The precise formula of the sprays is a secret known only to the Tokyo Gull Detective Agency, but it is believed to be similar to the Acid Phosphatase Test widely used by forensic scientists in modern police departments investigating cases of sexual assault. In this, alpha-naphthyl phosphate is sprayed onto a sample, and any semen present will react to produce alpha-naphthol. The application of a second chemical, often a diazyl dye, will produce a vibrant purple.
*
In Germany in November 1999, Bayer and Hoechst, jointly known as Dystar, announced plans to merge its dye operation with BASF, thus creating a company of 4,700 employees and annual sales of about £720 million, almost a quarter of the annual world dye market of about £3 billion. Approximately 30 per cent of its output was expected to be sold in Asia, while 40 per cent would be sold within Europe. At the time of this announcement, a name for the new dye company had yet to be agreed.
IG Farben in Liquidation, the official name of the company which still operated more than fifty years after its parent company was disbanded by the Allies (and ostensibly still exists in order to dissolve itself), still has more than 200 shareholders. It paid DM30 million of compensation to the Jewish Claims Conference in 1957, but at the beginning of 2000 was still involved in disputes over further individual payments to its former slave workers.
*
On St Valentine’s Day 2000, the public relations officer at Yorkshire Chemicals PLC in Leeds had some romantic news to mark the company’s centenary year – or as romantic as things ever got in the modern dye trade. Penny Netherwood said the company was to have a new corporate colour: mauve. She pronounced it ‘morv’, like the Victorians.
Yorkshire Chemicals is the fourth largest textile dye works in the world, just a few hundreds of thousands of kilos behind the Bayer/Hoechst/BASF alliance and Ciba and Clariant of Switzerland. In November 1999 Yorkshire had engineered a reverse takeover of the dyestuffs division of the American company C. K. Witco, and in so doing expanded its product range from acid dyes for wool and nylon fibres and cationic dyes for acrylic fibre, to one which also included reactive dyes for cotton. It now had global sales of £170 million, still only one quarter of its German rival, still only 5 per cent of the total market, but a serious contender again for the first time in many years.
The company formed in 1900 from a merger of eleven firms engaged primarily in natural dyes, a company seemingly untouched by the advances of the previous fifty years: indigo still came from India and Madagascar, logwood from the Caribbean, camwood from West Africa and cochineal from Tenerife. On one site men ‘as yellow as canaries’ ground turmeric to colour piccalilli. The daughter of one of the founders – Annie – married a son of William Perkin, Arthur George.
These days the machinery at the Hunslet Road and Kirkstall Road sites produce the latest artificial colour for the latest synthetic fibres, but Yorkshire Chemicals is facing difficult times despite its recent acquisition. Over-capacity. Tumbling prices. Huge safety-testing costs. Impossible competition from the Far East.
‘When I first came into this industry it was incredibly exciting,’ says John Shaw, the business development director at Yorkshire. ‘I used to show clients new colours every few weeks, and say, “Isn’t this wonderful?’”
Shaw says that when he started in the 1960s, the job was all about technical support, innovation and helping people solve problems. The last thing he discussed as a salesman was price, but now this is everything.
Shaw, who is fifty-five and comes from Wigan in Lancashire, worked in dyes for ICI for thirty years, leaving not long after ICI (Zeneca) sold its textile dye division to BASF in the summer of 1996. The sale to the Germans told you what sort of industry this had become, he says – a desperately competitive one. The market demands that the colour from his factory now comes in granulated form, like freeze-dried coffee. Easier to measure, and to dissolve.
The first problems came from India, and then Japan and Taiwan and China, the cheap imports that arose from a mixture of low-cost labour, pirated technology and some genuine innovation. Almost all the major European companies established partnerships in India and the Far East, but soon found their expertise duplicated by their competitors. Shaw has the figures in his head, but he struggles to believe them: in India there are more than 600 manufacturers of reactive dyes, ‘one under every railway arch’; in 1993 the Chinese exported about 5,400 tons of dyes, but by the end of 1998 the figure was almost 60,000 tons; in 1989 the world price for synthetic indigo was $22-$24 per kilo, but now it’s coming out of China at $6 a kilo. Then there are stringent environmental controls and the testing fees, the strict health regulations that ensure each new molecule of colour costs between £100,000 and £250,000 to approve, not including perhaps £200,000 already spent on molecular design.
Against this background, Yorkshire Chemicals’ recent takeover seems more a bid for survival than a triumph of expansion. Shaw thinks about what happened at Ellesmere Port. Once a German plant, then British after the war, the site enjoyed a huge boom in the 1960s and 1970s supplying the demand for blue jeans. In the 1990s it was back under German ownership, and was closed down for good in July 1999.
‘The same pots and pans that make dyes make pharmaceuticals,’ Shaw reasons. ‘If you discover a new chemical that solves a basic health problem, then the pharmaceutical industry will cover all its costs and potentially make a huge profit. That used to be the case in the dyes business – the invention of a new dye would command a premium that would reward the cost of invention and bringing it to market. Sadly, that’s no longer the case.’
*
At 425 Oldfield Lane, Greenford, the pub menu at the Black Horse contains a little local history. The pub overlooks the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal, opened in 1797 to link Limehouse Docks to Birmingham. ‘It was sensibly decided to place a hostelry every two hours, offering refreshment to both bargees and their horses.’
The canal is now all houseboats and lazy tourist trade. It is dirty and fat with waste, and no longer the colour of wine.
In the pub there is no memory of Perkin, no sepia artefact or silk sample, and his colour factory opposite has long gone. The pub is now popular with the employees of the new businesses on Perkin’s land – the Hovis distribution point for British Bakeries and the Glaxo Wellcome company.
Glaxo is proud of a nineteenth-century blouse in its possession dyed with mauve produced at Greenford Green. The company showed it off at the centenary celebrations, and the editor of its in-house magazine made topographical and scientific connections between then and now. Some of it was merely tenuous marketing: Perkin set up his works in 1857, just as Joseph Nathan was establishing a business in Wellington, New Zealand that would later become Glaxo Laboratories; Perkin utilised coal-tar waste to find colour, while Glaxo used a sisal waste product to synthesise cortisone; Perkin was moved to study chemistry by observing the formation of ‘beautiful crystals’, and did not some beautiful ruby red crystals isolated by a pharmaceutical giant many years later yield forth vitamin B12?
In 1956, Glaxo employees claimed to ‘own and tread daily upon the ground that Perkin once owned and trod’. Managers lunched at The Cottage, the home of Perkin’s nephew Alfred, the place where Perkin would entertain overseas visitors who had come to buy his dyes. ‘Being himself a teetotaller, Perkin would not refresh his visitors at an inn, even though the Black Horse stood close by …’
The pub has survived, but The Cottage, where William Perkin once had his laboratory, has disappeared, to make way for more drugs and a car park.
*
A mile away, on Roxeth Hill, down the road from Harrow School, two large green signs proclaim: ‘The Millennium is Christ’s 2,000th birthday. Worship Him here – now.’
This is Christ Church, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott a few years before he modelled the Albert Memorial, and it is where William Perkin is buried. But the search for the grave is a tricky one; many tombstones, most from the nineteenth century, are fading fa
st; some, separated from their plots, are piled up against walls.
Ralph Goldenberg, the vicar here, lives in a house on the edge of the graveyard. He said he had no idea who Perkin was, or where he was. He explained he had only been in Roxeth for eighteen months, and said that the church administrator would be around to answer any enquiries in three days.
But when Fran Caldecourt examined the burial records she found that Perkin’s name was absent.
‘How strange,’ she said.
His name did, however, appear in a survey of the burial ground conducted in 1991. This revealed that Sir William had since been joined in his grave by Frederick Mollwo Perkin, his son (in 1928), Alexandrine Caroline Perkin, his second wife (1929) and Sacha Emilie Perkin, their eldest daughter (1949) – stacked on top of each other like pancakes. The survey disclosed that it was marked by a large arched headstone with white marble kerbs and chippings, and at the base lay an inscription from Revelation: ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth’.
One afternoon at the beginning of February 2000, Fran Caldecourt walked around the burial ground in search of Perkin, up and down the narrow muddy lanes with a copy of this survey and a photocopied site-plan of the crumbling plots of forgotten Victorians.
‘He should be just here,’ she said, ‘adjacent with the end of the church.’ But she could find no trace of him.
* Photo-dynamic therapy has also found uses in the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMG), the leading cause of sight-loss in the elderly in the developed world. AMG is caused by blood vessels leaking into the central part of the retina, causing hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness and several million cases of reduced vision each year. The therapy uses the light-sensitive dye Visudyne. Once this has been distributed around the body, a beam is shone through a lens into the eye, and the leaking blood vessels are destroyed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
After all these years, everyone has their own mauve.
In the duty-free catalogue on Virgin Atlantic there is a picture of Eddie Izzard with his usual painted fingernails, and the option to buy an item called Virgin Vie Spring Nail Polish. ‘Make your friends green with envy, and your nails glossy green or blue or mauve.’ In an issue of Talk magazine there is an item about how the Old Vic theatre in London, once home to towering performances by John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, had redecorated its dressing rooms. Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney and Tommy Hilfiger enjoyed adding shine and irony to the fusty old rooms, and the theatre’s chief executive Sally Greene was proud of their work. Commenting on McCartney’s efforts with many mirrors, she said, ‘It’s for the times when you’re feeling fabulous.’ In comparison, an ante-room done up in sombre Rothko mauves was ‘for when you’ve just died’.
In movies, the word has been used imaginatively. In Bruce Robinson’s screenplay for Withnail And I, the lecherous Uncle Monty defines Withnail with the disparaging phrase, ‘He’s so mauve.’
There is no comfort in books. The word has moved on since Thomas Beer defined American life in the 1890s as the Mauve Decade and Tom Wolfe chose Mauve Gloves & Madmen as his fictional firm of caterers in the 1970s. In a story collection by Will Self called Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, some of the toughest boys were drug dealers, and they spent some time in a suite at the Ritz. The flock wallpaper was purple, the books on the shelf had been bought second-hand by the yard, and the carpet was – predictably by this time – mauve.
I imagined there was some sort of dare being played out, a bet placed at a writers’ gathering, whereby all those who had anted up agreed to place the word mauve in the first chapter of their novels. In the opening chapter of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, the narrator takes us on a tour of his brother’s second-division boarding school, and describes the portraits of headmasters hanging in the refectory. One of them ‘suggested either that the artist was a tragicomically inept doctrinaire cubist, or that Mr R. B. Fenner-Crossway MA was in reality a dyspeptic pattern of mauve rhomboids’.
In the opening chapter of England, England by Julian Barnes, the narrator talks of childhood memories and the delights of a jigsaw puzzle of the English counties: ‘… they would try to recall the colours of the pieces … had Cornwall been mauve, and Yorkshire yellow, and Nottinghamshire brown, or was it Norfolk that was yellow – unless it was its sister, Suffolk?’
In the first paragraph of The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble we learn that ‘The windows are open on to the terrace and the lawn, and drooping bunches of wisteria deepen from a washed mauve pink to purple. The roses are in bloom.’ This is the most common mauve these days, the mauve of gardens. But even here, horticulturists are as subjective as novelists: even now – particularly now – mauve isn’t one colour, the way orange tends to be. Mauve moves from lilac to lush purple depending on the light, on descriptive prowess, on memory, on upbringing. Everyone has their own mauve, whatever it may be.
Very near the beginning of The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain, a character also recalls a gentle childhood. ‘It was the day before we left our house in Devon and went to Paris. I could describe it as the day before my real life began. Mum was wearing a little mauve skimpy top, and a drapey kind of shirt she’d bought from an Indian shop.’
In this way, mauve is often a remembered colour, a shade from one’s past. It isn’t often a high-tech colour. But early in 1999 a man called Geoffrey Hughes, an Englishman living in San Francisco with a weird ambition, had given the shade a new twist. Hughes hung out at an aircraft hangar in the Mojave Desert where his company, Rotary Rocket, had erected something called the Roton. This was intended to be the world’s first multi-use private space rocket, something that would send satellites up to the beginning of space and then return for another payload a few hours later. Eventually the rocket would also carry wealthy passengers who would pay to play astronauts.
The prototype was impressive, but visitors were also struck by the huge mauve curtain swaddling the base of the rocket engines. ‘The curtain is somewhat in our house colours,’ Hughes explained. ‘The same as the girders in the hangar. The curtain is to hide the rather grotty underneath of the ‘air stairs’ that are used to board the vehicle and hide the computers that are underneath. The curtain also acts as a modesty panel for people climbing the stairs with skirts on.’
Perkin would have liked that: his very own colour helping women and Scotsmen travel towards the moon.
*
Predictably, I dreamt about Perkin a few times. On one occasion he left me trivial information: his fellow workers at Greenford used to call him Stainchild; how awful Mrs Swaffield was on harmonium; how the ties at Delmonico’s were the wrong shade; and how glad he was that Koch and Ross had received the Nobel Prize. He said how much he missed his father, and how he hoped they’d master artificial quinine soon. He said he wished to be remembered for his work on magnetic rotary power.
On another occasion he told me of the terrible state of his grave. The madder he planted had come through his coffin to push him sideways. There was a strange formation of gases. Before his burial his family had covered his body with silk squares, each a different colour of his own making. The magenta on his hands had caused great eruptions, made worse by leakages from the canal near his factory – effluent that had once burnt the grass. And coal was now bursting up into his back and sides, sharp rocks tangled with logwood, safflower, sandalwood and dava. So beleaguered, he said he felt like one long bruise.
*
On my visits to Imperial College it was apparent how slender was the connection between the current batch of ambitious chemistry students and their Victorian predecessors. The future was too exciting to look back. As they entered the Perkin Laboratory for their latest analysis of complex carbons, the objects around them didn’t seem to be the subject of particular concern. But they wrote their theses on blueberry iMacs, photographed their friends on one-use Kodaks, sprayed themselves with Calvin Klein and masked their headaches with aspirin. Th
eir clothes were not all black; some of them wore blue, green, even yellow. And they walked around as if these colours were the most natural thing in the world.
*
In November 2000, two months after this book appeared in hardback, I received a letter from a woman called Wendy Blewden. She had important news: she had found Perkin’s grave. She explained that she had tracked it down with her husband two years earlier, and that it lay to the north-east side of the church, with the gravestone facing Roxeth Hill.
‘You may be wondering why we had already looked for his grave,’ she wrote. ‘The answer is that I’m his great-great-granddaughter.’
Born in Scotland, Wendy moved to Pinner some years ago, and is now within a short drive of Sudbury, where she has discovered places named Perkin Close and Chestnut Avenue. In the front room of her house she has a magnificent bronze punchbowl presented to Perkin on his trip to Boston in 1906.
She asked me for tea not long after her letter arrived, and we spent a wet Sunday touring local landmarks with her family. We located Perkin’s grave without trouble; it was covered in moss and surrounded by weeds, but otherwise in respectable shape. We paid our respects, and then his great-great-granddaughter picked her way back through the sodden churchyard and retold her children about their famous relation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped me with this book, particularly those who gave up their time to be interviewed and share their thoughts. In addition to those who appear in the text, I am indebted to Tony Travis, of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for his scholarly assistance and personal advice. The local history provided by David Leaback has also been very informative.
Mauve Page 20
