The Gentle Art of Faking

The six-day Glasgow meat trial of 1889 was a milestone in public health.

It led to the enhanced inspection of abattoirs. But fraud, truth denial and producer prioritisation delayed the effective regulation of the meat and dairy industries for many decades.

On 9 May 1889, Peter Fyfe, who had been appointed as Glasgow City Council’s chief sanitary inspector in 1885, saw something troubling in the city’s Moore Street slaughterhouse. Two carcasses showed red discolouration and contained nodules well known to indicate the presence of tuberculosis. He duly seized and condemned the carcasses from their sellers, Hugh Couper and Charles Moore, judging them unfit for human consumption.

This state of the meat that he had found was by no means unusual. The barely regulated abattoirs of Victorian Britain were, by modern standards, disgusting. Animals were packed into filthy, overcrowded pens and killed within sight of each other. There was no legal requirement for ante- or post-mortem animal inspection. Diseased cuts and offal from emaciated, often decomposing carcasses, were consumed by the poor, who relied on cheap meat for their meagre diets. Awareness of animal diseases and their zoonotic effects was limited. 

In addition, many scams were prevalent in the meat trade. Norwich sanitary inspector Bernard Penny wrote of butchers in The Sanitary Journal in March 1910: ‘These gentlemen are past masters of the gentle art of faking and can dress a dead lamb or calf and clean up an old cow or a weedy steer in a marvellous manner. What with the inflation of veal and lamb (misdescription of cheaper meat) and stripping and cleaning of beasts, it often takes very careful inspection to detect anything wrong.’

Milk was also a nutritional staple of the poor, particularly for children and infants. But dairies and cowsheds were as unhygienic as abattoirs, so the purity of milk could not be relied upon, and it was often watered down. It was a serious public health issue. Infected milk was a primary cause of streptococcal infection, typhoid, scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as tuberculosis.

Over the Victorian period, protective legislation, which was some of the first in the world, slowly caught up as urban populations swelled in size. UK statutes on food composition, powers to seize and condemn foodstuffs and laws to clean up cowsheds and dairy herds appeared from the middle of the century. They were enforced by medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors. However, in his brave enforcement action of 1889, Peter Fyfe, a prolific writer and lecturer who devoted his life to improving housing, air quality and food safety in Glasgow, was going out on a limb, pushing the law to its limits.

The science of tuberculosis

It makes sense that if food stinks, it will make you ill. But links between bacteria and disease were still being discovered. German pioneer microbiologist Robert Koch had identified the bacterium causing tuberculosis – a milestone of medical science – in 1882. It was known that both cows and cattle could contract TB. In humans, TB, which was untreatable, was ubiquitous in overcrowded slums. Called phthisis, then consumption, this scourge of the poor was dreaded under another name, ‘the white plague’. It is thought to have been responsible for a quarter of human deaths in the nineteenth century – but, in 1889, a link between bovine and human forms of the disease had yet to be conclusively established.

Fyfe and other sanitary inspectors were convinced that TB did transmit from the milk and meat of cattle, causing a massive toll of human illness and death. They were extremely concerned by the extent of TB in Britain’s beef and dairy herds – it was estimated that a fifth of cows were affected by the disease – but felt that their hands were tied behind their back. Legislation was patchy. The Public Health Act 1875 (1867 in Scotland) allowed unsound meat and animals to be seized, for the first time, by local authorities but the powers were sparingly applied.

Angered by an injustice, Fyfe, who was a chess player and dramatist, as well as a health campaigner, asked eloquently in The Sanitary Journal in 1910: ‘Who can calculate the mass of human suffering, the numberless army of pale-faced pilgrims in their weary march to the consumptive’s grave, whose painful progress from birth to death has been caused by a draught of disease-bearing milk?’

In practice, in rural areas, the meat trade was dealt with leniently by magistrates, who often had close connections to farmers, while urban authorities were hugely under-resourced and they had to tackle slum housing and poor air quality and seek to reduce the spread of a host of communicable diseases, as well as cleaning up the food chain. In 1911, Manchester's sanitary department employed only 100 staff for a city of 1.5 million people. Rotting and pathogenic food was a major health menace. Sanitary inspectors annually seized and destroyed hundreds of tonnes of unfit mean, fish shellfish, fruit and vegetables.

Then as now, vested interest in the food chain were implacably opposed to reform. The farmers, abattoirs, wholesalers and butchers providing the nation’s meat did not want even emaciated and diseased carcasses to be removed from the food chain.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, other countries, notably the USA, had successfully cleaned up their cattle and dairy herds. But the UK lagged behind. Farmers vigorously objected to a system requiring them to certify their animals as healthy, and they opposed pasteurisation – a life-saving measure which was well understood by the beginning of the century. To support this stance, they denied that infected milk or animal products caused tuberculosis and other illnesses in humans – lobbying issues that contributed, in 1908, to the formation of the National Farmers’ Union. 

Need for vigilance

Because the economic stakes were so high, Fyfe’s bold seizure of two grossly diseased carcasses in Glasgow triggered an important test case The butchers involved – Couper and Moore – contested his action. This triggered a six-day trial, heard in May and June 1899, in which both sides called numerous witnesses.

The trial was extensively reported, well beyond the medical and trade press. The defence maintained that, as only parts of the carcasses were diseased, they should not have been seized. The prosecution argued, citing studies that were still not universally accepted, that science had shown that the presence of the tubercular bacillus in part of an animal would render the whole dangerous. 

The case went well for Fyfe – the judge found in Glasgow’s favour. Following this verdict, councils with meat inspectors, including Liverpool, Belfast, Leeds and Newcastle, now began to seize whole carcasses with localised signs of disease – a measure that must have saved many lives.

Eliminating diseased carcasses at the end of the food chain was effective in cleaning up herds. It also circumvented the many tricks of the meat trade to pass off sub-standard products as being safe to eat. Outraged butchers lobbied their MPs and the Board of Agriculture, complaining that they would be driven out of business.

Delighted by the verdict, The Lancet wrote that the sale of tuberculous meat is now ‘illegal . . . even where disease is limited in distribution and the carcass otherwise apparently sound’. The Meat Trades Journal pronounced the judgment to be ‘momentous’. However, these conclusions proved to be premature. Battles between town and country, regulated and regulator were to continue, and the science of tuberculosis was not settled.

At the instigation of the Local Government Board, a royal commission on tuberculosis in animals was commissioned in 1896. It called for meat inspectors to be trained and qualified in animal pathology, but fudged the contamination issue. A second royal commission was set up in 1901. Its work dragged on for a decade, further delaying clarity.

The Public Health (Meat) Regulations, which set standards for slaughterhouse inspection and consolidated local authority powers, did not come into force until 1924. As we have seen in another blog (The Battle for Safe Milk), regulation of the dairy industry was also delayed for many decades. Many private bills requiring the certification of dairy herds, some introduced by the London County Council, were successfully blocked by land owners and farming interests.

Edith Summerskill’s Milk (Special Designations) Act, systematically tackling sick herds and ushering in widespread pasteurisation, was not passed until 1949 – one of the most costly to life and egregious delays in UK public health history. Pasteurisation did not become compulsory in Scotland until 1983 – and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, two years later.

The Glasgow meat case is interesting because it illustrates themes that always apply to regulation. Science evolves and is subject to interpretation, and regulators and the regulated often have incompatible agendas. The worst hygiene horrors of the Victorian era may have passed into history, but new and novel threats will always emerge and fraud will never disappear.

Fyfe was feted in his city and was to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His successfully pursued case has much to teach us about the need for vigilance in public health and precautionary, impartial, science-based practice based on the best available understanding. These principles are too often forgotten, ignored or compromised by politicians.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.