A VERY ENGLISH HABIT

Today it is Afghanistan. A couple of decades ago it was the "golden
triangle" in Southeast Asia. Before that it was India and Mexico, China and
Turkey. Opium and the people who grow it were always the outsiders, the
infidels, the Oriental fiends. Even as harassed Victorian mothers lulled
their children to sleep with laudanum laced patent medicines, they
shuddered at tales in the popular press of East End opium dens run by
Chinamen just off the junk from Shanghai.

So it comes as a shock to discover that Mitcham, a dormitory suburb of
south London just off the end of the Underground map was once the drugs
capital of Britain. For through much of the 19th century, the water meadows
of Mitcham were alive with white opium poppies. This little corner of
Surrey was the largest centre of cultivation of the dreaded plant in
Britain. It was the golden triangle of the home counties.

THE VILLAGE of Mitcham, in the sleepy headwaters of the River Wandle, was
for some 150 years the medicinal plants capital of England. As Surrey
squire Sir T. Cato Worsfold recalled at the turn of the last century:
"Almost everything in the vegetable kingdom that had a healing virtue in
the medical world was produced in the village." And that included much that
was narcotic, as well as much that was fragrant and soothing.

Back then people didn't distinguish between bad and good drugs the way they
do today. Opium had been a staple of life in Britain since at least the
Middle Ages. In the 17th century it was embraced by Thomas Sydenham, often
regarded as Britain's first modern doctor, though more as a sedative than a
mind altering agent. Early in the 19th century, at least half the national
intake was consumed in the marsh fens of Cambridge and Lincoln, where it
eased the malarial fevers still rife there.

But demand soared throughout the country for much of the rest of the
century, as it became an ingredient of hundreds of patent medicines, often
in the form of laudanum a mixture of opium and alcohol. It stopped the
runs, cured gout, soothed toothaches and dulled menstruation pains.

Queen Victoria used it, as the records of the local pharmacy in her
Scottish Highlands fastness at Balmoral attest. By one estimate, a sixth of
all the children in the country were regularly sent to sleep with Godfrey's
Cordial a judicious mixture of opium, treacle, water and spices. In the
1870s, some 100 tonnes of opium was consurned in Britain annually. In its
many forms it became the aspirin of its day.

Despite this, Britons have persisted in seeing opium as an alien invader.
But although it's true that the opium poppy grows better in hotter climes,
it has a long history in Britain. Archaeologists recently found opium poppy
seeds in an underwater excavation of a Scottish settlement in Perthshire,
some 2500 years old.

Maybe cultivation died out. But its revival was ensured by a campaign run
in the 1790s by the Society of Arts in London to encourage the growing of
pharmaceutical plants. The society offered cash prizes to successful opium
growers. One winner was John Ball, who produced a bumper crop on his land
at Williton on the Somerset Levels, selling the harvest to local apothecaries.

It would not have been long before this came to the attention of Mitcham's
farmers. Starting around 175O, they built up a huge business supplying
London and elsewhere with every kind of pharmaceutical plant and fragrant
herb. Major James Moore of Figges Marsh was the big cultivator in the
heyday of the first half of the 19th century, along with his neighbour
James Arthur of Pound Farm.

"Probably there is not in the whole kingdom a single parish on which the
wholesale druggists and distillers of the metropolis draw more largely for
their supplies," said local chronicler Edward Walford in 1884.

They set aside hundreds of acres around the village of Mitcham for what
became known as the Mitcham Physic Garden, a cornucopia of the fragrant,
the toxic, the hallucinogenic, the anaesthetic and, sometimes no doubt, the
fraudulent. They set up stills and mills to process the products. Some
famous names began here. The Yardley cosmetics company, for instance.
Mitcham Mints became famous sweets. And Moore's family got together with
their relatives the Potters, and began pushing lavender fragrances under
the Potter & Moore brand.

But not all was fragrance. In among the fields of camomile and liquorice,
peppermint and caraway, Major Moore was growing opium poppies and other
subsequently banned narcotics such as wormwood. The poppies were harvested
both for their opium the dried juice extracted from the unripe seed
capsules and for morphine, one of opium's most powerful alkaloids. By the
1830s, local records show that Mitcham poppy heads were the major source of
"English opium" for London druggists.

Moore grew hemp too in the 1840s. It was a popular antidote to opium
withdrawal symptoms, but was also used along with opium to treat for
insanity. And he grew the hallucinogenic wormwood which was used in place
of hops in local beer.

Benjamin Slater -- one of a family of Slaters who mostly left for
Australia, where they founded three towns called Mitcham, grew lavender and
became the first to commercialise the eucalyptus tree described the
extraordinary variety of pharmaceutical plants growing in the fields of
Mitcham (the one in Surrey), in a memoir written in 1911. The poppies "grew
5 to 6 feet tall, with large heads as big as your fist, their stalks thick
and strong", he wrote.

He went on to describe how he had eaten a piece of wormwood in the fields
and "shuddered from head to foot" at its bitterness. Saffron too was "a
poison", he said, along with the "pretty little green foliage" of lavender
cotton, and the "very deadly" monkshood.

Opium gradually fell out of favour at the end of the 19th century, partly
because of growing medical concern about its psychotropic and physical
effects, and partly because of late Victorian panics about Chinamen and the
like. With the introduction of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, it finally
became illegal in Britain to possess opium without a doctor's prescription.
The drug went underground, reemerging as heroin.

Soon history was being rewritten. The opium poppies were written out. The
local council publishes a book The Story of Lavender, but nothing on the
Mitcham poppy. Nonetheless, if public morals had taken a different turn,
perhaps Potter & Moore would have become famous in the 20th century for its
"English opium" rather than for its lavender-scented toiletries.