didn’t hear me say that often, and I saw the tears in the corners of her eyes. If only I could have said it more: Mum, you are amazing. I wish I had. It was those rare moments I said she was special that were very special for both of us. After she died, this became what I remember and hold close.
We are never really that proud of our parents, but there are pockets in time when we see how hard it really is for them to get it right and keep going on and on day after day, fighting the impossible systems put before them. I was proud that she managed to stay alive. It was that simple; she fought every day to stay alive and be with us.
We had many foreign products from Egypt, Syria, Greece, the United States, India, Grenada, and all sorts of other wacky places I’d never heard of or had seen only in pictures in scuffed geography textbooks. It was the best way to learn geography. But all those sweets, when I look back, were very different from today’s.
A lot of the candy companies that existed then have been acquired or are now out of business. The world of confectionery has changed a good deal, but of course it has, as has the rest of the world. This was a few years before we bought our first Apple Macintosh Plus computer with which to publish. Fry’s and Rowntree’s were independent companies that were, like Cadbury, founded on Victorian Quakerism. There were a number of large food companies that were founded by people with such strong faith. That was in the days before death duties and new employment laws existed, and the owners of businesses amassed huge private wealth and built their fabulous English mansions.
Fry’s was bought by Cadbury and then Cadbury by Mondelēz (Kraft Heinz), but I still remember when Fry’s was independent. Believe it or not, they were the first company to invent the molded chocolate bar in 1847. Yes, Fry’s invented our chocolate bar, and few people know it. It also invented Fry’s Turkish Delight, a chocolate-enrobed, rose hip–flavored gelatin countline bar, still made by Cadbury—and it was another product I had available on regular call in my school blazer’s inside pocket.
Meanwhile, Rowntree’s, which is from York in the United Kingdom, invented some of the world’s best-known brands in the 1930s—including none other than Kit Kat (1935). Hershey acquired the rights to produce Kit Kat in 1978, and today it is one of the world’s biggest selling confectionery brands. Reports say they now sell around 250,000 every day! Yes, all from a small factory in York.
Rowntree’s also invented Aero, Smarties, and Quality Street in the 1930s. I always found that a small yellow box of their colorful Fruit Pastilles would make a bad movie a good one; they were first produced by Rowntree’s well over one hundred years ago, in 1881.
When gobble-up time began, they merged with another British company that is all but forgotten, Mackintosh. Then Rowntree’s bought a whole load of other companies, including Tom’s Foods, Sunmark confectionery, and more, and then (deep breath), along comes Nestlé in 1988, who gobbled them all up in one delicious gulp. Bang, gone, amen, lest we forget.
I always had some Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles in my blazer. You could go into a corner shop and see their name on large glass jars on the shelves among other products such as Terry’s All Gold chocolates, Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, Mackintosh’s Egg and Milk Toffees, Anglo Bubbly bubble gums, Paynes Poppets, Maynards Wine Gums, and Barker & Dobson Television Selection. Really—they had a tin of sweets with a picture of a family all watching TV together as the big occasion. The tins alone are worth around $265 on eBay now, so if you find one, hang onto it. Anyway, these are names I have engrained in my mind to this day, and soon many will perhaps be remembered only with a trip back in time to my dusty attic.
It wasn’t long ago that what I would estimate was most of our sugar confectionery was presented in large glass jars on shelves behind store counters. You could pop down to your local sweetshop (which existed then), point to your favorite jar on the shelf, and be served your quarter pound of Humbugs. You’d see them weighed on a scale and placed in a paper bag. I would keep mine in my pocket at school all day. Almost everything came in a jar, from lollipops to sugar mice. No one thought of having them available in a different format.
That was until the late 1970s, when a company called Haribo came along and, thinking ahead, realized that they could argue it was not entirely hygienic for fingers and scoops to go in and out of the sweets jars all day long. They packaged their jellies in small, individual, hermitically sealed cellophane bags. Newly available packing technologies could weigh and deposit exact amounts of jellies into tiny bags by the thousands. They’re actually called multihead weighers, and these amazing machines took the industry by storm. They could cope with high volumes of small packs at exactly the right weight and then drop the jellies into a superfast, vertical-form seal packaging (bagging) machine that fired the packs out at the speed of a machine gun. Today’s machines can do around three hundred a minute.
No one paid Haribo much attention at first. Then in the late 1970s, terms such as food contamination and product safety became more critical and began entering the early workplace manuals. The new machines unfortunately also meant less labor, as shop assistants didn’t have to measure or weigh products from jars. It was a win-win. The factories could have fewer people working for them, the retailers could do other things with their time, and there was no food contamination (which I believe there wasn’t in the first place) caused by scoops and spoons.
By the time many other producers realized what was going on, the new packaging used by Haribo and other early adopters had changed the landscape of our corner confectionery shop forever and gradually the jars disappeared. By the end of the 1970s, jars had given way almost entirely to prepacked products in bags, and companies that were not fast enough to realize this trend did not survive. The industry went through a quiet but huge revolution in packaging.
However, my room at home needed no sealed packs, as most of the stash was taken straight to school for trading. The legendary “sweet mountain,” as we called it, would be piled high in our living room, higher than our black-and-white television, which never worked very well anyway. (That was in the days when, to get our TV going, I would have to bang it hard on the top and then stand on the end of the couch while dangling the utterly useless antenna off the side of the curtain rails at such an angle that we could actually watch it.)
My new hoard of confectionery contained all the power in the world for a nine-year-old boy. I was the Candy King. Chocolate still has a magical power, even for adults. I believe in its magic; I am still alive and that’s proof.
I was the boy who could bring any type of confectionery to school, at will and to order. This gave me a lot of confidence and a great deal of popularity. Even back then I was often called the Wonka boy. Who isn’t popular when they always give away free sweets? I was a living fairy tale: a cross between Robin Hood and the Pied Piper, and living in the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel.
Returning to school after any period of time, after a fire, illness, or simply because my mother did not take me in for a while, would always spark curiosity. My mother would pull the car up outside the rusty iron Victorian school gates, and I knew that my arrival would always be different from the other kids’. I walked into the schoolyard, which had surprisingly little to play with considering it was said to house our playground—just some old car tires to roll around the yard and high brick fences. It was a claustrophobic place, but I could always brighten it up with the copious amount of sweets stuffed into my leather satchel and my pocketfuls of Gobstoppers and penny chews. In an instant, children came running across the schoolyard, caps flying off their heads, to get in with the kid with candy. Hypnotized by the treats, they pulled on my blazer, tried to open my satchel, and demanded free sweets.
Well not so free. Some pieces were given away, but others, like the new products not yet on the market, were definitely for trading. And here I learned a very important life lesson, namely how to trade and negotiate.
I must have appeared a rare human sample, a frail, pale, and
