Sake Deen Mahomed is celebrated in Brighton for having been the owner of fashionable baths on the seafront.

But it was revealed earlier this year that before his move to Brighton, he was the founder of Indian curry houses in Britain.

The Lord Mayor of Westminster unveiled a plaque on the site in Marylebone where he opened the restaurant and coffee house in 1810.

That date does not square with local histories, such as the Encyclopaedia Of Brighton by Tim Carder and Life In Brighton by Clifford Musgrave.

They say Mahomed opened his vapour baths in King's Road in 1786 and have him in Brighton at a time when he was supposedly running a curry house in London.

There is also a dispute over his death. The London plaque has him at 92 when he died in 1851 but the Brighton version has always been that he lived to be 101 or 102.

Mahomed was born in Patna, Bengal, and he joined the East India Company when he was only 11 years old. He moved to Ireland, where he married and had five children before coming to Britain.

It seems likely he first settled in London as assistant to Sir Basil Cochrane at his vapour baths, before opening his coffee or curry house.

It lasted only two years before he was declared bankrupt.

Mahomed did not exactly set a fashion at the time, for it was to be another century at least before curry houses started again in Britain.

The trend really accelerated after the Second World War and, of course, nowadays Indian restaurants are flourishing in every town and village.

Never a man to be put down for long, Mahomed was certainly in Brighton by 1814 and managed baths in Devonshire Place.

By the end of 1818, he was managing baths at the Battery House and in 1820 he was in charge of baths on the West Cliff.

In 1822 he opened Mahomed's Baths on the seafront, which attracted royal interest. But he could not have achieved this without a partner, and a man called Thomas Brown provided the funds.

Mahomed may have added ten years to his age in his book in 1822 called Shampooing Or Benefits Resulting From The Use Of The Indian Vapour Bath.

He also said that he arrived in Brighton in 1784, the same year as the Prince of Wales, in the hope he would gain more standing. It seems to have worked.

But Mahomed was always something of a salesman. Musgrave says he was not over-scrupulous about his advertising claims.

He said many illustrious people who had never been to the baths had benefited from them but others did go there.

Mahomed claimed that vapour baths cured asthma, paralysis, rheumatism, sciatica, lumbago and loss of voice. He even claimed credit for Brighton's fast growth as a resort at this time.

He was also given the grand title of Shampooing Surgeon to King George IV and put in charge of complicated arrangements at the main bathroom in the Royal Pavilion, allowing the corpulent monarch to be lowered into water in a chair.

His ceremonial dress, including a green and gold silk jacket and scarlet trousers, complete with turban, has been preserved at the Royal Pavilion.

The baths, under different management, lasted into the 1870s, when they were demolished to make way for the Queen's Hotel.

Mahomed was buried in the graveyard of St Nicholas, the mother church of Brighton, where his age is given as 101.

No one is ever likely to find out for certain exactly how old he was at his death but 92 does sound more likely than 101.

What is surprising is that the historians of Brighton never knew about his previous existence as the curry king of London