Christmas crackers

Peter Kimpton

TOM SMITH’S MAGICAL INVENTION

Beautiful crackers and a wonderful court jester; this super artwork appeared in the early years of George V’s reign.

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CHAPTER ONE

HOW IT ALL BEGAN WHILE THERE ARE FEW clues as to Tom Smith & Co.’s early sales and distribution strategy, it is interesting to look back at the company’s simple, indeed some might say unsophisticated, approach; although making use of traditional price points, the company seems to have relied very much on fine box graphics to give it an edge. Judging by Tom Smith’s continued progress over the years, it seems that the strategy worked – the public loved them!

The great majority of people today will have absolutely no idea just how vast the range of products stocked by Tom Smith was. It included Christmas crackers, confectionery, bunting, banners, flags of nations, masks, giant crackers, party products and table and cake decorations for weddings, together with tinplate and china novelties. The basic crackers in those early days were initially somewhat smaller than those of today, often quite plain and about six inches long, with many having fringed ends.

Crackers were originally called ‘cosaques’ – and it is interesting, and rather puzzling, that during the late 1870s Tom Smith’s featured both ‘crackers’ and ‘cosaques’ in their product catalogues at the same time.

I have yet to discover why they ran these two names in tandem, but my guess is that, at the time, their crackers had indeed come to be called ‘crackers’, so the original name ‘cosaque’ was applied only to more ornate table decoration crackers. This seems to be borne

out in part by the fact that Caley’s, a major competitor, was offering a range of over fifty ‘Art Cosaques’ as late as 1923 – a stunning selection of fancy and frilly table decorations,

A very rare box. The young lady scatters crackers and balances precariously, high above the river Seine and Eiffel Tower, in this wonderful design produced to celebrate the 1900 Paris Exhibition.

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A plate from the 1930-31 catalogue showing ‘Artistic’ crackers for use as table decorations.

These fancy creations are a tribute to the nimble and skilful hands that created them.

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Just a small selection of confectionery items that the Tom Smith company was offering in the early years of the twentieth century.

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member of the Tom Smith company for many years, who recalled a story concerning the father of one of the company’s employees in London in 1936. This man’s father supposedly helped Tom Smith in the successful development of the ‘snap’ effect over a two-year period in the 1850s.

Although this story cannot be confirmed by the present generation of the Varnon family, if this experimentation did indeed take place during the latter part of the decade, then some credence is given to Tom Smith’s claims.

Whether the story of the spitting log is

The reverse cover of the 1906-07 catalogue showing an excellent graphic interpretation of Tom Smith & Co.’s Wilson Street factory in Finsbury, London. Wilson Street still exists today, though sadly not the factory.,

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A superb example of a box label from Tom Smith's ‘Box of Tricks’ Crackers, design No.686, produced in the early 1900s, featuring a young conjurer performing his repertoire. Note how the design includes a white rabbit (bottom right); rabbits were very popular as good luck tokens in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Image by kind permission of Paul Chappell.

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A colourful selection of nine assorted scraps from the Edwardian period.

publisher by selling religious pictures (often known as oleographs) and scrap reliefs.

Artur Mamelok was Jewish and like so many others (across Europe and particularly Germany) in the 1930s, he was persecuted by the Nazis and spent a short time in a concentration camp.

Astonishingly, using contacts, his family was able to get him released and they escaped to the UK. Artur’s son, Peter, confirms that he was able to bring with him a quantity of original printing plates and probably pattern books, which he would have used to good effect when he subsequently set up his new business in Bermondsey, London, where it reincorporated in 1940 and operated for many years before moving to Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1968.

Sadly, from among those many excellent printers of the nineteenth century, Mamelok is now the only remaining supplier of scrap reliefs in the UK today and one of only two companies across the world that still produce 38

these traditional items. Even a very brief look through the current Mamelok catalogue reveals fine reproductions of a large number of the earlier Victorian and Victorian-style scraps as well as more modern designs and other papercraft materials.

Printing and ephemera In later years, Tom Smith’s bought in their advertising and packaging material requirements from outside suppliers (as do cracker manufacturers today). However, in the middle years of the company, not only did Tom Smith’s produce its own cracker boxes in London (as was the case at the time of the merger with Caley’s of Norwich), but it also had its own inhouse printing company (or possibly internal department), the aforementioned Smith Val Rosa & Co., which was responsible for a good deal of the company’s printing needs. This was initially done by the chromolithographic method,

Front cover of a Tom Smith’s catalogue from 1937. The illustrated figures, similar to those used in the company’s scraps, bear an uncanny resemblance to ‘Major Quality’ and ‘Miss Sweetly’, the Quality Street characters of confectioner, John Mackintosh and Sons.

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More tip-top design work with a whole range of what appear to be pantomime figures, almost alive, suspended from a sash. A National Archives image kindly sponsored by International Greetings.

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Three lovely and mysterious ladies from the east in this Tom Smith’s ‘Jewels of Asia’ design. A National Archives image kindly sponsored by International Greetings.

Graphic design at its best. Where would you find a more typical Mr Punch?

Here he is pulling a cracker with Toby the dog in a label from 1907. A National Archives image kindly sponsored by International Greetings.

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one that probably had not changed much for well over a hundred years.

By the 1980s and 1990s these were being marketed as ‘Indoor Fireworks’ in their own right; for Halloween there was the ‘Midnight’ range featuring the ‘Giant Cobra’, ‘Serpents of Doom’, ‘Wizard’s Wands’, ‘Bat’s Breath’, ‘Swamp Fires’, ‘Midnight Flares’, ‘Witches Brew’ and ‘Magic Dust’.

However, back in Victorian and Edwardian times, and even into the reign of George V, these little amusements were usually referred to as ‘Parlour’ fireworks (with, as ever, super graphics).

Novelties, decorations and sweets Allied to their cracker business, Tom Smith & Co. also stocked and sold numerous decorative and novelty festive items. The selection included: Christmas decorations, candle ornaments, hanging grape bunches, napkin bouquets, holly wreaths, glazed vine leaves, magic flowers, dessert and fish papers, flags and banners, French satin boxes, Christmas figures, birds and lanterns.

For the discerning shopkeeper, there were cottages, windmills, trains, clocks, pies and watermills, all displayed under glass domes.

Similarly, for window displays, confectioners could purchase automatons in the form of dancing sailors, ‘Paddy’s Obstinate Pig’, ‘Darwinian Cooks’ and mechanical tea drinkers.

The years 1895-96 saw the company offering ‘Window Attractions – Musical & Mechanical Of The Finest French Manufacture’, and very fine they were, with a Parisian laundress, Japanese tea drinker, singing cook, seated figure with baton and music and Chinaman being among the most visually impressive.

One could also obtain clockwork pictures, with or without music and costing between 17 and 25 76

shillings. Musical versions would run for about one hour when fully wound. Subject matter included children with a jack-in-the-box, a woman with a cat, a man with a rat, children with a dog, a dogs’ concert, a ballet dancer with chicks and a dancing lesson.

To cap it all, you could acquire the strangely named ‘Tom Smith’s Relics from Pompeii’, a range of imitation artefacts that the catalogue describes as ‘the most remarkable novelties ever produced, consisting of daggers, padlocks, caskets etc. made to imitate old iron

A superb mechanical counter or window display novelty, dated 1981-82, in the guise of a Japanese lady – just one small example of the many, now highly collectible novelties offered by Tom Smith’s over the years.

Strangely, this box featuring a harlequin and clown having fun with their firework crackers has no company brand logo on the lid. Dated somewhere between 1920 and 1939, the crackers were actually manufactured by Hovell’s, who eventually took over Tom Smith’s in Norwich in the mid-1980s. Image from the Kathleen Kimpton Collection.

to such perfection as to render detection almost impossible’.

It’s also worth noting that Tom Smith’s were still producing confectionary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Confectionary catalogues for the years 1884 to 1887 show stunning gum-paste wedding cake ornaments such as ‘Cupid on Dolphin’. The company was also an early player in the Easter novelties market, selling eggs decorated with chicks and ‘empty’ eggs that customers could open and fill with whatever they chose.

By 1911, the range of confections, still huge, had been supplemented with more than ninety sweet-filled novelties, many sold in fancy tinplate and china containers. From teapots to banjos and boots, these novelties have become highly sought after by collectors today.

Tom Smith’s confectionary interests, the base on which the business had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, finally came to an end in the late 1930s, when the decision was made to concentrate on crackers and associated Christmas products.

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A SELECTION OF NOVELTIES, TAKEN FROM TOM SMITH’S CATALOGUES 1906-1931

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Crackers as gifts Reference to old sales catalogues reveals that, during Victorian times and into the early twentieth century, boxes of crackers, and even individual crackers, were increasingly given as gifts.

In 1912, one love-struck gentleman wrote to Tom Smith’s, asking if a very special object might be concealed within a cracker; with the letter he enclosed a ten-shilling note and a gold and diamond engagement ring! Sadly, the gentleman forgot to enclose his address and, for whatever reason, he never contacted the company again.

Did the couple ever get married? We shall, of course, never know, but the ring, the letter and ten-shilling note still remain safely guarded in the company archives to this day!

Special requests Over the years, the Tom Smith company has fulfilled many requests for special crackers, from large to small, plain to fancy. In the 1920s, the company received an order to produce what was, at the time, the largest cracker ever made. The length was around 18 ft (5.5m) and such was the girth that when ‘pulled’ at a banquet in London, a number of waitresses were able to walk out from inside and distribute gifts. Larger still, although not made by Tom Smith’s, was a massive version 207ft (63.1m) long and with a diameter of 13ft (4m). Claimed as the largest cracker in the world, this whopper was made by the children of Ley Hill in Buckinghamshire and was ‘pulled’ in December 2001. Sadly, the days of very special productions are now few and far between.

Expense, coupled with modern bulk-production methods, mean that special one-off items are rare. Today, in the early twenty-first century, some cracker companies do still make ‘giant’ crackers but ‘giant’ in today’s terms usually only means something around 3ft (1m) long!

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What a whopper! One of the bigger efforts: A giant 12ft (3.6m) cracker produced at the Tom Smith’s factory in Norwich in 1981 and carried by eleven smiling staff, with Val Bartley second from the left (see page 48 for more on Val).

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British cracker manufacturers such as Batgers and Kaputine produced countless imaginative, themed boxes of crackers in the early years of the twentieth century.

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and retailers, but considering the size of the country, sales are relatively modest. The fact that many Americans regard crackers as something one eats with cheese certainly doesn’t help their cause!

In the early twentieth century, the Americans didn’t tend to use the term ‘crackers’ at all and often called them ‘mottos’, ‘snappers’, ‘snapping bonbons’, ‘snapping mottos’ or ‘motto favors’. One company, Dennison and Co., seemingly not wanting any nasty surprises and apparently showing a certain unease with the ‘snap’ effect of the crackers, offered them for sale as ‘serviette rings or napkins filled with hats or masks’. On a lighter note, crackers did seem to have an attraction for those dance enthusiasts holding ‘flapper’ parties, as was also the case in the UK. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most, if not all, crackers sold in the

USA were imported. Many retail and wholesale catalogues, now long gone, offered pages and pages of crackers for sale, but sadly most were unillustrated. In 1903, the company Wannamaker-Laden mysteriously listed the crackers they had for sale amongst their range of confectionery. At prices from 8 cents up to $2.50 per dozen, they described them as ‘an elegant assortment’.

The year 1910 saw two companies – B Shackman and FAO Schwartz (the large New York toy shop) – offering crackers. Shackman, in its party items catalogue, listed crackers at prices from 25 cents up to $1, with Schwartz coming in at 10 cents to $1.25 for crackers containing ‘Paper hats, toys, jewellery and musical instruments’. The year 1920 saw The American Supply Company offering ‘motto savers’ containing ‘full-size hats made of material’.

Two colourful, early twentieth-century cracker boxes from Caley’s of Norwich, designed by Alfred Munnings (see page 113); Caley’s would later export their crackers well beyond British shores.

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This superb Tom Smith's label image, from a box originally produced and exported to America in around 1910, returned home to England from California over a century later in 2014. An amazing journey and a great survivor.

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A snappy dresser to say the least! This picture of a relaxed and confident looking Alfred Munnings must have been taken sometime between 1905 and 1910, a few years after he completed his wonderful cracker box designs for Caley’s crackers (whilst working for Page Bros.)

Caley’s, who greatly encouraged the young artist, taking him on many trips to the Continent.

On his first visit abroad, at the age of twenty-two, he was taken to the 1900 Leipzig Fair (via The Hague, Amsterdam and Berlin), where he was required to paint and design posters on the spot for A. J. Caley’s trade stand. He also visited Dresden, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Munich, presumably with Mr Hopkins.

Caley’s started out as a chemist’s, originally formed by Alfred Jarman Caley, who came to 114

Norwich in 1857 and operated from premises in London Street. By 1863, he was producing mineral water as a profitable sideline; and the business then expanded significantly with the addition of chocolate and ice cream to the product range, necessitating a move to nearby Bedford Street. In 1890 the company began operating from an ever-expanding factory at Chapel Field, which became known as the Fleur De Lys works.

Around 1898, some three years after A. J. Caley’s death (Caley having retired from the business in 1894), his son, Edward, and nephew, Frederick, both directors of the company, added Christmas crackers to the company’s range, a product which would become a vital part of the business. Caley’s, although not on a par with Smith’s, were no mean operators in the industry and regularly supplied crackers to France, Egypt, Australia, Canada, India, China, Japan and, surprisingly, even to Iceland!

By 1904, the Caley company employed some 700 people in Norwich. It carried on in the family’s hands until 1918 when, for reasons unknown, it was sold to The African and Eastern Trading Corporation – eventually further passing into the ownership of Lever Bros/Unilever. Despite these various changes, things obviously did not go too well. Caley’s had become over capitalised and was eventually acquired by the confectionery company of John Mackintosh and Sons of Halifax in 1932 in a deal finalised in a London hotel.

Although the cracker making arm of the business continued to trade under the Caley’s name for a while, this eventually ceased following the subsequent merger with Tom Smith’s in 1953 when the latter relocated to Norwich and whose name was probably better known than the Norwich firm. Nonetheless, under the new umbrella name of ‘Tom Smith’s’, crackers bearing

Above left: The founder of Caley’s of Norwich – Albert Jarman Caley; above middle: Edward J Caley – Director and son of A J Caley; above right: Frederick W Caley – Director and nephew of A J Caley.

Alfred Munnings painted this picture of the Caley’s stand at the Leipzig Fair in 1900. Image by kind permission of Ken Cunningham-Brown, Chairman of the Unicheq Group, current owners of the Caley brand.

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ISBN: 978-1-85149-740-9

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