Bile Beans was a laxative and tonic first marketed in the 1890s. The product supposedly contained substances extracted from a hitherto unknown vegetable source by a fictitious chemist known as Charles Forde. In the early years Bile Beans were marketed as “Charles Forde’s Bile Beans for Biliousness”, and sales relied heavily on newspaper advertisements.
Charles Edward Fulford (1870–1906) and Ernest Albert Gilbert (1875–1905) first sold Bile Beans in Australia in late 1897, marketed as “Gould’s Bile Beans“. Fulford was a Canadian who had travelled to Australia to sell “Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People”.
Fulford and Gilbert established the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company in Leeds, England, in 1899. It was claimed that the formula for Bile Beans was created by an Australian scientist Charles Forde in 1898, based on research he had conducted on a vegetable source known only to Aboriginal Australians. In reality, Charles Forde did not exist; the name was used as an alias for Charles Fulford, who had no scientific training. Trading under the name of C. E. Fulford Limited, which also sold other patent medicines, including the Zam-Buk ointment, Pep pastilles and later Vitapointe hair conditioner.
After setting up in England in 1899 the company spent about £60,000 a year in advertising its products and “created a demand by flooding the country with advertisements, placards, pamphlets and imaginary pictures.” Early newspaper promotions usually took the form of testimonials proclaiming “miraculous life changing cures”. Often illustrated, they included letters from customers cured of lost appetites, severe headaches, indigestion and biliousness.
In 1905 the Bile Beans Manufacturing Company initiated a passing off court case in Scotland against an Edinburgh chemist, George Graham Davidson, who sold “Davidson’s Bile Beans”, seeking to prevent him from selling any product using the name “bile beans” except that supplied by the company. The presiding judge, Lord Ardwall, rejected the case, as he considered that the plaintiff’s business was “founded on, and conducted by fraud”, there being no secret ingredient and no connection with any plant found in Australia. The Court of Session dismissed an appeal, because it considered that the Bile Bean Manufacturing Company had deliberately defrauded the public by making false factual statements about the product, concluding that it was not entitled to any legal protection against the use of the term “bile beans”.
Ernest Albert Gilbert died in 1905 and Charles Edward Fulford the following year in Australia, aged 30. Charles’s estate was valued at £1.3 million, equivalent to over £1 billion today. Despite the Bile Beans Manufacturing Company having lost the Scottish court case in 1906, Bile Beans remained popular through the 1930s, and continued to be sold until the 1980s.
[The above summary is based on the Wikipedia page for ‘Bile beans‘]
I have put together the following timeline based on a wide range of archive material.
September 1894:
6 October 1897, Dundee Evening Telegraph:
November 1897:
1901 census, Hotel Cecil, London:
January 1906, Emigration to Australia:
31 December 1902, The Tatler:
13 March 1903:
6 Sept 1905, The Scotsman [shared again by the Scotsman in September 1995]:
Advertisements for Bile Beans:
Advertisements for Zam-Buk:
21 September 1905, published in TRUTH:
20 November 1905, Yorkshire Evening Post:
6 February 1908, The Scotsman:
13 April 1906, Daily Mirror:
30 April 1906:
26 August 1906:
5 November 1906:
23 November 1906, Whitby Gazette:
April 1908, The British Medical Journal:
June 1911, The British Medical Journal:
To read about Charles Fulford’s father and his proprietary medicine business please click here or on the image below:
Footnote:
Davidson, the Edinburgh chemist, supplied medicines to my family [way back when].
