The founding of the Vegan Society (1944)

By the early 1940s a current inside British vegetarianism had been arguing for a decade that milk and eggs belonged on the wrong side of the line. Leah Leneman’s archival study No Animal Food (Leneman, 1999) traces the shift from letters in The Vegetarian Messenger in the 1910s through Mahatma Gandhi’s dairy-scepticism after 1929 to a small but persistent correspondence column in the 1930s. What had been a minority conscience became, in November 1944, an organization with a name.

The Leicester current and the Vegetarian Society

Donald Watson, a woodworking teacher from Mexborough who had renounced meat at fourteen after watching a pig slaughtered on his uncle’s farm, had given up dairy some years before the war on the reasoning that the cow’s life was as instrumentalized as the pig’s. He was not alone. A cluster of non-dairy vegetarians — among them Elsie Shrigley, a Londoner active in the Leicester Vegetarian Society, and Fay K. Henderson, a Scottish cookery writer who would produce the movement’s first recipe book — had been pressing the Vegetarian Society to recognize the stricter position.

In the August 1944 Vegetarian Messenger, Watson proposed a regular column for “non-dairy vegetarians.” The society’s committee, anxious about doctrinal splintering in the middle of rationing, declined. Watson and Shrigley decided instead to convene a separate meeting. The gathering on 1 November 1944 is usually associated with Leicester because of Shrigley’s society work there, though the founding discussion itself took place at the Attic Club, a small vegetarian restaurant on High Holborn in London. Six people attended. They resolved to publish a newsletter, draft a constitution, and find a name (The Vegan Society, 2021).

Coining the word

Watson and his wife Dorothy, with input from the other founders, tried several candidates — dairyban, vitan, benevore — before settling on vegan, formed from the first three and last two letters of vegetarian. Watson later explained the coinage as marking “the beginning and end of vegetarian” (Rodger, 2014): the position from which vegetarianism had started and the destination to which, in the founders’ view, it logically tended. The pronunciation with a long e was specified in the first issue of the newsletter to forestall the “veggan” variant that had already appeared in correspondence.

The first Vegan News

The Vegan News, four quarto pages mimeographed on tinted paper, appeared in November 1944 with Watson as editor and twenty-five subscribers paying a shilling a year. The lead editorial announced the new word, invited members to suggest alternatives if they disliked it, and set out a programme: a quarterly newsletter, a recipe exchange, a register of suppliers of non-dairy foods, and lobbying for wartime ration-book recognition of the new category. By its second issue the society had a hundred members; by the end of 1945, around five hundred. Henderson’s Vegan Recipes appeared in 1946 and went through multiple editions, providing the practical substrate without which the ethic would have remained a debating position.

The 1951 definitional turn

The society’s original statement of purpose described vegans as people who abstained from all foods of animal origin. Leslie Cross, a council member and later vice-president, argued through the late 1940s that this dietary framing understated the movement’s logic. In a 1949 paper to the council he proposed redefining veganism as the principle of emancipating animals from exploitation by humans, with diet as one expression among several. The council accepted the reformulation in 1951. The text adopted that year — “to seek an end to the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection, and all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man” — shifted the reference point from what vegans ate to the system they refused (The Vegan Society, 2021). Every subsequent redrafting, including the “as far as is possible and practicable” phrasing still in use, descends from Cross.

The 1964 Rodney Drew test

A recurring practical question in the society’s first two decades was how to certify that a manufactured product contained no animal-derived ingredient or process aid. Rodney Drew, a chemist and council member, developed in 1964 what the society’s internal correspondence called the animal-free test: a questionnaire and laboratory-assay protocol that manufacturers had to pass before their goods could be listed in The Vegan Trade List. The Drew protocol was the direct ancestor of the modern trademark criteria, and it forced a distinction — later central to labelling law — between the finished article and the supply chain that produced it.

Incorporation and the 1979 trust deed

The society operated for its first thirty-five years as an unincorporated association. In 1979 it registered as a charity under the Charities Act 1960 (charity number 279228) and adopted a memorandum and articles of association that put the 1951 definition, with the now-familiar “as far as is possible and practicable” qualifier, into legal form (Charity Commission, 2024). The trust deed named the objects of the charity as public education about veganism and the advancement of animal welfare, and gave the council power to license the society’s name and marks. Registration also conferred tax advantages that allowed the society to hire its first paid staff and move from a domestic address to a London office.

The sunflower trademark (1990)

The Vegan Trademark, a stylized sunflower with the word vegan beneath it, was launched in 1990 as the first third-party certification mark for vegan consumer goods anywhere in the world (The Vegan Society, 2023). Products bearing the mark had to satisfy the successor to Drew’s protocol: no animal ingredients, no animal testing commissioned by or on behalf of the company, and no genetically modified organisms incorporating animal genes. The mark was registered at the UK Intellectual Property Office and, over the following decades, in jurisdictions across Europe, North America, and East Asia. By the mid-2020s more than sixty-five thousand product lines worldwide carried the sunflower — a scale that retroactively vindicated the founders’ bet that a distinct category, distinctly named, was worth the 1944 split.

What the founding accomplished

The Leicester-London meeting produced three things the older vegetarian tradition had lacked: a word that drew a bright line, a publication apparatus that kept the argument continuous, and — after Cross, Drew, and the 1979 deed — a legal and technical infrastructure that could be extended to a global consumer economy. Colin Spencer’s longer history (Spencer, 1993) treats the November 1944 issue of The Vegan News as the hinge at which ethical vegetarianism became a movement capable of organizing its own supply chain rather than merely protesting the prevailing one.

The twenty-five subscribers of the first issue would, within eighty years, have grown into a census figure running into the tens of millions worldwide. The institutional scaffolding that carried that growth — the definition, the trademark, the charity — was built in the two rooms the founders could afford, by people whose day jobs were teaching woodwork, testing chemicals, and writing cookbooks.