Tin Tales - Supplemental

Oh dear, I’ve been buying tins again. Or to be specific, a tin. I didn’t actually plan to. But if you ‘suffer’ from having a collector’s gene, you’ll maybe understand how it is. You see, since completing my Victoria tins collection, I’ve been doing the odd bit of research, sniffing around the subject. I was researching just what sort of tins each of the three chocolate companies was producing on or after the turn of the 20^th century. I came upon a Rountree’s chocolate tin made for the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII (God Bless ‘Im!) and Queen Alexandra. I was interested in what seemed to me to be clear similarities in design to the Victoria tins.

So, as you do, I thought to myself, well, I wonder how much they go for on Ebay and I had a look. And without boring you with figures, you can pay a lot for a particularly fine one, but a decent one will set you back quite a bit less than a decent Victoria tin. So I thought – that’s interesting – and went on my way.

Now, if you’re not an ebayer you might not be aware of this. When you are the first person for ages to show interest in an item with a long listing, the dealers get alerted and will sometimes knock a bit off the price and offer it to you for a limited time. It happened to me with the Rountree’s coronation tin and before I came to my senses, I bought it. It arrived today. Here it is:-

Rountree's 1902 Edward VII Coronation Commemorative chocolate tin. If you've been following my posts about the Boer War Chocolate tins, this surely looks familiar to you as well.

Now the red background and the blue border are very reminiscent of the Victoria tin. That’s surely deliberate. When there’s nothing to compare it with in the photograph it’s difficult to get a feeling for the tin’s dimensions. To me it looked to be a similar size to the Cadbury’s Boer War Tin. Well, that was wrong. Here it is compared with the Rountree’s Boer War Tin.

Above - Rountree's Boer War Chocolate tin. Nowhere does it actually say Rountree's but there are a couple of distinguishing marks.
Bottom - Rountree's Coronation commemorative chocolate tin - this is actually stamped Rountree's on the bottom of the tin.

What you can’t see from the picture is that it’s very thin too. Well, it’s a nice thing. I don’t plan to start collecting coronation and other royal commemorative items. But as everyone with a passing acquaintance with the collector’s gene knows, never say never.

Tin Tales - Collection complete

Yes, I have bought a Fry’s 1900 Queen Victoria Boer War chocolate tin. Yes, I paid more for it than I paid for either the Rowntree’s or Cadbury’s tins, but I was comfortable with the price and it completes the set.

Top - Cadbury's
Middle - Rowntree's
Bottom - Fry's

In case you haven’t read any of my previous posts on the subject, I became interested in the gift tins ent by the Royal Family to members of the Armed Forces during both the First World War and the Boer War. Queen Victoria decided in 1899 that she wanted to send a gift to each soldier, NCO and officer serving in South Africa in the Second Boer War. The gift would take the form of ½ lb of finest British chocolate in a presentation tin. She originally commissioned Cadbury’s. They, being a quaker firm, did not want to profit from war, but a commission from Queen Victoria was a difficult one to refuse.In the end, they shared the commission with fellow quaker firms Fry’s and Rowntree’s. The three firms would donate the chocolate, while Victoria would pay for the making of the tins and the shipping to South Africa. The firms refused to put their names or logos on the tins, although Victoria insisted that the firm’s name would be stamped on the chocolate, so that her boys would know she was sending them the best British chocolate.

Each firm used its own manufacturer to make the tins. They all followed the same design, but there are differences to be seen between the tns used by the three manufacturers. And this is why I now have three tins and not just the one. The collector’s gene compels me.

Now, the three tins are in different conditions, so I won’t point out any of the differences in shade of colour because this could just be a matter of condition. But here’s a few of the features of difference between the tins.

The most obvious difference which you can see from the photo of all 3 tins is that the Cadbury’s tin is slightly longer and slightly narrower than the others. The Rowntree’s and Fry’s have almost identical proportions to each other.

The medallions of Queen Victoria in the centre of the tins help us to distinguish.

Rowntree's

Fry's

Cadbury's

Now, try to ignore the fact that each of these as a different amount of gilding remaining. If you look at the top photo of the 3, the Rowntree’s tin, close up, you can see that the beads around the edge are almost square, compared to the beads on the middle photo the Fry’s tin. These are more oval and slightly bigger. I’m not suggesting you should count them, but if you did you’d see there are more beads on the Fry’s. On the bottom photo of the Cadbury’s tin you can see that the beads are small, but there is a prominent raised and bevelled edge around them.

If you look at the black ovals I have drawn on the first two photographs, they highlight that the image of the Queen on the Fry’s tin is much closer to the beading than it is on the Rowntree’s tin. The Cadbury’s is close to the beading too.

Each tin bears a printed message of New Year’s good wishes with Queen Victoria’s signature.

Rowntree's

Fry's

Cadbury's

Comparing the signatures on the Rowntree and Fry tins, the most obvious difference is that the signature on the Rowntree’s slants upwards. As for the Cadbury’s, the signature appears smaller and more compact.

Well, that's it. The collection is now complete and the collector's gene should be satisfied.

Nassau v. W.H.Smith own brand - comparison

Yesterday I used the 40^th page in my Crawford and Black sketchbook. This means there are only 120 pages left in it which I think is reasonable if I decide to use it as the next sketchbook in the sketchbook challenge. I’ve got 39 pages left in the Nassau now which means we should be finished with it in a fortnight. I decided to put the Crawford and Black to one side for the time being and to switch to the WH Smith I bought last week as secondary sketchbook.

I thought I’d do some testing on the WH Smith. It already had the old bus sketch that I made last week. I decided to make a picture using coloured fineliner. Then it occurred to me this morning to make a comparison picture n the Nassau – same coloured fineliner, similar subject. Here they are.

Top - W.H.Smith own brand
Bottom - Nassau 

In terms of quality it’s not easy to say that either one is much better than the other. Maybe it’s because of the paper colour but the lines on the Nassau do seem to merge together more making the picture a little less distinct than the picture in the WH Smiths. I found this happened when I used coloured fine liner in the Royal Talens which also had off white paper. I made the point that the paper in the WH Smiths book reminds a lot of the paper in the Derwent Academy and again, when I made this sketch I really enjoyed the feel of the pen on the paper. With the W.H. Smith you can only see a few dots where the ink has gone through to the other side of the page. With the Nassau it’s far worse.

In the same spirit of investigation I took today’s photo prompt on Faacebook’s Daily Drawing challenge and did it in watercolour in both books. I used the same photo promt, the same set of paints and even the same brush. Here they are:-

Top - WH Smith own brand
Bottom - NAssau

Again, I would not say that there is really a great deal in it. The colours in the Nassau book look a little warmer than in the Smiths. That’s probably the effect of the off white paper on the tonal values. It was the Nassau version that I posted in the Facebook group because I think it’s slightly better.

Where the WH Smith book is clearly superior you can see when you turn the page over. With the Smith book there’s just a tiny bit of buckling but the other side of the page is perfectly usable. In the Nassau book, where I painted the peppers the other side of the page and to an extent the page underneath it has waffled and cockled very badly, so much so that the page looks as if it will be extremely unpleasant to draw upon.

Tin Tales Update

On 8^th March I posted about my collection of Mary tins, real, replicas and fakes, and I described how I had branched out and bought the tin that maybe inspired the Mary tin, the chocolate tin that Queen Victoria sent as a New Year gift in 1900 for the soldiers in the British and Empire armies in South Africa. I explained how I found out that the tins were made by three firms, Cadbury’s, Rowntree’s and Fry’s and that each firm had their own manufacturer. Although none of the firms put their own names on the box and although they all used the same design it is possible to tell which tins were made by which company.

So I bought a tin and was able to identify it as having been made by Rowntree’s. I did say in the post that I wasn’t planning to add to my collection, although the Cadbury’s and Fry’s tins were still out there. . .

Famous last words. I bought a Cadbury’s tin that arrived today. How can I tell it’s Cadbury’s though? Well, have a look at the tin on its own first.

The Queen Victoria Boer War chocolate tin from Cadbury

Okay. Now let’s compare it with my Rowntree’s tin. 

Top - Rowntree tin - Bottom - Cadbury Tin

You can see that they’re very similar at first glance but you can’t help noticing that the dimensions of the tins are different. Cadbury’s tin, on the bottom of the picture is noticeably narrower than Rowntree’s and slightly longer. When you pick them up, the Cadbury’s tin feels ever so slightly heavier but there’s really not a lot in it.

For reference here’s the two tins with the genuine Princess Mary tin.

Of course, it now means that I’ll have to try and get hold of a Fry’s tin. My collector gene demands it.