And, of course, he was a vegetarian, a cause he embraced in middleage. Or we might say he thought he was a vegetarian; the college chef was soworried that Mayor was abstemious and getting too thin that he added meatstock to the soups that Mayor preferred to eat. Mayor was also a teetotaller.Although he didn’t foist his diet or abstention onto others, he did spread theword in his books: Modicus Cibi Medicus Sibi, or, Nature her Own Physicianin 1880, What is Vegetarianism? in 1886, and Plain Living and High Thinkingin 1897. He contributed articles to Dietetic Reformer and VegetarianMessenger, publications of the Vegetarian Society. He became President ofthe Society in 1884, a position he held until his death in 1910 when he waseighty-five – and he attributed his healthiness in later life to his diet andascetic mode of living. Over this period, Mayor had witnessed new words fortypes of vegetarians: veg (1884), fruitarian (1893), and nutarian (1909). (Theword vegan would not appear until later, in 1944.)

Promoting coffee as an alternative to alcohol was a tactic of the temperance movement that had begun to take hold here in the early 1800s, and by the end of the century it looked as if it might actually be working. Certainly, it was more subtle than some attempts to curb drunkenness – in Islandmagee, for example, local landowner Lord Dungannon had dealt with “the appalling number of sudden, violent and premature deaths, solely from the effects of intemperance” by the simple act of smashing up all 14 pubs on the peninsula