Composite image: 1921 Census of England and Wales, John Gollop/iStock
Marmite. A brand known and loved (or hated) across Britain. While today, most of us are familiar with its distinctive taste and iconic black and yellow jars, the story of how it came to be is not so commonly known.
Let’s explore the history of Marmite and the man who made it famous: Frederick Wissler. Because its origin story, like that of so many other ‘quintessentially British’ brands, is a migration story.
Frederick Heathcote Wissler was born in Morat, Switzerland in 1855, to parents Samuel and Elizabeth Wissler. He immigrated to England prior to 1880, when he married London-born Alice Maud Mary McLeog, in Hackney. The couple had four children together: Frederick, Jr., William, Alice and Clement.
In the marriage register, we see Frederick identifies himself as a merchant, and this is repeated in the 1891 Census of England and Wales. At that time, the family is residing in Woodberry Down, Stoke Newington, Hackney. He was 36 years old.
In the years surrounding the census, he was involved in a partnership with the “Messers. Leon Brothers, of London and Paris,” and Mr. Ransohoff as merchants. This new relationship, Ransohoff and Wissler, were sugar merchants specifically dealing with Paris and London. In 1897, the partnership was sued over a beetroot sugar dispute and in 1898 the Daily Telegraph and Courier identifies ’21 Mincing Lane EC’ and Paris as their place of work.
London Evening Standard, 2 Jan 1884
On 19 Dec 1898, the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser identifies Wissler as a director of the London Sea Water Supply Company. The company intended to construct works for “taking an unlimited quantity of sea water from the English Channel and conveying it through mains to London…”
Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), 19 Dec 1898
An article on “Let’s Look Again: A history of Branded Britain” indicates that the Marmite Food Extract Company was incorporated in 1902 and initially produced on Mincing Lane, London. In the article above for the London Sea Water Company, Frederick Wissler, of Ransohoff and Wissler, is listed at “21, Mincing Lane, E.C., and Paris.” Thus, we can conclude that Marmite was certainly not his only business venture at this time, and that the original business location and production site for Marmite on Mincing Lane was the same as that listed for his other ventures. In the 19th century, Mincing Lane was the “world’s leading centre for tea and spice trading.”
21 Mincing-Lane, as seen on this 1915 London Ordnance Survey map (National Library of Scotland). The site is now one large building housing several businesses.
In 1902, the Marmite Company is incorporated and the Chemist and Druggist, “New Companies & Company News” publication indicates that the Marmite Food Extract Company (Ltd) has adopted an agreement to … “acquire any invention or process relating to the production of food-extracts from yeast…” This is the first mention of G. Huth, who would become a business partner to Wissler for just over a decade. By 1916, this long-time partner would cease to be mentioned in documentation regarding the company.
Chemist and Druggist, Vol 60, 1902. Google Books
By October 1902, the company has relocated to Burton upon Trent, utilising yeast residue from the nearby Bass Brewery in the production of Marmite, and has started advertising the sale of residue from the manufacturing process as cattle food. It didn’t take long to expand from small-scale sales to national awareness.
Burton Chronicle, 11 Dec 1902
In December 1906, Frederick Wissler naturalised and became a citizen of Great Britain. This same year, a second factory was established in Camberwell Green, south London, utilising what was once a brewery.
Naturalisation documentation for Frederick Wissler. Images: The National Archives
The company was not without intrigue during this period, and in fact, we find William Wissler, Frederick’s son, acting as joint managing director, in the records of the Old Bailey. The Central Criminal Court on 22 June 1909 saw a legal fight for payment of an order of Marmite to the A. Huish and Co., a “tea and coffee merchant and importer of foreign products.” Orders were filled on credit but eventually it was necessary to take them to court to settle the outstanding balance due of £10 18s. 1ld.
Old Bailey Online
In the 1911 Census, we see the Wissler family as residents of Heath House, in Blackheath, south-east London. The Census does indicate his status as naturalised and the company appears to be progressing well. What is about to happen, though, will change everything.
Frederick Wissler and his family in the 1911 Census of England and Wales
Marmite was already growing in popularity as a product, and it was heavily advertised across the country as a replacement for meat extracts. Its value as a source of nutrients was already well known, and the discovery of vitamins in 1912 was a significant boost for the brand . Advertisements tell us it was, “… half the price, just as nourishing, eminently stimulating and digestive, very pleasant to take… and invalids will not turn from it, as is so often the case with Beef Tea.”
Burton Observer and Chronicle, 26 Nov 1914
As more and more men departed for the battlefields of Europe and trench warfare became the norm, the British Army struggled to find a way to keep their forces well fed and healthy. Part of the answer was in Marmite. It soon became a part of the standard field rations given to troops and contributed significantly to the wellbeing of many. First World War trenches were wet, muddy, cold and not always sanitary; the vitamin boost they could receive with a cup of Marmite tea was, for many, essential.
By forging the relationship with the government, Wissler and his company experienced significant growth during the war-time economy. In 1916, he and the board hosted the London employees to an event at the Surrey Masonic Hall. Over 250 people attended, including wives and children of the workers, where Mr. Wissler opened the day with a speech “full of patriotic sentiment,” the attendees enjoyed high tea, additional speeches, and “excellent entertainment.”
Burton Observer and Chronicle, 13 Jan 1916
As the war came to a close and the men returned home, they had developed a fondness for those little jars of spread, and in the inter-war period of economic recession and continued rationing, they remained an essential part of the British diet. The war also ensured that men from every town and village across the country were very aware of Marmite and its benefits, firmly placing the brand into the minds of people across Britain.
Finally, we see the Wissler family in the 1921 Census of England and Wales. He continues to act as Director of the Company, and they remain in residence at Heath House, 1 Shooters Hill Road, Greenwich – an area commonly referred to as Shooter’s Hill.
Frederick Wissler’s signature on the 1921 Census of England and Wales
The Census would become one of the last public documents of Wissler’s life. His son, Clement, also employed at Marmite, lived in a home on the same road.
Frederick Wissler died on 8 April 1924 in London, aged 69. He left a will in which his shares of Marmite were inherited by his children and his cousin. Over the course of his career, he travelled to Algiers, Hong Kong, Saint John, New Brunswick and New York City, representing Marmite… a quintessentially British brand created by this Swiss-born, naturalised British citizen.
And discover more migration stories, and perhaps even your own, with two weeks’ free access to Findmypast.
About the author
With a family tree that dates back to London in 1635, Jen Baldwin, Research Specialist at Findmypast, loves the moment of discovery. And with ancestors from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England, the discoveries are endless. Jen specialises in the British diaspora and social history, adding depth and stories to traditional genealogy.
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If you want to join, you have two options:
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Our Borderless Cup football and basketball tournament in 201927 April, 2021
A guest post from Iqbal Wahhab OBE FRSA, founder of London restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast and Distinguished Friend of the Migration Museum, who was born in 1963 in Rajshahi, and moved to London before his first birthday.
I was born in 1963 in a Rajshahi hospital, in what was then East Pakistan and which just over 50 years ago became Bangladesh, where there had been a malaria outbreak which killed the other babies in the maternity ward. I was the lucky one.
All images courtesy Iqbal Wahhab OBE FRSA
Soon after this picture was taken, aged eight months I was boarded on a plane with my Mum, brother and sister to London to join Dad who had won a scholarship to do a PhD in philosophy at University College London. We were classic examples of “the myth of return” – Mum had been Principal of Dhaka Women’s College and Dad was an associate professor at Dhaka University. The plan was that after about three years the PhD would have been completed and we’d all go back.
Mum had “the trunk” which most migrant settlers will know about, regularly putting things into it to take back home.
But the PhD took longer than expected, then turned into a post-doctoral programme and by the time Dad was done with UCL, we were growing up as Londoners. The three of us did well at school – especially my brother and sister being head boy and head girl. I developed an early interest in becoming the prime minister and took to emulating Harold Wilson who always had a pipe in his mouth.
I knew nothing of Bangladesh except what I picked up from conversations between my parents. A phrase I heard a lot was “first class first” and one day I asked what it meant. It seemed that in Khulna, where both my parents were from, there was just one scholarship per year for the entire region for someone to go study at Dhaka University and in order to qualify, you had to have the highest first in the then equivalent of A levels. Both my parents got it in different years, met at university and married at university.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t got the scholarship, what if they had been ill on the day of the exam, what if there was someone better than them. The answer of course is we would have still been there. As I grew older, I also wondered what happened to the others who applied and didn’t get the scholarship. That’s why ever since my 20s, Mum always got us all to pay for kids from Khulna to go through university.
Dad started to spend part of the year back in Dhaka, part in London writing books and looking after us as by now Mum had become the first non-Christian head of a Church of England school.
I’ve only ever been to Bangladesh twice. The first time was when I was 13. On my first day, Dad took me at the crack of dawn for an hour-long rickshaw ride around Dhaka and I watched all these industrious people already working hard on the roads, in the markets and shops. This was probably around the time the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had called Bangladesh a “basket case” and I had imagined Bangladesh must have been poor because the people were lazy. The rickshaw ride knocked that out of me.
My brother had been five and my sister seven when we came to London so remembered our relatives and for the first time, I was able to put faces to the names I had been hearing all those years.
I’m the one with the brown shoulder pads.
I was brought up only speaking English and with most relatives that was fine. With others, it meant improvising with facial expressions and gesticulation which everyone found hilarious but somehow it worked.
My next visit was another 10 years later and by this time I was a full-on foodie. One day I cooked biryani for about 15 of us on an open flame on the beach in Cox’s Bazaar, pretending I was Keith Floyd. Another day we were treated to a boat launch trip to the Sundarbans where we came across some local fishermen who had just caught some massive prawns. We bought them and cooked them on the boat. I remember that was a Christmas Day and suddenly none of us were missing turkey!
In Sylhet we stayed on a tea garden and were given an elephant ride followed by the chance to cast a net into a huge pond and took some of the fish we caught and straight away slapped them onto a barbecue.
Back in Dhaka, a family friend took us on a boat ride for a very noble mission – to go to the old town where this old guy was famous for making one massive pot of biryani every day which was a pilgrimage many would make and boy, was it worth it!
All images courtesy Iqbal Wahhab OBE FRSA
Curiously, I never returned to my land of birth after that.
The closest I got was in 1994 when with the restaurateur Amin Ali I staged the London Festival of Bangladesh in Spitalfields, which The Evening Standard described as Bangladesh’s equivalent of the Notting Hill Carnival. We flew over singers, actors, even village opera singers who performed what’s known as Jatra. Tens of thousands of people came to celebrate a culture I previously had little clue over. Begum Zia was prime minister at the time and she called me The Golden Boy of Bengal. All very odd.
Apart from still helping people get an education, I have inadvertently, unintentionally drifted away from any bond with Bangladesh other than through its food. My siblings keep close links but me, not so much.
That may be changing though. I’ve often lamented the fact that with so many Bangladeshi owned restaurants there’s a hardly a single one serving Bangladeshi cuisine. I’ve got some restaurants with different themes to them coming up but I’m also plotting a very elaborate way to celebrate the food of my (by a scratch) place of birth. I don’t feel my restaurant career would ever be complete without me doing that.
Self-confessed busy body Iqbal Wahhab OBE is the founder of London restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast and is planning some new ventures this year. In 2019 he was the High Sheriff of Greater London. Iqbal is a Distinguished Friend of the Migration Museum.
“This is another fab exhibition from what’s fast become one of our favourite museums.” – A five-star review of our Taking Care of Business exhibition by Tabish Khan of Londonist
