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Chapter Two

Not the Land of Science

Sugar Ray Leonard slipped out of his red and black Ferrari Boxer Berlinetta, strode through the front door of Jamesons restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, and made his way to the bar. Leonard always seems to be the handsomest man in the room, especially when someone calls his name and he flashes that dazzling smile, and on this August afternoon he looked as if he had stepped right out of the pages of GQ.

He wore a mauve cardigan, a light mauve shirt with the cuffs folded meticulously over the sweaters’ cuffs, mauve suspenders embroidered with figures of Cupid.

‘I feel great, I really do,’ Leonard said.

Former World Welterweight Boxing Champion Sugar Ray Leonard profiled in Sports Illustrated, 1986

In May 1956, precisely one century after the discovery of mauve, a trades journal entitled The Dyer, Textile Printer, Bleacher and Finisher carried a warning for its subscribers. ‘Readers who have thoughts of making a pilgrimage to Shadwell to see Perkin’s birthplace would be well advised not to delay,’ wrote the journal’s editor Laurence E. Morris. ‘For the site has been scheduled for redevelopment.’ Once the developers moved in there was no stopping them. The site has been the subject of significant municipal improvement three times in the last four decades.

King David Lane, Upper Shadwell, is a short street containing Blue Gate School and an ugly office block, and practically nothing remains from the area in which William Perkin was born on 12 March 1838. Today’s visitor finds that King David Lane has become one-way, built up with islands and bollards and signs. The road connects Cable Street – a string of council estates – to The Highway, a thundering four-lane parade of trucks and speeding Ford Mondeos. Number 3 King David Lane, where Perkin was born at home as the last of seven children, has been demolished. Like much of the East End of London, little looks the way it did before the last war.

The oldest structure is the parish church of St Paul’s, a small building with an incisively tall spire. Built in 1669, the last of five London churches constructed during the Restoration, it has some famous names to its history. John Wesley preached here. Captain James Cook was an active parishioner and baptised his first son here. Jane Randolph, the mother of Thomas Jefferson, was also baptised at the church, as was William Perkin in 1838. There is a little graveyard around the church, but it is impossible to read the gravestones. In the church crypt you will find the Green Gables Montessori School.

Behind the church there is a footpath leading to many converted wharves, where those who live there can have breakfast on little terraces overlooking the Thames. Beneath them are offices for security guards and estate agents. At Shadwell Basin you may go angling and canoeing, and admire the view towards Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome.

Forty years ago, Perkin’s birthplace became A. E. Wolfe, beef and pork butcher. When that went, and the shop and rooms above it were knocked down, another new estate went up. Opposite this stands a council block called Martineau that once used to be 1 King David Fort, the house and stables the Perkins leased when William was in his teens. On one corner of this building there is a round blue plaque affixed by the Stepney Historical Trust: ‘Sir William Henry Perkin, FRS, discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site, and went on to found science-based industry.’ No one you meet who lives here today knows very much about him.

When he was in his twenties, William Perkin went to Leeds on business and found time to visit the house of his late grandfather, Thomas Perkin, born in 1757, of a line of Yorkshire farmers. Thomas became a leather worker, but his grandson was moved to find that he also had a rare hobby. On visiting his house at Black Thornton, near Ingleton, Perkin found a cellar containing what looked to be a laboratory. There was a still and a small smelting furnace, and various jars with grimy burnt mixtures. It was a strange stash to find in this rural community; on asking around, Perkin learnt that his grandfather had been an alchemist, and had attempted to transmute base metal into gold.

Thomas Perkin’s leatherwork led him to London, where he appears to have switched trades to become a carpenter and boat-builder. His only son, George Fowler Perkin, who was born in 1802, also became a carpenter, and a successful one. He employed twelve men, and engaged them exclusively in building the new terraced housing for the local dock workers. By today’s standards, his family would be judged parvenu middle class.

Not long after his birth, William Perkin’s family moved into a larger three-storey house close by, a few yards north of the High Street, a place known as King David Fort. They employed servants, and were one of the wealthiest families in the area. Their house stood out, a neighbourhood talking point. Shadwell, particularly the lower side by the docks, had some of the most wretched and crowded slums in the East End. One visitor in the early nineteenth century noted that ‘thousands of useful tradesmen, artisans and mechanics inhabit, but their homes and workshops will not bear description, nor are the streets, courts, lanes and alleys by any means inviting.’

Victorian writers liked to remark on the extremes of London’s poverty and wealth, virtue and iniquity. When Henry Mayhew viewed the city from a hot-air balloon in the middle of the century he was struck by the presence of mass destitution so close to the great institutions of trade, finance and empire. In Shadwell, the Perkins encountered such extremes on a daily basis. Disease was all around them. William Perkin was to lose both eldest sister and brother to tuberculosis. Their mother Sarah, a woman of Scottish descent who had moved to east London when she was a child, was thought never to have recovered from her losses.

The Perkins grew up opposite the police station, from where they witnessed an endless stream of the drunk and lawless. Much of the police work centred on a pub named Paddy’s Goose, where local seamen sought prostitutes, and the unwary were press-ganged into the Royal Navy.

William Perkin attended the private Arbour Terrace School in Commercial Road, a few hundreds yards from his home. He was a gifted student, with many interests outside the standard curriculum. ‘He showed remarkable dexterity in all kinds of hobbies,’ his nephew Arthur H. Waters recalled. Waters’s mother was about two years older than Perkin. ‘They were fond of taking long rambles together, and William was particularly keen on natural history and botany. On one occasion he produced a large pipe and tobacco and proceeded to puff away manfully. But after a time he became so confoundedly ill that his sister had some difficulty in getting him home. William’s craze for probing into everything, especially small things, seems to show that his wonderful instinct for research was present at a very early age.’

He became interested in photography when he was twelve, and at fourteen he took his own picture: he has a stony look, his broad forehead and strong features framed by dense black hair. He is done up in evening gear, or perhaps his church best, and he looks about twenty.

‘I do not quite know where to begin,’ he wrote to his colleague Heinrich Caro in 1891. ‘But as the circumstances connected with my childhood and youth had, I believe, a good deal to do in influencing me in respect to practical matters, I have ventured to relate a little connected with that period for your private information.’

Caro, from 1869 to 1890 the principal investor at BASF, had written to Perkin a few weeks earlier, explaining that he was preparing the first major history of the dye industry and would like more details about his early life. Perkin wrote that he would help him with the facts as he could remember them, but midway through his reply he had a change of heart. ‘I have now written you out an account of my early days, which I have never done before, and now I have done so feel some hesitation in sending it to you.’ Why this should be so he did not say, but he remained a meek and demure man throughout his life. He said later that he believed only his work was important.

At the beginning he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, though he fancied something artistic, or something practical he could do with his hands. ‘Being interested in what I saw going on around me, I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps,’ he wrote. He built wooden models, among other things of the steam trains he saw passing near his home. He was also drawn to engineering, and liked the illustrations of levers and pulleys he saw in a book called The Artisan. Published in 1828, this contained a popular summary of what was then known about mechanics, optics, magnetism and pneumatics, all of it written with an element of wonder and disbelief that science was moving so rapidly.

But Perkin was being pulled in other ways. ‘I took a great interest in painting,’ he explained, ‘and for a short time had the mad idea that I should like to be an artist.’ There was also music – he learnt the violin and double bass, and he and his brother and two sisters entertained thoughts of becoming a travelling quartet. But just before his thirteenth birthday a friend showed him some elementary experiments with crystals that he regarded as ‘quite marvellous’.

‘I saw chemistry was something far higher than any other subject that had come before me,’ he remembered. ‘I thought that if I could be articled to a pharmacist I should be happy.’

In another telling of the story, Perkin again flattened the drama. ‘The possibility also of making new discoveries impressed me very much. I determined if possible to accumulate bottles of chemicals and make experiments.’

When he was thirteen he joined 600 other boys at the City of London School in a narrow street by Cheapside, not far from St Paul’s. It was a strict institution with painful punishments for misbehaviour, but its educational outlook was progressive. On his arrival, Perkin was delighted to learn that it was one of the few schools in the country to offer lessons in chemistry, a subject believed to have little practical use (and certainly less than Latin or Greek). The course was taught twice a week in the lunch-hour by a writing master called Thomas Hall, and Perkin persuaded his father to pay an extra seven shillings each term for the privilege. He skipped lunch to attend. ‘Thomas Hall noticed that I took a great interest in the lectures, and made me one of his helpers to prepare his lecture experiments. This was a wonderful lift for me . . . to work in the dismal place that was called a laboratory in that school.’

Hall suggested that Perkin might like to conduct some of the safer experiments at home, and helped him buy some glassware. Perkin’s father again agreed to pay for his son’s enthusiasms, although he made it clear he wished him to become an architect. Chemistry was fascinating, but there was no money in it.

Outside school, Perkin attended chemistry talks given by Henry Letheby at the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and both Letheby and Thomas Hall suggested to Perkin that he write to their friend Michael Faraday requesting permission to attend his monumental lectures at the Royal Institution. Faraday replied in his own hand, an act that delighted Perkin greatly, and so it was that on Saturday afternoons a fourteen-year-old boy found himself the youngest spectator of the latest developments in the peculiar science of electricity.

A few years before, the leading German scientist Justus Liebig had had some damning news for the delegates to the British Association meeting in Liverpool in 1837. ‘England is not the land of science,’ he declared. ‘There is only widespread dilettantism, their chemists are ashamed to be known by that name because it has been assumed by the apothecaries, who are despised.’

In contrast, Liebig’s teaching laboratory at the University of Giessen was the envy of all experimental chemists, and men travelled hundreds of miles to engage in what their own countries believed to be an unrewarding pursuit. There were chairs in chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge, but the idea that the subject should be taught and learnt in the laboratory was unheard of; students were merely taught chemical history as part of a wider science course. At the University of Glasgow, a man named Thomas Thomson was probably the first to open up his laboratory to his students for practical instruction, and Thomas Graham, singled out by Liebig as a rare example of a forward-looking scientist, did the same at the city’s Andersonian Institution in 1830. At the time of Perkin’s birth there was no college anywhere in the country dedicated to the study of chemistry.

Liebig was an inspirational speaker, and it was his British lecture tour in the early 1840s which convinced men of influence that London needed a specialist chemical school (Liebig met the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, who expressed personal interest due to his family’s involvement in calico printing). There were plans to establish the Davy College of Practical Chemistry within the Royal Institution, but when these foundered, Sir James Clark, the Queen’s physician, Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort, for years a keen sponsor of scientific research, established a private subscription to finance the Royal College of Chemistry, raising some £5,000, and counting both Peel and Gladstone among its contributors.

The College opened temporary laboratories just off Hanover Square in 1845, and moved a year later to a permanent site at the south side of Oxford Street. The building was soon full with twenty-six students, and its size dictated that lectures be held at the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street. It was here that Perkin’s teacher Thomas Hall first came to hear the young director of the college, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.

Hofmann was born in Giessen in 1818, and first studied mathematics and physics before taking chemistry with Liebig. His appointment at the Royal College was widely favoured by Prince Albert, not least because he believed that Hofmann would make advances directly beneficial to agriculture. And there was another reason: in the summer of 1845, the Queen and Prince Albert visited Bonn for the unveiling of the monument to Beethoven. Queen Victoria noted the occasion in her diary, and recorded what happened afterwards. ‘We drove with the King and Queen [of Prussia] to Albert’s former little house. It was such a pleasure for me to be able to see this house. We went all over it, and it is just as it was . . .’ The lack of alteration was down to August Hofmann, who now lived there and occasionally conducted small chemical experiments in one of the rooms.

Thomas Hall believed that Perkin should enrol at the Royal College at fifteen, but there was severe opposition from Perkin’s father. Why couldn’t William be more like his older brother Thomas? Thomas was training to be an architect. ‘My father was disappointed,’ Perkin recorded years later. But Hall persuaded his father to meet Hofmann, who may have beguiled him with the exotic possibilities of benzene and aniline.

‘He had several interviews with my father,’ Perkin noted. ‘And the end of it was that I went to study chemistry under Dr Hofmann.’

That was in 1853. Within five years, Perkin had made his fortune.