Cadbury's - Not flavour of the month with Charlie

When you get right down to it, it’s very difficult to know what members of the Royal Family really feel about things. The higher you go up the pyramid, the less scope that they have to be partial. So I don’t actually know if His Majesty the King really doesn’t like chocolate. But buying the Rowntree’s Edward VII Coronation tin has made me do a little bit of light research about the connection between the royal family and chocolate. What do you know, I found out that King Charles has withdrawn the Royal Warrant from Cadbury’s chocolate, and if I’m correct this is the first time they haven’t had one for over 170 years.

Queen Victoria first granted the Royal Warrant in 1854. We can be pretty certain that she was a bit of a fan from the way that Cadbury’s were her first port of call when she wanted to send a present of the finest British chocolate to soldiers fighting in the Boer War.

The Royal household doesn’t go into details about why companies lose their warrant, but since 2010 Cadbury’s have been owned by US based Mondelez International. It’s believed that the King faced calls to withdraw warrants from companies still operating in Russia, as does Mondelez. Has it made a material difference to Cadbury’s? I doubt it. All it means is a certain loss of cache, no invitation to warrant holder shindigs and having to remove the crown logo from packaging.

The silly thing about all of this is, I can’t eat chocolate now because my blood sugar is way too high as it is!

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 Rowntree’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 Rowntree’s coronation tin and before I came to my senses, I bought it. It arrived today. Here it is:-

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

Mary Tins Supplemental

If you’ve ever bought off ebay you may well have experienced what happened with me. So, a fortnight ago, just a few days after Christmas I ordered a replica ‘Mary’ tin from ebay. I posted yesterday all about this. Well, what I didn’t tell you was that I was messed around something rotten by Evri, the delivery company, so last Sunday I was looking at alternatives in case it never did get delivered before my nerve snapped and I claimed a refund. Well, one of the reasonably priced alternatives I looked at obviously alerted the owner and he offered it to me at a reduction. The price was so good that I felt, hmm, I certainly don’t mind having three boxes rather than 2, so I bought it. This was the one that arrived yesterday and the one in the photos with my post yesterday.

Later on yesterday, then, the first one I ordered arrived. Here’s a photo of the three together.

So, the genuine Mary tin is in the middle. The one on top is the last one to arrive, while the bottom one is the one that I wrote about and photographed yesterday. So let’s take my original away for a moment:-

The embossing on the lids seems pretty much identical, but of course there is one glaring difference. The top one seems much closer in colour to my original while the bottom one seems more of a coppery or bronze colour almost. There is one other even more obvious difference between the two tins which you can’t see from the photo. Compare the bottoms of the three tins :-

Yes, my first replica tin on the bottom does not have any writing on it, while the top is stamped with the Daily Mail. I don’t know why. There doesn’t appear to be any sign that the plain one has had anything done to it to remove the writing so that someone could try to pass it off as an original. Which I’m sure would be a forlorn attempt anyway because it doesn’t require any expertise whatsoever to tell the difference between original and replica. I guess its because they were made in different batches, and being promotional items, nobody was that bothered about each replica being identical to all of the others.

I do find the whole replica business quite interesting. During lock down I assembled a little collection of various models of trams and buses produced by Matchbox and a few of their competitors. In the process I obtained these two models –

The one on the left is an original Matchbox Models of Yesteryear London Tram. The one on the left is not – it is a promotional model offered by Typhoo tea in 1985 to celebrate their 80^th birthday. Apart from the advertising banner, they seems identical. But they aren’t – there is little or no plastic in the Matchbox model, while the roof, wheels and baseplate of the Typhoo bus are all made of plastic. My guess is that the plastic parts made it cheaper to manufacturer and lighter to transport.

Mary Tins

Okay, this is neither about art nor quizzing so doesn’t really fit  within the scope of either of my extant blogs. But what the hell, it maybe fits slightly better within this one.

I do find the First World War an interesting subject, and have done ever since reading some of the poetry like “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “An Irish airman foresees his death” and “The Soldier” when I was at school. It’s just as well considering how many times I would teach the poetry in my career as an English teacher. Then when I started researching my family history I embarked upon a quest to find out where and when my grandmother’s father had been killed and was buried. (This was my father’s mother.) It took a lot of time and some creative lateral thinking, but I found that he had been killed on the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) and that originally his body had not been identified. His name was inscribed on the Menin Gate, but then removed when it was identified and buried in Voormezeele on the outskirts of Ieper (Ypres). I visited in 2016, and found the whole experience very moving.

However, for all of my interest, I’m not really interested in building up a collection of memorabilia. However, for Christmas a few weeks ago my brother bought me a genuine Princess Mary Tin, and I loved it.

If you’re not aware of the story, in the early months of the war, 17 year old Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, decided she would like to buy a present for every British soldier on the Western Front and every sailor on a Royal Navy ship. She was gently informed “Sorry, your Royal Highness, but you ain’t got enough lolly for that, but never mind, we’ll get Joe and Josephine public to pay instead” or words to the effect. A public appeal was launched that proved wildly successful, so much so that the scheme was extended to include everyone in the Armed Forces. Mind you, not everyone got these by Christmas 1914. The last were distributed as late as 1920. The majority of them contained tobacco and cigarettes, but there were a variety of different contents for non-smokers, nurses and Sikhs amongst others. The tins were made of brass and this is one of the reasons why it took so long for everyone to be given one. Brass was in short supply at times, for example, the Lusitania was carrying tons of the stuff when it was sunk by a U boat in 1915.

I think that the tin itself is a very desirable object and I think a lot of the recipients did too considering how many of them are still around. On the lid is an embossed design, which seems to owe something to art nouveau. In the centre is the profile of the Princess, white there are 6 roundels in the border containing the names of allies Belgium, France, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and Japan.You can probably see from the photograph that my time seems to have been extensively polished over the years and this has rubbed away and flattened out quite a bit of detail. But I like it tremendously.

Being the kind of person that I am, over the next few days after Christmas I set out to find out as much as I could about the tins. One of the things I discovered was that in 2014 the Daily Mail made a promotional offer to their readers to provide a replica Mary tin – and a replica King’s Shilling. I think they had to collect tokens or vouchers from the paper. I immediately wondered just how good a replica they were. To cut a long story short I found one for a reasonable price on ebay and bought it. Here it is

 

The first thing you notice about the replica is not something you can see in the photos. It’s the weight. The original is much heavier, and feels far more substantial. If anything the replica feels even lighter than the Old Holborn tobacco tins my father used to use. The detailing on the lid, the embossed design is cruder than the original. The Christmas 1914 lettering is smaller, and further down the lid too. As regards the insides:-

The lids are very different. The original opens flat while he replica only opens through 90 degrees. The original‘s lid closes over the edges of the body of the tin, while the replica lid has a deep edge that closes inside the edges of the main body of the tin. In short, then, I don’t see any way you could mistake the replica for original if you know anything about what the original is like.

What will I keep in the tins? I don’t really know yet, but I do plan to use them both

As I said, I’m not planning to start a memorabilia collection. But I will admit that there is one other object that I am curious about. Sadly this is a little more macabre than the Mary Tin. This is the Death Plaque, also nicknamed the Death Penny. This was a circular bronze plaque which was issued after the war to the next of kin of every member of the services who was killed in service during the war. By that reckoning one must have been issued for my great grandfather, Edgar George Bennett. As next of kin, surely it would have gone to his widow, my great grandmother. The complicating factor is that she remarried in 1919. As it happens, although she passed away before I was born I do remember her second husband, who my Dad called Grandad. I’d just love to know what happened to Edgar’s plaque. I imagine that if it had been retained it would have passed to my grandmother, and then to my father or my Uncle Jim. I’m guessing it was either discarded or lost in the years following the war. I’d love to know what happened to it, but at this stage I think that’s highly unlikely.