Rebel Britannia

November 12th 1944:

If the man known locally as "Don the woodwork teacher" was a rebel, he was a very quiet one, but he founded a controversial movement that today involves tens of millions of people around the world and is the basis of an industry worth billions.

A headmaster's son from Mexborough in Yorkshire, Donald Watson (1910-2005) left school at 15 to start as an apprentice joiner. Within a few years he'd become a joinery teacher at a school in the Lake District, which was where he settled for the rest of his life. By then, he was already a committed vegetarian, after seeing a pig slaughtered on his uncle's farm when Donald was in his mid-teens. His siblings, who, like him, often worked on the farm, also gave up meat - though apparently none of them were at the time aware of the word vegetarian, or the concept of vegetarianism.

Coming to believe that dairy and egg production were as cruel as meat production, Watson stopped eating all animal produce in his twenties. This made him what was then known as a "non-dairy vegetarian." Records of people following what we now call a vegan diet for ethical, philosophical or religious reasons go back many centuries.

The modern vegetarian movement, which began formally in the first half of the 19th century, was largely vegan in its origins (the first known vegan cookbook was published in London in 1849), but compromised over dairy and eggs in order to broaden its appeal through practicality, and because it felt nothing should distract from its priority of ending the slaughter of animals for food. Even so, the debate over whether you could call yourself a vegetarian if you still ate animal food continued - at least, it did until 1944.

On either the 5th or the 12th of November in that wartime year (the month is known for sure, but nobody now knows the date for certain), Watson convened a meeting in Holborn, London, of five of his fellow non-dairy types to discuss setting up a society for the stricter abstainer, independent of the Vegetarian Society, initially called The Non-Dairy Produce Group.

A new movement needs a new name, and preferably one that's a bit more rousing than "non-dairy vegetarian." Those discussed and rejected include dairyban, vitan, benevore, beaumangeur, sanivore, vega and allvegan. The shortening of that last word to the one familiar today seems to have been the idea of another teacher, Dorothy Morgan, or possibly of both her and Watson (they married each other two years later, and one version of the story has it that the courting couple came up with the new word while dancing). They then had to instruct people in the pronunciation of "veegan," not "veggan" or "veejan."

Years later, Watson explained vegan as combining the first three and last two letters of vegetarian, representing "the beginning and end of vegetarian." Mind you, the word "vega," without the 'n', was already well-known, being the name of London's most fashionable vegetarian restaurant, owned by Jenny and Walter Fliess, who'd run vegetarian restaurants in Germany before being forced to flee the Nazi regime; they were members of an eccentric social democratic organisation known, rather misleadingly, as the Militant Socialist International. By the late 19th century most big cities in Britain had vegetarian restaurants, one advantage of which was that they were considered so respectable, so inherently free from vice, that women could dine in them unchaperoned without disapproval.

Before the word vegetarian became popular in the 1840s, deliberately meatless meals were usually known as "the vegetable diet." As early as 1907, one famous cookery writer felt obliged to include a vegetarian volume in her series, because of growing demand for restaurant menus to include what we would call a "vegetarian option," and what she called "maigre dishes," presumably from the Roman Catholic term for food which may be eaten on days when meat is forbidden to the faithful.

The earliest avowedly vegetarian cookbook that we know about was published in London in 1691. Like most publications in those days it had a remarkably long title, a small part of which is A Bill of Fare Of several excellent Dishes of Food, easily procured without Flesh and Blood, or the Dying groans of God's innocent and harmless Creatures, which do as far exceed those made of Flesh and Fish, as the Light doth Darkness, or the Day the Night, and will satisfie all the wants of Nature to the highest Degree, which Banquet I present to the Sons of Wisdom, and to all such as shall obtain that happy Condition, as to decline that depraved Custom of Killing and Eating their Fellow-creatures, and whose desire is to Live according to the innocent Law of Nature, and do unto all Creatures as they would be done unto, though I doubt that was actually printed on the book's spine.

Through the 19th century and much of the 20th, vegetarianism, and veganism, were strongly associated with radical causes, such as economic reform and votes for women, as well as with the likes of artists and poets. Much of its propaganda effort was aimed at the industrial working classes, in the belief that a vegetarian diet offered the lower-paid (which was more or less everyone) an opportunity for thrifty eating and proper nutrition which would never be available to them from expensive meat.

Proprietary vegan and vegetarian foods on sale in Victorian and Edwardian Britain included the unfortunately-named Nutter (nut butter, nut suet and nut lard), Meatose, which was a tinned meat substitute made from nuts, Vejola and Nutvego, which were made of nuts, Nuttose (a veal substitute, consisting of nuts), and a faux beef called Protose, which was made from nuts.

In 1944, Donald Watson's newly-formed vegan group initially had 25 members, each paying a subscription of one shilling. The movement has grown as bit since then; 2019 was declared Year of the Vegan by The Economist.

As for Watson himself, according to his daughter his diet wasn't complicated: "He ate just vegetables really." It doesn't seem to have done him any harm: he continued fell-walking until he was 94.

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Sources:

The Super Organic Gardener by Matthew Appleby (White Owl, 2018)

Early vegetarian recipes by Anne O'Connell (Prospect Books, 2008)

https://thevou.com/lifestyle/2019-the-world-of-vegan-but-how-many-vegans-are-in-the-world/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-50351484

www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history

www.vegansociety.com/about-us/further-information/key-facts

https://veganplace.blog/tag/dorothy-morgan-watson/

www.happycow.net/blog/vegetarian-central-london-1947/

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A63820.0001.001?view=toc

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwji6Nn_sYL6AhVOSkEAHQLXCqEQFnoECAYQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvegsoc.org%2Forigins-of-the-vegans%2F&usg=AOvVaw3mBVUOAOh_blYvegWF2Fe6