Address to the 2000 annual meeting of the UK Vegetarian Society

(c) Derek Antrobus (September 2000)

A few months ago the Independent on Sunday newspaper carried a rather interesting feature about vegetarianism being seen as less and less cranky. I was pleased by the promptitude with which they published my letter pointing out that this was a particularly modern and Eurocentric judgment. Eurocentric because in many cultures it is meat-eating which is seen as cranky and vegetarianism which is the norm. Modern because it plays down the extent to which vegetarianism– although not dominant – was part of mainstream Victorian culture.

I am constantly astonished at the remarkable fact, for example, that in Manchester in the 1880s there were more vegetarian restaurants than there were in the 1970s. And the largest of these establishments was a club which boasted smoking rooms, reading rooms, two dining rooms and a lecture theatre to which they would resort after a meal for talks justifying their diet: even then, vegetarians wanted the proof after their pudding!

One reason for such a number of vegetarian restaurants was because the founders of the modern vegetarian movement came, in the main, from Manchester and its neighbouring city, Salford. It is a story I have told elsewhere. The crucial moment was the establishment in Salford in 1809 of a new denomination – the Bible Christians. Their autocratic leader was the Rev William Cowherd who imposed a vegetarian diet on his flock. The church was the first institution to promote vegetarianism in the contemporary western world and its followers effectively set up the Vegetarian Society.

Among them were Joseph Brotherton, the MP for Salford, who succeeded Cowherd as pastor of the Bible Christians. Brotherton chaired the meeting at Ramsgate in 1847 which set up the Society. The society’s first president was James Simpson, a Lancashire industrialist who was a deacon of the Church. His successor as president was William Harvey, Mayor of Salford and a Bible Christian.

It is sometimes argued that the Bible Christians were only one influence on the birth of the Society and that the other influence came from the Concordium – a utopian socialist community. William Oldham was head of the community founded on the principles of American writer Bronson Alcott. Oldham had already been connected with a short-lived forerunner of the Vegetarian Society called the British and Foreign Society for the Promotion of Humanity and Abstinence from Animal Food, founded in 1843.

The Alcott House Concordium, as the community was known, had existed since 1838 and its members were utopian socialists, influenced partly by the Owenites (followers of Robert Owen, father of the co-operative movement). The American Alcott himself had visited the community in 1843. Its members shared with Bible Christians senior positions in the newly-formed Vegetarian Society. I want to suggest that in fact the influences were not so separate as might be thought. Indirectly, the Concordium was influenced by the Bible Christians. To explain this, I have to take you on a detour to the United States.

The Manchester City News of October 9th, 1909, contained an article by the Bible Christian minister the Rev Alfred Broadley in which he states: "In the year 1817 - one year after the death of our founder - forty emigrants from our church landed in Philadelphia and a little later founded a Bible Christian Church in that city. It was the beneficial results of the work done by that church in spreading the principles of vegetarianism which led Dr Kellogg to conceive the idea of the great sanitarium (sic) at Battle Creek, whose branches are to be found in almost every part of the world." The claim appears to be somewhat overstated although there are definite links between Kellogg and the Bible Christians.

What is more certain is the role played by the church in establishing the American Vegetarian Society and developing the vegetarian movement in general. Like their British counterparts they campaigned for other causes - the prohibition of alcohol, abolition of the death penalty, the promotion of peace and the ending of slavery. In the latter, they had to confront their principles in practice when their pacifism came into conflict with their opposition to slavery in the American Civil War.

The group of migrants was led by two ordained ministers of the Bible Christian Church - James Clarke and William Metcalfe (1788-1862). Clarke was unsuccessful in trying to organise a church and died a farmer in 1826. Metcalfe was more successful. Born in Westmoreland in 1788, he received a good education. His first work was as an accountant at Keighley in Yorkshire. There he became involved with the Swedenborgian Chapel which joined the Bible Christian Church in 1809. The 28-years-old Metcalfe became a vegetarian along with the rest of Cowherd's followers. In 1811 he became a tutor at the King Street chapel in Salford and was ordained by Cowherd. Metcalfe then founded his own grammar school at Adingham, Yorkshire.

But Metcalfe was anxious to travel to America which for Bible Christians and many English radicals was the Promised Land. Metcalfe wrote to a friend soon after his ordination: "The civil and religious freedom of the people of the United States has been the topic of many an hour's conversation among the teachers of the Salford Academy, and the members of the church". Eventually, the forty-one pilgrims from Manchester and Salford left Liverpool on March 29th, 1817, and their voyage took 79 days. The journey also took its toll on their numbers, only eleven adults and seven children having remained faithful to the principles of the
Bible Christian Church throughout the journey. On their arrival in Philadelphia, the Bible Christians prospered and in 1823 were able to build themselves a church.

Metcalfe earned a living from teaching and devoted his spare time to journalism and vegetarian propaganda. In 1820 he published a seriesof tracts including The duty of abstinence from all intoxicating drinks (mainly written by Cowherd) and followed it in 1821 with Abstinence from the flesh of animals. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, the Philadelphia Gazette and the United States Gazette as well as other papers. Metcalfe's sermon, Bible Testimony on Abstinence from the Flesh of Animals was published and had a wide circulation. In 1832 he gave up teaching and began to publish with his son Joseph the Independent Democrat and later the Temperance Advocate. He then took up the study of medecine, graduating as a homeopath in 1852.

Two years before, an American Vegetarian Convention was called with Metcalfe as its president for its inaugural meeting. The convention established the Vegetarian Society of America. Metcalfe became the society's correspondence secretary and in 1851 he became editor of the American Vegetarian and Health Journal. Metcalfe returned to England several times to attend the annual meeting of the Vegetarian Society and speak at its meetings as the official delegate of the American society. In 1859 he was elected president of the Vegetarian Society of America on the death of its first president, Dr William Alcott. Metcalfe himself died in 1862.

How does Metcalfe’s American ministry relate to a utopian socialist society in Surrey? In 1830, the Bible Christians had two influential recruits, Dr Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) and the aforementioned William Alcott, editor of the Moral Reformer and the Library of Health. Both became presidents of the American Vegetarian Society. Metcalfe converted Graham, inventor of graham bread and graham crackers, to vegetarianism. Graham was an enormous influence on John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg was already a vegetarian but Graham’s views on diet turned Kellogg’s mind to food reform. And the result of that concern is on most breakfast tables every day. Alcott converted his cousin, Bronson Alcott, to vegetarianism in 1835 and it was Bronson whose ideas inspired the Concordium community in Richmond. Influential in his day, Alcott’s fame was superseded by that of his daughter, Louisa May, who wrote Little Women.

By the time of the American Civil War, the Philadelphian branch of the Bible Christian Church had some 100 members - a position from which the Church later declined and eventually, in the first quarter of the 20th century, died. The American Civil War, however, presented an interesting dilemma to the Bible Christians. They were committed to the abolition of slavery and yet they also held pacifist views. It appears that the Church remained opposed to participation in the hostilities but several of its young men joined the Union army while its Ladies' Aid Committee supported the soldiers with money and food. Among those who joined the Unionist side was Henry Stephen Clubb (1827-1921). He resolved the conflict of principles by going into battle on the side of the abolitionists - but going unarmed! He rose in rank to captain then quartermaster-general before being wounded at the Battle of Corinth in May 1862.

Clubb was born in Colchester in 1827 and was influenced in his childhood by his parents' Swedenborgian ideas. He was a vegetarian from his youth. In 1842 he became a member of the Concordium Community. It was during this early phase that he drifted into journalism and his writings were noticed by James Simpson. He eventually became Simpson's secretary and in 1849 became first editor of the Vegetarian Messenger. Under Simpson's influence, Clubb was baptised into the Bible Christian Church at Salford in 1850. He had a longing to travel and in 1853 went to New York where he soon obtained a post on the New York Tribune. He wrote a series of articles about the abolition of slavery and his revelations about the conditions of slaves created considerable controversy. He later settled at Grand Haven, Michigan, where, between 1857 and 1862 he edited and published the Clarion newspaper. After the Civil War hebecame publisher of the Grand Haven Herald and served in the Senate of Michigan in 1873-4, while maintaining his involvement in the American peace movement. In 1876 Clubb attended a major exhibition in Philadelphia as a journalist where he renewed his contacted with the Bible Christians. It was then he was invited to become their pastor and remained so until his death in 1921. He was also for some time president of the American Vegetarian Society.

Henry Clubb, it seems to me, personifies the the early days of the Vegetarian Society. For them, vegetarianism was not being sentimental animals, but holding to a view that saw all nature as interconnected and of equal value. To harm one part was to harm the whole. That is why so many vegetarians were pacifists and advocates of human as well as animal rights. Clubb epitomises the courage of those pioneers. But most of all is his internationalism. At your annual meeting of 1850 you welcomed the formation of the American Vegetarian Convention as heralding the start of a world movement. Today, exactly 150 years later, we can see how right they were.