At the tail end of the 19th century, bustling Belfast was at the very centre of the world’s soft drinks trade, shipping its sought-after bottles of fizz in vast quantities to far-flung corners of the globe. And the man chiefly responsible for the city’s outstanding success was Dublin-born chemist Thomas Cantrell, whose inspired creation of ginger ale was one of the foundations of a formidable drinks empire he ran from Castle Place with partner Henry Cochrane.
Cantrell had devised the recipe for ginger ale as a young employee in a Cornmarket chemist’s shop, and by the time he retired in 1883 he was joint head of what was said to be “the largest soft drink manufacturer in the world.”
Around the time Cantrell was starting to bow out of the business, a young man named John James McLaughlin was pondering his future as a pharmacist in the township of Enniskillen. But his home wasn’t in Fermanagh, it was 3,000 miles away across the Atlantic in Enniskillen, Ontario. And like Cantrell, who had also studied pharmacy in his youth, soon McLaughlin would be drawn into the soft drinks trade.
Jack McLaughlin Credit: McLaughlin Library and Archives Canada
It won’t come as any great surprise to learn that the area where McLaughlin grew up had been settled in the mid-1800s by Presbyterian immigrants from Tyrone and Fermanagh. His grandfather, John McLaughlin, had sailed from Ireland in 1832 with 140 others who left their mid-Ulster homes to seek economic advancement in the New World. He arrived in the forests of Ontario having lost nearly all his possessions when the riverboat taking him inland overturned. Nevertheless, he set up home there with others who had made the perilous journey and, in a nostalgic tribute to the land left behind, they christened the area Tyrone. Enniskillen, where his grandson was to grow up, was the name given to an area 200 miles to the south-west, near the US border.
The McLaughlin family flourished in Canada’s industrial heartlands, and grandfather John’s son, Robert, became a highly successful businessman who founded the McLaughlin Carriage Company that later became an early manufacturer of motor cars and ultimately part of the giant General Motors corporation. Robert’s son John, who was more commonly known as Jack, wasn’t interested in making cars, however. Graduating from the Ontario College of Pharmacy in Toronto, he got a job with the largest chemist in Brooklyn, New York, and there he might have remained if it hadn’t been for the entrepreneurial bug buried deep in his DNA.
Inspired by the popularity of ‘soda pop’ in America, which was mostly sold through drugstores, Jack saw a business opportunity that could make his fortune and took off on a study tour of European soft drinks producers to see what he could learn. Details of his trip are few, but it’s a safe bet that at some point he landed in Belfast – it was, after all, home to the biggest soft drink manufacturer in the world. And when he returned to Toronto in 1890, one of the first drinks he started selling was what he called ‘Belfast-style ginger ale’. The words were printed on bottle labels above a map of Canada and a drawing of a beaver.
The spicy Belfast recipe proved a hit, and Jack’s brazen marketing campaigns for ginger ale and his other soft drinks – ‘Don’t Suicide By Drinking City Water’ was one of his more outlandish slogans – helped him outsell the 12 other businesses operating in Toronto at the time. To speed up production, he invented a mass bottling system and, like Cantrell & Cochrane in Belfast, kept having to move to larger premises as demand soared.
But Jack’s biggest masterstroke was still to come. For some time, he had dreamed of elevating the status of ginger ale to make it the non-alcoholic equivalent of champagne, and in the first years of the 20th century, he perfected a recipe for his new, sophisticated ‘dry’ ginger ale by reducing the sugar content and making the drink lighter and less fiery. His wife Maude was a key figure in creating the new drink and it was she who came up with the advertising slogan, ‘The Champagne of Ginger Ales’, that ensured Canada Dry’s place as one of the country’s iconic brands.
The drink was launched in 1906 and within a couple of years, Jack was having to field tempting offers from large American corporations who wanted to buy the recipe for Canada Dry and produce the drink in ever larger quantities across the border in the US. As sales rose to levels he could only dream of, his health began to fail and in 1914 he died from a heart attack. His sons took over the booming business and eventually set up production in America themselves.
Jack McLaughlin, the grandson of a Co Tyrone emigrant who took Belfast’s unique soft drink and developed it into a mixer that’s still a favourite the world over, was laid to rest in St James’ Cemetery in Toronto. In a lengthy obituary, the city’s Daily Star called him “one of Toronto’s shrewdest businessmen.” As an epitaph, it hardly seems to do him justice.
