Thomas Allinson

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Richard Allinson walked from Edinburgh to London in 1891, covering the distance in fifteen consecutive days at an average of 28.5 miles per day. He arrived in London on Saturday, the 12th of September. He was not a wanderer or an athlete. He was a physician, and the walk was a statement. He wanted to prove, with his own body, that a vegetarian diet could sustain strenuous physical effort. That argument would define his life.

  Born in the Hulme district of Manchester on the 29th of March 1858, Allinson died in his home in Marylebone on the 29th of November 1918. In between, he was struck off the Medical Register, sued a newspaper, was convicted under the Obscene Publications Act, bought a flour mill, purchased a struggling magazine, and wrote over a thousand articles for a single publication. His name outlived all of it. Today, Allinson bread is still sold across Europe, carrying a recipe he devised and a slogan coined decades after his death. How a Manchester-born physician became a brand, and what he lost along the way, is the story that follows.

• 2. A Doctor Formed on the Margins

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  At fifteen, Allinson began work as a chemist's assistant, which was not the most obvious route to a medical degree. The conventional path through the University of Edinburgh was beyond his means, so he used money he had saved and financial support from his stepfather to attend the city's extramural medical school, the less expensive alternative. He graduated in 1879 as a Licenciate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

  Assistantships in Hull and the East End of London followed. By 1885, he had established his own practice in Marylebone, in the prosperous west of central London, a long way socially from the East End. That same year, he became medical editor of the Weekly Times and Echo, a position that gave him a platform far larger than a single consulting room. Over his lifetime he would write more than a thousand articles for that publication alone, as well as answering readers' medical queries directly.

  In 1888, he married Anna Pulvermacher, an artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy. They had one daughter and three sons, among them Bertrand P. Allinson and Adrian Allinson. The Marylebone practice and the editorial column together made him a figure of some public standing, which he used, consistently and deliberately, to promote ideas his profession found uncomfortable.

• 3. Hygienic Medicine

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  Allinson called his framework Hygienic Medicine, and it rested on a set of principles that set him directly against the orthodoxies of his era. Where most physicians of the 1880s relied heavily on drug treatments, Allinson argued that health came from diet, exercise, fresh air, and bathing. He opposed the use of drugs, many of which were at that time both ineffective and toxic by his account, and he was a lifelong opponent of compulsory vaccination against smallpox.

  His book A System of Hygienic Medicine appeared in 1886. How to Avoid Vaccination followed in 1888. The Advantages of Wholemeal Bread came out in 1889, and in it he made the case that wholemeal bread was healthier than refined white bread. He also argued, at a time when the idea was considered radical, that smoking was a cause of cancer. A Book for Married Women, published in 1894, covered stomach diseases, consumption, rheumatism, vegetarian cooking, and healthy diet in addition to subjects that would bring him into separate legal trouble.

  He did not confine his audience to medical colleagues. He gave frequent public lectures throughout the country, wrote books directed explicitly at general rather than medical readers, and sought press coverage deliberately. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the General Medical Council took a different view of his self-promotion and his opposition to drugs and vaccination. In 1892, he was struck off the Medical Register.

• 4. The Vegetarian Society Dispute

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  Allinson was expelled from the Vegetarian Society not because of his diet but because of his views on birth control. The society drew a line at positions it associated with sexual immorality, and Allinson's advocacy for contraception crossed it. The expulsion put him in the company of at least one notable dissenter: Mahatma Gandhi, who was studying law in Britain at the time and was also a member of the Vegetarian Society. Gandhi spoke in favour of Allinson's right to hold and express his views on contraception, even though Gandhi was personally opposed to it.

  In 1893, Allinson sued the Vegetarian newspaper for libel after it published a comment suggesting his theories encouraged sexual immorality. The jury found that the comment was fair and dismissed the action, awarding costs against Allinson. The case was a public loss on two fronts: he neither recovered his reputation in the vegetarian movement nor recouped his legal costs.

  The conviction under the Obscene Publications Act followed in 1901, arising from A Book for Married Women. That book had advocated equality between women and men, a woman's right to choose the size of her family, and access to birth control. The prosecution turned those arguments into a criminal matter. Allinson was convicted.

• 5. The Natural Food Company

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  The same year Allinson was struck off the Medical Register, 1892, he founded the Natural Food Company. His aim was to produce and sell the foods he had been promoting in print. He bought a stone-grinding flour mill in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, and a bakery was established shortly afterwards.

  Allinson's original bread recipe used one hundred percent whole grain flour, no fat, less yeast, and more water than standard loaves. During World War I, the food value of wholemeal bread gained wider official recognition, and demand for whole-grain products rose sharply. The company flourished as a result. A claim circulated that Allinson was offered the chance to re-register as a physician during the war, but the General Medical Council has no record of this, and by that point he no longer held registrable qualifications in any case.

  Allinson died from tuberculosis at his Marylebone home on the 29th of November 1918. After his death, the company continued to grow. Two more stone-grinding mills were purchased, one in Newport, Monmouthshire and one in 1921 in Castleford, Yorkshire. The mills stand to this day. The advertising slogan adopted for the Allinson bread brand since the 1980s is "Bread wi' nowt taken out", a phrase that captures, in dialect, exactly what he had argued for decades earlier.

• 6. A Magazine Interlude

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  In 1911, Allinson bought the magazine Vanity Fair from Frank Harris. Vanity Fair was failing by that point, and Allinson's attempt to revive it did not succeed. In 1914, three years after he acquired it, the magazine merged with Hearth and Home. It was a brief and losing venture, a side chapter in a life otherwise defined by health advocacy and food production, and it stands as evidence that Allinson's restless energy extended into publishing as well as medicine and commerce.