Origins of the British beet sugar industry

Britain's first sugar beet crop was grown and processed in Norfolk more than 80 years ago. That first harvest and factory 'campaign' began a remarkable partnership between agriculture and industry that has endured throughout the 20th century.

While making a major contribution to Britain's economy, the beet sugar industry has been a way of life for generations of farmers and factory workers.

This history looks at the origins of Britain's 'home-grown' sugar industry which has developed to become the efficient and sophisticated business it is today.

The origins of sugar

It would be hard now to imagine a world without sugar. Yet it was not manufactured in Europe until the 17th century, and even then it was a luxury most people could not afford.

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Andreas Marggraf >>
Napoleonic Wars >>

It is generally accepted that the giant grass we call sugar cane was probably first harvested for its flavour as long as 5,000 years ago when it grew only in the Pacific islands.

Migrating Polynesian tribes must have taken the sugar cane plant with them to the coastal regions of India where it eventually became established. When the Indian sub-continent was overrun by the Persians in 510 B.C. they described it as 'the reed which gives honey without bees'.

Some 200 years later, Alexander the Great took the 'sacred reed' with him when he conquered parts of western Asia.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, who valued sugar not only for its sweet taste but also for its ability to restore energy to the sick and exhausted, risked perilous sea voyages to supply their empires with the raw cane. And so it went on. Wars, invasions and conquests, and the advent of trading links between countries, established the sugar cane as a crop in many parts of North Africa and the Mediterranean.

The Arabs invaded Persia in the seventh century A.D. and took the sugar plant to every country they conquered in the next 100 years: Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Sicily, Cyprus, Crete and Rhodes.

Within a few centuries Egypt had become a major producer of sugar, with plantations stretching 450 miles along the Nile Valley.

A record from the household of Henry Ill in 1226 refers to the procurement of three pounds of sugar. It seems that shipments of large quantities of sugar only began to arrive in England in 1319, selling at the equivalent of 44 GBP per pound at 1994 prices. By the end of the 14th century it was still extremely costly and only used by royalty and the nobility.

The Mediterranean sugar industry reached the peak of its prosperity in the 15th century, then went into steady decline because of competition from cheaper sugar produced in Portuguese Madeira and the Spanish Canary Islands.

Between 1516 and 1520 Syria, Egypt and Cyprus fell to the Turks and the sugar industries in those countries never recovered.

Instead, the West Indies soon became the world's main sugar producing region. In 1493 Christopher Columbus had established a crop on the fertile Caribbean island of San Domingo. Sugar cane grew faster there than anywhere else in the world and by 1530 the island boasted 28 sugar mills.

The Spanish and Portuguese remained dominant in the West Indies for a century, but by the 1640s the English, Dutch and French had established sugar colonies in the Caribbean islands. As the century progressed, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly shipped from their homelands to work as slaves on the European farmers' plantations in the West Indies and South America.

By 1750 there were 150 cane refineries in Britain, producing some 30,000 tons of sugar each year.

The rich, who were becoming accustomed to the flavour of white sugar crystals in their tea and coffee, equipped themselves with silver sugar spoons, boxes, sieves and tongs.

The lower classes, meanwhile, could only afford the syrup and molasses which would settle in the bottom of sugar barrels during the long voyage from the West Indies. Deckhands and dock workers who handled the empty barrels would 'scrape the bottom of the barrel' to remove the black, sticky deposit that gave them a free taste of the sugar molasses.

By 1815 the British Government had collected 3 million GBP in sugar duties. Although sugar continued to be heavily taxed until 1874, improved transport and refining methods eventually brought it within the price range of working people.

In the 18th century England's annual sugar consumption increased eightfold: from around 10,000 tons in 1700 to 80,000 in 1800 when, with the population of Great Britain being less than 11 million, average consumption of sugar per person must have been around 16 lb per year.

Cookery books of the time show that sugar was no longer regarded as a luxury. It had become a common ingredient, and an everyday taste.

Andreas Marggraf
Sugar cane was the world's sole source of sugar until 1748 when a German scientist, Andreas Marggraf, found a way of extracting sugar from the root of the sugar beet. He won backing from Frederick the Great and William III, and in 1799 the first beet sugar factory was built at Breslau. Initially it produced just six tons of sugar per year.

Within two years, France was growing beet on about 65,000 hectares (160,000 acres) and had 330 small factories, together producing some 3,350 tons of sugar. Other European countries followed suit. Production increased steadily as the century wore on and surplus beet sugar was exported, mainly to Britain.

By 1900 the beet sugar industry was firmly established in mainland Europe and had even spread to the United States where, in the south, sugar cane was already an important crop.

Britain lagged far behind France and Germany in establishing a 'home-grown' sugar industry. There was no sense of urgency because our cane refineries were plentifully supplied by plantations in the colonies and cheap, raw beet sugar was available from the Continent.

Short-lived attempts at growing and processing sugar beet took place in the mid 1800s in numerous areas, including Maldon in Essex, Lavenham in Suffolk, and Mountmellick in Ireland. These enterprises failed for various reasons:

Farmers were reluctant to grow a crop they did not know, the factories were ill-equipped, or the projects simply ran out of money.

Interest in sugar beet stayed alive, however, because of the crop's success wherever it was introduced in Europe. Also, experiments were showing that sugar beet could flourish in British soils and weather conditions. Nevertheless, concerted efforts to develop a British beet sugar industry did not emerge until after the turn of the century.

A detailed history of British Sugar >>