When going green could kill you - superstition was based on fact

Did your Gran refuse to wear green, thinking it was an unlucky colour? It may have been a superstition, but it was well-founded. In Victorian times, the colour green could kill you, and if it didn't, it might still make you very ill.

- Eugene Byrne tells a story of arsenic and old taste...

AFTER his surrender to the British a month after the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena, where he lived out the last six years of his life under the close guard of British soldiers, and with a few faithful French servants and followers.

He died on May 5 1821, having been in poor health for some time. An autopsy concluded that he had died of stomach cancer, but at the time and since, there have been accusations of dark plotting on the part of the British authorities, for whom he was an embarrassing inconvenience.

Napoleon himself claimed on a couple of occasions that the British were killing him, an accusation he reiterated in one of the two wills he wrote a few weeks before his death.

There were other conspiracy theories; one popular one was that someone had poisoned him on behalf of the French government. The unpopular and grotesquely obese King Louis XVIII might well have feared that Napoleon might escape and return to take control of the country once more.

In the 1990s another hypothesis emerged: the former Emperor had indeed been killed, though not deliberately.

It was his wallpaper that did for him.

Had this thesis been put forward in Victorian times, it wouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone.

Many people in the later 19th and 20th centuries considered green an unlucky colour. To your grandmother, or her mother, it may have become a superstition, but it had once been based in fact, and that fact was arsenic.

A chemical element which had been known since ancient times, arsenic had long had several uses. It had been used in paints and pigments, for example.