Free Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain by Stephen Halliday Page A

statue to Drake as the discoverer of the potato in the town of Offenburg but it was removed by the Nazis. In the early days it was a luxury product, two pounds of potatoes being supplied to Queen Elizabeth I for five shillings (25p) – far more than a working man’s weekly wage at the time.

    Spud-u-don’t-like?
    In the early days of the Royal Society scientists like Robert Boyle advocated the potato’s cultivation while in his
Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith commented that the product was popular amongst ‘porters, coalheavers, prostitutes’ and the Irish. He suggested that this explained why these groups were ‘the strongest men and the most beautiful women in the British dominions’. The great economist also argued that if pasture and cornfields were turned over to the cultivation of potatoes then population would increase, profits would rise and prosperity would follow. Despite such champions the potato was slow to gain acceptance, one reason being the doctrine of signatures which prevailed in medical circles. This held that plants which resembled parts of the human body, especially when the body was diseased, were responsible for the illness itself. The tubers of the potato were compared with the deformed hands and feet of lepers and the English writer Lovell, in his book
The Complete Herbal
, wrote of potatoes that ‘if too frequently eaten they are thought to cause leprosie’. Not much of an endorsement there! During the World Wars the potato flourished as a year-round crop that was rich in nutrients and it was during World War II that a new strain was developed called Golden Wonder which later gave its name to a variety of potato crisp. £1.3 billion is now spent on crisps every year, far more than is spent on potatoes in their raw state.

    THE IRISH POTATO FAMINE
    The Irish potato famine was a result of English exploitation and monoculture. It bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations. The green fields of Ireland had been used for centuries to pasture cows but as English and Scottish landlords used the grazing to feed the British taste for beef, Irish tenant farmers were forced on to poorer land where potatoes were the most viable crop to feed a family. Potato blight arrived in Europe, probably from South America, in the early 1840s and was reported on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1845. Its effects in England were damaging but, since potatoes were still a comparatively small element of the English diet, the effects were limited. By 1846 it had devastated the potato harvest in Ireland which, unlike England, was dependent on the crop to feed two thirds of its population. The reaction at Westminster, from which Ireland was ruled, was less than sympathetic. The normally benign Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, commenting on the alarming reports from Ireland, wrote that there was ‘always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news’. Public works, such as constructing roads which even now lead nowhere, were an inadequate response to the tragedy as whole families died from starvation. Charles Trevelyan, the British Treasury official responsible for administering relief, declared that ‘the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated’ though just what the ‘lesson’ was remains unclear. The immediate consequence of the famine was a great increase in emigration, especially to England and the United States. In the 1830s the Irish population had been 8 million. By the time the famine ended the population had fallen by half due to emigration and death from starvation. The population today is 6 million, 2 million less than it was almost two centuries ago. The famine gave additional impetus to the Irish independence movement .
Gathered By Virgins
The British love affair with tea
    T ea reached Britain in the mid-17th century and is recorded as having been sold in a coffee house in Exchange Alley in London in 1657. Its proprietor, Thomas Garway, sold both liquid