How old is this cardboard box?
May 28, 2020 2:44 AM   Subscribe

My local shop sells sticky labels. They keep them in an old cardboard box. This box is advertising candy cigarettes for 1p. Is there any way of figuring out the approximate age?

I put a picture up on Twitter.

I'm really just curious as to how long it must have been there.
posted by Just this guy, y'know to Grab Bag (16 answers total)
 
Best answer: I was a kid in the mid-70s and remember buying sweet cigarettes then at about this price. The picture looks consistent with that sort of time. I don't think it can be much earlier because 1p implies it is post-decimalisation.
posted by crocomancer at 3:23 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


The typography doesn't narrow it down – those typefaces are older than UK decimalization.
posted by zadcat at 3:52 AM on May 28, 2020


Post-decimalisation, so no earlier than 1971; cheaper than I remember sweet cigarettes as being in the mid-80s. I thought the brand would be helpful in narrowing it down, but "Daredevils" gets you jawbreakers and "Goodies" is a little too relevant to sweets in general.

Perhaps someone at the Museum of Brands would enjoy helping with this question.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 4:34 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I was a kid buying penny sweets in the '90s.
posted by EllaEm at 4:48 AM on May 28, 2020


I did some more hunting. I'm now suffering a serious bout of nostalgia for defunct childhood confectionery brands, but I found some Goodies sweet cigarette packets on a collectors' site, dated in the early to mid '70s. The logo is different! So if you can find out when the Goodies company used the logo on your box, you can narrow things down.

(And yes, sorry, didn't mean to imply that you couldn't get penny sweets at all in the '80s - it's just that IIRC sweet cigarettes were a bit more expensive, because they came in a packet rather than being sold singly.)
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:18 AM on May 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


According to my Rookledges International Type-Finder, the font for DAREDEVILS is "Pretorian". Early 20th century.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:13 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


And the SWEET CIGARETTES is in "Balloon", designed in 1939 although the drop shadow was added by Letraset. Maybe. At any rate, pre-1983, maybe pre-1977.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:27 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


dear god ignore everything after the word "pre".
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:38 AM on May 28, 2020


According to Bristol Archives holding of Records of HJ Packer & Co, Carsons Ltd and Elizabeth Shaw Limited, chocolate manufacturers, the plant closed for good in 2000. It was the subject of a dizzying number of mergers and acquisitions.

Goodies had a different logo in 1973/74, so it's after that. For no concrete reason beyond having been around UK newsagents and sweet shops in 1983-85, I feel that the logo and the colours are of that era. I don't remember 1p sweets surviving the early 80s and its inflation: Fruit Salads (oh ffs such a fierce hankering for one right now) went from 2 for a ½p, ½p each, then up to a penny. Smol round mindless sugar-hoover scruss was shocked, I tell you!
posted by scruss at 8:33 AM on May 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


I don't know if I'm spinning in nostalgia more for Fruit Salads, or the fact that's the first time I've even thought of Letraset in about 30 years!

My gut-level guess, purely as a former-buyer-of-10p-mix-ups-in-the-early-80s squinting at the colours and fonts, would be '82. *Squints again* Could be as late as '87 from the colours, but 1p seems unlikely by then. Not much help, but there's my 1-penn'orth!
posted by penguin pie at 12:44 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Best answer: A bit of searching for "Goodies" on this site for Bristol's Free Museums and Historic Houses brings up a number of results. We have this Star Jellies box from Jan 1980 and this Doctor Who Candy Favourites from ca. 1981 each using a wordmark logo different from both the apple(?)-shaped 1970s one and the drop-shadowed, sun-faced one in the OP. The earliest instances I could find at that site for the logo in the OP is this White Mice box and this Starmen Green Candy Shapes box, both dated to Nov. 1982.

So, if we assume consistency in logo usage, I would say that this box is a product of the 1980s, most likely post-1981.
posted by mhum at 2:02 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Oh, also for the sake of completeness, the latest entry that I found from that musem site's search is this NINJA sticks box dated to March 1988.
posted by mhum at 4:01 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks! These are great!
I added that NINJA sticks box to the thread already. That's interesting because it says "Candy Sticks" and not "Sweet Cigarettes". So I reckon that suggests that we're looking at somewhere between 1981 and 1988.

I've been trying to find out when the legislation was passed that banned selling candy cigarettes, but I've had no luck so far.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:14 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


> Just this guy, y'know: "That's interesting because it says "Candy Sticks" and not "Sweet Cigarettes"."

Oooh, good catch! I was squinting to see the logo and missed the text.

I was also looking for the alleged legislation that banned candy cigarettes in the UK with equally poor results. I would think that UK news articles about Ireland's ban in 2007 would reference the equivalent banning date in the UK... if they were, in fact, banned in the UK.
posted by mhum at 10:24 AM on May 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: I went back to the shop today and took pictures of the side and back of the box.

I doubt they'll narrow the range much, but, you never know.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 11:59 AM on May 29, 2020


> Just this guy, y'know: "I went back to the shop today and took pictures of the side and back of the box."

The only extra information I was able to obtain from the new images was the postcode -- BS5 6HR, corresponding to their long-time Greenbank factory and offices -- which was discontinued by Royal Mail in 2003. Not a very useful upper bound, I'm afraid.

I do have one other observation, however. The 1988 NINJA sticks box has something that all the other (earlier) Goodies boxes from that Bristol Free Museum site search lack: a barcode. Granted, most of the images from that site are of just one side of the box but even among the fully unfolded ones that they have, only the NINJA sticks box shows a barcode. Perhaps tracing the evolution of Goodies' (or its parent companies, Famous Names and Elizabeth Shaw) use of barcodes could be another avenue for investigation.
posted by mhum at 3:50 PM on June 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


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