Rose's Lime Juice: Lachlan Rose of Leith and the First Fruit Cordial

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The business history of Rose's is reasonably well documented. Grace's Guide records the 1898 company registration and the Dominica estates; the cocktail historian behind Bar Vademecum has traced the 1867 patent and contemporary reports in The Chemist and Druggist and The Lancet. The text of the Merchant Shipping Act 1867 and Commons debates in Hansard set out the law.

The weak point is the scurvy story told around the brand. Popular accounts, including Carol Foreman's Made in Scotland (2nd edn, 2010), say the 1867 Act made lime juice compulsory "because lime juice kept better", that James Lind discovered the cure, and that Captain Cook used citrus to keep his crews healthy. Each of these needs correcting or qualifying. The modern explanation of scurvy as vitamin C deficiency dates only from the twentieth century, and nineteenth-century officials did not know that limes and lemons differed in what mattered.

The scurvy problem

established Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C. Without it the body cannot maintain connective tissue: gums swell and bleed, old wounds reopen, and the sufferer becomes exhausted and eventually dies. On long voyages, where crews lived on salt meat and ship's biscuit, it killed more seamen than battle. The connection with vitamin C was not established until the twentieth century; the substance was identified as the antiscorbutic factor in 1932, in work associated with Albert Szent-Györgyi.

established James Lind, born in Edinburgh in 1716, served as a naval surgeon. In May 1747, aboard HMS Salisbury in the Channel, he gave six pairs of scurvy patients six different remedies. The pair given oranges and lemons recovered fastest. He published the result in A Treatise of the Scurvy (Edinburgh, 1753). The trial is often called the first controlled clinical trial.

shared Lind did not settle the question. His book put citrus among several remedies and leaned on theories about moisture and digestion. He also recommended "rob", a juice concentrated by boiling, which destroys much of the vitamin C. The Admiralty did not act on his findings for more than forty years. Calling Lind the man who "discovered" the cure, as many accounts do, simplifies a long and muddled history.

established Captain James Cook is often credited with defeating scurvy by citrus. In fact Cook relied on fresh provisions taken at every landfall, on cleanliness and on a range of supposed antiscorbutics, including sauerkraut and malt wort. In a paper sent to the Royal Society and published in 1776, he reported that none of his crew had died of scurvy on his second voyage. Carol Foreman's statement that Cook "lost only one man to scurvy in three years" after adopting citrus treatment does not match that record.

established The decisive step came in 1795. Gilbert Blane, a pupil of Lind, persuaded the Admiralty to issue lemon juice to the fleet. The daily ration, mixed with sugar and the sailors' grog, was a great success. Scurvy, which had crippled fleets, became rare in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The lemons came mainly from the Mediterranean, especially Sicily and Malta.

Lemons, limes and "limeys"

established In the mid-nineteenth century the navy and merchant shippers increasingly bought lime juice from the British West Indies in place of Mediterranean lemon juice. Lime was cheaper and came from British colonies. At the time "lime juice" and "lemon juice" were often used loosely, and the two were assumed to be equally effective.

established They were not. In 1918 Harriette Chick and colleagues at the Lister Institute reported in The Lancet that, volume for volume, fresh lime juice had "about one-fourth" of the antiscorbutic potency of lemon juice. Preserved lime juice, of the kind carried at sea, was in their experiments useless. They noted that Arctic expeditions supplied with lemon juice, such as HMS Investigator in 1850, had escaped scurvy, while the Alert and Discovery in 1875, supplied with lime juice, suffered badly.

established The Nares expedition of 1875–1876 shows the cost. Its sledge parties were struck by scurvy and several men died. Nares was blamed for not making sure lime juice was carried on the sledges, but men on board ship who took their daily ration also fell ill. The failure fed doubts in the late nineteenth century about whether citrus worked at all, and encouraged the false theory that scurvy came from tainted tinned meat. Scott's Antarctic expeditions in the early 1900s were affected by that confusion.

shared The nickname "limey" for British sailors, and later for Britons generally, is usually explained by the lime-juice ration. The explanation is reasonable, though the word's exact first use is hard to date. Foreman's version, that the 1867 Act chose lime because it "kept better" than other citrus, is not supported: the Act names "lime or lemon juice", and the preference for limes was commercial and imperial rather than medical.

The Merchant Shipping Act 1867

established Lime or lemon juice was already required on British merchant ships before 1867. When the Liberal MP Alderman David Salomons asked about rising scurvy among merchant seamen in the Commons on 27 May 1867, the government replied that existing Acts already required merchant captains to carry lime juice. The problems were that the juice was often adulterated, that it was stored badly and spoiled, and that the law gave no power to inspect it.

established The Merchant Shipping Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vict. c. 124), passed on 20 August 1867 and in force from 1 January 1868, dealt with those gaps. Section 4 set rules for medicines and anti-scorbutics. Lime or lemon juice could only be taken on board from a bonded warehouse, with a certificate from a Board of Trade inspector that a sample was fit for use. It had to contain 15 per cent of proof spirit. Once a crew had been at sea for ten days, each man was to receive one ounce of juice a day, with sugar, mixed with water.

established The Act was enforced, if unevenly. In April 1888 a member asked in the Commons whether the lime-juice rules of section 4 were often neglected. The President of the Board of Trade replied that he had no reason to think so, and that every reported case was followed up.

shared The Act gave the lime-juice trade a large, regulated market, and L. Rose & Co. was well placed to supply it. It is often said that Rose's alcohol-free method made the juice suitable for sailors. The Act's own text points the other way: certified ship's juice had to contain spirit. Rose's spirit-free cordial seems to have been aimed chiefly at the domestic market, while the firm also traded in juice for ships.

Lauchlan Rose and Leith

established Lauchlan Rose was born in Leith in 1829 into a family of shipbuilders. He became a merchant, importing goods including grain and wine. In 1857, according to the Leith historian Jack Gillon, he was advertising West Indian lime juice and Messina lemon juice from his premises at 23 Commercial Place. In 1865 he founded L. Rose & Co., described as a lime and lemon merchant supplying ships leaving Leith.

shared Carol Foreman describes the Rose family business as ship repairers and chandlers, and Lauchlan as a younger son who set up the new firm to provision ships. Other sources describe him as a grain and wine importer. Both may be true at different stages. The spelling of his name also varies: most records use "Lauchlan", and "Lachlan" is common in modern writing.

established In December 1867 Rose was granted patent No. 3499, "for an improved mode of preserving vegetable juices". The method adapted a technique used for light wines: fumes of burning sulphur were passed through water, and a small amount of the resulting sulphurous acid was added to the juice to stop fermentation. The Chemist and Druggist described the process in November 1868, and The Lancet analysed Rose's lime juice and cordial in 1868 and found them free of spirit.

established Sweetened with sugar, the preserved juice became Rose's Lime Juice Cordial, sold to households as a soft drink to be diluted with water. The cordial, the bottle and the trade name made it one of the earliest branded fruit drinks in Britain. Foreman calls it "the first branded fruit juice" and "the world's first concentrated bottled fruit drink". Such claims are hard to test and are best treated as shared.

shared Wikipedia says the first lime juice factory opened on Commercial Street, Leith, in 1868. After incorporation, Rose's works in Leith were at 41 Mitchell Street. The firm also sold other drinks; Foreman lists ginger brandy, rum shrub and orange quinine wine.

From Leith to London and St Albans

established In 1875 the firm moved its head office to London while keeping production in Leith. In 1898 L. Rose & Company Ltd was registered as a public company with capital of £150,000, taking over the business in London, Leith and Roseau, Dominica. Lauchlan Rose had died in 1885.

established The London premises were destroyed in the Blitz in 1940, and the company moved to St Albans. Foreman says a depot at Boxmoor, near Hemel Hempstead on the Grand Union Canal, received barrels of concentrated juice by barge from the Port of London. The Hemel Hempstead factory closed in 1983 and its work moved to St Albans, which has itself since closed.

Dominica and the lime plantations

shared To secure its supply, the firm bought lime estates on Dominica, in the British West Indies. Grace's Guide says it bought the Bath and Elmshall estates in 1891 and converted an old sugar factory to process limes; other sources give 1893 or 1895. By 1909 the estates covered hundreds of acres. A factory to make citric acid crystals was built at Bath Estate in 1921, and the company made calcium citrate from 1906.

established Rose's dominated the Dominican lime trade for years. In the early twentieth century the local firm A. C. Shillingford & Co. broke its near-monopoly and gave growers better prices. In 1924 the company set up a lime estate at Asebu, near Cape Coast in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). It withdrew from Dominica in 1980. Today the limes come mainly from Mexico and Peru.

shared Foreman reports company claims about how the limes were processed: crushed between granite rollers soon after falling from the tree. These are promotional details and are not independently confirmed.

Schweppes and after

established Schweppes bought L. Rose & Co. in 1957 in a share exchange valuing the company at £1.8 million. Schweppes merged with Cadbury in 1969. Foreman's statement that Rose's has been part of Schweppes "since 1969" confuses the two events.

shared Coca-Cola bought much of Cadbury Schweppes's international drinks business in 1999, and in Britain the cordial is now made and distributed by Coca-Cola's bottler. The exact route by which the British rights passed is not set out in the sources we consulted. In the United States the brand passed in 2008 to Dr Pepper Snapple, now Keurig Dr Pepper. The firm's lime marmalade, sold under the Rose's name since the 1940s, has separate owners.

The gimlet

established Rose's has a place in cocktail history. The gimlet, a mixture of gin and lime cordial, was a naval drink, and Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye (1953) has a character insist that a real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice. Abroad, Rose's is now sold largely as a cocktail mixer.

• Lime juice protected sailors far less well than lemon juice; the 1918 Lister Institute work put fresh lime at about a quarter of lemon's strength.
• The 1867 Act required ship's lime juice to contain 15 per cent proof spirit.
• Rose's patent adapted a sulphur method used to preserve light wines.
• The Nares Arctic expedition of 1875–1876 suffered scurvy despite carrying lime juice.
• Rose's lime estates on Dominica included the Bath and Elmshall estates near Roseau.
• After the Blitz destroyed its London premises, Rose's moved to St Albans.
• According to Foreman, lime juice concentrate once travelled by barge up the Grand Union Canal to Boxmoor.
• Raymond Chandler made Rose's part of a famous line in The Long Goodbye.

• Myth: the Merchant Shipping Act 1867 first made lime juice compulsory. Earlier Acts already required it. The 1867 Act added inspection, certification and a daily ration.
• Myth: lime juice was chosen because it was the best or longest-keeping antiscorbutic. The Act allowed lime or lemon juice. Limes were cheaper and came from British colonies, and they were much less effective.
• Myth: Captain Cook beat scurvy with citrus. Cook relied on fresh food, cleanliness, sauerkraut and malt wort, and reported no scurvy deaths on his second voyage.
• Disputed: James Lind discovered the cure for scurvy. His 1747 trial pointed to citrus, but he did not press the point and the navy waited until 1795.
• Disputed: Rose's alcohol-free juice was what sailors drank. Certified ship's juice under the 1867 Act had to contain 15 per cent proof spirit.
• Disputed: Rose's joined Schweppes in 1969. Schweppes bought Rose's in 1957; 1969 is the date of the Cadbury Schweppes merger.
• Disputed: Rose's was the world's first bottled fruit drink. It was one of the first branded fruit cordials, but "first" claims of this kind are hard to verify.