Tom Allinson
Academic research isn’t just about poring over arcane titles in dusty libraries - information can appear from the unlikeliest of sources. So it was that one day in 1987, a member of staff at the University of Edinburgh library noticed on a bread wrapper that ‘Dr Thomas Allinson (1858-1915), pioneer of healthy lifestyle and eating’ was described as an Edinburgh graduate.
A colleague in the Erskine Medical Library dug deeper and found that Allinson had been struck off the Medical Register for advertising his own products and publications, advocating vegetarianism and a healthier diet. Today you’ll find Allinson bread on the shelf of any corner shop. The slogan ‘bread with nowt taken owt’ is a nod back to the dietary revolution the good doctor set in train back in the 19th century from his Bethnal Green mill.
Thomas Allinson was born in Grange-over-Sands, on Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. He left school at 15, becoming assistant to a pharmacist. Allinson was determined to go to university and, having managed to save a good chunk of his small weekly wage, he persuaded his stepfather to help fund his studies. Allinson went up to Edinburgh University and qualified as a licensee of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1879 at the age of just 21 (not graduating from the university as such).
He was already formulating his views on diet and vegetarianism and soon after qualifying Thomas discovered Naturopathy - a medicine which avoids drugs and encourages the consumption of natural foods. He developed his ideas into the system of ‘hygienic’ or ‘Allinsonian’ medicine. If a healthy diet and wholemeal flour sound pretty mainstream today, Tom Allinson was considered a quack in Victorian London - dangerous or laughable depending on your point of view. During the 1890s he ruffled the feathers of the Royal College of Physicians, the General Medical Council and the courts, over his views on health and the treatment of disease.
Radical ideas Allinson came up with including the linking of cancer to smoking tobacco - needless to say the doctor was a non smoker. Dr Allinson established his practice in central London and began his pioneering work promoting the benefits of healthy eating. Allinson’s ethos was social improvement as much as anything. Life expectancy in the East End of London was low - in a city made rich by trade and commerce, children were failing to thrive by being denied a healthy diet. Malnutrition and Osteomalacia (rickets) were rife. From his office in central London, Tom wrote long letters to The Times where he advocated a vegetarian diet, as being not just healthy, but cheap enough for poorer people to afford.
He explained his theories on the importance of diet and exercise in his book A System of Hygienic Medicine (1886). He also wrote The Advantages of Wholemeal Bread, and books on stomach diseases, rheumatism and vegetarian cookery. Allison was convinced that diet influenced people’s health and encouraged his patients to eat wholemeal bread and keep to a vegetarian diet. But in Victorian London that was easier said than done - where on earth could you buy wholemeal bread in Bethnal Green? Stoneground flour, where most of the grain stays in the mix, had largely ceased with the introduction of roller milling after the Industrial Revolution. The enterprising doctor decided to bring it back.
In 1892 Dr Allinson purchased a stone grinding flour mill in Bethnal Green, London and set up The Natural Food Company which produced wholemeal flour under the slogan ‘Health Without Medicine’. He soon opened a bakery at the mill to make his own bread. The authorities seized this as ammunition, saying that a medical doctor shouldn’t be engaged in commercial practices - Allinson was struck off the Medical Register.
It wasn’t as if vegetarianism and healthy eating were new ideas, more that they were continually forgotten and pushed to the fringes. Religions including Brahminism, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism advocated vegetarianism, as did early thinkers such as Pythagoras, Seneca, Ovid, Diogenes, Plato, Plotinus and Socrates. Voltaire, Pope, Shelley and Bentham all propounded the idea as did John Wesley, co-founder of Methodism. And by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the movement was again gaining momentum. Joining Allinson were such luminaries as Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army.
It was during World War I that Allinson’s ideas finally became (relatively) mainstream, as the government accepted the nutritional value of wholemeal bread at a time of scarcity of food. Demand for Allinson products increased and the company purchased two more stonegrinding mills, one in Newport, Monmouthshire and one in Castleford, Yorkshire, to add to the Bethnal Green base. A contrite medical establishment had already offered to place Tom back on Medical Register but he refused. In 1918, Allinson died, his revolution set in pace.