The Vegetarian Movement Began In A Salford Chapel In 1809, Under A Preacher Called Cowherd

In 1809 a preacher in Salford told his congregation to give up meat and drink for good, and made it the price of staying in his church. Ellen White would not have her vision in Michigan for another 54 years.

The preacher was called William Cowherd. History writes its own jokes now and then, and it rarely bothers to hide them.

This site has said that Western veganism began with an American cultist receiving a vision in 1863. The British record moves the start back half a century and puts it on the other side of the Atlantic. By the time of that vision, the movement Cowherd began had crossed the ocean and lost more than half its faithful on the way over. It had helped found a national society in America, founded another in Kent, and settled on a name.

The word vegan came later still, typed on a second-hand typewriter by a woodwork teacher in Leicester in 1944.

The pledge was to eat no more meat while the world standeth

Cowherd had been a curate at St John’s in Manchester before he took up the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic. Then he quarrelled his way out of Swedenborg’s church as well. In 1800 he built a chapel of his own on King Street in Salford, called it Christ Church, and paid for it himself.

He ran an academy that took in boarders. He dabbled in medicine, enough that the town knew him as Dr Cowherd, and the poor came to him for treatment and for his soup. The seats in his chapel cost nothing, and his burial ground was open to all.

In 1809 he “promulgated views which were a severe test of his popularity”, as a Manchester librarian put it with Victorian restraint nearly seventy years later. His members pledged to “eat no more meat while the world standeth”, and intoxicating liquor went under the same ban. The congregation called itself the Bible Christian Church, and anyone who wanted to stay in it would now live without meat or drink.

For most of English history the people who decided what went on a poor man’s plate had been kings and landlords, by way of forest laws, sumptuary statutes and enclosure. Cowherd answered to a different authority, and his people knew their verses.

The first chapter of Genesis gives man “every herb bearing seed” and the fruit of every tree: “to you it shall be for meat”. In the King James Bible, meat simply means food. The church’s list of proof texts ran on from there.

The list took in the commandment against killing, and the verse in Romans that calls it good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine. It took in the Israelites in the Book of Numbers, who demanded meat in the wilderness and were struck down by a plague “while the flesh was yet between their teeth”.

The book the church published in 1818, two years after Cowherd’s death, was mostly a scrapbook of other men’s quotations keyed to Bible verses. Its best line was borrowed from Thomas Tryon, a London hatter who had given up meat in the 1650s. Tryon described the meat eater as “making his throat an open sepulchre, wherein to entomb the dead bodies of beasts”.

St Paul told the Corinthians to eat what the butcher sold

The pledge itself came from St Paul. “I will eat no flesh while the world standeth,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “lest I make my brother to offend.”

Paul was dealing with meat that had been offered to idols, and with fellow Christians whose consciences were troubled by it. Salford kept his words and dropped his reason.

Two chapters further on, in the same letter, Paul settles the matter for everyone else: “Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience sake.” The shambles was the meat market.

In Romans, in the same chapter the Bible Christians quoted, he is blunter about which of the two diets belongs to the weaker brother. “For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs.”

The church’s other texts kept awkward company too. Its list cited the ninth chapter of Genesis, where Noah is told not to eat flesh with the blood still in it. One verse higher, God hands Noah “every moving thing that liveth” for food. Even the church’s own scrapbook admitted the menu had changed. It quoted a writer who held that mankind lived on vegetables only “even till after the deluge”.

The first authority the movement called on was the Bible, and the Bible kept wandering off its side of the room.

Salford’s poorest were already living on the diet

The Bible Christians had real reasons, and some of them were good ones. Drink was doing serious damage in the mill towns. Meat was dear. Cowherd’s church fed people, doctored them and buried them for nothing, and some of its members knew the mills from the inside.

Joseph Brotherton joined the church in 1805. Years later he told the House of Commons that he had worked in a factory himself until his sixteenth year, for twelve and fourteen hours a day, through “all the privations which factory children endured”.

He married Martha Harvey, and the church’s cookbook, A New System of Vegetable Cookery, has been credited to her ever since, though it went out without a name. It came out in parts and was collected into a book in 1821. It is often called the first vegetarian cookbook.

Its introduction, in an edition of 1829, lays out the case against the butcher. “Animal food, therefore, must always be more or less dangerous,” it says. It warns that butchers, “perhaps with diseased lungs”, made a habit of blowing into their meat, “particularly veal, to make it look fine”.

That complaint was a fair one. A town that bought its veal from a man with a bad cough and no inspector had a genuine problem. The answer, when it came, was the meat inspector.

Brotherton rose. By his own account in the Commons, he went from factory boy to master spinner. In 1832 he was elected Salford’s first member of Parliament, a seat he held for the rest of his life.

He took the diet into the House and left the sermon in Salford. It caused consternation at public dinners, and his friends among the reformers made sure there was a pudding or a vegetable dish on the table for him.

His causes were shorter factory hours, public libraries, public parks and an end to hanging. He argued that the libraries bill “would provide the cheapest police that could possibly be established”, which is as practical a case for reading as anyone has made.

In February 1842 William Ferrand, the Tory member for Knaresborough, told the Commons that the member for Salford had long since retired from trade, and spoke of “that factory system, by which his enormous fortune was amassed”. Brotherton answered him in the House four days later. His riches, he said, “consisted not so much in the largeness of his means, as in the fewness of his wants.”

He died in January 1857, of a heart attack on an omnibus from Pendleton into Manchester. Salford’s memorial fund raised more than £2,550, and £1,050 of it paid for a bronze of him, with a line of his cut into the pedestal: “My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions but in the fewness of my wants.” The statue stands in Peel Park, a park he had helped to raise the money for.

In the early 1840s, while Brotherton sat for Salford, a young German was working in his father’s cotton firm in Manchester and taking notes. In 1845 Friedrich Engels set down the diet of the working class in the great English towns as a ladder, and he ranked it by meat.

The best-paid families had “meat daily and bacon and cheese for supper”. Where wages were lower, meat came “only two or three times a week”. Further down, the animal food shrank to “a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes”, and then it vanished. That left “bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes”, until on the lowest rung, among the Irish, “potatoes form the sole food”.

The diet the Bible Christians took up out of conscience was the bottom half of that ladder, and their leaders could afford any rung of it. Brotherton had climbed from the factory floor to the Commons. James Simpson, who would become the first president of the Vegetarian Society, was the son of a wealthy calico printer and had been schooled in London and Berlin.

They chose the lower rungs on purpose and stayed on them for life, which is more than most people who preach a diet ever manage.

The families at the bottom of Engels’s ladder were spared the decision. Their wages had already made it for them.

Forty-one sailed for Philadelphia, and eighteen arrived still vegetarian

William Metcalfe joined Cowherd’s church in 1809, at 21, the year of the pledge. In the spring of 1817 he and another minister, James Clark, led a party of 41 out of Liverpool for Philadelphia. There were the two ministers, 20 other adults and 19 children. The crossing took eleven weeks, and they landed on 15 June.

Only 18 were still keeping the rule when they arrived, 11 adults and 7 children. The church’s centenary history, published in 1922, could only blame “the strong salt breeze of the Atlantic, or some other cause”. It also blamed the advice the newcomers kept being given, that nobody could live in so hot a climate without animal food.

Science has yet to isolate the sea breeze that turns a vegetarian back into a man who wants bacon.

Metcalfe held the remnant together. He taught school and preached in a room behind a house on North Front Street, and in 1823 the congregation opened a chapel of its own on North Third Street. In 1821 he published a tract called Abstinence from the Flesh of Animals.

In 1830 a Presbyterian minister turned temperance lecturer arrived in the city. His name was Sylvester Graham, and he would become the most famous food reformer in America, with a cracker named after him to prove it.

The Bible Christians later claimed him as their convert. Their own history says that meeting the church’s members “most probably” set him investigating the diet, and that is as far as the documents go. Outside the church’s own records, the connection rests on a meeting that may or may not have happened.

What is on the record is New York, 15 May 1850, when an American Vegetarian Convention assembled with Metcalfe in the chair. He told it he had been a vegetarian for forty years.

The convention founded the American Vegetarian Society. William Alcott was its president and Graham was among the vice-presidents. A hydropathic doctor called Russell Trall was recording secretary, and Metcalfe was corresponding secretary.

The society held its first annual meeting that September in the Bible Christian church in Philadelphia. Metcalfe edited its journal until it folded in 1854, and when Alcott died in 1859 he became president.

By the early 1860s the society was gone. Metcalfe died on 16 October 1862.

Ellen White’s vision came within eight months of the Salford emigrant’s death

Less than eight months later, on 6 June 1863, Ellen White had her vision of health reform at Otsego in Michigan. What the Seventh-day Adventists built on it is already told on this site, from Battle Creek and the cornflake to a founder of the American Dietetic Association. What the dietitians did next has its own page.

No document runs directly from Metcalfe to White. Her own account says she read no works on health until after she had written up her vision. It says she did not visit James Caleb Jackson’s water cure at Dansville, in New York state, until August 1864, fourteen months after it.

Jackson kept no meat on his table there, and no butter or salt either, as she noted in a letter. The historian Ronald Numbers argued in 1976 that her health teaching borrowed heavily from the reformers who came before her. The Ellen G. White Estate has disputed it ever since.

The documented thread is Russell Trall, recording secretary of the society Metcalfe chaired into being. Trall lectured at Battle Creek in 1868 and wrote for the Adventists’ health magazine. In 1872 he taught the young John Harvey Kellogg at his college in New Jersey.

So the vision this site once called the beginning arrived in a movement that was already 54 years old. Its American branch had been planted by Salford emigrants. Its national society had held its first annual meeting in their chapel, and had counted Kellogg’s future teacher among its officers.

The Adventists gave the idea a sanitarium, a breakfast cereal and, in time, a Californian town still sold as a longevity miracle. The idea itself had sailed out of Liverpool in 1817.

The Vegetarian Society was founded at a water cure in Ramsgate

Back in England the old Salford men were still at it. In the autumn of 1847 they went to the far corner of Kent to found a national society.

Northwood Villa, near Ramsgate, was William Horsell’s water cure. Horsell was a temperance campaigner from Wiltshire. The year before, he had advertised it as a Hydropathic Infirmary “for Persons of Limited Means”, with the baths to be built as soon as £200 could be raised.

By the end of 1846 it had room for ten patients living in and ten coming by the day. Hydropathy treated illness with water, applied inside and out, which made it the one branch of medicine where a temperance man could prescribe freely.

On Thursday 30 September 1847, Joseph Brotherton MP took the chair there, and by the end of the meeting upwards of 150 people had joined the Vegetarian Society. Twelve of those present had travelled more than 300 miles to get there.

The official report singled out nine people in the room who had gone without flesh and alcohol for more than thirty years, most of them for 38. Thirty-eight years before 1847 was 1809. Cowherd’s old congregation had come to Kent.

Simpson became president and stayed president until he died. Horsell was secretary. The treasurer, William Oldham, came from Alcott House, a vegetarian school at Ham Common in Surrey. Its journal had printed the word vegetarian in 1842, the earliest use of it in print yet found.

To join the new society you declared that you had abstained from the flesh of animals as food for at least a month, and you had to be over 14.

Two months earlier, a conference at Alcott House had resolved that “abundant proof may be adduced from history, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry”. The proof was that the products of the vegetable kingdom were “the natural and best food of man”, good for beauty, intellect and morals, and good “to length of life”. Eating flesh, the same resolutions said, was “engendering disease” and “abridging the lives of its consumers”.

The movement had traded Genesis for science, and science, unlike Genesis, can be checked.

Most of the science came from one book, John Smith of Malton’s Fruits and Farinacea, the Proper Food of Man, published in 1845. The movement’s own Victorian historian called it the most complete work on the subject yet published in England. It promised that a vegetable diet gave more endurance for hard labour, better government of the passions and a longer life. One chapter promised protection against epidemics, and the epidemic it discussed was cholera.

The disease it promised to keep away was in the water

Cholera came back to Britain the next year. In 1849 it killed 53,293 people in England and Wales, 14,137 of them in London.

Sylvester Graham had already lectured New York on the subject in 1832. In a time of epidemics, he told his audiences, no other diet was so well suited to preserving the health of the body as a vegetable one. In the printed edition he claimed the epidemic had entirely confirmed him.

In 1854 a London doctor called John Snow traced an outbreak in Soho to a single water pump on Broad Street. Cholera travelled in the water. What protected a city from it was clean water and a sewer, and Britain spent the next generation building both.

So the Vegetarian Society was founded in a water cure, and the epidemic its own textbook promised to keep away was coming out of the water all along. It belongs on the same shelf as the rest of the science that was settled before anyone checked.

The promise of long life made the leaders’ health a public matter. James Simpson died at Foxhill Bank, near Accrington, in September 1859, after eighteen months of illness, before he had reached fifty. His death needed explaining, and the movement duly explained it, so that it would not reflect badly on the diet.

The Society counted 478 members in February 1850 and 889 in February 1853. After Simpson’s death it fell away, and by 1870 it was down to about 125.

The Ministry of Food paid the vegetarians in cheese

The Society recovered in the decades that followed, and by the twentieth century it was able to negotiate with the state. When the state began deciding what everyone could eat, the vegetarians bargained for their own terms, and the terms were dairy.

In October 1918 the Vegetarian Society told its members that they could now surrender their meat and lard rations. They would take extra butter and margarine in exchange, with nut butter promised later in the year.

In the Second World War the currency was cheese. The vegetarian societies had been lobbying government since 1937, and between 1939 and 1942 they won extra cheese, extra fats and a special allowance of nuts.

By September 1941 a registered vegetarian handed in the meat and bacon coupons and drew 8oz of cheese a week against the general ration of 3oz. That put them on the same list as underground miners and farm labourers.

The rest of the country, meanwhile, was queuing for a meat ration measured in pennies.

Some 50,000 people registered as vegetarians during the war, by one historian’s count. She noted that the figure included some families who had taken up a vegetarian ration book purely to get the extra cheese.

By the summer of 1946 the vegetarian cheese ration was 12oz a week, with 2oz of extra vegetarian margarine. That July bread was about to go on the ration and the meat ration was going up, and an MP asked what was being done for the vegetarians. The Minister of Food, John Strachey, opened his answer by saying he was sorry that vegetarians would not benefit “from this addition to the meat ration”.

A minister of the Crown, apologising to the vegetarians that he could not give them more meat, is about as warm as relations between the movement and the state have ever been.

Cheese in those years was set with rennet, an enzyme taken from the stomachs of calves, and the vegetarians’ wartime bargain rested on it. Not everybody in the Vegetarian Society was comfortable with that.

A woodwork teacher in Leicester objected to the cheese

Donald Watson was born in Mexborough, in South Yorkshire, in September 1910. As a boy he spent his holidays on his grandmother’s farm, which his uncle George ran.

One day the farm killed a pig. Watson saw the whole thing, screams and all, a few feet from where the pig’s companion was still living. His uncle George, whom he thought the world of, was one of the men doing it. Speaking about it nearly eighty years later, he said: “I decided that farms, and uncles, had to be re-assessed.”

He made it his New Year’s resolution in 1924, at 13, and by his own account he never ate meat or fish again. He trained as a joiner, became a travelling woodwork teacher in Leicestershire, and served as secretary of the Leicester Vegetarian Society. In the war he registered as a conscientious objector. By the early 1940s he had given up dairy and eggs as well.

He was not alone. Elsie Shrigley, a music teacher, organised a debate on the question in Croydon in April 1944. Watson had already put the case in the Vegetarian Society’s own magazine that spring, in a two-part article called “Should Vegetarians Eat Dairy Produce?”

He asked the Society for a section of its own for the non-dairy vegetarians. On 19 September 1944 its executive declined to set one up. It offered instead to keep giving some space in the magazine to any group formed outside, and the annual meeting upheld that decision in November. As Watson’s group later reported it, the committee had decided that the Society’s full energies were needed for the job of abolishing flesh-eating.

According to the Vegan Society’s own history, Watson called a meeting in November 1944 with five other non-dairy vegetarians, Shrigley among them, at the Attic Club in Holborn. World Vegan Day is kept on 1 November in its honour.

The society’s seventieth-anniversary history reckons the meeting was more probably on the 5th. John Davis, a historian of the movement, points out that the first newsletter mentions no meeting at all, and no society either. Most movements have a founding meeting. This one may have had to manage without the minutes.

The newsletter, at least, survives. The Vegan News, a quarterly for the non-dairy vegetarians, is dated 24 November 1944. Watson typed it on a typewriter he had bought second-hand along with a Roneo duplicator, and ran off the copies himself. It ran to four pages, cost twopence, and went to the group’s 25 members, who were scattered too widely, it explained, to form a committee.

It also needed a name. Non-dairy, Watson wrote, was too negative, and the diet ought to be named for what its followers did eat. So he took the first three and last two letters of vegetarian, called the paper The Vegan News, and invited the members to do better.

They tried. The next issue printed their suggestions, among them Allvega, Neo-Vegetarian, Dairyban, Vitan, Benevore, Sanivore and Beaumanger. Vegan won, and on 8 April 1945 the Non-Dairy Vegetarians renamed themselves the Vegan Society.

Britain had a narrow escape from the Dairyban Society.

The founders’ reasons have been tested since

The cruelty, the first newsletter said, was in the by-products: cheese set with rennet from slaughtered calves, and eggs that could not be produced without killing the cockerels. Then there was disease. At least 40% of cows, it said, were now tubercular.

The figure was not far off. Tuberculosis was rife in British cattle in the 1930s and 1940s. Britain dealt with it by testing herds and taking out the infected animals. A voluntary Attested Herd Scheme began in 1935 and compulsory eradication followed from 1950. By October 1960 the whole of Great Britain counted as attested.

The cows were cured, and the diet carried on regardless, much as it had after the meat inspectors arrived.

The newsletter thought it perhaps premature to make any great claims for the physiological superiority of its diet. Then it made some anyway. Its secretary, it reported, could now cycle 230 miles in a day, roughly twice what he had managed on milk and eggs, and could dig his allotments for ten hours a day.

Its stated aim was a reform it believed to be “moral, safe and logical”.

Vitamin B12 was isolated in 1948, four years after the diet was named. Chemists at Merck in America and at Glaxo in Britain got there almost at the same time. It is made by bacteria, and the human diet gets it from animal foods.

In 1954 Frank Wokes, a vice-president of the Vegan Society, told the International Congress of Nutrition in Amsterdam that vegans appeared to be running short of it. Wokes spent eighteen years as director of research at Ovaltine, the malted drink people stir into hot milk.

The Vegan Society now puts it plainly: “Fortified foods and supplements are the only reliable sources of vitamin B12 for vegans.” Since 2005 it has sold a tablet of its own, VEG 1, with B12, vitamin D, iodine and selenium in it.

The definition moved as well. In May 1945 the new society defined veganism as a way of eating: a life on fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and other wholesome foods that did not come from animals. By 1949 Leslie Cross, one of its leading members, had recast it as “the principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man”. That was the seed of the longer definition the society uses today.

In four years the case had moved off the plate and onto the animal, where no vitamin could follow it.

The world is still standing

Cowherd was buried in front of his chapel in 1816. Brotherton was the first man buried in Weaste Cemetery in 1857. Watson died in Keswick in 2005, at 95.

In 135 years the movement they made rested on three different authorities. In Salford it rested on Genesis and St Paul, who would not stay on its side. At Ramsgate it rested on anatomy and physiology, until cholera and the membership figures had their say. In Leicester it rested on the calf and the cockerel, where no laboratory can reach.

The conclusion travelled from one authority to the next without a mark on it, which tells you the order in which the two were arrived at.

The Bible Christians pledged to eat no more meat while the world standeth. Two hundred and seventeen years later the world is still standing, and the society at the end of their line sells B12 in tablet form, because no plant on earth makes it.