The last of my three stops in Yorkshire involved boiling sugar, human talent,

and the most surreal souvenir I got on the entire trip.

In the East Riding of Yorkshire,

just on the outskirts of a fishing port called Bridlington,

I arrived at the John Bull Rock Factory.

I don’t think you could come up with a more English name than that:

John Bull, the caricatured personification of England

that fell rather out of fashion during the 20th century,

and rock, which is…

difficult to translate to any other dialect of English.

6:30 in the morning, because folks who make candy get up early.

Rock is a type of candy, or to use the English term, sweets,

and I’m going to need to explain its significance later,

not just to those outside of Britain,

but I suspect these days to a lot of younger folks in the country as well.

All you need to know for now is that it’s not “rock candy”.

It’s not the crystallised stuff that Americans might know.

It’s more like a candy cane

only a bit more brittle, without the bend,

and usually with letters all the way through it end to end,

usually the name of whichever seaside town you bought it in.

So, let me introduce you

to Albert and Charles,

who are on deck early to start making rock.

30 kilos of sugar and about 19 litres of glucose.

We class it as about ten seconds of water. -Right.

So, we turn the tap on, ten seconds of water.

As I say, that’s just to stop it sticking.

And that’s all going to boil away.

That’s gone.

The pan’s cooking now, so it’s up to you, what colours and flavours would you like?

Oh, okay. What are my options?

-We’ve got a traditional pink mint. -Yep.

We’ve got all the flavours you can think of, orange, banana, raspberry, pear.

Oh, raspberry. Raspberry’ll do nicely.

Raspberry, okay. Colour-wise, full casing or stripes?

Red? Oh, stripes, definitely. Reddish... -Red and white?

Red and white stripes? -Yeah.

English flag, and also, your colours. -Perfect.

-Red and white, raspberry. All right. -Perfect. We’ll go for that then.

Also, my colours! My filming uniform for this series was red and white.

It worked out nicely.

Now, Charles said that the “pan” was “cooking”,

which sounds much less dangerous than it actually is:

the pan is a boiling cauldron

of sugar, glucose syrup and water.

Oh, I can feel the heat off that. That’s, what, 135, you said?

It will be 135, but at the moment the thermometer is reading 113,

so, we’ve got a little bit to go yet. -Okay.

So, that’s just steadily ticking up.

And there’s just a giant gas burner under there!

That’s 135 Celsius, so about 275 Fahrenheit.

Molten sugar burns are particularly bad,

because not only does the heat scald you,

you can’t rinse the sticky goo off easily,

it clings to you while it’s retaining all that heat

and it might take some skin off with it.

So, I stood well back as they rigged up the cauldron on their equipment

and poured out the sugar-syrup mixture onto a table.

Let’s not put me in the middle of this…

And it looks just like a bubbly liquid.

It looks like it isn’t dangerous.

I have to keep reminding myself that that is boiling sugar water.

That’s boiling sticky sugar water.

So, the water’s just there just to stop when it first starts,

that helps it mix and stops it sticking to the pan.

-Oh, so most of that’s boiled off. -That’s gone. The water’s gone.

-So that’s just… -There isn’t a lot of water.

It’s just enough to get it mixing. -That’s just sugar syrup.

It’s pure sugar.

The table is divided into sections.

That’s so they can keep different colours separate.

-Oh, so that’s the colouring going in. -That’s the colouring going in.

So, we have ten minutes, roughly, to play on here.

-Ten minutes? -About ten minutes.

About a quarter of the rock is going to be red.

The rest is going to be white.

It doesn’t look white yet, we’ll come back to that later.

I did set up a wide-angle camera to catch some shots that I might miss,

but it really

did not like the fluorescent lighting in there, so we’re going to

stick to my POV camera for most of this.

If they left it, it would go like glass,

underneath. -Right.

-So it’d set like a sheet of glass. -Oh!

And that’s within ten minutes.

So it has to get stirred up, no matter what.

Yeah. We have to cut it up and mix it.

The sugar’s already being folded into sheets

after just a few seconds on the table.

It’s now an amorphous goo,

cooled enough that it can be handled,

at least by people who understand the safety part.

They mixed the red into one section of it,

and then, I got handed a bit of the goo that had cooled, off at the side.

-Is that safe to…? -Yeah, yeah, that’d be quite cool.

Huh. That is set like glass. -That's how it goes.

-Yeah. -And it’s not sticky.

And it will cut you as well. If you break that, it’ll be sharp.

Wow. I don’t know what I’m expecting.

This is pure sugar, but you know, it’s…

Yeah, that’s pure, unflavoured sugar.

Of course it tastes good, it’s pure sugar!

I’m going to put that away before I eat far too much of it.

If you ask someone from Yorkshire

to tell the story,

they might say the inventor of rock was a man named Ben Bullock,

an ex-miner who’d moved over to Yorkshire from Lancashire and become a confectioner.

Plain rock, without the colours and letters, was already a thing

sold in fairgrounds, but Bullock was on holiday in Blackpool

in the 1880s and had an idea.

He came back home to Yorkshire and made the first modern rock

with words running through it.

And those words were:

“Whoa Emma”,

the title of a then-popular music hall song.

Because inexplicable phrases and in-jokes have been part of pop culture

since well before the internet, since well before today’s kids

started yelling... whatever they’re yelling right now.

“Whoa Emma” is listed in Green’s Dictionary of Slang

with quotations that seem to show that not only it was known across the country,

but people were getting really tired of it!

And it’s almost completely forgotten now.

I did look it up, there are two more recent songs with the same name,

it’s not them.

I had to track down a copy of the sheet music in the British Library

and it turns out the lyrics are a man complaining about his alcoholic wife.

Because it’s out of copyright, I asked a composer I know, Ben,

to create a couple of lines of the chorus

as it might have sounded in the music hall.

(piano and singers) ♪ Oh, Emma, whoa, Emma!

♪ Emma, this will never do.

♪ Whoa, Emma, oh, Emma!

♪ Emma, I’m ashamed of you. ♪

That wasn’t really exciting enough,

so I also asked Ben to turn it into 1990s Dutch happy hardcore.

(happy hardcore music; high-pitched vocal) ♪ Ohhhh, Emma! Whoooa, Emma!

♪ Emma, this will nev-er do.

♪ Ohhhh, Emma! Whoooa, Emma!

♪ Emma, I’m ashamed of you. ♪ (music echoes and slowly fades)

I make no apologies for that.

Anyway, the story goes that Ben Bullock sold that first “Whoa Emma” batch locally,

but his second batch said “Blackpool”, was sent to Blackpool, became a hit,

and suddenly there was seaside rock.

Some of that is probably true!

But there’s a reference in Henry Mayhew’s book, “London Labour and the London Poor”,

which I also pulled from the British Library,

that’s from a few decades earlier, and it says,

“The man who has the best trade in London streets, is one who, about two years ago,

“introduced short sentences into his sticks.”

So, it’s fair to say that Ben Bullock popularised rock and commercialised rock,

but probably didn’t invent it?

But also, his timing was right.

The Victorians, in the 1880s, had invented

the seaside holiday.

The new railways had made the fresh air of the coast available to the working class.

And up in the north-west of England,

with the Industrial Revolution in full swing,

whole towns would take their holidays at the same time.

The factories would all shut down together,

and lots of people would decamp to the same place,

to the town at the end of the train line, at the seaside.

The different towns would coordinate with each other

so, there weren’t too many people in the resorts at the same time.

And those holidaymakers wanted souvenirs.

You would bring a stick of rock back home.

It’s really cheap, and it’s got the town’s name running all the way through it.

It was this small, edible, affordable piece of the seaside

that you could keep for yourself or give to the folks who hadn’t travelled out.

And when most of the jobs were hard factory labour

and medical science wasn’t anywhere near as advanced,

there was a lot less concern about sugar.

By the later part of the 20th century,

a combination of cheap package holidays, industrial decline, and health concerns

meant that going to the seaside and giving your child a lump of flavoured sugar

became less fashionable than it once was.

But rock is still very much made, sold, bought, and eaten.

John Bull have a shop in Bridlington, and the factory offers tours.

Plus, they make chocolates and cookies, and they have a gift shop.

Rock is still a very cheap souvenir.

And they’ve also expanded to have a kids’ soft play centre next door,

’cos it’s important to have more than one income stream.

Now that the colour’s mixed in,

the John Bull folks are going to cool the sugar-goop down

to a better working temperature.

They connect the table to a cold water supply

so, there’s a constant stream running through it,

take off the safety gloves and instead dust their hands

with what I think might be cornstarch to stop anything sticking.

See how it’s changing and getting thicker

and thicker and thicker, yeah? -Yeah.

There you go. Have a touch of that.

It’s a bit sticky, but have a feel of the heat that’s still in it.

Oh, that’s slightly squishy and just hot enough

that me without my asbestos fingers is just a little bit worried about it.

-Ah, you’re fine, you’ll be fine. -(laughing)

But that squishy proto-candy is yellow,

and it needs to be white for seaside rock.

The solution to that

is the pulling machine.

So, too soft it’ll fall off the pulling machine, too stiff it’ll fly everywhere.

-Right, okay. -It’s got to be just right.

And again, there’s no measuring thing for that, you’ve just got to know.

It is just knowledge, it is just knowledge and skill and trial and error,

I think, at the beginning, I reckon. (chuckling)

That machine folds air into the proto-candy,

changing the structure and making it a very pale white.

That’s your raspberry flavour going in it.

So, we have white rock and red rock.

The flavour’s in the white, the colour’s in the red,

but as yet

we do not have the letters.

And as far as I knew, they were going to make a tiny batch of candy

that said, “Tom”.

And I can only describe what’s about to happen as wizardry.

It is someone who is extremely skilled,

extremely well-practiced just doing their job.

-So this is gonna be the T. -That’s going to be the…right!

-This is your name, now, this is it. -That’s it, yep.

There we go, that’s a T.

So, you’ve just got to remember the recipe for every letter basically and figure out…

Yeah, yeah, the construction of it.

You’ve got to know the full construction of how you make every letter.

The candy is still warm enough to be pliable.

If they need parts to stay separate, they dust them.

If they need to make them stick,

they wipe them down with water.

And everything just ran smoothly.

There’s a T, an O which is made by rolling the colour around a white central part,

and then an M

which obviously, in hindsight,

is constructed by making one half

and then folding it over to the other side.

And at that point, with all the letters inside the packing bars,

I thought we were done.

But then, with...

with an unnecessary but very impressive flourish of the scissors,

he kept going.

Wait, hold on, are you doing a full name here?

-Tom Scott, right? -Oh my...

Yeah, I assumed it was just gonna be Tom, because you can re...okay.

Because I figured they could sell rock

with “Tom” in it, right?

There are a lot of Toms in the world. But...

No. Full name.

So those get stretched.

Meanwhile, cut the stripes in half,

put ’em next to each other,

clean them up,

and they just glue together.

Yeah, just wet on the cloth, just water on the cloth,

because it’s quite dry, believe it or not. -Huh.

So, you need it a little bit sticky, so, you just put water on the cloth,

sticks it together. -Right.

So, now we’re going to build up one very large stick of rock with your name in it.

(laughter)

It’s a little difficult to make out the name right now,

but that’s going to change, I’m guessing.

I wish I could have thought of something less egotistical

than my name to put in there,

but I didn’t know this was happening until I got there.

And more than that,

I didn’t realise quite how much rock they were making,

because there’s a minimum batch size!

-That is about, what, 30, 35… -45, 50.

45, 50 kilos of rock with my name in it!

That’s a lot of rock.

I did also get a quick go at lettering myself with some offcuts,

and I started by saying the immortal words…

-How hard can it be? -Well, we’re about to find out.

Right, it’s just Tom, right? That’s the plan.

-That is the plan, just Tom. -Okay.

I will spare you the lengthy shots of me

struggling to work as fast as a professional,

partly because it’s a bit boring, and partly to save my ego.

Physical dexterity is not exactly my forte.

And again, sorry for the lighting on that side camera, it did its best.

Highlights, though, I did say this...

-Wet. -Wet.

-Wet. -And then put that over the top.

And put that over the top.

And also this...

Oh, I don’t think my piece is thin enough!

And also this...

Not a big fan of that 'O', I’ll be honest with you.

-Stretch it out. -Stretch it out.

Yeah, so it’s all the same length.

The longer I took, the more that proto-candy

cooled and the more difficult the job got.

Charles said it was about six months to a year of on-the-job training

before someone really had it up to professional standard.

Even he’s not an expert, it’s been a while since he did it.

Alright, and then that should be…

Tom. -(laughter)

It’s not! (laughter)

I mean, we still have to break them.

We still have to actually see what it’s like at the core there. We’ll, um...

We’ll see.

First, Charles’ effort...

Look at that!

(laughter)

It does look a bit wonkier before it’s pulled into rock.

The stretching process will even things out.

And anyway, compared to mine…

-I mean, I could have done worse! -There, see?

I could definitely have done worse! (laughter)

Meanwhile, what’s happening to that

45 kilos of rock with my full name in it, which is

a service they do for corporate clients, by the way.

If you’re a business and you want to hand out candy canes

with your company name lettered all through,

or if you want something special for your wedding favours, they’ll do that.

My lump of rock was going into a single- purpose machine to do the stretching

where it goes in, gets rotated back and forth,

and it’s steadily squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

There’s this colossal 45-kilo lump over there

that’s just been...spaghettified?

So, as we’re rolling it, we put a little twist in it.

You see how I’m twisting? -Right.

Yeah, so we put a little twist just to make it a bit jazzy.

You must keep it rolling otherwise it goes square.

So we’ve got the fans to set it now.

So the fans are cooling it down rapidly. -Yeah.

There’s so much temperature management, isn’t there?

Yeah. That’s the skill of it, I think.

Eventually there was about

a hundred metres of rock

with my name all the way through it.

This is some of that rock!

It’s got my name through it, which is very, very strange, right?

That’s just a strange thing to say.

I am uncomfortable with having my name in… well, not lights,

but you know what I mean, right?

Rock with your own name in it just sounds incredibly vain.

They chopped it up, bagged it up…

Oh!

(chopping)

That’s so much more gentle than I thought it would be.

And then they gave me some of it.

And it’s really difficult to explain to a worldwide audience

how much seaside rock is a thing

and how much seeing my name in there is just like…

no-one, no-one gets to see their name in a stick of rock!

But I wasn’t going to take 45 kilos of rock with me.

What would I do with it?

I’m not going to hand out vanity rock to people, that would be ridiculous.

And where would I even keep it? I’m on a road trip.

I’d end up with an ant colony in the back of my car.

So, the last thing I need to introduce you to is...

the Chipper.

Because it’s not going to waste. That batch of rock,

it was the warm-up batch.

Get everything sorted for the day before the serious stuff,

before they start making

the Union Jack rock or the corporate orders

so they can check all the equipment works.

That batch was turned into...

broken rock.

It gets mixed in with all the other test batches,

maybe even factory errors or mistaken orders,

and it gets sold in bulk at a steep discount.

I don’t know where that rock ended up.

But if you bought a bag of candy at some point in the last few months

and a few pieces of it had my name in it…

now you know why.

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