In January 1895 a 'sensation' occurred in Sutton Coldfield which 'creat(ed) a good deal of alarm:

It centred on the Wylde Green Hotel on Birmingham Road, which was run by John and Anne Page.

A few days after Christmas Anne decided to make a large cauldron of soup which she intended to give away to local people.

She used a large piece of salted beef which she had bought from Charles Burbridge, a butcher in Aston, and added peas, carrots, parsnips, turnips and swedes.

It was intended as a kindly gesture at Christmastime. The inhabitants of Wylde Green collected their soup in tin mugs in the afternoon and evening of Saturday December 29.

With hours those who had drunk the soup began to suffer from vomiting and diarrhoea. It was reported that about 120 people succumbed. Mrs Rose of Dale Cottages was said to be 'dangerously ill but is slightly better'. With one exception, all of those who became ill recovered.

The exception was 47-year old Esther Ivens, the wife of Joseph Ivens, a gardener of Green Lanes. She had drunk three-quarters of a pint of the soup and died a few days later. An inquest was necessary and the jury decided that there should be a post-mortem to establish the cause of death.

It was said that Anne Page had added a hare to the soup to improve the flavour and that this was the cause of the sickness.

This she firmly denied and 'indignantly resents the suggestion as a reflection of her culinary knowledge: She announced that she would sample the beef herself. One local physician suggested arsenic poisoning, but this was quickly ruled out. The alternative was ptomaine poisoning - food poisoning as a result of eating putrefying meat or vegetables.

A sample of the soup was sent to Dr Edward Klein of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He reported that the sample was 'crowded' with bacteria and it was 'highly probable that the soup had been polluted with
sewage:

The post-mortem established that Esther Ivens had died of catarral enteritis. The coroner and the jurors inspected the hotel and concluded that an outlet for sewage near where the soup was cooked was the cause of the outbreak. To their relief, Anne Page and Charles Burbidge were publicly exonerated - but it was not good news for Sutton Coldfield which promoted itself  ‘a health resort for thousands of toilers ..’ 

Part III of Glimpses into Sutton's Past, covering the years 1886-1914, by Stephen Roberts has just been published and is available from Amazon, £4.99.

Associate Professor
Stephen Roberts