And then there were less expected results, including a show of begrudging respect towards the industry from those who had previously only ridiculed the discovery of mauve. Punch appeared to do a complete about-turn, although there was hyperbole in its comic verse:
There’s hardly a thing that a man can name
Of use or beauty in life’s small game
But you can extract in alembic or jar
From the ‘physical basis’ of black coal-tar –
Oil and ointment, and wax and wine,
And the lovely colours called aniline;
You can make anything from a salve to a star,
If you only know how, from black coal-tar.
More important, perhaps, was the impact that the success of the dye trades had on the recruitment of young chemists. Ten years after Perkin’s discovery of mauve, organic chemistry was perceived as being exciting, profitable and of great practical use. Perkin and Sons employed the talented chemist Charles Greville Williams (later to make his name in the field of hydrocarbons and secure four new colour patents of his own), and many others attached themselves to the huge dye works springing up throughout Europe. In Britain, it appeared that about two-thirds of former pupils of the Royal College of Chemistry later worked for dye firms such as Simpson, Maule and Nicholson, or Brooke, Simpson and Spiller, or Read, Holliday and Sons, and most of these were later honoured with fellowships of the Royal Society. There had been no finer example of the mutually beneficial relationship between science and industry, and these new minds would soon unlock the structures of a great many other carbon compounds with direct benefits for medicine, perfumery and photography.
What the young chemists had not expected from the dye trade was an education in litigation, but many soon found themselves embroiled in bitter disputes over patents. This was bound to happen. All aniline dye companies soon found that they would make most money by imitating the most popular new tints.
The problem for the courts was that the colours often looked exactly the same; the more skilled the dyers in copying a patented recipe, the harder to distinguish between, say, six shades of blue. There was no colour chart to which experts could refer and make distinctions, and molecular analysis was still in its most primitive form. In addition, there were interminable disputes over process – the extent to which the same shade, derived from a slightly different method of manufacture, contravened an existing patent.
The hottest arguments inevitably concerned the colours in greatest demand. In the early 1860s this meant magenta. The most prominent lawsuits came from Lyons, where Renard Frères & Franc sought to protect their fuchsine by successfully suing companies in Mulhouse and Paris. These cases outraged Renard’s rivals, and in 1861 over 100 Lyons firms petitioned the French Minister of Agriculture and Commerce to establish an independent commission to resolve the claims surrounding fuchsine and other aniline dyes.
They obtained little satisfaction, for at the end of 1863 Renard Frères & Franc entered into an alliance with Crédit Lyonnais to set up La Fuchsine, a huge monopolistic alliance formed out of multiple mergers with several leading dye companies. This alliance forged close links with Simpson, Maule and Nicholson in London, which, in return for a licence to manufacture magenta, granted the French company licences for Hofmann’s violets. La Fuchsine was also grateful to August Hofmann for another reason: it was his expert testimony which influenced the French courts to uphold its claims of patent infringement.
La Fuchsine ended in failure a decade later, not least because of poor management and several claims that its arsenic acid process was poisoning the locals. In one case, the wife of a signalman died very close to one of its factories, and a post-mortem established the presence of arsenic in her organs. The same type of arsenic was detected in the well from which she drew her drinking water, and in all the wells and subsoil within 200 yards of the fuchsine factory. The company paid out to her family, and, following public protests, production of the red dye ceased.
In England, many of the earliest disputes concerned attempts by Henry Medlock and Simpson, Maule and Nicholson to protect the very same arsenic acid oxidation process for magenta that had caused such concern in Lyons. Some £30,000 had been spent defending the process, as the London company actively sought out offenders. Two big cases occupied the London High Court for several months, and both centred on the precise interpretation of the term ‘dry’ arsenic acid. At one, the judge told the jury that he was relieved that they, and not he, had to decide on the case, such had been the bewildering and conflicting array of expert evidence. In both cases the patent was upheld. One losing party was obliged not only to pay Simpson, Maule and Nicholson damages and costs, but also to take out a series of public apologies in The Times.
William Perkin’s patent wars were recorded in a trade journal, Chemical News. This reported the successful battles against British and French firms who were marketing imported aniline purple or making their own Britannia violets or Perkin’s green by a similar process. These companies were fined several hundred pounds, and also forced to make humiliating apologies. But Perkin observed that he could have spent his entire career in the courts, such was the money to be made from synthetic dyes. In 1865 the gross profit made by Perkin and Sons stood at about £15,000, even though the price of dyestuffs was by then falling sharply.
In his last years, Perkin would speak out against the inadequate system of legal protection of his work. At the time, he noted the increased number of overseas visitors to his factory, particularly Frenchmen, and the growing amount of German and Polish-born chemists employed at various British dye firms. In Manchester, Roberts, Dale and Co. employed the calico printer Heinrich Caro, who made important technical advances, and Carl Alexander Martius, who patented Manchester Brown and his own brand of aniline yellow. A man called Otto Witt made new dyes at a firm in Brentford, north of London. Peter Griess, employed as a brewer in Burton-on-Trent, developed an important new family of colours, the azo dyes. And Ivan Levinstein set up his own dyemaking company in Salford, and made blues and oranges.*
With the exception of Levinstein, all the chemists would return home with their knowledge, and they would make their fortunes (Martius was co-founder of the predecessor of the dye company AGFA). But none would be as missed as August Hofmann. His departure in 1865 was believed to have been inevitable ever since his main sponsor Prince Albert had died four years before; from Germany, Hofmann would speak of the loss of financial support and lack of encouragement for his teaching. He criticised the British government for failing to grasp the importance of chemistry both as a pure science and as a means to further industrial advance. His forecasts from the International Exhibition of 1862 he now saw as being rather optimistic. He was lured back to Berlin by the promise of a lucrative research post and large laboratories that he could design himself. It was with much genuine disappointment that he noted that England had no such ambitions. Hofmann was given three years of absence from the Royal College to pursue his career in Berlin, but he never returned.†
For William Perkin, too, it was a time of farewells and sad departures. His father died in 1864, and the factory he had financed closed for several days as a mark of respect. Perkin grieved alone, for his wife had also died of tuberculosis a few years before.
Dear Dr Hofmann,
I have received the Queen’s commands to express to you the great pleasure which Herself and the Royal Family derived from the very interesting and clear lectures on chemistry, and the beautiful experiments by which they were illustrated, delivered in Windsor Castle last week.
Her Majesty also admired the numerous beautiful specimens of richly coloured silks and wools, the results of the recently discovered aniline dyes, and perceives clearly the great advantage to the material interests of this country which must result from the discovery of these beautiful colours, and it gave her great pleasure to learn that they originated in researches conducted in the Royal College of Chemistry, in which his late Royal Highness
the Prince Consort took so much interest …
Within a fecterial interests’ mentioned in the letter would have fled with its recipient to Germany.
He may have taken some comfort from the fact that mauve had transformed itself from the colour of frivolity and display to the colour of mourning. Before her marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1863, Princess Alexandra made a grand entrance into London in a half-mourning dress of pale mauve poplin, and Queen Victoria would graduate from black to mauve within four years of losing her darling Albert.
By 1869, however, mauve was all but forgotten. Its replacement – another great new colour, another rage throughout Europe – rejuvenated the fortunes of the British dye trade. William Perkin was again responsible for its manufacture, but its success would lead to his acrimonious departure from the industry and a promise never to return.
*
‘You can tell when a colour is taking off. You can spot it all over the place. You watch what people do when they shop, and what catches their eye first is usually the colour. Then they feel it, and if it still works for them they might try it on. There has to be a little bit of theatre, and some pleasure.’
Sandy MacLennan was back from his trip to Manhattan. In his East Central Studios in Shoreditch, east London, he was already thinking about Fall/Winter 2001, about the way he may edge us towards burnished neutrals or colours at the edge of sleep.
MacLennan, forty-seven, from the west coast of Scotland, did not always think of colours in this manner; once he thought such talk was absurd.
‘There is only a small community that regards colour in this way,’ he concedes. ‘The design community don’t need a guide book to get through this … we see colour as a catalyst for new ideas. It’s the beginning point in any cycle.’
He says that each season’s new colour forecasts begin with looking at the last – he’s not simply dropping in on a season and inventing it. ‘Then you look at the things that need to be there – the things that people will wear. You watch everything, talk to people, you see what people are wearing and what’s selling. Then you build up this balanced offer.’
He knows that people wonder about his unique vocabulary. For Spring/Summer 2001 we will be Dreaming, Idling, Exploring and Flirting, and more specifically touching new surfaces and being softly greened with bone-dry basics. Blues, greens, organic ochres and crimsons.
This palette is again for Tencel. ‘You want to try and sex it up in a way that is completely relevant for that product,’ MacLennan says. ‘You wouldn’t want to use words that were all to do with transparency or glass or plastic, because that’s another world, and Tencel is a very natural world.’
When he presents his new colours to a company (MacLennan also forecasts and designs for DuPont, British Home Stores, Nordstrom and Liberty), he never suggests that they have to do it all. ‘We simply try to talk about colour in an emotional way. Like the way people describe wines – in terms of what it evokes – what emotions, what memories, what aspirations.’
MacLennan selects one of his colour brochures. ‘It’s not easy to say which colours are going to be the ones – but it won’t be that [pointing to yellow] because yellow is a terribly difficult colour to sell. But that lime-green and this orange thing is still going strong – that’s three years it’s been going. Over winter, consumers forget about these colours, forget that they enjoyed this colour on the beach, and so when spring comes round they find it charming again.’
In the winter of 1999, MacLennan detected a liking for a family of colours including purple and grape and blood-reds. The other trend over the last few years has been the growth of green. ‘For the longest time people thought of green as German – oh, we don’t wear green, green is difficult and always a problem. But six years ago there was a change in people’s perceptions. Blue took a bit of a back seat, coinciding with people deserting denim. The tones tend to go clearer and more acidic in the summer, and richer and heavier in the winter.
‘Mauve will be forever associated with the seventies – Biba and all that. It enters the psyche in a sensual way, and is often perceived as decadent or forbidden. Doesn’t suit everyone. People often buy it in error and then are alienated from it for good. In the family of purples, I always think of mauve as something lighter, greyer, softer than all its friends. Culturally it can be quite awkward globally. People in Japan won’t wear it because they associate it exclusively with royalty. You can’t use it as a fashion statement very easily over there. And there’s that whole cardinal thing as well. When it does arrive, it comes and goes quite quickly. Mauve tends to swamp the things it comes into – if you add it to other colours it just tends to go mauve, rather than a gentle mix. I think it has a mythical feel. We’re moving on to describe colours by smell, and I think mauve would be incense, probably patchouli oil or a smoky, holy, churchy smell.’
Sandy MacLennan is aware that 70 to 90 per cent of all sales are always black, all the year round. Followed by grey and navy. But he doesn’t find this soul-destroying. For him, the key is to pick upon the things that are going to be the other 10 per cent.
‘I think we’re used by companies to give them an edge. There’s too much fibre in the world, and therefore potentially too much fabric. There’s too much product being made, and the choice for the consumer is so big. Even the slightest edge can make a big difference. The luxury garments – luxury wool or silk – will always sell itself, but how do you sell the crap? There is always going to be too much crap around, so the companies that sell it have got to be quite busy with their marketing and understanding of what people want. Years ago it was very different. In the nineteenth century, people made something and you sold it.’
* Griess was particularly useful to a Burton firm of brewers because he had helped them discover an important ingredient that imparted a desirably bitter taste to beer and for years had given an advantage to London brewers. The ingredient was picric acid, the yellow wool dye.
† Before he left for Berlin, Hofmann received a cheering letter from Jaz Clark, a secretary at Windsor Castle. It was dated 27 March 1865: by this time it was clear that his presentations had advanced from broad theoretical discussions of the great potential of inorganic chemistry to practical demonstrations of the miracle of synthetic dyes.
8
MADDER
The local spy – and there was one – might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind … he would most certainly have remarked that they were people of a very superior taste as regards their outward appearance.
The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness …
The colour of the young lady’s clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behaviour, demanded of a colour was brilliance, not discretion.
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969
Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Regarded from any angle, the madder plant has never been an attractive specimen. William Perkin examined it in 1868, and found leaves rough with prickles. Rubia tinctorum L is an herbaceous perennial that grows up to five foot high. The flower, such as it is, is small and greenish yellow, its stem square and jointed, its root cylindrical and fleshy. It is propagated from suckers, and the roots give off a strong odour.
Only a dyer could love such a plant. Up until 1868, dyers loved it very much, for madder
provided half the world with red. Even one decade after the discovery of the coal-tar dyes, annual imports of madder to the United Kingdom (principally from France, Holland, Turkey and India) were valued at £1 million. Alongside indigo, madder had provided the textile dyer with a staple ingredient of their trade for centuries. Between 1859 and 1868, wool and calico printers imported an average 17,500 tons of madder and its derivatives each year, much of it used in Scotland by the likes of Reid and Whiteman of Maryhill, and James Hendrie of Arthurlie, and J. & W. Crum and Co. of Thornliebank. Among many things, madder dyed soldiers’ trousers.
In 1876, William Perkin planted some madder on a piece of land opposite his home in Harrow. It was a symbolic act from a man not much given to such displays: he was growing it, he said, ‘lest the breed should become extinct’.
By 1876, the import of madder into Britain had fallen to 4,400 tons, a quarter of the intake a decade before. Its price had fallen by almost a third in the same period, to £1 per hundredweight. The decline showed no sign of abating; madder growers, once secure in a lifelong industry, were witnessing their world collapse around them. They could blame the advances of chemistry, and, if they had known his name, they could have specifically blamed William Perkin.
Mauve Page 9
