The Bradford Sweets Killings of 1858

One of the most macabre and unintentional poisonings in history is the sad case of the Bradford sweets killings of 1858. Twenty people died and over 200 sickened when they ate candy that had accidentally been prepared with arsenic. Kind of makes whatever mistakes we might be doing on Zoom this week seem a lot less significant, no?.

The incident happened when a sweets shop in Bradford, England (in Yorkshire) owned by one William Hardaker, aka “Humbug Billy,” decided to mix fillers that mimicked sugar into the British candy known as “humbugs” – you can see what they look like in the second slide. Mixing things like powdered limestone or Plaster of Paris in these sweets was common practice at the time, owing to the high price of sugar — it was labor-intensive to produce (in fact, it had been a major catalyst for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade), and the government made a lucrative tax on it – in 1815, the sugar tax brought in three million pounds in British currency.

In 1858, Humbug Billy’s worker bought filler he thought was harmless from a pharmacy, but there was a mix-up, and arsenic was purchased instead. At Billy’s candy shop, about 40 pounds of humbug candies were made with the poison, which acts by interrupting cell processes and causing liver disease, coma, and death in the right doses. For 20 people, this was the amount they consumed, as the first image from _Punch_ magazine’s November edition of that year commemorated (see first slide).

The Bradford sweet poisonings caused such a sensation that they led to legislation in Britain that regulated the ways ingredients could be mixed, as well as how poisons and medicines could be handled by druggists.