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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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HP Sauce
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Britain's most famous sauce has a precise origin. In 1899 Edwin Samson Moore, owner of the Midland Vinegar Company in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, was visiting a creditor in the hope of getting a bill paid. Moore liked the smell of a sauce that was brewing in the room behind the grocer's shop, and he liked even more its name: HP Sauce. The grocer said he called it that because someone had seen a bottle of his sauce in the Houses of Parliament. Moore cancelled the debt, and for £150 bought the name and the recipe (a blend of spices and malt vinegar).
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The product was relaunched in 1903 and was marketed with great flair. Eye-catching square-shaped green bottles, with the Houses of Parliament on the label, were delivered to grocery shops by a fleet of tiny wagons drawn by donkeys. In 1917 Moore added an exotic touch to the label – a description of the sauce in French, the language of smart menus. The paragraph about 'cette sauce de premier choix' and the assurance that 'elle est absolument pure' provided for decades the only French phrases known to many people in Britain; and there was a public outcry in 1984 when a later generation of marketing men dropped this detail. Meanwhile the product had received its most famous piece of free publicity; in 1964 Mary Wilson, wife of the newly elected prime minister Harold Wilson, let slip in an interview her irritation at the way he smothered everything she cooked in HP Sauce.
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