materials in photography.
Clearly, the speaker concluded, ‘the world cannot spare such an extraordinary man. May his life be spared to us for many years to come, and may it be replete with health and happiness.’
This tone was sustained when Dr William Nichols, president of the US General Chemical Company, presented Perkin with the first gold impression of the Perkin Medal, henceforth to be awarded annually to only the most distinguished of American chemists. Charged with drink and the desire to better all that had gone before, Dr Nichols went for the big finish. This is the age of destruction, he announced, but his fellow chemists had a mission, and it was no less than ‘saving the world from starvation’.
‘Honoured by your king, by your fellow chemists, by the world,’ Nichols said, as he looked down the table to Perkin, ‘you may pass down the hillsides toward the setting sun with a clear conscience. You have seen the dawn of the golden age – the age of chemistry – that science which by synthesis will gather together the fragments and wastes of the other dynasties, and build for the world a civilisation which will last until the end.’
Then he sat down. A few places down the table Adolf Kutroff removed his napkin. Kutroff was one of the pioneers of the coal-tar industry in the United States, and tonight had the task of presenting Perkin with an eight-piece silver tea service, each piece inscribed with the details of one of the Englishman’s discoveries.
At the very end of the dinner, and just at that time when the evening’s alcohol was beginning its downward path towards stupor and headache, Sir William himself got up to speak. The crowd roused themselves once more, and really cheered. He had a deep, clear voice, and he blinked a lot as he spoke, perhaps out of modesty and shyness. Those next to him at his table noticed how he had not been drinking at all – he had been teetotal for many years. He held in his hand the speech he had written on the Umbria, but his first words were a mass of improvised retorts; they had thanked him, and so he must thank them, and they could have gone on back and forth like that all night. It was twenty-four years since he had last been to New York, and on his last trip far fewer people seemed to know who he was. But everything now was a great honour – the library, the medal, the tea service. ‘I do not feel strange with you,’ he said. ‘And it may perhaps interest you to know something of my early days and how I became a chemist.’
He spoke for ten minutes about his school and his great discovery, and of the hard time he had convincing others that he had found something that might be of significance – and yet he said that even he didn’t dream of what that significance might be. He was only eighteen, after all. Who else could have imagined that this filthy thick coal-tar could contain all it did? And he was lucky, because it transpired that his great invention occurred purely by chance, and it was not what he was looking for at all.
Tumult as he sat down. More toasts. Sighs as other men got up. Dr Nicholas Buller, President of Columbia, declared that democracy depends on scientific discovery. ‘The age wants the man who knows. The nation will most progress that follows the advice of the men who know. The guest of the evening is a man who knows.’
Dr Ira Remsen said he knew it was getting late, but there was surely time for another rendition of ‘Blessed Be the Tie that Binds.’ It was a suitable song, he said. ‘A pun.’
After this, the eminent scientists hailed carriages for home, or to their Manhattan hotels, and perhaps they told their partners that it had been an historical evening, and what great food. Then they all did one identical thing. Their invitation to this jubilee announced that it was a black-tie affair, but with a twist. Their dinner jackets were to be black, but their bow-ties were to be of a different colour, in recognition of the colour that had started it all off for Perkin, the colour that had chanced to change the world.
Two weeks before the event, each of the diners received a brown envelope containing a new necktie, dyed for the occasion by the St Denis Dyestuff and Chemical Company, France. The colour was often identified as a shade of purple, but for one night only there would be no mistaking its precise hue.
The men all wore it to the banquet, and now, well past midnight, they each removed it, and perhaps made a mental note to keep it safe, a perfect souvenir from a famous night in honour of a man who had invented the colour mauve.
Chapter Two
Not the Land of Science
Sugar Ray Leonard slipped out of his red and black Ferrari Boxer Berlinetta, strode through the front door of Jamesons restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, and made his way to the bar. Leonard always seems to be the handsomest man in the room, especially when someone calls his name and he flashes that dazzling smile, and on this August afternoon he looked as if he had stepped right out of the pages of GQ.
He wore a mauve cardigan, a light mauve shirt with the cuffs folded meticulously over the sweaters’ cuffs, mauve suspenders embroidered with figures of Cupid.
‘I feel great, I really do,’ Leonard said.
Former World Welterweight Boxing Champion Sugar Ray Leonard profiled in Sports Illustrated, 1986
In May 1956, precisely one century after the discovery of mauve, a trades journal entitled The Dyer, Textile Printer, Bleacher and Finisher carried a warning for its subscribers. ‘Readers who have thoughts of making a pilgrimage to Shadwell to see Perkin’s birthplace would be well advised not to delay,’ wrote the journal’s editor Laurence E. Morris. ‘For the site has been scheduled for redevelopment.’ Once the developers moved in there was no stopping them. The site has been the subject of significant municipal improvement three times in the last four decades.
King David Lane, Upper Shadwell, is a short street containing Blue Gate School and an ugly office block, and practically nothing remains from the area in which William Perkin was born on 12 March 1838. Today’s visitor finds that King David Lane has become one-way, built up with islands and bollards and signs. The road connects Cable Street – a string of council estates – to The Highway, a thundering four-lane parade of trucks and speeding Ford Mondeos. Number 3 King David Lane, where Perkin was born at home as the last of seven children, has been demolished. Like much of the East End of London, little looks the way it did before the last war.
The oldest structure is the parish church of St Paul’s, a small building with an incisively tall spire. Built in 1669, the last of five London churches constructed during the Restoration, it has some famous names to its history. John Wesley preached here. Captain James Cook was an active parishioner and baptised his first son here. Jane Randolph, the mother of Thomas Jefferson, was also baptised at the church, as was William Perkin in 1838. There is a little graveyard around the church, but it is impossible to read the gravestones. In the church crypt you will find the Green Gables Montessori School.
Behind the church there is a footpath leading to many converted wharves, where those who live there can have breakfast on little terraces overlooking the Thames. Beneath them are offices for security guards and estate agents. At Shadwell Basin you may go angling and canoeing, and admire the view towards Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome.
Forty years ago, Perkin’s birthplace became A. E. Wolfe, beef and pork butcher. When that went, and the shop and rooms above it were knocked down, another new estate went up. Opposite this stands a council block called Martineau that once used to be 1 King David Fort, the house and stables the Perkins leased when William was in his teens. On one corner of this building there is a round blue plaque affixed by the Stepney Historical Trust: ‘Sir William Henry Perkin, FRS, discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site, and went on to found science-based industry.’ No one you meet who lives here today knows very much about him.
When he was in his twenties, William Perkin went to Leeds on business and found time to visit the house of his late grandfather, Thomas Perkin, born in 1757, of a line of Yorkshire farmers. Thomas became a leather worker, but his grandson was moved to find that he also had a rare hobby. On visiting his house at Black Thornton, near Ingleton, Perkin found a cellar containing what looked to be a laboratory. There was a still and a small smelting furnace, and various jars with grimy