HP Sauce: we all love a bit on the side

A dining-table fixture for more than a century, from greasy spoons to the House of Windsor

WHILE POUNDING on the base of my upturned bottle of fruity brown stuff, attempting to induce a blob to descend onto my waiting bacon butty and contemplating the Royal Warrant adorning its neck, I began to muse on the possibility that the Queen might have a bottom-bashing equerry on hand at breakfast time. Getting the sauce out of the bottle can be a pretty strenuous exercise, particularly for a lady in her nineties. I suppose she could use the squeezy version, but somehow I don’t like to think that Her Majesty would use anything so vulgar as plastic. Glass only for her, and for me too.

Brown sauces in Britain have a history stretching back to Roman times but, after a millennium-long lull, it was the Victorians who once again got the hots for a spicy sauce – the taste of Empire.

Worcestershire Sauce set the trend in the 1830s but the inclusion of anchovies in the recipe was perhaps too fishy for some palates and milder, fruitier brown sauces soon followed, including anchovy-free Yorkshire Relish in the 1850s. Sauces started getting thicker with the arrival of A1 in 1862 and in 1880 an even fruitier blend, OK, joined the brown club, but the sauce that would eventually come to dominate the British breakfast table made its debut in the 1890s.

Frederick Gibson Garton, a Nottingham grocer, started producing a brown sauce using a recipe brought back from colonial India by one of his titled customers. It had a malt vinegar and tomato base blended with molasses, sugar, cornflour and rye flour, with the exotic and fruity overtones provided by dates and tamarind and the ‘secret ingredient’ spices that make HP unique.

Garton peddled it around the local area and, in 1895, on hearing that its fame had spread as far as the restaurants of the Houses of Parliament, decided to call his semi-viscous condiment ‘Garton’s H.P. Sauce’.

Garton, however, ran into debt with his vinegar supplier, the Midlands Vinegar Company. Its owner, Edwin Samson Moore, dropped into Garton’s store to discuss the situation, sniffed the aroma of the brewing HP and, recognising its qualities, promptly settled the debt and – for an additional £150

‘ONE SOMEWHAT INSENSITIVE ADVERTISEMENT READ: “MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB, WITH LOTS OF HP SAUCE”’

– bought the recipe and the name. Moore saw a great future in the sauce and began investing a considerable amount of money in his new asset, expanding his factory in the Aston district of Birmingham. In 1903 he launched Garton’s HP Sauce to a wider world, complete with an engraving of the Palace of Westminster on the bottle.

Moore also invested a considerable sum in advertising, with one somewhat insensitive ad – bearing in mind modern militant vegan sensibilities – reading ‘Mary had a Little Lamb, with lots of HP Sauce’.

In 1917, for no discernible reason, the label acquired a French ‘side’. Ironic really, in that no self-respecting Frenchman would countenance a so-called sauce from Les

Rosbifs. It was, presumably, an attempt to add a little Continental sophistication to the sticky brown stuff. French fell from the label in 1984 (provoking the inevitable letters of protest to The Times from indignant HP fans) but not before comic Marty Feldman created a TV sketch in which he sang the French side of the label in an hilarious parody of an impassioned, might-commit-suicide-before-the-end-of-this-song chanteur.

In 1967 HP fell into the maw of the multinationals: first Imperial Tobacco, followed by a succession of companies before it was acquired by Heinz in 2005. Uncaring of HP’s unique place in British hearts, Heinz moved production to Holland, leading to questions regarding its retention of the name being raised in the House. Two years later, HP’s Aston factory was demolished.

A final thought struck me while waiting for the brown stuff to descend onto my cooling butty. As we stand on the brink of Brexit, perhaps it’s finally time to rename it EU Sauce, with a double-sided label showing the two EU parliament buildings.