Sugaropolis, Protestant incense and sweetie wives: Scotland’s sugar habit runs deep – Susan Morrison

Pan Drops seem designed to keep bored children quiet during long Kirk sermons

On January 27, 1974, a storm roared up the Clyde and hit the fully-laden ship MV Captayannis, sitting just off Helensburgh. It dragged her so badly she collided with the anchor chains of a nearby tanker. They sliced through her hull like cheese wire. She heeled over into the shallow waters of a sandbank. Fortunately, her crew were all rescued. The only casualty was her cargo of raw sugar, washed out into the sea.

The next day Clydesiders could see her looming above the waves. We called her the Sugar Boat. She’s still there. She had been bound for Tate & Lyle at Greenock, or, as it was once known, “Sugaropolis”. At its 19th-century height, the town boasted more than a dozen factories refining raw cane into sugar to feed the habit of an addicted nation. Scotland.

Like a lot of things that turn out to be bad, sugar was first presented as a good idea. Scotland’s economy was pretty dire in 1660, and so the newly restored King Charles II granted licences to new enterprises that could deliver a shot to the nation’s coffers. One industry that took advantage of this great new opportunity was sugar-boiling.

The sugar houses were a rush for the money markets, although the product itself was pricey. Lady Grizelle Bailie’s household book of 1692 -1733 notes 18 shillings and ten pence for sugar. She got two bottles of Champaine (Champagne) for nine shillings.

Sugar was more plentiful by the time Samuel Johnson trundled north with his biographer James Boswell in 1773. Dr Johnson's unfavourable opinion of the Scots was not improved by the standard of customer service he received. When he asked to “have his lemonade made sweeter… the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation... would have knocked the waiter down.” We can take a few lessons from this. One, sugar was now available upon request, two, don’t annoy Sam Johnson, and three, for heaven’s sake, use a pair of tongs.

Sugar steadily seeped into every corner of Scottish life, even our folk music. Generations of Scottish children were lulled to sleep by “Ally Bally Bee”, forever “greetin’ for a wee bawbee, to buy some Coulter's Candy”. It's an advert, written by the candy man himself to flog around the Borders towns. Advertising mad men would kill to write a jingle that outlives the product.

Coulter himself was a weaver who seems to have started producing candy to make a bob or two. Good choice. Boiled sweets were easy to make. A bag of sugar, some water and a flavouring, and you're in business. It was such a good sideline for women we even had a name for them. Sweetie wives. Today it might mean someone keen on a bit of malicious chat, but in Victorian times it really was a woman who made and sold toffees and boilings.

It's easy to see the link between a serving of juicy gossip and a quarter of Hawick Balls. The traditional Scottish sweetie shop was a neighbourhood hub. People went in for the sweeties and stayed for the chat, leaning on the counter in shops lined with jars of lurid confectionery.

No wonder we like Irn-Bru. All our best treats were neon, although we did put a Calvinistic twist on our enjoyment. Most boiled sweets seemed weirdly designed to be a challenge. Soor Plooms puckered your face right in. Kola Cubes sharp corners cut the inside of the mouth. The whiff of Pear Drops lingered for hours.

In 1884, John Millar and Sons of Leith hit the pinnacle of Presbyterian sweetie production with the Pan Drop. Now this was a sweetie the Church of Scotland could get behind. Minty sweeties were considered wholesome, therefore suitable to sustain churchgoers through particularly arduous sermons.

Many a lengthy service was quietly accompanied by the sound of gently rustling paper bags, followed by the scent of mint wafting around the kirk. Incense, Protestant-style. It was a sort of spiritual Kendal Mint cake, only unlike its soft southern cousin, you had to work hard to enjoy a Pan Drop. It seemed specifically sized to entirely fill a bored child's mouth, thus silencing complaints of boredom. The sugar coating was confectionery Kevlar. It took a lot of serious sooking to get through that to the sweet minty centre.

Not all sweets were a battle. We gave the world tablet, which is essentially sugar with sugar added to it. And then more sugar. Family firms such as Tunnocks gave us the Teacake and the world-beating Caramel Wafer. Lees of Scotland produced the macaroon bar, never to be confused with that fiddly multi-coloured creation, the macaron.

McGowans Highland Toffee delighted lovers of Heilan' coos everywhere, whilst terrorising dentists' dreams. Barrs Irn-Bru is a global phenomenon, but some connoisseurs preferred day-glow Limeade or an American Cream Soda Float with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Like all addictive substances, sugar had a dark side. Back when Johnson was threatening to defenestrate waiters, the first sugar pushers became obscenely rich, their wealth built on the bodies of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people, who were worked to death on the Scottish-owned and run plantations of Jamaica, St Vincent and Antigua, places still remembered in the street names of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To this day, we live with the health implications of a nation raised on the white stuff. A few years back, I met a retired Clyde fisherman who knew the Sugar Boat well. He told me that the fish they caught around the wreck that year were fat and sweet. But, he said, laughing, they all had diabetes.