Kidderminster Probus Club

At the last meeting Robert Barber gave an excellent talk about sugar. Thought to have been established in Polynesia about 3000 years BC, the delights of sugar only reached Britain in the 11th Century. The 166h Century saw sugar cane introduced to the Americas where it flourished and became inextricably linked with the slave trade. Beet sugar was first extracted by Andreas Margraff in Germany during the mid-1700s but it was the Napoleonic Wars that saw the process become fully exploited. The Kidderminster sugar beet factory opened in 1926 although Clement Dalley had investigated the idea in the 1890s.