor had only limited access to professional medical help and hence their women and babies died more frequently in childbirth. If both survived, the malnourishment of the mother was then passed on to the child. Hence one of the key reasons why life expectancy was so low: many more working-class babies did not live. In Liverpool, 53 per cent of babies died before they were five; in Preston, 57 per cent did. These figures are almost exactly the same as those of slaves in the West Indies. These infant deaths must have sapped many mothers’ will to live. But the position was so dire that some deaths were welcomed, on account of there being fewer mouths to feed. In the 18th century, the philanthropist Jonas Hanway estimated that an infant under the age of four had a life expectancy of just one month after entering a London workhouse. As he put it: “Parish officers never intend that parish infants should live”. Even more shocking was the desperate strategy of families living off the deaths of their own children. Hard-pressed couples would enrol a baby in one or more burial clubs and then, when the child fell sick, they would let him or her die so they could claim on the insurance. This is why rent collectors were sometimes asked to wait a few days until a child had died. On one occasion, a wealthy Lancashire gentlewoman heard that her wet nurse’s child was ill, so she kindly offered to send her own physician to help. But the mother replied: “Oh, never mind, Ma’am, it’s in two burial clubs.” A government inspector reported that “It is not an unfrequent circumstance to find a child enrolled in three or more burial clubs, so that the parents may receive at its death from £16 to £20. That, in certain instances, this has been productive of infanticide is proved beyond all doubt by the well-known trials for infanticide at Bolton and Stockport.” And, he adds, “an analysis of returns from Preston, where, in three societies alone there are upwards of 23,000 members, has distinctly shown that there is a greater rate of mortality among children entered in burial clubs than in those not belonging to them”. Shockingly, babies under the age of six months whose parents entered them in a burial club were 35 per cent more likely to die than those who were not in such a club. Turning to prostitution Extreme poverty was, almost inevitably, accompanied by high levels of crime. If a couple with a family were denied poor relief and did not wish to go into a workhouse, they had no choice but to resort to more desperate measures. Huge numbers of women turned to prostitution: it was estimated at the time that one in five women in London lived off immoral earnings. Large numbers of men and women took to crime. More than 90 per cent of all cases in the county courts in the early 19th century were for theft. (For comparison, in the modern world, less than a quarter of arrests involve stolen property.) Until 1823, the Bloody Code was still in force, meaning that the penalty was death for more than 200 crimes, including stealing goods worth more than 12d. If the principal breadwinner was hanged or transported to Australia, then a family was left in a worse position than before. Another strategy was to obtain food on credit. However, most shopkeepers only advanced credit facilities to those they believed could pay. Moreover, if a poor family failed to pay, then the father could be sent to prison at the shopkeeper’s request for non-payment of his bills. This meant extra costs (gaolers’ fees) and prevented him from earning while inside. Some people spent decades in prison for failing to repay a few pounds; many died behind bars. Again, the family was even worse off as a result. Given these circumstances, it is easy to see why there was so much discontent, especially in the industrial north of England. Fashionable ladies in London could spend £4 on a single tall feather to wear in their hair at a ball – a sum that would have fed a labourer’s family for 10 weeks. Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were 'happy' From rags to riches It really was both the best and the worst of times (to paraphrase Dickens), depending on how much money you had. Yet this age offered men and women more opportunities than perhaps ever before to start life at one end of the social spectrum and end it at the other. James Morrison was the orphaned son of an innkeeper. He gained a job in a London haberdashery business, married the daughter of the senior partner, and made himself rich through overseas investments: by the time he died in 1857 he was worth more than £6m. Harriot Mellon was the illegitimaate daughter of a poor Irish woman who looked after the wardrobe of a troupe of travelling actors. She learned from them how to act and came to London to star on the stage. There she caught the eye of the banker Thomas Coutts, who eventually married her. When he died, he left her his 50 per cent share in his bank, which she then controlled, enhancing its value and becoming the richest woman in England. Then she married the much younger Duke of St Albans and ended up both a multi-millionaire and a duchess. But for every James Morrison and Harriot Mellon, there were millions who failed to bridge the chasm between rich and poor in early 19th-century Britain, and who were condemned to live and die in the poverty in which they were born. So what changed? The answer is that such poor living conditions gradually gave rise to public outrage – at both ends of the social spectrum. Workers’ protests made the grievances increasingly clear; the religiously inspired social consciences of upper and middle-class social reformers did the rest. Following the Great Reform Act in 1832 (which extended the franchise) and the abolition of slavery the following year, there was a greater political will to take responsibility for the welfare of people in Britain. Within two decades there were profound changes in urban sanitation, poor relief and working conditions in factories and mines. Gradually the difference in life expectancy between the poor and the rich declined – in fact, it constantly diminished between the 1870s and the 2010s. But anyone who thinks of the early 19th century as a glorious age, when Britain was riding high on the profits of the industrial revolution and victory over France, should be aware: such wealth and glory had long, dark shadows. Ian Mortimer is a historian and author. His latest book, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain (Bodley Head, 2020) is out now This article was first published in the December 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine Explore more content from week one of our Regency course: Introduction to the Regency, with Dr Lizzie Rogers - watching time 10 mins Regency timeline: the key dates you need to know - reading time 3 mins The Regency era: everything you wanted to know - listening time 54 mins The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved? - reading time 13 mins The illness and decline of George III - reading time 10 mins
Inside debtors’ prisons: what life was like for people jailed in Georgian Britain
Debtors’ prisons inflicted untold misery on families in the 18th and 19th centuries, with people facing unlimited imprisonment if they could not pay off their arrears. Yet England’s credit-fuelled economy would have ground to a halt without them. Alexander Wakelam explores their history and the lives of some of the people behind bars – including the father of Charles Dickens
In May 1728, the 36-year-old trumpet player John Grano discovered his luck had finally run out. Grano’s debts had been piling up for weeks. Business had not been good of late but his spending on fine clothes and finer wines had not slowed. By Thursday 30th his creditors had finally had enough of Grano’s empty promises and applied to the court for his arrest. He was seized by a bailiff in the street and instructed to pay up or face the consequences of his spending. Grano was not panicked – this was hardly the first time he had faced his creditors’ threats. However, this time there was no deal to be done, no new extension to be found and, as he wrote in his diary that night, no “brother, relation or friend came nigh me” to bail him out. Unable to pay, Grano was taken to “this Hell between 7&8 at night” – the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain The debtors’ prison was not a distant threat in 18th-century England but a feature of everyday life. Almost every town had a jail, and some maintained several – when Grano was arrested, at least 15 were operating in London. Prisons stood on bridges, on the edges of marketplaces, and in the middle of fashionable high streets. Many castles in Britain were converted into jails, meaning that in the countryside, debtors’ prisons dominated the landscape for miles around. While some were grim dungeons, others were built in opulent style, looking more like palaces than prisons. York’s debtors’ prison – the only purpose-built jail still standing today – cost the town more than £8,000 in 1705 and its fabulous baroque styling ensured it quickly joined the medieval walls and cathedral on the city’s burgeoning tourist trail. Visiting shortly after it opened, the spy and travel writer John Macky described it as “by much the finest, as well as the pleasantest [prison] in England”. What were debtors’ prisons? Debtors’ prisons were not just an abstract reminder to look after your money, but a functioning system that processed thousands of men and women across the country every year. Many more faced a real possibility of their debts catching up with them, with as many as one in 25 adult men at risk of imprisonment in London by the end of the 18th century. Few people in cities would not have known at least one friend, relative or co-worker who had been arrested. It is easy to assume debtors’ prisons were a cruel medieval hangover where the poor were sent to die, inevitably brushed aside by enlightened thinking and the rise of a rational capitalist society. However, while imprisonment for debt had been introduced in the 13th century, it remained on a small scale and focused on the merchant class until the commercial explosion from the 1660s. As the law around arrest liberalised and the costs of obtaining a warrant collapsed, the debtors’ prison entered its heyday. The prison was an integral part of the developing economy. Almost everyone in England was in debt. For most, this was not due to the carefree spending habits of the likes of John Grano, but simply the way people did business. Money was still based on the weight of the gold or silver it contained but, since the late 16th century, supplies of both had been insufficient to meet inflation or demand. Rampant counterfeiting and coin-clipping – the illicit practice of removing small pieces from the outer edge of a coin to use in forging counterfeits – meant that even circulating currency might not be accepted by traders. Read more | Debtors’ prisons: how bad were they? People regularly had the wealth to buy, but not the cash to do so (storing their money not in gold, but in land, goods or debts owed to them). Most buying was, therefore, done on credit, whether for everyday goods like bread, luxuries like a new watch, business supplies to make watches, or even paying the watch maker’s assistant’s wages. The credit of merchants and the state was beginning to look like that of modern high finance, but most everyday credit was given without interest or even without specified terms of repayment. These were handshake agreements “to pay” when demanded without a written contract. The value of a buyer’s credit – the amount they could buy on credit and, in some cases, the length of time allowed for repayment – was based on their reputation in the community, for example increased by regular church attendance or decreased by incidents of public drunkenness, rather than their physical wealth. As the person of the buyer determined the value of their credit, it was the person of the buyer that was at stake when they defaulted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/2E46H3Abig-9324f66.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Marshalsea, 1773 engraving. Despite its reputation, “fashionable” prisoners lived in cleaner cells with greater privacy, and could even employ servants (Photo by Gallery Of Art / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="The Marshalsea, 1773 engraving. Despite its reputation, “fashionable” prisoners lived in cleaner cells with greater privacy, and could even employ servants (Photo by Gallery Of Art / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Liberal credit kept the wheels of commerce spinning at the pace of demand rather than the glacial movement of silver. Most people did pay when they had cash, or at least when asked to by creditors. Consumers were reminded of the importance of prompt payment by shopkeepers, in the books they read, and every Sunday from the pulpit. In 1718, the bishop of Ely preached to his flock that God commanded money should always be put “first, to the payment of… debt, and secondly, to the sustenance of [your] children”. But when polite reminders were not enough, greater pressure was needed to ensure money changed hands. Suing in court was expensive and slow – shopkeepers who had debts of their own could not wait. An arrest, by contrast, required only swearing to the reality of the debt and payment of a shilling. Once a bailiff caught up with the debtor, they could be held indefinitely until creditors were satisfied. What was life like in a debtors’ prison? As Grano discovered when he reached the Marshalsea, being imprisoned without limit was far from a death sentence. Prison might even be comfortable. Arriving in the lodge, he was greeted by the Master Turnkey (the prison warden’s second in command) who “made me set down & offer’d to treat me with something to drink”. He was then asked “if I was for the [more comfortable and private] Master’s Side and if so wither I was provided with five shillings advance for a fortnight’s Beding, a shilling for sheets, and sixpence for the bedmaker”. On the podcast | Dickensian horrors or economic successes? Alexander Wakelam reveals how debtors’ prisons operated For debtors, imprisonment was not free. As well as having to pay fees for their own commitment (and their eventual release) they could also choose to pay rent on a room in the Master’s Side. There were free Common Sides – though, as a visitor to one such in London’s Wood Street prison discovered, there were good reasons to pay: “We entered a sort of dark hall, where we saw some people eating and drinking with little seeming concern. The smell of the place was almost intolerable. I observed, the beds of such as had any, were placed in ranges, as our shelves, over each other; and those who had none, were obliged to lie upon the boards.” At the Marshalsea, those on the Common Side were kept behind a high wall, out of sight and out of mind of the wealthier debtors. Master’s Side rooms were cleaner, more comfortable, and offered greater privacy, even if you had to share a bed (a not uncommon situation in 18th-century renting), while rent was usually below market rates. One guide book for imprisoned debtors recommended the third-floor rooms at the King’s Bench prison due to the “pleasing view of the Surry and Kentish hills”. Debt imprisonment did not end the rigid class structures of 18th-century Britain. Grano had no money on him but assured the Turnkey that he would by tomorrow and, given his fashionable status, was provided his first night’s rent on credit. Were women sent to debtors’ prisons? Separate wards were also usually provided for female debtors. There were no women’s prisons, and so jails were mixed spaces. Sometimes women in the prison were not actually imprisoned, but the wives of male prisoners. They lived there voluntarily, often with their children, and were thus able to leave each day to work or buy goods. Married women were protected from debt imprisonment, though only because they could not own debt independently of their husbands. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/AY4GCB-9442f50.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A family in a debtors’ prison, from an early 19th-century illustration. The wives and children of many male prisoners joined their husbands in jail (Photo by Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A family in a debtors’ prison, from an early 19th-century illustration. The wives and children of many male prisoners joined their husbands in jail (Photo by Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Single women and widows, however, had no legal protections against imprisonment and, if engaged in trade, were just as likely as men to be arrested. In the 1720s, around one in three prisoners in London were female – though by 1800 that figure had plunged to around one in 20, due to higher rates of marriage. Despite women usually sleeping in their own ward within the prison, there was no rigid separation between the sexes and prisoners regularly mingled in communal yards during the day. On the podcast | Elaine Farrell shares the stories of women incarcerated in 19th-century Ireland Invited or not, Grano frequently visited the female ward. On one occasion, having barged into the room of a group of women during dinner, he noted how he was given the cold shoulder: “I had a very cold bow, not so much as how do you do or will you seat yourself.” There was apparently little to prevent Grano from walking in or staying, as he “took my seat on the opposite bed… and as I was not spoken to, said nothing”. Other debtors interacted more successfully and the comedic actress Mary Wells, during her imprisonment at the Fleet in 1797, actually married a fellow debtor in the prison, treating the other prisoners to a “great feast” reported extensively in the newspapers. How did people secure their release from debtors’ prisons? Grano adapted to prison life – though perhaps not always as his creditors intended. He spent much of his time in the prison’s coffeehouse, playing backgammon and flirting unsuccessfully with female prisoners. Not all prisoners were as relaxed about the situation in which they found themselves as Grano. Unlimited imprisonment was an excellent motivator to find money as soon as possible – and so most inmates directed all of their energies towards achieving that, whatever the personal cost. The result is that more than 90 per cent of inmates managed to secure their release within a year. Many tasted freedom much earlier than that. When the explorer Henry Timberlake was imprisoned in the early 1760s, he actually had the cash on him, and so was released that same day. Paying, however, left him with “but two shillings left” of his planned expedition fund. Other prisoners sent word to friends and family for help, though not always successfully. Elizabeth Foote, confined in Truro prison from December 1742, wrote to her son in London: “Dear Sam, I am in prison for debt. Come and assist your loving mother”, only to receive a reply from the Fleet prison: “Dear mother, so am I.” Others began selling property. Some debtors parted with prized luxuries to regain their freedom, but others took more drastic courses of action. In 1738, Michael Dicq, apprentice to a Westminster jeweller, appeared before the city begging for assistance as his master had “sold all his tools and goods” to get out of prison, leaving Michael unable to work and “almost starved”. What work could prisoners do? Many prisoners accepted that freedom was not coming immediately and so threw themselves into work. Most debtors were middle-class dealers and craftspeople (few inmates came from the working poor, as they were rarely offered enough credit to be worth imprisoning) and often chose to practise their trade within the confines of the prison. Read more | The Bloody Code: your guide to the severe legal system When a parliamentary inquiry investigated life in the prisons in 1792, it spoke to John Stanley, a silk-weaver at the King’s Bench prison. Stanley was keen to be moved to a different room as “I can’t carry on my trade here”. He had recently been contracted to weave cloth within the prison but “as the trade in which I was employed requires… much length and light”, his current room was unsuitable. Though Stanley was frustrated, the only thing apparently stopping him from moving his loom into the prison was the ceiling. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/EG75AP-5f30120.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An 1823 engraving shows dandies visiting a friend in a Fleet prison gin palace. In some jails, debtors could gamble and revel, or run bars run from their cells (Photo by Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="An 1823 engraving shows dandies visiting a friend in a Fleet prison gin palace. In some jails, debtors could gamble and revel, or run bars run from their cells (Photo by Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Grano also eventually got to work, offering music lessons to the children of local craftsmen. Debtors’ prisons offered cheap goods and services for those who would otherwise find them too expensive. Prisoners like Grano had to take what rates they could. At Wood Street the committee found “one attorney, a carver, a taylor, a pattern drawer, and a cabinet maker” plying their trades on the Master’s Side. This suggests that it wasn’t uncommon for those in need of cheap legal advice, new shirts, or even furniture to pop into the local jail. Prisoners also sold among themselves. The keeper of Newgate prison waged a constant battle against the wives of debtors who smuggled in gin under their skirts for sale in the prison’s black market. Others acted as servants to richer prisoners like Grano, who employed a maid from the Common Side and was shaved by an imprisoned barber. Read more | Floating hell: the brutal history of prison hulks The Marshalsea’s coffeehouse was run by a prisoner called Mother Bradshaw from her rooms. Upstairs, Grano occasionally dined at “Titty Doll’s”, a restaurant run out of the rooms of Mr and Mrs McDonnell. Such enterprises certainly helped some incarcerated debtors repay their creditors. What happened to those who could not pay for their release? Many prisoners had no hope of raising the funds to meet their creditors’ demands – no matter how desperate those demands grew. They would never pay their way out of prison. This presented the authorities with the spectre of overcrowding, with hundreds of debtors potentially languishing in prison for years. To head off this prospect, parliament passed a series of amnesties releasing debtors if they turned over all their remaining assets to their creditors. Around 10–15 per cent of prisoners took up this option, though it was almost always a last resort: while those who paid their debts returned to society with their credit restored, those freed by parliament were shunned. Grano, whose many money-making schemes (including organising a concert, writing new music and even being allowed to play in the lord mayor’s annual parade) never seemed to bring success, was one of the latter. In September 1729, after more than a year at the Marshalsea, he walked free; we know little of his subsequent life until his death in 1746. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages-590673247cmyk-1987f14.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A door from a Birmingham debtors’ prison, common sights in the urban landscape from the late-17th century (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="A door from a Birmingham debtors’ prison, common sights in the urban landscape from the late-17th century (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Almost 100 years later, another resident of the Marshalsea walked free. Unlike Grano, John Dickens spent just three months incarcerated in the south London prison. However, as his son Charles would later make clear, even this “short” imprisonment was devastating to the family. In his novel Little Dorrit, when William Dorrit (an analogy for the author’s father) is told the release he has been dreaming of for 20 years is to be delayed by “but a few hours”, the old man breaks into tears and, “with a sudden passion”, dismisses the insignificance of the delay: “You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?” The Dickens family had been ripped apart by John’s imprisonment, Charles having to leave school and enter the boot blacking factory he would later immortalise in David Copperfield to support the family. Why was debt imprisonment so common? The answer is that it worked. It meant creditors got paid and it helped commerce continue in an era of pre-modern credit. But while John Grano had a relatively pleasant time at the Marshalsea, the system shattered numerous families. Even those who returned to their lives and enjoyed commercial success were forever haunted, as was the young Charles Dickens, by their humiliating experience of imprisonment. Read more | Charles Dickens: prison reformer, scourge of capitalists, champion of the poor By the time Dickens wrote Little Dorrit in the 1850s, the economy had changed significantly. Credit had declined as a new reliance on wage labour took many out of the trade world, and the greater availability of coin meant people could actually pay for what they could afford. Most of the prisons closed out of a lack of business long before parliament finally abolished the practice of indefinite imprisonment for debt without trial in 1869. Few lamented their loss. Charles Dickens certainly didn’t. Writing of the closure of the Marshalsea (but maybe, also, of the system as a whole), he declared: “It is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it.” Alexander Wakelam is a research associate at the University of Cambridge and author of Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England: An Economic History of Debtors’ Prisons (Routledge, 2020) This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Pineapples, tulips and follies: 10 status symbols from history
From flowers to follies, Nige Tassell looks at the bizarre array of items that the rich and powerful have used to flaunt their wealth in times gone by
Pineapples It might now be a staple of every supermarket on every high street, but once upon a time, the pineapple was a symbol of exoticism and exclusivity. This was initially down to Charles II, who used pineapples to emphasise his military, political and economic power. In 1668, Britain and France were at loggerheads over control of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. The king entertained the French ambassador over dinner, the highlight of which was a pyramid of fruit, topped by a pineapple. The fruit had only recently appeared on British shores and its inclusion at the dinner was at Charles’s behest. He had ordered that one be imported from the colony of Barbados and proceeded to use it as a visual display of Britain’s global prominence to France and its representative that evening. Charles referred to it as ‘King Pine’. The well-to-do quarters of British society would later replicate the king’s admiration for pineapples and, during the Georgian era, enterprising individuals began to grow the fruit despite Britain’s inclement climate. Those that were successfully cultivated came with a sizeable price tag – in the region of £60, around £11,000 in today’s money. To merely eat such a prized commodity would have been too decadent. Instead, those who owned a pineapple refused to cut into it, preferring to show it off at a succession of social gatherings until it had rotted beyond recognition. Pineapple owners were also known to carry their fruit around as they went about their day to indicate their status, a practice that prompted the arrival of pineapple thieves. Wigs The wearing of eye-catching, status-defining wigs has been a near-constant feature of various societies since classical times. In ancient Egypt, a person’s social class was easily identified by what material was used in the manufacture of the hairpiece. Those from the upper echelons of Egyptian society wore wigs made from human hair, while those worn by lower standing citizens were created from wool or vegetable fibres. Women’s wigs were enhanced by jewellery; the more intricate and/or plentiful the adornments, the higher one’s place on the social hierarchy. Read more | A brief history of changing hairstyles The wearing of wigs became fashionable in western Europe with the dawning of the Renaissance, especially when the prematurely balding French king Louis XIV sought assistance in giving the impression of a full head of hair. The nobility of France followed his example, as did his English cousin Charles II. In Georgian England, particularly during the latter half of the 18th century, wigs became a true signifier of social class. With a common-or-garden wig costing around a week’s wages of the average middle-class Londoner, richer individuals plumped for higher quality hairpieces that could cost as much as £9,000 in today’s money. The term ‘bigwig’ was born. Hand-copied books Before the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, a book was a rarefied object, one of high value both financially and socially. Painstakingly handwritten on parchment, these manuscripts were exclusively the possession of the Church, the wealthier educational establishments or powerful individuals. For the latter, owning one such book offered a level of respect from their peers; owning an entire library of them bestowed an overwhelming degree of social standing. Not only did such a collection signal the depth of one’s wealth, but also – presuming the collector had read them – the extent of their intellect and knowledge. It is perhaps correct that these recreations were prized and coveted. Depending on the length of the text being reproduced, some handwritten books could take beyond 20 years to create. A commission might be near enough the life’s work of a scribe, many of whom were monks hand-copying ancient religious texts. The scribe’s toil was arduous, as the historian Mary Winnifred noted. “It is hard to bend the neck and furrow parchment for twice three hours.” The exclusive nature of book ownership meant that the exchange of ideas and information was as closely guarded as the manuscripts that disappeared under lock and key when no one was around to show them off to. But the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440 precipitated the broadening of book ownership. Although the hand-copied manuscripts retained a high degree of their value, a revolution was underway. By the end of the 15th century, 15 million books had been produced using Gutenberg’s famous invention. Cabinets of curiosities Sometimes, a cabinet of curiosities was just what it sounds like – a piece of furniture, inside of which all manner of small-scale curios were displayed. The grander ones took the form of entire rooms, allowing the exhibition of much larger objects. As Giovanni Aloi, from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, explains, cabinets of curiosities were “the aristocrat’s answer for those who sought to enliven the opulent but dimly lit parties thrown during the Italian Renaissance”. The intellectual inquisitiveness of the cabinet’s owner was on display to their peers. The more exotic the exhibit, the greater the respect that one would achieve. That was the simple equation. The objects contained within such cabinets often drew from natural history, art, religion, archaeology and geology. Wealth enabled the most impressive collections, and it was thus unsurprising that monarchs across Europe boasted the most eye-catching curios. One of England’s most prominent cabinet owners was Elias Ashmole, whose huge collection of botanic and alchemic objects led to the establishment of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 1683. The Ashmolean precipitated the demise of cabinets of curiosities, enabling the general public to observe the fascinating holdings, not just those attending high-society social functions. Sugar Sugar first arrived in Europe from the Middle East during the Middle Ages and very rapidly became a highly prized substance. Expensive to cultivate due to labour and transportation costs, it was only really available to those in the higher strata of European society. Aided by its supposedly medicinal properties, sugar was in high demand and the wealthy commissioned confectioners to create fabulous concoctions over which party-going nobility could marvel. Even when large-scale sugar plantations were established in the colonial West Indies, the price of sugar largely held steady and so remained unaffordable to those lower down the social spectrum – at least initially. The wealthy simply accumulated more, the act of which helped maintain social standing. Indeed, chronic tooth decay was welcomed as a sign of substantial, and therefore supposedly admirable, sugar consumption. Read more | Success, sugar and slaves: the uncomfortable story of slaveholder Simon Taylor Follies Follies – those ornamental structures designed to appear like buildings but which have little or no practical use – were de rigueur among the land-owning classes of western Europe from the late 16th century onwards, right into the Victorian era and beyond. The only real purpose they served was to showcase the wealth of those who had commissioned them, along with displaying their taste and artistic sense – or otherwise. Read more | Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain A famous example of such a folly is the Needle’s Eye, an archway in the shape of a pyramid that stands in the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire. Legend has it that its construction was due to an alcohol-fuelled bet accepted by the estate’s owner, the Marquis of Rockingham, in the mid-18th century. Having drunkenly announced he could drive a carriage through the eye of a needle, he promptly ordered the construction of this 14-metre-high structure with a sufficiently wide archway. It was a great expense to make to win an ill-conceived bet. Of course, the word ‘folly’ suggests a foolish idea without worth or purpose. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “an ill-conceived, extravagant building or residence which often proves too costly to finish building or is otherwise ridiculed”. The Marquis of Rockingham was one such builder. Tulips The tulip embodied stature long before its introduction to western Europe in the 16th century. The flower’s origins are located in the Middle East and it was first cultivated in Persia around the turn of the 11th century. In the Ottoman empire, sultans placed a tulip in their turbans as a symbol of prestige. Indeed, it was this practice, along with the general shape of the flower, that led to its name: ‘tulipan’ was a common Turkish pronunciation of ‘turban’. Although not merely the preserve of powerful sultans, the tulip was nonetheless revered during the Ottoman era and anyone found guilty of selling tulips beyond the city limits of Constantinople could be sent into exile. However, this did not prevent their passage to Europe, and in the late 16th century, some tulip bulbs made their way into the hands of the head gardener at the Austrian emperor’s residence in Vienna. This horticulturalist, Carolus Clusius, not only began to cultivate the flower, but also wrote an influential book about it, thus spreading intrigue and interest in tulips. Clusius would later take up a prestigious post at a Dutch university and thereafter the United Provinces (later known as the Netherlands) became synonymous with the flower. ‘Tulipmania’ broke out in Amsterdam in the mid-1630s when, fuelled by French enthusiasm for rare bulbs, prices skyrocketed. Demand for such a recognisable status symbol was so strong that a single bulb could change hands for more than the price of a townhouse on the banks of one of Amsterdam’s canals. Cacao beans Used as currency in Meso-American culture around 1000 BC, cacao beans were first brought to Europe at the beginning of the 16th century and used to make drinking chocolate. Although the beverage was enjoyed across the classes in Aztec and Maya society, in Europe it was the exclusive preserve of the elite, with the middle classes preferring coffee and the poor classes still largely drinking alcohol. In the 17th century, Louis XIV helped popularise drinking chocolate within the French court and, over time, it became the beverage of choice for the aspirant bourgeoisie seeking higher status in society. However, this growing appeal – along with the introduction of cacao trees in the West Indies and West Africa – meant chocolate gradually lost its position as the exclusive refreshment of the aristocracy. Board games Nowadays, every house has a plentiful supply of board games, usually fashioned cheaply from plastic and cardboard. It wasn’t always thus. In ancient Egypt and the Middle East, the ownership of board games – particularly those constructed from the finest materials – could signify a person’s importance in that society. They were also offered as gifts, either to influence those in power or as part of royal burials. Read more about board games from ancient history During her lifetime, Queen Nefertari of Egypt owned a highly decorative version of the board game Senet, while another game, named the Royal Game of Ur in the 20th century after its discovery in southern Iraq, was another popular pastime. Not dissimilar to backgammon, five Royal Game of Ur boards were excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s. The most elaborate example, one that clearly belonged to someone of high ranking, was decorated with shells, red limestone and the blue rock known as lapis lazuli. The colour purple Purple has been a colour denoting wealth, prestige and importance since antiquity. In both ancient Greece and Egypt, clothing dyed this shade was the preserve of emperors and kings. The more purple items that you owned and wore, the higher your position in society. The Roman empire had strict laws over how the colour could be worn and by whom. In 40 AD, the erratic emperor Caligula ordered the assassination of King Ptolemy of Mauretania, a move many believe to have been provoked by Ptolemy’s wearing of a purple cloak, which Caligula interpreted as a threat to his rule. The Romans also used purple in some of their important buildings and statues, thanks to the colour of the igneous rock called imperial porphyry. Read more | Monarchy timeline: from Hastings to the Windsors in 122 moments Since then, purple has continued to be regarded as a signifier of high standing because of its rarity; it was largely only harvested from the glands of sea snails. Its exclusivity declined from the mid-19th century onwards, thanks to the work of a teenage chemist named William Henry Perkin. While attempting to discover a cure for malaria, the Englishman inadvertently created a synthetic version of purple – called mauveine – which was then widely used as a clothing dye. Purple no longer belonged just to the elite. Nige Tassell is a journalist specialising in history This article first appeared in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
Every venture the American business magnate undertook was big – from his blockbuster movies to the planes he constructed. But how did Hughes go from rubbing shoulders with the stars to living a life of seclusion?
With the death of his father in 1924 and just two years after his mother’s passing, Howard Robard Hughes Jr took over a million-dollar business at barely 18 years old. He was studying engineering and not overly enthused to run a company manufacturing drill bits for the oil industry. But he was keen to make the most of his fortune and freedom. Buying out his relatives’ shares and putting savvy businessman Noah Dietrich in charge of day-to-day dealings, the young Hughes set off to pursue his passions: movies and planes. In 1925, he moved with his new wife Ella Botts Rice from his home state of Texas to be a filmmaker in Hollywood. Since money was no object, he immediately delivered a string of hits as a producer, including the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, before starting work on Hell’s Angels, a World War I epic featuring a huge fleet of aircraft in stunning dogfighting sequences. An aerial obsession It would be his magnum opus, albeit a troubled one. A compulsive need for perfection over every miniscule detail cost him over $3m and three years on production, while the dangerous aerial stunts cost several lives. When finally released in 1930, the movie had been re-shot from a silent to a talking picture; the leading lady replaced; and two directors had given up, with Hughes himself taking the reins. Still, it was a blockbuster smash. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/GettyImages515171538-89f9d7f-e1669283213560.jpg" width="411" height="619" alt="Hughes's first wife, Ella Botts Rice, divorced Howard after becoming increasingly tired of his playboy lifestyle (Picture by GettyImages)" title="Hughes's first wife, Ella Botts Rice, divorced Howard after becoming increasingly tired of his playboy lifestyle (Picture by GettyImages)" /> From a shy loner as a child struggling with partial deafness, Hughes became the talk of Hollywood, famed as an opulent spender – not content with one suit or car, he would buy dozens at once – and a playboy. Ella had grown weary of being ignored and filed for divorce by now. Among the myriad movie stars that he dated were Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, and he proposed to Joan Fontaine. His later movies made headline-grabbing news too, such as when Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1943) ran afoul of the censors for violence and women’s revealing outfits respectively. Simultaneously, Hughes was making his name as an aviator. Despite crashing on the set of Hell’s Angels performing a manoeuvre deemed, rightly, too risky by the stuntmen, he had a deep love of the thrill and solitude of being airborne. In 1932, he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company and set about creating and meticulously refining planes. Soon, he was breaking speed records in his H-1 Racer and, in 1938, circling the world in a new quickest time of 91 hours and 14 minutes. Read more | 13 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars Priorities changed during World War II as Hughes turned his full attention to his lucrative military contracts, but that was when his impossibly high and eccentric standards became a problem. None of the projects, including the XF-11 reconnaissance plane and H-4 Hercules, were finished by the time war was over. He also badly crashed during a couple of test flights, one resulting in broken bones, a collapsed lung and burns. To cover a scar on his lip, he started growing a moustache. Hughes kept working, fixatedly needing to complete the Hercules: a giant flying boat with eight engines and a 98-metre wingspan capable of carrying more than 750 troops or tonnes of equipment. Nicknamed the Spruce Goose as it was made of wood, it took so long that Hughes ended up being called before a Senate committee over misusing government funds. The surest way to silence his detractors was to fly it, which he did – only once, and covering just a mile – on 2 November 1947. Crashing down to earth The high-flying, fabulously wealthy business tycoon is half the Howard Hughes story. The other half relates to his mental state: his severe germaphobia and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). His behaviours had long been dismissed as eccentricities, such as washing his hands until they bled and burning his clothes if he had been near someone ill. Once, he locked himself in a darkened room for four months, sitting naked on a chair watching movies and keeping his urine in jars. But they worsened until, in 1950, he went into complete seclusion. There he stayed for his last 26 years. His businesses kept operating – he even established a new one, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – and he kept getting richer. He could still spot an opportunity too: when asked to leave the penthouse he was holed up in at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, he responded by buying the hotel, followed by huge swathes of land around the city that he developed. By the end, however, he cut a drastically different figure: emaciated, addicted to the painkillers he took for the injuries from his crashes, going days without sleep and rarely bathing, and sporting a wiry beard, curling fingernails and tissue boxes on his feet. Hughes died of kidney failure on 5 April 1976, aged 70, while travelling on board a plane to receive medical treatment in Texas. Without a valid will (inevitably, several forgeries and fakes were put forward), it took years to resolve his billion-dollar fortune. This article first features in the December 2022 edition of BBC History Revealed
The South Sea Bubble: when was it formed and what happened?
When was the South Sea Bubble formed, and how successful was it? Jonny Wilkes explains the history...
What was the South Sea Bubble? The South Sea Bubble was a period of speculation frenzy and collapse on the British stock market, revolving around the fate of a single company. For years, the South Sea Company had been at the centre of a complex and tangled web of financial manoeuvrings; deliberately obfuscated dealings around selling shares and government debt; the exploitation of publicity and hype to inflate stock prices; as well as bribery, corruption and the slave trade. It worked for a while and stock prices skyrocketed in 1720, until the bubble burst. Investors were ruined and an inquiry had to be held. While the South Sea Bubble went down in history as the cause of a total financial crash, that wasn’t actually the case: it certainly had its losers, but it had its winners, too. What was the state of Britain's finances before the Bubble? The Bank of England formed 26 years earlier had grown into a powerful institution as the sole lender to the government. It was, however, controlled by one of the two main political parties, the Whigs, so when Robert Harley became the new Tory chancellor of the Exchequer in 1710, he looked for other means of making money. With Britain engaged in expensive wars and the government debt at around £9m, funds were preciously needed. Harley gave the job of organising the Bank of England’s lotteries to John Blunt, the less-than scrupulous director of an unofficial bank (and sword manufacturer) called the Hollow Sword Blades Company. While the ironically named Blunt had great success selling lottery tickets, the two men devised a grander scheme to make serious money. That’s where the South Sea Company came in. So, what was the South Sea Company? It formed in 1711 with the purpose of consolidating the government’s debt. In return for taking on and paying off this debt, the company would be granted a monopoly on trade between Britain and Spain (particularly the sale of slaves) in the ‘South Seas’ around South America. This idea had a major problem, though: Britain was at war with Spain and in no position to dictate the trade there, unless favourable terms were reached in peace talks. How successful did the company get? The Peace of Utrecht – a series of treaties signed between 1713 and 1715 – did indeed grant the South Sea Company a monopoly, or Asiento de Negros, for 4,800 enslaved people a year, but the Spanish put a tax on the ‘cargo’ and permitted only one ship at each port annually for other goods. The company ultimately transported tens of thousands of slaves, helped by the Royal African Company and Royal Navy protection. Yet the restrictions meant profits would never be enough to resolve the debt. Read more | ‘Show me the money!’ A brief history of American spending power Instead, what proved more lucrative was getting investors enthused. From its headquarters on Threadneedle Street in London, the company launched a propaganda campaign to sell shares: promising riches and marketing the business as a patriotic venture. Success for the South Sea Company would be a success for Britain. By 1718, nobles, politicians and celebrities, like author Jonathan Swift and scientist Isaac Newton, had invested, and George I had been appointed as governor. How did the sale of shares work? It was a cunning, if convoluted, scheme: the company encouraged all the individual people who held an ‘instrument of debt’ (essentially, an IOU from the government) to swap them for shares. In other words, swapping the hope of getting paid back by the government for the promise of getting payouts from the company’s profits. Every year, investors would also receive a dividend. But that didn’t mean the company was out of pocket since the government paid interest on the total debt taken on, set at a high six per cent. Simply, the point was to keep the share value going up – and the more shares sold, the higher it got. To that end, the company introduced several other reckless, legally questionable methods, including lending people its own money so they would buy shares. In terms of the stock market, this created the illusion that share demand was high, which inflated the value. And if people made personal fortunes by exploiting the market or politicians had to be bribed to ensure their support, so be it. How high did the share value reach? Converting debt into shares was working so well that the South Sea Company hatched an audacious plan to take on most of the unconsolidated national debt, which stood at over £30m. If successful, it would become the biggest financial institution in Britain. Never mind that its actual profits from the slave trade were nowhere near strong enough to justify this. This set off a massive boom in the stock price, from £128 per share to over £1,000 in August. Is that when South Sea Bubble burst? Other businesses tried to get in on the act, which resulted in a flurry of speculative and unwise investments. The Bubble Act of June 1720 put a stop to this, and essentially removed all competition to the South Sea juggernaut, but this didn’t last long. By September, the market collapsed and company shares plummeted to £124 by the end of the year. What was the fallout? Thousands of investors were ruined and the resulting parliamentary investigation revealed widespread corruption. The Bank of England stepped in as company directors were disgraced and had assets seized; government members were impeached; and the chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. As for Blunt, who had been made a baronet earlier that year, he had cashed out before the collapse. Read more | The 2008 financial crisis explained It was one of the first economic bubbles known to the general public – and came at the same time as another one in France – so was pounced on by satirists, writers and artists, including the famous William Hogarth. It also inspired a crusade by politician Robert Walpole to restore faith in the financial system. Despite being a South Sea investor himself, he made stern examples of a handful of those implicated, while ensuring others (his friends and the king, say) were left alone. In fact, Walpole did such a thorough job that he grew into power and popularity to become the first de facto prime minister of Britain. This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
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