SerpApi.Org
Right now, you might be scrolling through your social media feed and seeing dire warnings about how an overly laissez-faire approach to food regulations can lead to serious and sometimes grave illness. Even the invisible hand of the market needs to make sure it uses soap before handling food.
Likewise, over on the social media account you stopped using but haven’t deleted yet, that one aunt of yours is insistently posting about how you need to make sure you check your kids’ trick-or-treat sweets this fall, because they heard that people are going to be poisoning Halloween candy this year.
These might seem like two very different concerns, but they actually both stem from the same century-and-a-half old incident. Serious food regulation and paranoid superstition alike can be traced back to a single tragic event: the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
A morbid cautionary tale, the story of the Bradford sweets poisoning can feel more like something out of a dime-store penny dreadful or a Charles Dickens novel than real life, and that includes the name of its central figure, the candy salesman Humbug Billy. Billy, whose real name was William Hardaker, earned his moniker for a particular sweet he sold called the humbug.
You’d be forgiven for only knowing “humbug” as a catchphrase from A Christmas Carol, but as far back as the 1820s, it was also a boiled sweet, or what we might call a “hard candy,” and notably one of Billy’s top earners. The traditional recipe called for combining water, gum, and sugar into a paste, which would then dry and solidify. The flavor was commonly peppermint, though in Australia and other regions, local variants like aniseed or cinnamon could also be found.
Hardaker didn’t make his own sweets, he merely bought them from candy maker Joseph Neal on Bradford’s Stone Street and then carted them down to the Greenmarket (most recently called the Kirkgate Market, which closed in June 2026). On a normal day, Neal diverted from the traditional recipe when making his humbugs. Sugar was expensive, so he did the 19th-century equivalent of cutting street drugs with baking soda—he simply substituted powdered gypsum for a pound of sugar here and there.
Back then, they called this powder “daft.” Today, we call it plaster of Paris.
In the week leading up to the October 30, 1858, Saturday Market at Greenmarket, Neal was due to make a new batch of humbugs for Hardaker, but he was running low on the “daft” he relied on. What followed was a game of telephone with a deadly conclusion.
Neal asked a lodger of his to travel roughly five miles to a druggist, from whom he would procure the necessary gypsum. Had Neal gone himself, he might have noticed that the druggist, Charles Hodgson, was not there, and had let his apprentice, William Goddard, manage the shop in his stead. It might have given Neal some pause, but the lodger didn’t know one man from another, and after all, one was just as good as the other.
This was probably the same thinking William Goddard applied when, to fill the lodger’s request for 12 pounds of daft, Goddard walked into the back of the druggist’s shop and found, per the BBC, “two unmarked casks of white powder in the room.” One fake sugar was just as good as the other.
The trouble, of course, was that these two casks contained very different powders, “one containing the innocuous daft, the other poisonous arsenic.”
For the record, this was not a case of “back then, they didn’t know it was poison.” Though arsenic was a component in many aspects of Victorian life, from candles to dyes, the country was well aware of its lethal potential. Only a few years before Goddard made his horrific mistake, in fact, Parliament had passed a law in the hopes of curbing arsenic-related deaths. The Arsenic Act 1851 was an attempt to regulate the sale of arsenic to prevent its purchase for murderous purposes.
“Every Person who shall sell any Arsenic shall forthwith,” the law stated, “and before the Delivery of such Arsenic to the Purchaser, enter or cause to be entered in a fair and regular Manner, in a Book or Books to be kept by such Person for that Purpose.” The seller had to keep a written record of all those who purchased arsenic from them.
Even then, they couldn’t just sell to anybody: “No Person shall sell Arsenic to any Person who is unknown to the Person selling such Arsenic, unless the Sale be made in the Presence of a Witness who is known to the Person selling the Arsenic, and to whom the Purchaser is known, and who signs his Name, together with his Place of Abode, to such Entries, before the Delivery of the Arsenic to the Purchaser, and no Person shall sell Arsenic to any Person other than a Person of full Age.”
The problem was that this law didn’t regulate who could do the selling. Victorian Britain had no definition of a pharmacist. And so, druggists like Charles Hodgson could freely keep arsenic in their inventory, making it possible for men like William Goddard to mistake that arsenic for plaster of Paris, which Joseph Neal would receive from his lodger and attempt to pass off as sugar that he would make into candies to sell to William “Humbug Billy” Hardaker.
After this particular batch of candy was made, Hardaker had the opportunity to shut the whole thing down. When Hardaker arrived to pick up the humbugs on October 30, 1858, he had noticed that they were a different shade than usual. But Neal assured him that they were fine, that he had sampled some himself, and they had tasted just as good (Neal did not attribute the violent vomiting spell he experienced afterward to the candies).
Still, Hardaker was not satisfied. The darker shade suggested that the product was faulty. Therefore, Hardaker would not leave with them. At least, not at full price. He negotiated a discount with Neal, and having secured some extra money to go back in his pocket, “Humbug Billy” took his sweets to market, where they sold, as they usually did, like gangbusters.
The next day, October 31, boys started dying. Joseph Scott, age fourteen; Elijah Wright, nine; Orlando Burran, five; John Henry Burran, two—all dead or dying just as doctors arrived. Some of Bradford’s doctors blamed disease, but one, Dr. John Henry Bell, suspected poisoning. When he ascertained that the Burran family, who all felt ill, from the adults down to the children, had also all consumed a candy purchased the previous day from Greenmarket, Dr. Bell actually had the candy tested via a process known as the Reinsch test, which involves “heating the sample with copper strips.” The test confirmed Dr. Bell’s worst suspicion: anyone who consumed candy from that batch had been exposed to a dangerous, and possibly fatal, level of arsenic.
By November 4th, the number of dead had reached 18, and the number of those who fell ill was impossible to calculate. When questioned by police, “Humbug Billy” estimated that he had sold roughly a thousand candies on that one day alone. The Bradford Observer called it “the most dreadful calamity that perhaps ever befell the district…[spreading] suffering, mourning and woe.” Modern experts consulted by the BBC acknowledge that while the official death count was 20, with some 200 who fell ill but survived, the actual number of people impacted may have been much higher, and even beyond the borders of Bradford, “because the sweets were also found in Leeds and as far as Bolton.”
Police eventually traced the arsenic back to its source and arrested the assistant, Goddard, who had sold the powder. Then they arrested Hodgson, from whose store the arsenic was sold. Neal attempted to run from authorities when they came after him, but he was ultimately caught and arrested, too.
The three men were to stand trial for the deaths of 20 people, many of whom were children, some as young as 17 months.
Appearing before Judge Baron Warren in December that year, Warren instantly determined there was no case against Neal, as he was not there for the purchase, and let him go free. The judge then determined there was no case against Goddard, who was merely an apprentice serving his master, so he was let go as well. Ultimately, only Hodgson was set to stand trial, and even then, partway through the proceedings, the judge determined there was no case against Hodgson either, and let him go free.
There was public outrage after the incident, and it proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back regarding regulations over food and drugs in Britain. For more than 30 years, activists and experts had been banging the drum for higher standards, but it took this egregious negligence to move the needle. The Bradford sweets poisoning played a major role in the passage of the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act of 1860, as well as the Pharmacy Act of 1868, which established criteria for qualified pharmacists who could partake in the sale of poisons like arsenic.
“Humbug Billy,” the Dickensian-named candyman who unintentionally killed more than a dozen people, did not emerge from the incident unscathed. His consumption of one of his own candies caused him to experience paralysis in half of his body. He would die in 1866 and be buried in an unmarked grave that would not be located again until March 2026.
The incident was immortalized in a haunting satirical image published in the pages of Punch magazine. The image, titled “The Great Lozenge-Maker. A Hint to Paterfamilias,” shows a skeleton stirring a pot of humbug, with a container of plaster of Paris on one side and a container of arsenic on the other. That haunting picture was drawn by the artist John Leech, a man best known for creating the beloved original illustrations for the Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol.
