Callard And Bowser Toffees

Cool English Butter Toffee Recipe images | Recipes

1953: Sweet rationing ends in Britain

Children all over Britain have been emptying out their piggy-banks and heading straight for the nearest sweet-shop as the first unrationed sweets went on sale today. Toffee apples were the biggest sellers, with sticks of nougat and liquorice strips also disappearing fast.

One firm in Clapham Common gave 800 children 150lbs of lollipops during their midday break from school; and a London factory opened its doors to hand out free sweets to all comers.

Adults joined in the sugar frenzy, with men in the City queuing up in their lunch breaks to buy boiled sweets and to enjoy the luxury of being able to buy 2lb boxes of chocolates to take home for the weekend.

Do you remember your favourite childhood sweets and the excitement of going to the local sweet shop and choosing from the vast array of jars on the shelves full of colourful mouth watering temptations?

They were weighed by the quarter on a big old fashioned metal scale pan and packaged into small white paper bags.

For many of us, the Saturday ritual of sweets-buying has lingered into adulthood, and it is heartening to find so many places selling from jars. Indeed, the Bonds sweets factory in Carlisle – a major supplier – is planning to redesign its plastic jars to be squatter and wider than usual: an echo of the prewar shape. Multicoloured jars lined up on shelves are very alluring, for many of us a potent reminder of a time when the local sweet shop represented a kind of El Dorado.

If you thought it was just kids who ate sugar confectionery you’d be wide of the mark. Many of the lines might have been developed for children but prove a hit with adults, too. Even the tough guys (and gals) in the British armed forces love their sweets according to NAAFI figures, servicemen and women in Afghanistan last year munched their way through 923,583 bags of Haribo.

Here in the UK, sweetie buying habits change as we hopefully head towards warmer weather, with more people opting for fruity sweets rather than chocolate bars.

THE SWEETS GRAVEYARD

Spangles

Dimpled, square boiled sweets in fruit-flavoured and Old English varieties. Spangles was a brand of boiled sweets, manufactured by Mars Ltd in the United Kingdom from 1950 to the early eighties. They were bought in a paper tube with individual sweets cellophane wrapped. They were distinguished by their shape which was a rounded square with a circular depression on each face.

Margo Feiden's The calorie factor, the dieter's companion

Goodnight, Nebraska

Communication arts magazine

Advertising's ten best of the decade, 1980-1990

MC. The Manufacturing confectioner