Your Planet, Your History and The 'S-Clause' Mystery

There once was a jolly fellow with a red nose who lived in London; historical documents mention something about a certain "S. Clause." Then, in 1833, he and his mates disappeared without a trace. Finding out what happened to him has something to do with the environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, and with heroic efforts to restore the River Thames to its former glory.

Listen and you’ll discover hordes of angry servants—who may have never existed in the first place. Find out why London was so stinky. Hear the actual words of a small-town vicar who was extra. And contemplate the least effective public health poster campaign in history.

This episode is a continuation of the previous episode called “History Is in Your Nature—and Vice-Versa,” but feel free to start with this one and you’ll be fine.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

Transcript

YAAW Podcast

S2E5: YourPlanet,YourHistory&TheS-ClauseMystery

[Cold Open]

Heyyy and welcome back to this unrefined, organic, and 100% pesticide-free podcast about how history helps you understand the strangeness of now.

Today’s episode is technically Part II of a two-part episode called “History is in Your Nature, And Vice Versa.”

I think you’re fine if you want to start here with Part Two and go back to Part One later. This podcast sort of goes against the flow anyway, so why shouldn’t you?

[pause]

We start this episode with a mystery [spooky music begins] from the British Isles.

[Spooky music mounts briefly, then cuts out suddenly]

No—not a scary mystery.

It’s the happy kind.

[Very quick major key happy jingle-bell music]

For centuries there seem to have been stories about a jolly, fatty fellow. 

Who has a reddish nose.

Who, against all odds, makes a special trip at a particular, special time of year.

Who sometimes seems to be able to be everywhere at once, even far from the chilly place he calls home.

[pause]

Are you on the edge of your seat yet? You should be.

I hinted coyly during the mind-tingling, spine-numbing conclusion of the previous episode that the topic has something to do with a certain “S. Clause.”

[pause]

No, we’re not talking about Jolly St. Nick or Father Christmas as they know him in the UK. We’re talking about your friend and mine, the salmon.

[pause]

Disappointed? You shouldn’t be. Salmon are nutritious, delicious and, as the old saying goes, “one spectacularly good way to understand how humans’ present-day relationship with the natural environment is really weird when understood in the big picture of history.”

[pause]

Uh—wait, hang on: My Editorial Advisory Team is telling me that that’s not actually an old saying.

Well it should be, dang it, because as you’re about to discover today, it’s true.

[pause]

At this point you might be thinking—Hey Doug The Podcast Host Guy, I didn’t know that there was a such thing as a history of salmon—or really any kind of ichthyological history.

Well I’m here to tell you that real history is concerned with pretty much everything that people thought about in the past.

And I mean everything—lox, stock and barrel.

[pause]

But don’t worry, this episode’s no simple fish story; it’s got plenty of excitement to lure you in.

I’m here to make it reel for you.

My name is Doug Sofer—and I’m a weirdo—just like you.

[Theme]

[End-of-theme pitchlet]

If you’re finding this unorthodox-but-noble experiment in public history to be valuable, consider subscribing and getting your very own Certified Historical Weirdo plastic medallion. Check findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how.

Salmon Clause

If you go to, say, Google Books, and go fishing for publications from prior centuries, you’ll find folks writing that there used to be so many salmon finning through the rivers of Great Britain, that the people there got tired of eating it.

Typical of these statements is this one from 1796 about the city of Worcester [WUH-stir] in England. In a section about the River Severn that runs through the city, it explains:

[QE] “Salmon, the produce of this river, was a species of fish formerly so plentiful, that many of the indentures for the apprenticing children in this city, have clauses in them that forbid the master from feeding them with it more than twice a week.” [/QE]

[pause]

Indentures are basically contracts for servants.

They’re best known in the U.S. through the early colonial system of indentured servitude—a limited-term forced labor system on North American plantations.

But there’d been indentures in Europe long before Europeans knew that there even was an America.

In England they date back to master-apprentice relationships of the Middle Ages—for laborers learning skilled crafts.

Here’s another reference to salmon in an indenture from close to a century later—from the town of Sunderland, further north in England:

[QE] “[S]almon were caught in very large quantities in the river, and became so plentiful and so cheap that the masters used to feed their apprentices on it so as to surfeit them; accordingly a clause was inserted in the indenture of apprenticeship that the apprentice was not to be fed on salmon more than two or three days per week.” [/QE]

[aside] If you don’t have your dictionary handy, surfeit as a verb is a fancy way to say you give so much of something to someone that they get sick of it and don’t want any more of it for crying out loud.

You know: like how Hollywood surfeited us with all those superhero movies.

 Anyway, this same book then adds a fascinating detail:

[QE] “[T]hese indentures have become very rare of late, and people have been led to disbelieve in their existence, and to treat the whole as a tale or a myth. [/QE]

Wait. Who would make up a tale about servants being so full of salmon that they demanded limits on how much of it they were given in their contracts?

Hang on: The mystery continues.

A few years later, in 1896, a medical doctor named T.N. Brushfield presented his research to the Chester Archaeological Society entitled “The Salmon Clause in the Indentures of Apprentices.”

In his conference paper he recounts that he discovered evidence of people mentioning this clause in England—as early as the year 1662.

BUT but after exhaustive research, Dr. Brusfield could find no actual indentures with this lox-limiting language.

In his talk, he concludes:

[U]ntil we are able to obtain, as a result of further researches, some direct positive evidence in support of this tradition… we are unable to regard the asserted salmon clause in the indentures of apprentices in any other light than as a myth.

[pause, then slowly for emphasis]

So hey listener: What about you? [pause] Do you believe—in the Salmon Clause?

[long pause]

Well Virginia, I’ve got a surprising answer for you: 

I set out a metaphorical plate of cookies and hid behind the metaphorical couch, trying to find real-world evidence of its existence.

I plunged into Google Books and other readily available online sources; I trolled for info about salmon and indentures and various kinds of servants’ lunch menus. And my ultimate answer is:

[pause]

It doesn’t really matter.

[long pause] Let me rephrase that: We don’t need to know for sure that these clauses existed in order for us to have a good conversation about British environmental history and the place of salmon therein.

[pause]

Now it’s true that if a researcher were able to find an honest-to-goodness indenture that included this fishy language, it’d be pretty cool.

Historians do occasionally unearth game-changing documents like that which make us rethink what we’d already thought we’d understood about the past.

But no, I couldn’t find anything like that online.

It doesn’t help that even later English indentures from the 17th & 18th centuries still look to today’s readers as if they’d been written by distant foreigners. Or Martians. Or by the salmon themselves.

One of the central points of the entire You Are A Weirdo project is that we’re pretty different from the folks who preceded us. Today’s standardized way of writing English is a great example of something that’s changed a lot since, say, 1662.

Equally unhelpful is the fact that the vast majority of these contracts that still exist, seem to require a visit to an actual archive or university special collection.

I’ve dropped a link on findyourselfinhistory.com to a site that shows you what these documents look like. 

The lowdown on what you’ll find is that if you haven’t worked extensively with paleography—meaning the reading & writing of really old stuff—it won’t look all that much like English—or really anything you’re likely to have seen before.

[pause] 

What we do know, though, is that this belief—that salmon used to be so abundant that folks just got sick of it—seems to have gotten its hooks into the British imagination.

[Emphasize] And the fact that so many folks believed in it is in itself important. I’ve found references to people believing this myth as late as 1959!

That’s nineteen fifty nine—as in a one and a nine—and then a five and a nine.

The myth’s persistence shows us that people just wanted to believe it; something about it just rang true for many people.

[pause]

Why did it ring true?

Because even if no salmon clause is ever found anywhere in any indenture ever, we know that salmon populations died off in large numbers in many parts of Britain.

The species’ decline seems to have been especially obvious on the River Thames that runs through London.

In 1858, George Venables, Vicar of the east coast fishing town of Great Yarmouth in England, took it upon himself to publish a 34-page booklet about salmon in the Thames.

It was called Salmon in the Thames

Sure that name’s a little on the nose, but fine.

Actually, the full title was Salmon in the Thames and Other Rivers. And then Venables tosses in a subtitle for good measure:

[QE] “Remarks upon the former abundance and present non-existence of salmon in the Thames, & other rivers” [/QE]

So the topic of the booklet seems plenty clear from the title. Yet some of its prose is downright florid—what younger folks call extra—by the standards of today’s writing.

Especially by the standards of writings about comparative quantities of fish.

Here’s an example:

[QE] How comes it to pass that the Thames, the noblest river in England, and, if valued by its other sources of importance, the noblest river in the world, can no longer boast of its salmon fisheries? How is it that its proud stream affords no such attractions to the fisherman as it did in the early part of this century, and, as it sweeps in graceful homage around the abode of royalty at Windsor, how is it that the best of rivers offers not, in its ample bosom, to her most gracious Majesty, the best of monarchs, a tribute of the best of fish? [/QE]

Whoo! Yeah, I’d like to see a couple sentences like THAT in the Journal of Applied Ichthyology.

But the grandiloquent text of the good Rev. Venables’ booklet eventually gets down to business, casting his metaphorical net to find whatever historical records were available to him about salmon fishing.

His best information comes from a fishing family who kept a detailed journal of salmon caught on the Thames for over a quarter century from 1794 through 1821.

He quotes from that journal extensively and even distills it all into a single table which he calls a “[QE] compendius view[/QE]” of its findings.

And he digs up more good stuff, too.

He also compiled info and stories from older folks who had fished for salmon prior to 1794, and they similarly claimed that salmon hauls from even earlier were larger still—both in terms of individual fish caught and total weight.

[pause]

Other historical and present-day sources verify this vicar’s information: 1833 was the final year in the 19th century that anyone recorded seeing a salmon in the Thames.

[Pause]

Where did they all go?

We’ll find out in the next part.

[Separator music]

Industrial Fish Pie

Yeah—they all died.

You probably knew that already.

[pause]

The better question, though, is why did they all die?

Remember that giant audio pie chart in last episode? We talked about how the Industrial Revolution took place just a couple hundred years ago. That’s a while ago for a person, but it’s crazy-recent in the big picture of human time. And it’s what killed the river’s once-abundant salmon population.

[pause]

Well, sort of. Abstract historical periodization of events like the Industrial Revolution doesn't kill fish.

Here, more concretely, is how that process went down:

First, it’s about all the people. London had grown so quickly that the Thames river—the lifeblood of the metropolis—just couldn’t handle them all.

Demographic data shows us that between the early 18th and mid-19th centuries, London’s population exploded: It went from fewer than 650,000 residents in 1714 to some two million by 1840.

By the middle of the 1800s, London had more people living in it than Beijing during the same era.

New industrial factory jobs had brought in more workers than ever.

As anyone who’s ever read virtually anything by Charles Dickens knows, Londoners back then often lived in slums with poor plumbing.

And even in those places where sewers were better set up, they couldn’t handle all the additional human waste oozing into the water—especially when the river flooded.

And we know from other historical records that the Thames has been prone to flooding even back when the ancient Romans lived there; it wasn’t a new problem.

This is where Snow fell on to the question of the salmon clause.

That’s John Snow—one of the founders of modern epidemiology who lived in the middle of this transformative period.

Snow showed that all of that flooding and all of those people—and all of their feces—also led to massive outbreaks of the bacterial disease cholera.

John Snow mapped out the city and demonstrated that cholera outbreaks correlated with consumption of water from specific sources in town.

[pause]

A couple of decades after the last salmon had been seen in the Thames, the situation only deteriorated.

In 1858, London’s air became so utterly, horrifyingly, insufferably noxious to breathe, that people remembered it as the Big Stink.

No, seriously, that’s what it’s actually called.

In the House of Commons, Parliamentarians jammed rags soaked with calcium hypochlorite—basically swimming pool chemicals—into the windows in the hopes of overpowering the stench.

 Entire books have been written about this malodorous moment in modern history.

[pause]

All that stinkiness occurred because in addition to all of the human waste, there was also a lot of industrial waste ending up in the River Thames.

These new factories just dumped their by-products into the river.

Industrial heavy metals, for instance, sullied the once-clean waters and got into everything.

And even when factory folks weren’t physically flushing their toxins directly into the river, air has other sneaky ways of dumping its trash into the H2O.

In fact, just like in the Last Airbender series, water and air tend hang out together a lot. And they share a lot with one another.

All of which means that Big Stinky air was partly caused by putrid water.

And on the flip side, polluted air from factory smokestacks gets into the water—it just takes a little rain.

In fact, the phenomenon of acid rain was first discovered—also in the 1840s—by the scientist Robert Angus Smith. He realized that the massive quantities of burning coal in the even more industrialized city of Manchester, led to high concentrations of sulphuric acid in the city’s water.

In fact, his research shows that London’s water got off easy compared to Manchester, whose water was significantly more acidic than London’s. 

Even so, the acidity levels were still high, and therefore industry added insult to injury in the estuary and beyond.

[pause]

With all this pollution, with all those people dying of cholera, and with all those folks throughout the whole city holding their noses or jamming their windows full of their favorite noxious fume-inducing chemicals in an effort to fight all the other chemicals—

Yes, with all of that stuff happening, 19th century Londoners might be forgiven for not worrying so much about the fish.

[slowly, pausing in between sentences] The salmon would presumably be less likely to forgive them.

Partly because they’re fish and therefore, as far as we know, incapable of abstract thinking along those lines.

But even if they could forgive, they weren’t able to. Because they were dead.

[pause]

By the 1950s, a full century later, even the meanest, toughest, most pollution resistant fish in the Thames were also dead.

Writes Veronica Edmonds-Brown, an ecologist at the University of Hertfordshire:

“[QE]For most fish to thrive, the water they live in must contain at least 4-5 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per litre.… Measurements taken during the 1950s showed that dissolved oxygen …levels in the Thames were… equivalent of half a milligram per litre. That meant the river could only support a few aquatic invertebrate species like midges and fly larvae.[/QE]

[pause]

That was the Thames: Once teeming with so much salmon that folks later believed—probably falsely—that laborers refused to put up with any more of it. By the 1950s, the only living things that river could sustain were a bunch of maggots.

[long pause]

But then, in 1974, something even crazier happened. The salmon returned from the grave.

[Replay of happy “oh yeah” music]

How’d they pull off that trick? Hang on a sec to find out.

[Separator music]

Return of the Salmon

Oh yeah! In 1974 a salmon was documented in the Thames, just swimming around as if nothing had happened over the past centuries. As if the river hadn’t been nightmarishly toxic just a couple of decades earlier.

By the early 1990s, researchers found hundreds of them—into the 300s in ’93.

Today, there are still salmon in the Thames and it is in many ways an extraordinary success story.

[pause]

So what was involved in bringing back so much nature to the Thames that it could bring a species back that had been entirely missing for around one hundred and fifty years?

[longer pause]

You might think that restoring a natural space back to its natural state just involves leaving it alone.

Frankly, a big part of improving the Thames was simply to get all those people to stop pooping into it.

[pause]

And yet that process involves a lot of more than just putting up posters with clever slogans like

[QE]“Hey! Don’t poop in the Thames!”[/QE]

The issue has been—and continues to be—the flooding of the sewer system; London has struggled to build flood-resistant sewage systems for literally centuries.

Which means that leaving the Thames alone in a natural state, actually involves a lot of NOT leaving it alone. It requires human intervention.

Like a giant so-called “super sewer” system designed to assure that all the waste gets to actual waste treatment plants.

T his is the origin of an alliteration lover’s dream called the Thames Tideway Tunnel that began construction in 2016 and has cost something like five billion pounds—which is roughly six-and-a-half billion US dollars—

And which is officially a ton of sewer-mollians.

[pause, clear throat]

Construction was only completed in March of 2024 and is supposed to be fully up and running at some point in 2025.

[aside] This episode is being written and recorded during the Summer of 2024, in case you’re from the future and were wondering.

[pause]

And the Thames Tideway Tunnel Super Sewer System was not the only feat of engineering that involved not at all leaving the Thames alone in a natural state in order to return to more of a natural state.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, London’s government also took it upon itself to build the so-called “Thames bubbler”—a ship-board system that literally pumps oxygen into the river.

[pause]

So part of the solution was bright, civic-minded engineers coming up with bright, civic-minded solutions to the city’s problems.

But it’s also about the people and their city government.

Today, there are significant restrictions on what kinds of developments can be built on the Thames.

And on what kinds of stuff can be dumped into the water.

And belched into the air. 

And what kinds of exotic animals you cannot release into the wild.

And what you can and cannot do with any fish you happen to catch.

And many, many other rules and regulations designed to keep the water cleaner and fishier—in the good way.

[pause]

And a final example is about groups of people becoming more involved in the intimate lives of the salmon themselves.

Since the 1970s, there have been multiple projects to breed salmon, collect their eggs, and free the fry—releasing those baby fish into the water.

Many of those projects were expensive.

And many of them failed spectacularly.

A study in 2011 showed that pretty much all of the salmon finning around in the Thames were not from London at all. Just another bunch of tourists.

So yeah, the history of the Thames salmon is definitely a success story. But it isn’t just about everything working smoothly and automatically becoming magically better without a lot of screwups along the way.

In fact it took a lot of trial and error, patience and vision to make the Thames into one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world today.

[pause]

And it’s a work in progress with constantly evolving challenges. It requires ongoing supervision and vigilance—and mounds of pounds—to keep it in a salmon-ready condition.

[pause]

And that, children, is the story of S. Clause.

What does it tell us about the intersection between nature and history?

For that we’ve got to swim back upstream one final time to spawn our exciting conclusion.

[Separator music]

Conclusion

[pause]

Let’s return to our original question from the previous episode.

We were asking how can we know how healthy a natural place is? How do we know when it’s in its normal state? Or when it’s become different—and weird?

The answers to those questions require an understanding of [echo effect] change over time [/echo]—which is what we historians spend a whole mess of our time trying to understand.

When you look at—or take a walk on—a pie chart of how humans have lived, you learn that today—that is, the past two hundred years or so—is truly a strange time for our species and for pretty much every other species that we come in contact with.

But that is a counterintuitive idea. As individuals our lifetimes are relatively short, so it makes sense for today’s ways of doing things to just seem ‘regular.’

Yet as we discussed last time, the fact is that we interact with nature in ways that are entirely unprecedented in most of our past. We’re using natural resources, and mixing up the globe’s stuff in new, exciting, and maybe terrifying ways.

We human-types lived in relative harmony with nature when we were hunter-gatherers—and even during our first ten thousand years or so as city-building agriculturalists.

But since the Industrial Revolution really got going, we’ve been fish out of water.

Which brings us back to the story of the Thames salmon. It’s just one illustration of humans’ radical impact on nature. It’s a sad story, not only for the salmon, but also for people who need clean water to survive—which is to say, all of us.

The story of the salmon clause also illustrates how people can make things better sometimes—how there’s an ongoing process of monitoring our impact, realizing what’s gone wrong, and making corrections when we can—sometimes having to shell out serious resources in the process.

[pause]

We can even learn a lot when we explore the past of that 140 acres of college woods called the College Woods that I mentioned in the intro to the previous episode.

Reading records from just about a century ago, you’d find that one of the most important tree species here in East Tennessee was—

The salmon.

No, I’m just kidding: It was the American Chestnut. Today it’s nearly entirely wiped out, thanks to the accidental introduction of a fungus called the chestnut blight.

But anyone who’s alive right now in the area—even the oldest old-timers—have no direct memory of ever seeing these trees grow to maturity throughout these mountain forests.

And that is where environmental history enters the scene—and why exploring our past connections to nature, so important.

It helps us understand what’s normal or abnormal about the present-day. And it indicates what sorts of trends are taking place, over time.

Ultimately, the American chestnut tree, along with mysterious case of the Thames salmon—are tiny pieces of a huge puzzle.

J.R. McNeill’s Something New Under The Sun—that book which I mentioned in the prior episode, doesn’t exactly claim to be about the strangeness of now.

It’s about this [QE] “uncontrolled experiment” [/QE] that our species is conducting on nature—whether we know it or not.

But he does use the word “peculiar” at least twelve times in the book to describe industrial people’s connections to nature—and the word “strange” shows up a couple of times too.

That’s because environmental historians like McNeill have given us perspective on just how unnatural human impact has been on the nature of this planet.

There’s a genuine danger when we assume—without reflection—that today’s rivers or forests or oceans or deserts are the same as they’ve always been.

Or that the way we use natural resources today is simply the way we always have.

Because history shows us that our relationship with nature has changed a lot over the years.

[pause]

We historians have an important role to play in conversations about the natural environment.

We investigate the records that past people left behind and what they can tell us about their connections with nature.

As a field that straddles both the humanities and social sciences, we can find useful information even when the documents we’re reading may not be literally true—like that apprentices resented being paid in salmon.

After all, even information that seems fishy at first can help us better understand the human condition when you learn how to read between the lines.

Outro & credits

[pause]

That was fun! Now it’s your turn: How can understanding the past help us make sense of today’s most pressing environmental questions?

Add your piece of the pie to the comments on the blog page connected to this episode over at findyourselfinhistory.com . Or send me an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

I’d also love to hear ideas you have for episodes, or any other feedback you’ve got—even your favorite salmon recipe.

I hope to hear from you!

(I was pointing at you like Uncle Sam when I said that.)

[pause]

You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

Want to support this program and also get certified as an official historical weirdo? Head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how.

And finally it just seems natural here for me to make another unsolicited plug for my institution, Maryville College.

That’s Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu

[Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast represent are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of anyone else at Maryville College or from anywhere else on planet earth.

The information presented on my show is based on my own best attempts at accuracy. No sewermolians were received to influence the content of this or any other episode.

[pause]

But if you’d like to support this show for real, tell your first, second, and eighth best friends about it and growl at them like a leopard until they subscribe.

Once again, findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors for more ways to help. 

And thank you.

This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2024 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Learn more about Matt at trimboli.com .

[pause]

Thanks for listening!