The Secret History of… Bovril?!?

The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.

But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss missus) left my flabber well and truly gasted.

It turns out that the brand name “Bovril” was ub fact formed from merging the genuine Latin word “bos” (meaning ‘ox“) with the made-up word “Vril” – the immensely energy-dense substance controlled and used by the “Vril-ya”, a super-powerful subterranean people described by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his best-selling (1870) novel “The Coming Race”.

Hence, the name “Bovril” is designed to evoke both a liquid beef extract and a fictional energy source powering an race of underground vegetarian supermen.

Now, not a lot of people know that.

In real-life the release of Bulwer-Lytton’s book caused quite a stir, yet the story about what happened afterwards is stranger still. Quite a few people (including numerous Theosophists) believed his wholly fictional account of the Vril-ya to be absolutely genuine; while some even claimed to have met real-life Vril-ya, in broadly the same way that some people claimed to have met real-life Rosicrucians.

As for Vril itself: in the mid-1930s, when the rocket scientist and sci-fi writer Willy Ley emigrated to the United States, he mentioned the existence back in Germany of a certain Wahrheitsgesellschaft (a ‘Society for Truth’) whose members researched Vril to achieve many otherwise impossible things (e.g. perpetual motion machines, etc).

By 1960, the whole story of this hunt for Vril had entered the feverishly conspiratorial imagination of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels: their book “Morning of the Magicians” revitalized the whole Vril issue, by claiming that the Wahrheitsgesellschaft formed a key part of the genesis of the Thule Society and indeed the whole Nazi Party. (In fact, Jacques Bergier was convinced that there was a secret global organization sending teams of “Men In Black” in to cover up such secrets, both about Vril and other “Livres Maudits” [Forbidden Books] such as the Voynich Manuscript.)

And it’s only a short antigravity ride from there to Vladimir Terziski’s “UFO Secrets of the Third Reich”, which insisted that it was Vril that powered the German “RFZ-1” circular flying machine – the first flying saucer, able to harness Vril’s almost-unimaginable power so as to build underground bases under Antarctica or indeed the moon’s surface.

But as far as I can tell, the Nazis never got round to investigating whether Bovril might be a good practical source of Vril. Perhaps memories of the resounding Prussian victory at the Battle of Sedan (where Napoleon III was captured) in September 1870 had convinced them that Bovril wasn’t actually super-powered. I wonder: if the French had instead used their million cans of Bovril as mortar rounds, might the Prussians have attacked with far less spirit? Having one of those explode over your head would surely be enough to drain anyone’s will to life.

Finally, even though Bulwer-Lytton also wrote the famous line “The pen is mighter than the sword” (which always struck me as terribly Freudian, but perhaps I read too fast), the one line for which he is arguably most often remembered opens opens his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford”: “It was a dark and stormy night“.

Of course, this was the phrase with which Snoopy started all of his novels, including his own Great American Novel. What’s curious is that, by my estimation, the “forty thousand head of cattle” Snoopy mentions would liquidise down to roughly… a million cans of Bovril. Coincidence… or conspiracy? What do you think? And moreover, what about the king?

Titter ye not!