The Grove Pharmacy 🧪 Charles Charnley's Chemist Shop in Wilmslow

🧪 Some of my favorite things in the whole shop are little scraps of paper from one chemist's shop in a small English town. They came out of The Grove Pharmacy on Grove Street in Wilmslow, Cheshire, and every one carries the same name at the bottom: Charnley.

None of these labels was ever stuck on a bottle. They are unused stock, left over from a shop that dispensed medicine on the same street for more than a hundred years. So pull up a chair. This is the story of Charles Charnley's pharmacy, the town around it, and the strange and wonderful things he put in his bottles.

🏘️ Where is Wilmslow, and what was it like?

Wilmslow is a market town in Cheshire, about 11 miles south of Manchester and 7 miles northwest of Macclesfield. The name goes back to Old English, Wighelmes hlaw, "the mound of a man called Wighelm."

For most of its life it was a quiet place. Before the railway came in 1842, Wilmslow was little more than a few farms and a church. The line from Manchester changed all that, and well-off Manchester merchants began moving out to the fresh air and riding the train back into the city.

The town center grew up around Bank Square, Grove Street and Water Lane. Grove Street was the only way through town, and there used to be a toll bar on it. It came down after townspeople complained that they paid taxes to keep the roads up and still got charged to drive their horses and carts down their own high street. Today Grove Street is Wilmslow's pedestrian shopping street.

💊 Who was Charles Charnley?

Charles Charnley was a chemist and druggist who kept his shop on Grove Street for decades. The Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser ran his notice on June 4, 1875: "CHARLES CHARNLEY, DISPENSING CHEMIST, GROVE STREET, WILMSLOW."

The trade directories follow him year after year. The Post Office Directory of Cheshire lists "Charnley C. Grove st." among the chemists in 1878. Kelly's Directory of Chemists and Druggists has him on Grove Street in 1885, when Wilmslow counted 6,025 people. Kelly's Directory of Cheshire lists him again in 1902 and 1910.

📷 That 1910 entry has a lovely little detail. Charnley's name carries an asterisk, and the directory's own key says the asterisk marks "Dealers in Photographic Materials & Apparatus." So the Grove Street chemist sold cameras and darkroom supplies too, and his own recipe book holds photographic recipes to match.

Slater's Manchester directory of 1911 puts "Charnley Charles, chemist" on the north side of Grove Street, between Grove Avenue and Water Lane. And there it is. The Grove Pharmacy took its name from its street.

📜 When was The Grove Pharmacy founded?

The shop answered that question itself. A Charnley pot-lid label from the "C. Charnley, M.P.S." years prints "Est. 1864," and so does a Charnley asthma powder label.

The family remembered it a year earlier. When the Wilmslow Express Advertiser wrote up the town's oldest chemist's shop on July 2, 1998, it spoke with 87-year-old Charles Charnley, whose ancestors, the paper said, founded the shop in 1863. Either way, the business was dispensing in Wilmslow long before the National Health Service, and the paper said just that.

The name Charles Charnley runs right through the whole story. A local paper reported the will of Charles Charnley, M.P.S., of Wilmslow in October 1953. And Charles Charnley Ltd was still at 50 Grove Street in the 1960s and 1970s, taking its turn on the Sunday duty-chemist rotas the local paper printed. By 1979 Charles Charnley Ltd had a second shop at 20 London Road in nearby Alderley Edge.

📚 What survives of the shop itself?

More than you might think. The Wellcome Collection in London holds two of the shop's own books, cataloged as "Charles Charnley of Wilmslow, Cheshire, Chemist."

The first is a worn leather-bound recipe book inscribed on its first page "Charles Charnley, 16 May 1866." It runs to 1940 and holds medical, household, cosmetic and cooking recipes, a few for animals and gardens, and some for photography. It is stuffed with cuttings, notes and labels tucked between the pages.

The second is a pharmacy register and recipe book covering 1869 to 1925. Its first forty pages are a register of prescriptions dispensed to named Wilmslow customers. The Wellcome bought both volumes from a manuscript dealer in 2006.

Charnley labels have found other homes too. Getty Images holds Buyenlarge pictures of Charnley labels for Ammoniated Tincture of Quinine and Liquified Paraffin, captioned as coming from the Charles Charnley Pharmacy in Wilmslow.

☎️ How do you date a label with no date on it?

Charnley never printed a year on a label. But he printed his telephone number and the name of his business, and both changed over time. His own advertisements in the Alderley & Wilmslow Advertiser show when.

• "Telephone 4X" is in his ads from 1909 to early 1913. That is the oldest form.
• "Tel. 59" runs in the ads from 1914 into the 1920s, still under the plain name C. Charnley.
• A four-figure number under "Charles Charnley, Pharmacist" turns up by 1946.
• "Charles Charnley Ltd" first shows up in May 1949 and carries on through the 1960s.

So a business that went limited is a later business, and the labels sort themselves out like rings in a tree. The 1940 to 1943 stockist lists in the same paper print another firm with its "Ltd" right beside plain "C Charnley," which shows the paper printed the word when a firm had it.

☠️ Why would a chemist sell carbon bisulphide?

One of the oldest labels I have is the Carbon Bisulphide label, printed for "C. Charnley, Dispensing Chemist, The Grove Pharmacy" with that early "Telephone 4X." It is printed in navy on cream with an octagon-cornered border, the chemist's title set in blackletter, and "HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE" right under the name of the stuff.

Carbon bisulphide (carbon disulfide today) was a powerful solvent and a fumigant, used on stored grain and against pests. Its vapor catches fire very easily, hence the warning.

🤯 What the label does not say is what it did to people. In 1902 Thomas Oliver published Dangerous Trades, and his chapter on the india-rubber works he visited in Manchester and London describes workers who breathed the vapor going into acute insanity. Some threw themselves from the top rooms of the factory, and the open fronts of the vulcanizing rooms had to be fitted with iron bars. Manchester is just up the line from Wilmslow.

So when my title says it "causes you to go insane," that is not me being dramatic. It is documented history. The French physician Auguste Delpech had described the mental effects as far back as 1856.

🗣️ Did people really suck on formaldehyde for a sore throat?

They did. The Formalin Throat & Voice Tablets label prints its formula in old pharmacist's Latin: dry Formalin, an eighth of a grain, with milk sugar, peppermint oil, citric acid and white sugar. One tablet was to dissolve slowly in the mouth, "a substitute for gargles and mouth washes."

Formalin was the trade name the Schering company used for its solution of formaldehyde. And this was no oddball idea of one small-town chemist. A tablet called Formamint, made by the German firm Wulfing and launched in Britain in 1907 by Genatosan Ltd, used the same base of formaldehyde, milk sugar and citric acid. It was sold with photographs of stage stars, which is just who a "Throat & Voice" tablet would be aimed at.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, Formamint advertisements told readers to suck a tablet whenever they entered "a crowded germ-laden place." Charnley's label is a Wilmslow chemist's own house version of the throat tablet all of Britain was buying. Formaldehyde for your throat. Believe me, that is a bad idea!

🥛 How do you make castor oil "tasteless"?

You can't, really. But the Tasteless Castor Oil label, printed for "C. Charnley, Pharmacist," tells you the trick. The dose is half an ounce to an ounce and a half, "floating on warm milk, coffee, or on water, and covered with a small quantity of spirit."

Now if it is so tasteless, why do you have to float it on something and put alcohol on top? Because it is physics. Castor oil is lighter than milk or water, so it floats on them. Spirit is lighter than the oil, so it floats on top of that. Build it right and you get three layers, and the oil slides down between them without touching your tongue. Pharmacists ran a fussier version of the same trick, adding water drop by drop until the oil hung as a ball in the middle of the glass.

Castor oil is about as old as medicine gets. Its use as a laxative is written in the Ebers Papyrus of ancient Egypt, around 1550 BC. The 1911 British Pharmaceutical Codex still called it "the most valuable laxative available in medicine" and recommended giving it in milk, which is exactly what Charnley's label says to do.

That word "Pharmacist" on the label meant something, too. The Pharmacy Act of 1868 made it unlawful to use the title chemist, druggist or pharmacist without being on the register.

😴 What was Gee's Linctus?

The Gee's Linctus label is the showpiece of the group, with a red-orange dispensing bottle over bold red and black stripes, from the Charles Charnley Ltd years.

Gee's Linctus is a Victorian-era cough medicine whose proper name is Linctus Scillae Opiatus, the opiate linctus of squill. The 1911 British Pharmaceutical Codex gives the recipe as equal parts camphorated tincture of opium, oxymel of squill and syrup of tolu. So yes, it held opium and alcohol, at about the strength of a fortified wine. Opium and alcohol, I am sure, cure almost anything temporarily.

The story goes that it was named for Dr. Samuel Gee of St Bartholomew's Hospital, who in 1888 wrote the first full modern description of celiac disease and became physician to the future King George V in 1901. And the way it came to me, Gee's used to be handed out to factory workers on a Friday night. In Wilmslow that is easy to picture, because Quarry Bank Mill, the great cotton mill Samuel Greg founded at Styal in 1784, came inside the town's borders in 1936 and kept spinning until 1959.

There is real history behind that picture. Opium remedies were sold over the chemist's counter with no prescription needed, and mill workers were steady buyers. Thomas De Quincey wrote in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) that cotton manufacturers in Manchester told him their workpeople had taken up opium so widely "that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening." Manchester is only 11 miles up the road from Wilmslow.

⚠️ The boxed line on the label, "Caution. It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose," is the wording the British Poisons Rules prescribed for medicines like this one. Gee's Linctus is still made in Britain today. Pharmacists remember how popular it was. One, looking back on a UK pharmacy forum in 2009, called it "a favourite in the old days. We sold hundreds of bottles."

🩸 What was in a "Blood Mixture"?

The Grove Quality Blood Mixture label promises "An excellent remedy for Impure Blood, Pimples and Skin Eruptions," one tablespoon in water after meals, three times a day. Better still, it prints its recipe right on the front, down to the hundredth of a percent.

There is iron sulfate, the old green vitriol. There is magnesium sulfate, Epsom salt, named for a bitter spring at Epsom in Surrey that made the town famous in the 1600s. There is a little dilute sulfuric acid, and the rest is a decoction of sarsaparilla.

Blood mixtures were big business. The best known was Clarke's World Famed Blood Mixture, made by Francis J. Clarke, a Lincoln chemist who was three times mayor of Lincoln. When the British Medical Association analyzed it for its 1909 book Secret Remedies, it found mostly water. That book sold some 62,000 copies in under two years. Charnley's mixture, at least, told you what was in it.

🦷 What was Glycerin of Thymol for?

Just about everything above the neck. The Glycerin of Thymol Compound label, in sage green and cream with a ghost of a chemist's bottle printed behind the directions, calls it "an antiseptic alkaline solution for the mouth, throat and nose."

It gives four uses: a nasal douche for catarrh or a cold in the head, a gargle for sore throat, a mouthwash, and a few drops on a wet toothbrush as a dentifrice. The "B.P.C." means it followed the British Pharmaceutical Codex formula, built on thymol, the antiseptic from oil of thyme, with menthol, eucalyptol and oil of wintergreen in glycerin. This one gives the shop's full address, 50 Grove Street.

🌲 What is cascara sagrada?

The Elixir of Cascara label, for "Charles Charnley Ltd., Dispensing and Family Chemists," is a little piece of the American West in an English chemist's shop.

Cascara sagrada, "sacred bark," comes from a Pacific coast tree, Rhamnus purshiana. Settlers used the bark as a laxative, and Dr. J. H. Bundy of Colusa, California, brought it to the drug trade in 1877. Its trouble was a fierce bitter taste, which is why Charnley's label promises "the bitter principle is covered by Aromatics."

The doses are in minims, the old apothecary's drop measure. Britain went metric for dispensing on March 3, 1969, which helps place this label before then.

🏺 What else happened in Wilmslow?

Quite a lot for a small town. On August 1, 1984, peat cutters at Lindow Moss, on the edge of Wilmslow, found the preserved body of a man who had died some time between 2 BC and AD 119. Lindow Man is now on permanent display at the British Museum.

And Alan Turing, the founder of computer science whose work was key to breaking the wartime Enigma codes, bought a house on Adlington Road in Wilmslow in 1950. He lived there until his death in June 1954. A plaque now marks the house.

🎁 Why collect pharmacy labels?

Because each one is a whole world on a strip of paper about three inches long. The Charnley labels give you the medicine, the dose, the law of the day, the chemist's name and even his phone number, and every one of them was printed for a real shop on a real street that served the same town for well over a century.

They are rare, too. As I write this, nobody else anywhere on eBay or Etsy is offering any of these seven labels. The only other Charnley pieces for sale are a bottle wearing the same Carbon Bisulphide label, a quinine pot lid, a pill box and one pair of different labels. There is only a limited supply of these left, and once they are gone they will be very hard to find again.

They look wonderful framed in a group, in a kitchen, a bathroom, or a doctor's or pharmacist's office. Here is the whole Charnley family I have right now:

• 🧪 Carbon Bisulphide label, 1910s
• 🧪 Formalin Throat & Voice Tablets label, 1910s
• 🧪 Tasteless Castor Oil label, 1920s-40s
• 🧪 Gee's Linctus label, 1940s-60s
• 🧪 Grove Quality Blood Mixture label, 1940s-60s
• 🧪 Glycerin of Thymol Compound label, 1940s-60s
• 🧪 Elixir of Cascara label, 1940s-60s

❓ Quick answers

Where was The Grove Pharmacy? On Grove Street in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England, on the north side between Grove Avenue and Water Lane in 1911, and at 50 Grove Street on the later labels.

When was it founded? The shop's own labels say "Est. 1864." The family told the local paper in 1998 that their ancestors founded it in 1863.

Were these labels ever used? No. They are unused shop stock, never glued to a bottle.

Where are Charles Charnley's recipe books? At the Wellcome Collection in London, as MS.8437 and MS.8438.