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April 01 2012
Coffees of Empire
You somehow feel that Britain has come to terms with its imperialist past. The recent BBC Tv five part series "Empire", an excellent travelogue / documentary with Jeremy Paxman suggests that.
Here is coffee essence a peculiar British product. A thick gooey syrup that was suppose to taste like coffee after hot water was poured over it. It is still retailed in places but I can't bear to purchase any. I remember it first time around. Ingredients : 40% water, 30% sugar, 26% chicory essence, 4% coffee essence, stabilisers and thickeners.
The label says everything about Empire and that later creation the Commonwealth. Manufactured by Patterson & Sons in Glasgow from 1875. The iconic label of an military officer in the Gordon Highlanders and a Sikh gentleman being a waiter / batman serving up the delicious sweet drink. That was the black and white days. Now the firm is a brand of the McCormick & Company (think of those over-priced Schwartz herbs and spices) it has been re-designed with both chaps sitting together enjoying the beverage. There was an intermediate design of the chap in his turban standing with the tray airbrushed out. Redolent of those Stalinist era photographs, when the old Bolsheviks got removed from the picture after Uncle Joe had them executed.
Getting back to the beverage I've always wondered why Britain, in the days of Empire, never got to grips with coffee making at home? Also the use of chicory in this product is an interesting and separate story. It can make an acceptable drink when there is a coffee shortage but there wasn't one.
March 30 2012
Butter of Empire
The advertisement is from Friday 17th April 1931 in the Manchester Guardian. Another in the series of Foods of The Empire. It says it is the first direct consignment, presumably from New Zealand to the Manchester Ship Canal. The S.S. Surrey was a steamship of the New Zealand Shipping Company. Built in 1919, with a tonnage 8,580 and like many of their ships was named after an English county. The ship was sunk in 1942 in the Second World War.
The New Zealand Produce Association had offices in Tooley Street, London and was set up by the CWS and the Marketing Association of New Zealand in 1922 after a visit by a CWS delegation to New Zealand. It served importers of agricultural produce which the CWS required for its factories. An international co-operative undertaking by both producers and consumers.
Links : New Zealand Shipping Company History
Cocoa of Empire
The English and the Scottish CWS opened a cocoa factory in Dallow Road, Luton, in 1902. Like the British Empire it is gone now, demolished early in 1970. It is now a site of the Guardian Business Park, near the junction with Vernon Road. The poster dates from 1906 and is a contrast between an idealised view of work in West Africa and the impressive building with smoking chimney to demonstarte a hive of industry in Luton.
Nowadays the cocoa and chocolate is advertised as a Fairtrade product, the workers in West Africa have their own co-operative, but no sign of any factories in the UK, or wherever it is processed in the EU.
Links :
Divine Chocolate
Teas of Empire - previous post
March 20 2012
First lorry
This is the first M&S Co-op lorry purchased in 1909. It's a Pagefield two-ton truck which was manufactured by Walker Brothers in Wigan. The story reads "The Society's first motor and its first load. This will as be seen a precious cargo of the celebrated and unequalled Crumpsall Cream Crackers......At the head of the motor is Mr. Brierley, the society's stable superintendent. He has a great admiration for horses, but he speaks very highly of the motor and its work."
To me it looks like a flat bed lorry and I'm thinking all that work needed to load it and then handball all those boxes off into the warehouse. No pallets and forklift trucks back then.
March 14 2012
Minerals as in pop
The advert is for J and B Mineral Waters by the veritable Manchester institution of Jewsbury and Brown who had their main factory and laboratories at Ardwick Green. It was a short walk around the corner to the M and S Equitable Co-Op's head office and central stores on Downing Street, Manchester. The Victorian building remains reduced to the three storeys from the glory of five storeys.
They sold aerated waters, colloquially we call it "pop", soda water, ginger beer and cordials throughout Lancashire. It merged into Schweppes in 1964. Their old bottles and other memorabilia are sought after by collectors of such ephemera.
Henry Jewsbury and Mr. Whitelow were two young chemists and druggists who went into partnership in 1826. Mr. Jewsbury was then 23 years old. They had a shop at 52 Market Street, and later moved into newly built premises at 113 Market Street. They supplied the booming city of Manchester with non-alcoholic drinks, medications and perfumes.
To thirsty souls the name be ever dear
Of Jewsbury's "Celebrated Ginger Beer;"
And let the meed of cool-tongu'd praise be paid
To Whitelow's "effervescing lemonade" 1
The partnership was dissolved in 1846, with Mr. Whitelow going to Liverpool. Mr. Jewsbury formed a partnership with their apprentice William Scott Brown. Business was good the company sold drinks in Lancashire and beyond. They also made a celebrated "Oriental Tooth Paste", distributed and advertised thoughout Britain and the Empire.
Now a couple of chemists putting carbon dioxide into water isn't that strange. It was pioneering chemists, as in scientists, with their experiments into gases that started this fizzy drinks industry.
You have to go back to Joseph Priestley in Leeds with his 'Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air' in 1772. They had yet to understand the concept of carbon dioxide. Thomas Henry a Manchester apothecary developed a method of carbonating water in 1781 and had a recipe to produce an artifical version of Pyrmont (Germany) spa water. His son William Henry MD FRS was the first to produce a carbonated mineral water in Manchester in 1802. It took place in a narrow street off Deansgate called Cupid's Alley, now called Atkinson Street.
Now to make some points :
i) Co-operative written history tends to overlook the fact that the local Co-Op store has always sold brands other than produced in CWS factories. The CWS factories overshadow your Pears soap, Gales honey and your J&B mineral waters.
ii) Whilst researching this I discovered that bottled waters and non-alcoholic fizzy drinks have a complex history. We think of selling bottled water in Britain as a recent fashion but for the middle class customer it has been purchased since the 19th Century. J and B were selling Stretton Hills spring water from near Church Stretton, Shropshire. This was first bottled in 1883.
iii) There were local manufacturers is a theme that runs through the history of the soft drink industry.
Now the regional companies have virtually disappeared to be overtaken by multi-national corporations which spend serious big money on international promotions - the likes of Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. A.G.Barr can still claim to be associated with Scotland. Founded in 1875 in Falkirk, and makers of Irn-Bru since 1901, originally called Iron Brew. They also now own "Tizer" a distinctive red-coloured fizzy drink that was first made in Manchester in 1924.
Carbonated water, sugar, carbon-dioxide and something the makers always claim are secret ingredients add up to billion pound industry. A long way from some pharmacists bottling their wondrous brews.
Adverts :
Advert from Manchester and Salford Co-operative Herald page 321, 1932
Older advert of Jewsbury and Brown's building in Ardwick is from 'A Practical Cook Book', circa 1890-1900. It is a battered and tatty slim volume and was published in Manchester. A treasured old book in the archives.
References - hey you can do this for yourself:
1. The Races (1823) a poem in 'Gimrackiana or Fugitive Pieces of Manchester', John Stanley Gregson published in Manchester in 1833. Here.
Reminiscences of Manchester Fifty Years Ago (1881) J.T.Slugg. Here
The Victorian Society in Manchester Spring Newsletter 2011 PDF which has an article about Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury, a successful Mancunian novelist, contemporary of Elizabeth Gaskill, and sister of Henry Jewsbury. You can download her romantic fiction in e-books formats for free.
Have a look at Jewsbury & Brown shop in 1880 at the Manchester Libraries Image Archive.
Bottled Water, Spas, and Early Water Chemistry (PDF)
March 11 2012
Teas of Empire
If you subscribe to enough email updates of other bloggers then occasionally something will surprise you.
An interesting one is Curatorial Space which is behind the scenes at Manchester City Art Gallery. This led to looking at their online collection of Empire Marketing Board posters. That's one on the left by H.S. Williamson from the 1930's.
As a way of contrast there is a E&SCWS postcard below, from around the same time. The artwork is not as sharp and crisp as the one by the E.M.B. Both shew tea picking by women wearing no shoes and a few bangles, and I'm guessing in Ceylon.
Produce from the Empire wasn't just foreign imports it was highlighted as a selling point of quality and very British to eat. For example Australian tinned fruit, Canadian flour, New Zealand lamb, and bananas from the West Indies.
It is all a bit suspect to modern sensibilities, but for a historian you tell the story of the propaganda of that age without endorsing the values.
The Empire Marketing Board commissioned these posters from 1926-1933 to promote trade and understanding between empire countries, but they are in essence propaganda that sends out a message of industry, nourishment and civilisation as seen from the powers in London. This view persisted until the trading patterns changed with Britain's entry to the Common Market (later called the EEU, now the EU) in 1973.
The English & Scottish CWS appear to have joined in with a series of picture postcards depicting work on the Co-operative's own tea estates.
If you wish to see the E.M.B. posters, and there are at least 200 of them then browse over to the Flickr collection. The quality of the paintings is superb. As a side note there are a four posters about imports and exports with the Irish Free State.
March 09 2012
Frozen Food 1950's
Having a few items in the freezer is taken for granted. But back in the 1950's it was a novelty for Britain. Most people then didn't have a refrigerator with its small compartment for frozen food. Just keeping butter and milk cool in summer was down to having a decent larder or a piece of furniture in the kitchen called a meat safe.
The picture is from 1950 and shews the Co-op employee at the Great Western Street branch talking up the merits of frozen food to the busy housewife. Note the chest freezer with whatever is inside buried in the dark. The selling point then and now has always been economy & convenience - there is no waste, and you don't have to wash and peel the vegetables - the birth of the ready meal. The M and S Co-op could announce "no less than 44 of our grocery branches now have a refrigerator which carries a stock of fruit, vegetables, or frozen fish fillets. Why not give yourself a treat and try the new flavour of quick-frozen foods?"
We all have to thank Clarence Birdseye with lots of help from his wife Eleanor for this. Their experiments in the kitchen to bring the winter of Labrador to the summer of New England by mechanical means gave the world quick-frozen food. That was back in the early 1920's. It took years and millions of dollars of development before it arrived into small grocery stores. Now you take it for granted. However you have to have a whole separate logistics of warehousing, transporting, and retail cabinets to move food at minus 21 degrees celsius from the factory to the home.
Home refridgerators with their tiny icebox were still an expensive purchase for those on workers wages. So the ice cream would have to eaten within an hour or so of purchase.
I would recommend reading the development of Birds Eye in the UK from 1946 to become market leader if you want to know more about the frozen food industry.
www.blackwellpublishing.com/grant/docs/13BirdsEye.pdf
February 27 2012
Little Shop Memories
Takes you back fifty yearsRe-creating the past isn't just about authentification, if it is in the recent past it's about jogging people's memories. So by chance spotted this story from the Ilford Recorder when I was looking for information on Spel washing powder. Oh, the things you do on Thursday afternoon when you should be doing something more tedious."Old-fashioned weighing scales and flowery aprons are back in fashion this season as a nursing home goes retro. Drinks, sweets, cereals and household product packages have been recreated by high street supermarket Co-op at Birchwood Care Home, Clayhall Avenue, Clayhall.
Elderly people took a trip down memory lane, recreating scenes from post-war London as they donned pinnies and set up a temporary shop.
And grocer’s son 91-year-old resident Spencer Tricker has taken on the role of shopkeeper“I made some suggestions about what to have on the stall, like scales and how the counter should be laid out,” he said.
“It jogged a few memories and the other residents and everyone’s been coming over to have a look.”Activities co-ordinator at Birchwood, Lesley Norton, said: “The 1950s was a special era and our residents would have been in their youth at the time.
“The shop is a very visual way of bringing that period back to life. It has proved a trip down memory lane sparking conversations among the residents about when they were young,” she added.
Items in the shop were ordered by Mrs Norton after they were given a leaflet from the Co-op supermarket on old fashioned products, which they decided to order.
Co-op’s own ranges such as Spel washing powder and other brands from the 1950s including Ovaltine and Horlicks also feature in the shop.
The products on display were ordered from the Co-op complete with original advertising posters of the time.
Mrs Norton added: “Even though the boxes were empty, we have filled them with things like washing powder and tea to make it more true to life.” “We plan to keep the shop open for the next three weeks at least as it has proved a real talking point for everyone here.”
Ilford Recorder 24 January 2012
February 20 2012
National Loaf...recreation
Maybe I should have used a better bread knifeThis is a continuation of the story of the National Wheatmeal Bread which was on sale across Britain in World War II. Had an attempt at a reproduction of said loaf. I made a 1kg bread machine version. I was in pressed for time and bread machines once loaded with the ingredients do all the work and release wonderful baking aroma in the kitchen. It was made to check the taste, crumb structure and crust. The result was just fine. Good for a sandwich. Dense, moist inside, with a firm thin crust. But as you can see from the photo it does make a few loose crumbs when sliced.Essentially I followed the wholemeal recipe for the bread machine using a flour mix with the following percentages :
75% lightly sieved 100% wholemeal.
The original used 85% wholemeal, usually called wheatmeal. I didn't have any so I bolted some of the bran out of a flour produced by The Watermill. They use organic English wheat, and yes it is milled by water power.
15% of strong Canadian white (the item that was in short supply in the war)
5% potato flour (really it is just a starch filler)
5% wholegrain barley flour
I'll have another attempt but trying a hand made version using fresh yeast and a longer proving time.
Links : Previous posts about The National Loaf.
February 19 2012
National Loaf...more
If you study history you realise it is never complete. To most what happened in the past is cut, dried and pressed into a series of memorable or not so memorable dates. For the historian you always want to know more. So it is when I got distracted by the story of the National Loaf introduced in WW2. This is an update from a previous post called National Loaf....
The real name is the National Wheatmeal Bread (1942-1956), the term National Loaf is one coined after the war. There was also a National Cheese which was rationed, some months at just 2 ounces (56.6 grams) a week. It was processed and homogenised in the cheddar style. Also National Dried Milk which came in large tins introduced in the winter of 1941. Times were tough on the food front...and then you had to make something from dried egg powder.
The M&S Co-op version of that National Wheatmeal Bread was called the Golden Twist loaf and we know it was still being made in 1950 from this trumpted article..." The result is the famous Golden Twist loaf. Its colour a rich nut brown, its crust delectable, its texture perfect. Just try one out on the kiddies, and they will clamour for more."1
Then made at the Manchester and District Co-operative Bakery which was formed after the war as a joint venture by the M&S, Beswick, and the Blackley Co-op Societies who were baking off 1,600 loafs an hour. So brown bread wasn't that unpopular. Some or most of these would have been at the factory on Cakeloaf Street in Ardwick. What a great name, who came up with that? Just off Ardwick Green, around the corner from the M&S head quarters. This co-op transfered its engagements, a phrase much used in co-op business to cease trading because of financial difficulties, to the CWS in 1961.
Still work to be done. Re-create the National Loaf...it's nothing special if you can make your own bread. Not rocket science but just four ingredients, a hot oven and 3,000 years of history.
1. Manchester and Salford Monthly Herald April 1950, page 86
National Loaf...continues
Here we have the M&S Co-op's Golden Twist loaf being pawed by film star Glynis Johns on a visit to the head office and central stores in Ardwick on Saturday 20th January 1948. Other photos not shewn here have the crowds and dinner with the directors of the co-operative. She is wearing a fur coat in all the pictures.
As in previous posts this loaf was the local version of the National Wheatmeal Bread. Clearly the M&S Co-op are proud about their bread if they make it a feature in story of a visitor from London. Bread wasn't on ration, other types of bread are available yet it is still being baked by the thousand. Somebody must have been buying it, so much for it being unpopular. It looks like a full 2 lbs. (907g) unsliced loaf. I've read reports that in the war years that bread had to be reduced to 1 lb. (453g) size due to wheat shortages.
Glynis Johns was in then in a new film release of "An Ideal Husband", directed by Alexander Korda and starring Paulette Goddard and Michael Wilding.
'The film was advertised on milk bottle tops in return for free advertising for the Society on the cinema screen, where the slogan : "An Ideal Husband's Ideal Wife Saves as She Spends at the Co-op." will be shown three times daily for the whole run of the film.' - Manchester & Salford Co-operative Herald February 1949.
The film was on at the New Oxford and Market Street cinemas in Manchester city centre.
Links : Glynis Johns Wikipedia a long and successful career in Hollywood, Broadway and Tv.
February 14 2012
Soft Drinks for the duration
You go down the store for a bottle of your favourite refreshing fizzy drink, only to find them replaced by cordials or concentrates. This was the position during WW2.
"In order to set free more factory space and more labour for the war effort and to save fuel and petrol, Lord Woolton has reduced by a large percentage the amount and variety of 'soft' drinks that may be manufactured" - Manchester Guardian, Saturday19th December 1942.
The Ministry of Food ordered the closure of many soft drink factories with some being turned over to aircraft production. Those manufacturers that remained produced bottles full of red, yellow, and orange concentrate. The Vimto factory in Manchester produced a deep purple version. The return of empty bottles was also encouraged due to a shortage of glass. The Soft Drinks Industry (War Times) Association Limited (SDI) ran the operation from 1942 through to 1948. After that the various brands Schwepps, C.W.S., Kia-Ora & etc returned to shelves.
A little research into the wartime National Loaf, officially known as National Wheatmeal Bread, led to discovering National Cheese, and now SDI Drinks. I wonder what else will be stumbled upon in the range of foods restricted in the national interest.
February 13 2012
Canned Retro Food
The demise of canned food has been predicted for sometime. Some sectors are in terminal decline - tinned fruit, rice puddings, sauces, custard. It's those more attractive forms of packaging like resealable pouches, cartons, and glass that makes cans look old school.
Now tinned new potatoes are old school, and occasionally I buy them but it feels like a culinary offence worthy a suspended custodial sentence. They were the standby for the "hunger gap" when what was left from the last of autumn crop and the first of the new season. Now those lean months are covered by imports from places warmer and a lot further south - Egypt, Cyprus, and Sicily. They are also the standby for the can't cook won't cook types...
Baked Beans remain the biggest seller in the canned vegetable department. Their sales march ever onwards. Britain is the biggest consumer of them in the whole wide world. True story and it is one I point out to those misguided folk who deny baked beans. Ellen MacCarthy sailed solo around the world in the fastest possible time, it was back in 2005, and I followed every piece of news as it progressed. It was some achievement. First meal back in Blighty, beans on toast with the family on the yacht. It's that much part of the national pysche.
Links : Food Manufacturing : The decline and fall of canned food
Photo credits from Flickr: Co-op Historian (top); Lorenzo23 (bottom)
February 08 2012
National Loaf
The National Loaf was introduced to Britain in 1942 due to a shortage of shipping space for flour from Canada and the USA. It was sold unwrapped and unsliced to save packaging. There are references to it being sold a day old despite bread being best when fresh as possible. White bread was then no longer produced so if you wanted bread you bought the National Loaf.
You have to ask why is there an advert for a monopoly product? A new loaf called Golden Twist with something that looks like biscuits in the illustration rather than slices of bread. Wasn't it just different bakeries using essentially one recipe. So what was the National Loaf made from? Well let's quote Colonel J.J. Llewellin MP the Minister of Food when asked that question in Parliament..
"Apart from yeast, salt and various improvers which are the recognised adjuncts of bread baking, the National Loaf is made from National Flour which is milled from a grist of 97½ per cent. wheat and 2½ per cent. barley or rye. Imported white flour is mixed in at the rate of 10 per cent., and other authorised additions are calcium, at the rate of 7 oz. per 280 lb. of flour and dried milk at the rate of 2 lb. per 280 lb. of flour. In addition the baker may use potatoes, potato flour and fat as permitted in the Bread (Control and Maximum Prices) Order, 1943" 1. Those amounts changed over the seasons, barley was removed, oats had been used.
It was nutrious, filling, dense, and if that was the only bread available no doubt monotonous. If you prefer wholewheat / wholemeal bread from the full 100 per cent of the grain it might be fine stuff. If you are used to white bread which has an extraction rate of 70-75 per cent (the bran, germ, fat and some of the minerals are removed) then you would grumble.
The National Loaf, at the time described as national wheatmeal bread, was never rationed in the war. "An equal ration for all is out of the question, so different are the degrees of consumption. Bread rationing would lead us straight into the thorny path of differential rations. We claim that our loaf is the best bread in Europe" so said William Mabane MP to the House of Commons. 2
He also alluded to the propaganda prestige of having the only unrationed bread in Europe and cheap at 2¼p a pound (.94p for 453g).
Bread was rationed after the war from July 1946 to July 1948, which is surprising given that more ships were available to import Canadian wheat which is the best for bread making. But that's another story. The National Loaf was still in production until 1956 so was it that unpopular?
Next step is to make a National Loaf, and yes recipes are available, so a future post on the baking and tasting...more to follow...
1. William Mabone MP, (1895–1969), Parliamentary Secretary to Ministry of Food (1942-1945) to House of Commons May 13th 1943 , MP for Huddersfield.
2. Hansard 14 March 1944 vol 398 c54W 54W. Col.John Llewellin (1893–1957) Minister of Food 1943-45, taking over from Baron Woolton 1940-43 (as in the famous Woolton Pie) MP for Uxbridge 1929-45, later 1st Baron Llewellin.
Advert is from Manchester and Salford Co-operative Herald June 1944 pg 122.
.
January 29 2012
Own brand 1970's
The picture is of the 1970's Co-op own brand label. Very likely still manufactured in CWS (Co-operative Wholesale Society) factories before they were closed or sold . For example the biscuit factory in Crumpsall, Manchester opened in 1873 finally shutting its doors in 1986 and it might have produced those cream crackers. There is a cream cracker story coming shortly that quintessential dry buscuit that demands a topping. It was invented in Ireland.....
In 1993 it was updated, and used extensively until 2006. But good fortune was hard to find for the co-operative movement during those years. The march of the multiples went on to grab the market share. It is only now with the "The Co-operative" branding do you feel the decline has been halted.
Black and white photo is from the Bishopsgate Institute in London which holds the London Co-operative Society archives. I hope to visit in a few weeks hence. A day out in Shoreditch just for curiosity. They have published lots of photos from the recent past on Flickr.
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