Agatha Christie and the Loughborough Connection

Well, would you believe it?! I was sitting quietly reading a book a friend had lent to me when you could have blowed me down with a feather when something with a local connection was mentioned, in a novel that was essentially about farming on the borders of Monmouthshire and Herefordshire. This, of course, reminded me about those Agatha Christie connections I came across when I was reading all her detective novels, and which I said I’d tell you about …

According to my copy of ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’, it was published in 1930, but according to all the other sources I’ve checked, it seems to have been published in 1970, being her 80th book, and being published to coincide with her 80th birthday. It’s a stand alone book, which doesn’t feature any of her regular sleuths, like Poirot, Miss Marple, or Tommy and Tuppence, etc..

The story is essentially a spy novel, and has been compared with novels by John le Carré, and Helen MacInnes. Just over 200 pages in, and towards the end of the novel, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton, the aunt of Sir Stafford Nye, who is one of the main male characters, meets with her old friend, Admiral Philip Blunt, and the two of them try to remember the name of a project being undertaken by scientist, Professor Robert Shoreham. This project went by the name of ‘Project B’, mostly because they couldn’t remember what it was actually called! The conversation went like this:

Matilda: “Well, I don’t know what [the project] was exactly. I mean, I don’t think it was sleeping or laughing [gas], At any rate, it was something. It wasn’t really Project B. It had another name.

Admiral: What sort of a name?

Matilda rather thoughtfully: Well, he did mention it once I think, or twice. The name he’d given it. Rather like Benger’s Food.

Admiral: Some soothing agent for the digestion?

Matilda: I don’t think [the project name] had anything to do with the digestion. I rather think it was something you sniffed, or something, perhaps it was a gland. You know we talked of so many things that you never quite knew what he was talking about at the moment. Benger’s Food. Ben – Ben – it did begin Ben. And there was a pleasant word associated with it.”

What Matilda was trying to remember was Project Benvo, which was a drug that made people altruistic, possibly on a long-term basis - all made up, of course.

The other Agatha Christie novel I read was ‘After the funeral’, published in 1953. Following the death of Richard Abernethie, his sister is then murdered. Poirot questions family members, including Richard’s wife, Maude:

“Poirot had talked with Maude Abernethie – also about paint (the smell of) and how fortunate it had been that Timothy [Richard’s brother] had been able to come to Enderby [Hall, not Enderby in Leicestershire!], and how kind it had been of Helen [Richard’s widowed sister-in-law] to extend an invitation to Miss Gilchrist [Cora’s paid companion], also.

For really she is most useful. Timothy so often feels like a snack – and one cannot ask too much of other people’s servants, but there is a gas ring in a little room off the pantry, so that Miss Gilchrist can warm up Ovaltine or Benger’s there without disturbing anybody. And she’s so willing about fetching things, she’s quite willing to run up and down stairs a dozen times a day. Oh yes, I feel that it was really quite Providential that she should have lost her nerve about staying alone in the house as she did, though I admit it vexed me at the time.”

Finally, a novel by Bruce Chatwin, called ‘On the Black Hill’, which, according to the novel’s cover was ‘Now a Sensational Film’ was published in 1982. It follows the life story of the family Jones family, particularly the twins, Lewis and Benjamin. It was initially thought that old Mrs Arkwright, a neighbour, died from nephritis and the effects of insanity, but when doubts were expressed, and her body exhumed for examination:

“Dr Galbraith professed himself shocked by the result of the forensic tests: ‘I knew she was a martyr to indigestion’ he said, ‘but I never expected this.’

To avail himself of her capital, Mr Arkwright had laced his wife’s Benger’s Food with arsenic purchased for the persecution of dandelions. He was convicted in Hereford and hanged in Gloucester.”

So, I’m sure many of us have heard of Benger’s, but what was it?

A blogger writing about products that no longer exist, refers to it as a bit of a pick-me-up, a cross between baby milk and invalid food. It was actually a mixture of wheat-flour and an extract that contained ‘digestive ferments of the pancreatic juice’ which when mixed with warm milk, could convert starch in food into sugar. Apparently, Horlicks or Benger’s might be sent to soldiers fighting in the Second World War.

The company that originally made Benger’s was created in 1790 at the Otter Works, in Strangeways, although the food supplement wasn’t produced until the mid-19th century. Frederick Benger and Standen Paine, two chemists, took over the company in 1870, and it became a limited company in 1903, eventually changing its name to Benger’s in 1939, following a move to purpose-built premises in Holmes Chapel – a name which will be familiar to people from Loughborough who used to work at Fisons, as Fisons, at the time described as a £5m chemical firm, took over Benger’s ‘the baby-food makers’ in 1947. The rest, as they say, is history!! And the Art Deco factory in Holmes Chapel was demolished in 2015.

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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