The brine that flows over the salt rock of Cheshire is a saturated solution—one quarter salt—and so it is incapable of absorbing any more. But as brine was removed, fresh groundwater took its place, and this water would absorb salt until the brine was once again one-fourth salt. The problem was that if large quantities of brine were removed, they were replaced with large quantities of freshwater that hungrily absorbed considerable amounts of salt. Once that started happening, the freshwater began eroding the natural salt pillars that supported the space between the salt rock and the surface. When a pillar collapsed, the earth above it sank.
But even in the nineteenth century, when this process was understood, it was difficult to know whom to blame. The area around a saltworks might remain solid even though the brine it was pumping was causing the earth to collapse four miles away. Two or three other saltworks, though closer to the hole than the culprit, might have caused no damage at all.
Identifying the culprit was an important legal issue, since hundreds of people, many of them not in the salt industry, had lost their property and were demanding compensation. Unable to name a defendant, they could not pursue a legal action. Could they charge the salt industry in general? Citizens formed committees and went to Parliament proposing a bill that compensated victims for the damages caused by the salt industry. Property owners, citing a long-standing principle of British law that the owner of land owned the subsoil, claimed that not only was their property being destroyed, but they were being robbed of the rock salt that they owned. The brine pumpers were sucking up their rock salt from under their own sinking property.
The salt producers argued, with typical nineteenth-century capitalist confidence, that the locals were already being compensated by the economic benefits of having the salt industry. They denied that the subsidence was caused by pumping, insisting that the sinkholes were a natural phenomenon that would continue even without pumping. These arguments prevailed, and, in 1880, the bill was defeated.
IN 1887, A group of London financiers raised £4 million to buy up saltworks for a company called the Salt Union Limited. The company, founded by seven entrepreneurs without prior connections to the salt industry, wanted to buy up all British salt production and become the largest industrial company in England. Both the London Times and the Economist warned that such a giant could not maintain a monopoly on an industry whose raw material was so common and initial investment requirements so modest.
In Cheshire, with its long tradition of individualists and small private operators, many were angered at the sight of a corporate giant buying out local salt makers one by one. But industry leaders felt that the Salt Union was a workable solution to a sector that had too many participants. The rate of brine pumping spurred by this competition was in danger of literally sinking them all. The low salt prices of the late 1880s gave a further incentive to selling out.
Sixty-five salt producers sold out to the Salt Union. They were not only from Cheshire but from neighboring Staffordshire, Worcestershire, northeastern England, and Northern Ireland. The Salt Union had cornered 85 percent of British salt production. But most analysts believed that it had greatly overpaid to acquire these companies.
Nevertheless, the company was highly profitable its first few years, before going into a steep decline. Not until 1920 did profits again reach the level of 1890.
In 1891, when the Cheshire Salt Districts Compensation Bill again came before Parliament, the Salt Union used the arguments that the independent salt producers had used a decade earlier: that the people were being compensated by the economic benefits of having a salt industry and that the sinking was a natural phenomenon that would have occurred without saltworks. But now the Salt Union provided a target, a single entity that was clearly responsible—a defendant. The local citizenry spent a fortune promoting the bill, and both the Salt Union and its shareholders spent a fortune fighting it. It passed, though, and within ten years the Salt Union itself was applying for damages, saying its properties had suffered subsidence from the pumping of others.
In the long run, the Compensation Act probably helped the Salt Union. It created the Cheshire Brine Subsidence Compensation Board, which was financed by a flat tax on salt producers. The cost of the tax was onerous for small operations and insignificant for large ones. The small-scale producers regarded the Brine Board, as it was known, as another attempt by big salt to drive them out.
The Brine Board established a building code that had to be followed for new buildings to be eligible for compensation. The collapsing towns were rebuilt in the old Tudor style, with each new house resting on a timber frame that had built-in anchors for the placement of hydraulic jacks powerful enough to lift sinking buildings. An eighteen-inch lift looking like a canister was capable of hoisting fifty tons. It was the same technology that had been used to lift salt barges at the Anderton boat lift.
ENGLAND IS SOMETIMES thought of as a land of eccentrics who stubbornly cling to quaint and hopelessly outmoded ways, but it is also the land of entrepreneurs who created the Industrial Age. British industrialists built powerful companies, such as the Salt Union, that were the forerunners of today’s multinational giants. In Cheshire, these two kinds of Englishmen were represented by the Thompsons and the Stubbses.
Both families have long histories in Cheshire salt. A 1710 map marks “John Stubbs salt pit,” though today’s Stubbses do not know exactly who John was. Some Stubbses were dreamers. It was a Cheshire Stubbs who built a plantation in the Turks and Caicos Islands. But in the nineteenth century, the Stubbses joined the Industrial Age and sent their sons to school to study engineering.
The Thompsons were cursed with longevity. So while the Stubbses’ family operations were run by well-educated young engineers schooled in new technologies, the Thompsons’ family salt business was often run by octogenarian grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
Both families had saltworks near the sinking town of Northwich. Eventually, various members of the Stubbs family had salt-works all over Cheshire. But toward the end of the century, brine works, unable to compete with large companies, were one by one going broke, sinking either financially or literally. In the 1870s, various Stubbs brothers consolidated their operations, and in 1888, they sold out to the Salt Union.
After selling out and taking a seat on the board of directors, some of the brothers opened new saltworks across the county line. Then, in 1923, they bought the New Cheshire Salt Works near Northwich.
The Thompsons were not that different. In 1856, they started the Alliance Salt Works by digging a hole behind the Red Lion Hotel. But they too wanted to remain an independent family operation, and after they sold the Alliance Salt Works to the Salt Union in 1888, they dug a new shaft beside the Red Lion Hotel and called it the Lion Salt Works. New technology had concentrated on finding salt and bringing it to the surface. But once the brine reached the saltworks, little had changed since the time of the Romans. It was still evaporated in lead pans. The pans had gotten larger than the three-by-three-foot Roman ones. The Thompsons had thirty-by-twenty-foot lead pans, heated by coal that was stoked from four furnace doors in the huge coal oven under the pan. Into the nineteenth century, even the pipes for brine were still made from hollowed tree trunks. Except for larger pans and coal being burned instead of wood, most of the process was described in Georgius Agricola’s 1556 work De re metallica, which remained the standard European text on salt making. The work was first translated into English in 1912 by mining engineer and future U.S. president Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover.
Cheshire salt makers had become skilled at making different products for an expanding and varied list of customers. Most of this simply involved adjusting the cooking time. Dairy salt was cooked fast, so that the rapidly moving water would create fine crystals used in butter and cheese. The large grains of solar-heated sea salt were replicated with the slow heating of so-called fourteen-day salt, which was shipped to Grimsby for salting cod. Salt hardened into blocks and then cru
shed was locally called “Lagos salt” because it was shipped to West Africa. Because the West African market bought salt by volume rather than by weight, all the Cheshire companies made a large, lightweight crystal for that market.
But in 1905, James Stubbs went to Michigan to learn about a new “evaporator.” The fundamental concept of a vacuum evaporator is that lower pressure reduces the boiling point of a liquid. A boiler produces steam, which heats a chamber, an evaporator. The steam is then piped into a second evaporator. The second evaporator cannot heat to as high a temperature, but because it is in a vacuum, the pressure is lower and less heat is needed for steam. This steam can then be passed to a third evaporator. And so an entire series of evaporators can be operated on the fuel that was expended to heat the first one. This solves one of the oldest problems in salt brine production, the problem the ancient Chinese solved with gas—the cost of fuel.
Liverpool sugar refiners had been using steam evaporators since 1823, when William Furnical had introduced the use of steam heat in sugar refining. In 1887, the first vacuum pan salt process was put in operation by Joseph Duncan in Silver Springs, New York. The evaporator heated brine to steam and forced it into a tank, where salt crystals formed; once the crystals reached a certain size and weight, they dropped through the bottom. If they were too big, they would be washed back up by the incoming brine; if too small, they would not drop down. For the first time in the long history of salt, a salt was being made in which every crystal was the same size.
The Stubbses’s first vacuum evaporator. New Cheshire Salt Works, Ltd., Northwich
The steam from the first tank was used to heat a second tank and a third tank. Today, up to six or even eight tanks, each evaporating brine, can be fueled by the first evaporating tank.
In the 1930s, the Stubbses finally imported their first salt evaporator to the New Cheshire Salt Works. This magnificent triple-towered machine was art deco in design, with vertical stripes of dark and blond wood and polished brass fittings and gauges. For a while, the Stubbses still had some open pans for larger crystal salt, but in time, the old pans could no longer compete economically with modern evaporators. New, more efficient evaporators were bought in the 1950s and again in the 1990s. The Stubbses, along with the Salt Union, are among only three surviving commercial British salt producers.
Anyone who makes bread in any quantity finds himself getting through a deal of salt. What salt then to use? Since with the exception of the famous Maldon salt from Essex on the east coast—again a luxury—there is now no sea salt extracted from English or Scottish waters, I use Cheshire rock salt sold in 11.2 pound blocks or 2 pound bags or 6 pound clear plastic jars, the latter being the best value and the most convenient. This salt is produced by the old Liverpool firm of Ingram Thompson (mention of “Liverpool salt” occurs quite often in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century cookery books) whose salt works are at Northwich. This firm’s packaging is minimal and their wholesale prices fair, so if you find you are paying too much for rock salt or “crystal” salt it is probably because middlemen have bought it in bulk and are charging retailers more than is fair.
—Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery, 1977
WITH BRINE WORKS closing or sinking all around them, the Thompsons continued in the old ways. They sent salt blocks to Cheshire schools for children to make salt carvings. At Christmastime, workers still dipped branches into brine pans to grow crystals. In the 1960s, they were still employing hand riveters to mend their lead pans and a steam engine to bring up the brine. Then, in the late 1960s, Nigeria, the Thompsons’ principal remaining market, was destroyed by the Biafran war.
Many artisans have been faced with the choice of whether to industrialize or remain a small shop. But at a certain point that choice can be lost. If the operation becomes too unprofitable, it will no longer be able to attract the investment needed to modernize. This was the fate of the Thompsons. They hung on for more than a decade without making money; finally, in 1986, they gave up.
CHESHIRE IS NOW green English countryside. The pastureland is spotted yellow and purple with wildflowers and hedges over which blackberry vines twist. Reedy swan’s paddle grows in the unused canals. It is hard to believe that 100 years ago the sky was black with coal smoke, the horizon filled with a hundred smokestacks, the soil contaminated, arid, barren, and scarred white where the pan scale was dumped.
Local people write to the Thompson works and ask for the old salt, which was packed into wooden tubs and dried into salt blocks. They call it lump salt and say it is better for cooking beans and for curing meat. But there is no more Thompson salt.
The Vale Royal Borough Council bought the site and established a charitable trust, which is trying to make this last of the Northwich brine works a restored museum. It is struggling to get funding because sinkholes surround it. Black-and-white cows lazily nestle into the sinkholes, which are covered with grass and shrubs and delicate white Queen Anne’s lace. But every now and then, a little more subsidence is seen, something else sinks. Many believe that one day the old Thompson brine works will sink too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Salt and the Great Soul
TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA lived under the kind of colonial administration Madison and Jefferson had rejected—the kind that would have made Adams angry. And it did anger a great many Indians. To the British, the Indian economy existed for the enrichment of Great Britain. Industry was for the profit of the English Midlands. Indian salt was to be managed for the benefit of Cheshire.
That the British always saw India as a commercial venture is demonstrated by the fact that when they first gained a foothold on the Asian subcontinent, they placed it in the hands of a private trading company, the Honourable East India Company. Founded in 1600 by a royal charter granted by Elizabeth I, the East India company, though a commercial enterprise, could function as a nation, minting its own money, governing its employees as it saw fit, even raising its own army and navy and declaring war or negotiating peace at will with other nations, providing they were not Christian. The company bought its first Indian property in 1639, a strip of coastline, and by the end of the century was building the city of Calcutta. A series of eighteenth-century battles between the British and the French eventually secured India for the British, who turned most of it over to the British East India Company.
The company established a sophisticated bureaucracy with a large, well-paid civil service. No high-ranking post was ever given to an Indian. By the nineteenth century, more than half of India was governed by the East India Company and the rest by local princes, who served as puppet rulers for the British. In 1857, Indians openly revolted, and the following year, once the British army had put down the rebellion, the British Crown took over most of the local government from the East India Company.
BEFORE THE BRITISH created artificial trade barriers, India had affordable, readily available salt. While it has huge saltless regions, with natural salt fields on both its coasts and huge rock salt deposits and salt lakes in between, India had an ancient tradition of salt making and trading. Although the extensive rock salt deposits in Punjab are unusually pure, strictly religious Hindus have always had a distrust of rock salt and even salt made from boiling. Indians have always preferred solar-evaporated sea salt not only for religious reasons but because it was more accessible. On the west coast, by what is now the Pakistani border, and on the east coast near Calcutta, river estuaries spread out into wetlands and marshes where the sun evaporates seawater, leaving crusts of salt.
On the west coast, in Gujarat, salt has been made for at least 5,000 years in a 9,000-square-mile marshland known as the Rann of Kutch. This marshland is covered by the sea and flooded rivers in the rainy season from August to September; in December, the salty water begins to evaporate with help from dry wintry winds from the north.
On the east coast is a salt-producing area known as Orissa, with a perfect natural sea salt zone along a tract that is 320 miles long and ten to sixty miles
deep. The salt beds, called khalaris, are flooded in two spring tides, which saturate the soil with salt as the water evaporates. Salt made from natural solar evaporation was called kartach. A second salt, panga, was produced by mixing salty soil in seawater and boiling it. The salt was a permanently renewed resource, which rendered this stretch of land not only ideal for salt making but useless for anything else. In Orissa, the poorest of peasants could make salt on the khalari to use or to sell.
The salt makers would clear the field, the khalari, of all vegetation, grass, and roots to a depth of a few inches and then pile the waste in dikes around the edges.
They built sluices to let in saltwater during high tide. Salt was absorbed into the earth and then more saltwater taken in with the spring tides. The additional seawater combined with the salty soil to produce concentrated brine, which they put in oblong pots, about 200 of which were cemented together by mud in a domeshaped kiln. The salt makers placed vents at the north and south ends of each kiln so that fire would be fanned by prevailing breezes. As the brine in the pots evaporated, workers called malangis added more brine, one ladle at a time, until each pot was about three-quarters full of salt crystals. The salt, which dried in piles in the open air and which the malangis then covered with reeds, was noted for its whiteness and was considered by many to be the best salt in India, yet it was also inexpensive.
This panga salt had an eager market in the neighboring provinces to the west, shipped on the River Mahanadi and its tributaries. Merchants came to Orissa to buy salt or barter with products such as cotton, opium, marijuana, and grains, carried by oxcart from central India.
Even the British in Bengal traded in Orissa salt. They needed large quantities of salt for the manufacture of munitions for their eighteenth-century wars with the French, and a significant part of the salt for their gunpowder came from Orissa.
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