In a world where recipes were widely published, could anyone in the 19th century really claim to be the sole manufacturer of the genuine Daffy's Elixir?
An early mould-blown Daffy's Elixir bottle,
circa 1770 - 1800 (1).
This is the first of two articles about Daffy's Elixir, the medicine. The second can be found here.
Successful British patent medicines of the 18th and early 19th centuries were almost all, sooner or later, subjects of intense rivaly between competing makers, each loudly proclaiming that theirs was the only genuine article and all others were frauds, counterfeits, or 'spurious imitations'. Declarations of ownership could, and often did, arise from any relative, employee, or former business partner of a medicine proprietor who could claim - legitimately or otherwise - to have had access to the recipe.
With a lifespan of around 300 years Daffy’s Elixir, one of the longest-lived and most successful of all patent medicines (2), had a correspondingly long history of claims, counter-claims, and rivalry.
Probably first made by Thomas Daffy, a clergyman from the English midlands, in the years immediately following the English Civil Wars, the Elixir first came to fame a decade or two later, in the 1670s and 1680s, when it was marketed on an international scale by Thomas' nephew, Anthony (3). Anthony, who developed a distribution network that extended throughout Britain and Europe to places as distant as India and North America, claimed to have acquired the recipe directly from Thomas, but he may not have been the only recipient: Thomas may also have given the recipe to his son Daniel, a Nottingham apothecary, and his daughter Catherine.
The secret's out.
Anthony died in 1685, but the recipe became an open secret long before then, “despite all the efforts of [Anthony] Daffy and his family to keep [it] to themselves” (3). How this happened is unknown, but recipes started to be widely published before 1700, and over the next 200 years numerous versions were published in dozens of domestic medicine books, pharmacopoeias, and books of household management (4).
By the 1720s half a dozen different Daffy's Elixir makers were competing, at something approaching a national scale, through the new and rapidly growing medium of newspapers which, over just a decade or two, expanded the reach of advertising beyond anything previously possible. Wray, Rock, Barclay, Bradshaw, Jackson, Swinton, Smith, Staples: throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries old makers names disappeared and new ones arrived, but one company in particular eventually became dominant: Dicey & Co of Bow Church Yard in London (5).
Above: seals used by some 18th century Daffy's Elixir makers, redrawn from newspaper advertisements of the 1720s - 1750s (6). Manufacturers were rarely identified by name in Daffy's Elixir newspaper advertisements of this period. Instead, the various seals were often the only way that advertisements differentiated the various brands from each other. Only two of the ten advertisements these seals came from gave any indication of the maker's name: The 1737 example includes the name Robert Bradshaw in the seal (but not in the text of the advertisement), and the 1757 advertisement was for Dicey's True Daffy's Elixir. The undated seal in the centre is from an undated and unnamed advertising pamphlet of the late 18th or early 19th century.
The 'True' elixir?
From the early 19th century or earlier, until the mid-20th century when it seems to have finally disappeared, the majority of Daffy's Elixir sold, if quantities of advertising and, particularly, numbers of surviving bottles are any indication, was Dicey's.
Other makers did continue to advertise until the mid-19th century, but so dominant did Dicey's position become that Daffy's Elixir and the Dicey name eventually became almost synonymous (7). This is something that persists to this day, with the idea that Dicey's Daffy's was somehow the genuine article and all others were copies or counterfeits being commonplace among collectors, and others with an interest in the medicine.
In fact Dicey’s Daffy’s (or rather, the Daffy's that eventually became Dicey's, see note 5) probably first appeared during the 1720s (8), thirty years or more after recipes were first published, and at a time when theirs was just one of several versions being advertised (9). On top of that, claims to be the only owners of the genuine recipe were standard patent medicine advertising tactics of the times, and so it is only to be expected that Dicey and Co., and their predecessors and successors, would make that same claim themselves.
In this context, and in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, any claim that Dicey's was the only genuine article starts to look questionable, and cannot be taken at face value. So, could Dicey's recipe have been based upon, or adapted from, one of the recipes that were publicly available at the time? We will probably never know for certain, but a look at the range of known recipes may start to give us an indication.
A Dicey & Co Daffy's Elixir bottle, circa 1830-40. Although the details of manufacture and embossing changed over time, Dicey & Co used bottles of this general form for around 150 years. Other shapes (tall straight-sided cylinders, squat bulbous cylinders, cones, tall flat octagons) were used for different Dicey medicines including Bateman's Drops and Squire's Elixir, amongst others (7).
Even a fairly cursory look at contemporary sources suggests that, in spite of the claims of various Daffy's Elixir markers, it was generally accepted during the 18th and 19th centuries that there was more than one version of Daffy's Elixir. Numerous books provide different recipes side-by-side, sometimes distinguished from each other by the names of different proprietors, but more often not unnamed. By the 1820s two names crop up repeatedly: Dicey, and Swinton, as in the 1829 example below (10).
So far as being the 'true' or 'original' Daffy's Elixir goes, and although it barely registers with collectors or researchers, Swinton's Daffy's Elixir seems to have one thing in its favour that Dicey's doesn't: a direct link to the Daffy family. This is in spite of Swinton's Daffy's not appearing until two or three decades after the Dicey / Cluer version. Dr Peter Swinton married Mary Acton some time before 1763 (11). Mary was the niece of Anthony Daffy the younger (d. 1750), who apparently died childless and was himself the grandson of the original Anthony Daffy. Mary seems to have been the source of Swinton's Daffy's Elixir as well as the maker of the medicine until her death in 1780. Peter Swinton died a few years later, leaving the rights to his son Anthony, who continued to make and sell "Swinton's Original Daffy's Elixir" until around 1814, after which the rights went to Smith & Co.
So, how similar (or different) were Dicey's Daffy's Elixir and the Swinton's version, and how do those two versions compare to the many others in existence? In the next post (Patent Medicines 3: One Daffy's Elixir, or four, or 26, or more?) we'll take a more in-depth look at these and other Daffy's recipes to see what they might tell us about the reality of Dicey's, Swinton's, and other Daffy's Elixirs during the 18th and 19th centuries.
A rare survivor: An 18th century boxwood stamp, 55mm x 30mm (2.25" x 1.2"), that may originally have been used to mark or seal the wrappers around Daffy's Elixir bottles. It bears a shield, crest and wording very similar to those used by Dicey and other makers, that may be derived from the original 17th century seal of Anthony Daffy. The blank area inside the arched "BEWARE OF COUNTERFITS" is where part of the stamp – possibly showing a globular bottle similar to those in some of the stamps shown above – was removed at a later date, perhaps during the last quarter of the 18th century when many makers began using squat, flat octagonal bottles (1). Private collection.
This post and the next (One Daffy's Elixir, or four, or 26, or more?) are both based upon an article that appeared in ABC Magazine, No. 75, 2019.
Notes and References.
1. A very early example of the distinctive squat, short-necked, rectangular 'flat octagonal' shape that became the dominant type of Daffy's Elixir bottle from about the 1770s. Until then the medicine was probably sold almost exclusively in long-necked bottles with more or less globular bodies, as illustrated in the 1723, 1735 and 1741 seals illustrated above. The flat octagonal form remained in use until at least the 1920s. A future post will be dedicated to the bottles used for Daffy's Elixir.
2. A 'patent medicine' that was never patented, Daffy's Elixir was first made in the mid-1600s and was still available in the early 1950s: "The principal preparations manufactured in [Dicey & Co's] earlier days were Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops, Squire's Original Grand Elixir and Dicey's True Daffy's Elixir, and they are still distributed to the public." (my emphasis). Fleming, L. Notes and Queries, June 1953, p238.
3. See Haycock, D., & P. Wallis, 2005. Quackery and Commerce in Seventeenth-Century London: The Proprietary Medicine Business of Anthony Daffy. In Medical History, Supplement No. 25. This provides the definitive account, to date, of the life of Anthony Daffy and the early history of Daffy's Elixir. Guy Burch (BBR 109, 2006, pp17-19) points out that most of the information about Daffy's Elixir published before this was "rehashed from C.J.S. Thompson's 'The Quacks of Old London'. Rehashed again and again, repeating inaccuracies and misunderstandings, very little new material has been added [since Thompson's book was published in 1928]". Most of Thompson's information, Burch also points out, is unreferenced in the book, but can be shown to have come from 18th and 19th century accounts that were themselves often "recycled and misleading".
4. An early example is in the 1696 edition of Hannah Woolley's The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight, in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery. The earliest Daffy's Elixir maker that Haycock & Wallis (3) identified outside the Daffy family "apart from the counterfeiters Daffy faced when alive" was a John Harrison, who claimed (probably untruthfully) to have acquired the recipe directly from Anthony Daffy during the early 1680s, and who was making and selling the Elixir by the very early 1700s, if not earlier.
5. Although I refer here to "Dicey & Co" the history of the company was complex. The Bow Church Yard business that included Dicey's Daffy's Elixir didn't become Dicey & Co until around 1730. Prior to that the senior partner in the business, until his death in 1728, was John Cluer (the business address being "Cluer's printing office in Bow Church Yard"). After his death the business was possibly run for some time by Cluer's widow Elizabeth (sister of William Dicey) and her second husband Thomas Cobb, but a 1730 advertisement for Dr Bateman's Pectoral Drops refers to "William Dicey and Co." at Bow Church Yard, the partnership consisting of William Dicey, Benjamin Okell, Thomas Cobb "in right of Elizabeth his wife" and Robert Raikes (The Newcastle Courant, 18th July 1730). The earliest possible date for a Dicey's Daffy's Elixir (rather than Cluer & Co's) is thus probably around 1730, but according to some sources (e.g. http://diceyandmarshall.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/intro1.htm) may be as late as 1736. The involvement of the Dicey family with the Bow Church Yard patent medicine business continued for about 80 years, finally coming to an end in December 1812 when William Sutton, formerly junior partner in Dicey & Sutton, took over. Bottles used by Sutton & Co continued to be embossed with the words "Dicey & Co" for over a hundred years, until the 1920s or later : a nice illustration of the conservatism common in early patent medicine branding.
6. From top left: The Newcastle Courant, 5th Oct 1723; The Stamford Mercury 7th August 1735; The Newcastle Courant 7th November 1741; The Newcastle Courant, 22nd August 1730 (this stamp sometimes appeared in advertisements that also included a version of the first three stamps); An undated pamphlet of "Directions given by Anthony Daffy for taking the safe, innocent and successful Cordial Drink, called Elixir Salutis". Printed by Shaw & Son of Fetter Lane, London, and so dating to after 1750; The Oxford Journal 31st July 1756; The Stamford Mercury 27th October 1737. Richard Rock used a crest with a mermaid (Guy Burch, BBR magazine No 109), so this advertisement is likely to be one of his; The Ipswich Journal 10th June 1749; "Robert Bradshaw", The Stamford Mercury 20th October 1737; The Stamford Mercury 4th January 1728. The last one, from 1742, was used by Susannah Daffy but I now can't find the original reference! When I do, I'll add it here.
7. It isn't only recently that this assumption has been made. Amongst many others, Fleming's 1953 article about Daffy's Elixir (note 2, above) which derived at least some of its information directly from Sutton & Co (successors to Dicey & Co), assumes that Dicey & Co's Daffy's Elixir recipe was somehow directly linked to Anthony Daffy, stating that "It can only be surmised that Messrs Sutton & Co. derive their rights, now apparently unchallenged, from Anthony Daffy". To add to the confusion it is also often assumed that any bottle embossed "Dicey & Co" must have held Daffy's Elixir, but this is not the case. For example, tall narrow cylindrical Dicey bottles contained Bateman's Drops, tall conical Dicey bottles probably held Squire's Elixir, squat globular Dicey bottles may have held Stoughton's Elixir, and so on.
8. Although published without a proprietors name, some 1727 advertisements for Daffy's Elixir (e.g. The Derby Mercury of 2nd November) also include Bateman's Pectoral Drops and Stoughton's Elixir, and may well have been placed by the partnership of John Cluer and Co (Note 5, above).
9. One online source (http://diceyandmarshall.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/intro1.htm) states that Daffy's Elixir "seems first to have been sold in the 1670s by Thomas Dicey, father of William Dicey". No source is cited for this information, and so far I can't find any supporting information elsewhere. It seems likely that this is an error, confusing Thomas Dicey and Thomas Daffy.
10. Rennie, J. (1829) A New Supplement to the Pharmacopoeias of London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Paris. Baldwin & Cradock, London.
11. In 1763 Mary Swinton advertised that, as "niece and sole executrix of the late Anthony Daffy" she sold the true, original Daffy's Elixir in quarter pint, half pint, pint and quart bottles “at my warehouse, the two large golden balls in the open square part of Salisbury Court [ … ] being the same house my uncle Anthony Daffy and family always lived in”. (The Chester Courant, 4th January 1763). Note, some sources state or imply that Mary was the daughter of the younger Anthony Daffy, rather than his niece.
© Jeremy Kemp, 2022.
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