The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Bygone brands

Bygone brands

by 319 Comments

For some reason yesterday I recalled Vesta Curry. I have to say it was an abomination and I have no idea how I have progressed to being a lover of Indian food using that as a starting point.
An then other brands that have disappeared – Apparently England’s Glory matches made by Bryant and May and long since defunct in this country are manufactured in some outpost of rural Sweden.
Wrigley’s Beech Nut – what happened to them?
A Chocolate bar called Cabana that was an upgrade on a Bounty as it included Cherries.
This list is endless.

What brands do you mourn the demise of and which brands are you glad have disappeared.

0

Comments

  1. I don’t think anyone misses the useless Izal toilet paper. Never has form and function been less integrated. Apparently the Queen Mother liked it. Suffer, baby, suffer.

    I used to like Texan Bars. A solid chew underneath decent chocolate. And Hedgehog Crisps. Not seen them in years. I also miss the NME from its heyday, and “The Word”. Oth excellent reads. As is here, now.

    • One Bar I’ve not seen mentioned is Cadbury’s ‘Country Style’, bits of crunchy biscuit and raisins in a chocolate bar. My dad worked at Cadburys and I had one of those every day for school break time. A big advantage of the Cadbury’s connection was occasionally we’d be used for ‘consumer testing’, ie he’d bring home a selection of potential new cadburys products for us to test and feedback on. My other favouorite was Pacers, minty Opal Fruits.
      A question : on Amazon, ebay and the like there are online shops that offer many of this decades old confectionery. Where the hell do they get the stock from? it cant be leftover from production that ended 35 years ago, and they surely can’t make their own versions. I know some items that we think are long gone are still produced for India, China and the like, but that can’t be the answer.

      • Snowfire was a green waxy lip balm that came in a small round tin, about 3cm wide and 1cm deep. My dad always kept a tin of it in the bathroom cupboard, and it was his go-to ointment for chapped lips or cracked skin on his fingers. It had a gorgeous warming smell, one I associate with midwinter; probably because I was introduced to its capabilities in the 62/63 freeze, when I used to come home from playing with my mates out in the frozen wilderness that was Plymouth during the ice age.

    • We (the gang of reprobates with which I roamed) used to take a Party 7 to a party, having had a few in the pub beforehand, and having various other libations stored about our persons. We’d kick the Party 7 along the road outside first of all, then leave it in the kitchen and leg it to the front room where the dancing was, keeping an ear cocked for the screaming.

        • We used to take a Party 7 and hide it behind the curtains. If the party was good, we’d stay and neck the wine and cider other people brought. If it wasn’t, we’d nick the wine and leave, the Watneys finest as our parting gift on the table.

        • No, long before any was imbibed, but precisely when some poor unsuspecting boozehound plunged a can opener into the top of the Party 7 and a frothy jet of an apology for beer shot violently out, all up the walls and across the ceiling, dousing any unfortunates in its path with a smelly, sticky spattering of something that was little short of proto-piss, as yet undrunk and as yet unwiddled, but essentially the same.

  10. we are fighting lockdown 3 boredom by eating a chocolate bar a day and rating it by weight/price ration (quant) plus Taste, Texture, Design.

    MIA I would like to include in the research exercise: Frys 5 Centres Bar. Mintolas are now After 8 Bitesize so a roll of them will be featuring. Also (though less distraught than with the Frys) the Timeout, Spira, Pyramint (not strictly a bar) and Banjo.

  11. we are fighting lockdown 3 boredom by eating a chocolate bar a day and rating it by weight/price ratio (quant) plus Taste, Texture, Design (qual. marks/5)

    MIA I would like to include in the research exercise: Frys 5 Centres Bar. Mintolas are now After 8 Bitesize so a roll of them will be featuring. Also (though less distraught than with the Frys) the Timeout, Spira and Banjo.

  12. Cabana. Much maligned in these parts. Prince of chocolate bars.
    A quick search reveals Rumba, plain Flake, and Texan bars too.

    Wasn’t there a Vesta curry advert that contained a high pitched voice over “It’s the prawns!” at the end?

  14. Aztec. A chocolate bar that if I remember was to all intents a Mars bar with raisins in.

    Spangles. I don’t miss those. They were shit.

    Have those vile alcopops gone yet? Hooch. Christ, the amount of vomit I’ve seen as a result of those. Not mine, I hasten to a.

    Toffo. Another one gone? And Fruit Polo’s. Which were basically Polo Mint shaped Spangles. But those I quite liked.

    • Philip K Wrigley – son of the company’s founder. No idea what the K stood for. I rather like the idea of being immortalised (or maybe not entirely immortalised…) in a food (kind of) product.

    • Indeed, and thrice indeed. Olde English in a gothic stylee, all cough sweet scrummyness, like Winter Mixture (which you can still get via ‘A Quarter Of’) without the wintergreen and cloves. Absolutely English as tuppence, but, sadly, changed (deleted), not changeless.

  18. Ronco. They sold all manner of shite didn’t they. What about Lloytron? They were the cheapo electrical brand for one of the high street chains years ago. Saisho too – I think that was Dixon’s.

  19. For a lengthy wallow in nostalgic flavour reminiscence, leavened by snorting derision at the recall of some ghastly marketing mistakes, may I heartily recommend that you buy this marvellous tome:

  20. Swisskit – “I’d risk it” etc. My grandma sent a letter of complaint to them once (Reason unknown) and received a huge complimentary box of the ‘delicious treats’ in apology. I risked eating them for months afterwards.

  21. Golden Wonder crisps – still available but market share crushed by Walkers.
    The best thing about Golden Wonder?
    They got the bag colours correct. Green is Cheese and Onion, NOT Blue

    • Ooh, Mackintosh’s Mint Cracknel…a thin choccy bar with a sort of spun sugar centre that resembled luminous green fibre glass. Also Lime Cracknel, which I preferred.

    • @Boneshaker In junior school we used to get the bus once a week to Woodcock street swimming baths for our mandatory swimming lesson
      When we had finished and got changed I used to have a packet of potato puffs and a bottle of (non alcoholic) pear cider..Magical memories

      • Was it ‘Peardrax’? Made by Whiteways, who were based in Devon, with several plants and orchards near Exeter. They also made ‘Cydrax’. The firm is long gone, but you can still buy Whiteways drinks in the West Indies; Pepsi seem to own the names.

        • My dad spent many years as a packaging engineer for Metal Box, and would do test runs on production lines. Our larder was full of tins with no labels on. My mum would have to open a sample tin and then write down the serial number and the contents – could be peaches, could be pineapple rings, could be dog food…

          One time he brought back whole trays of Peardrax cans. I used to sit of an evening playing Scrabble and knocking back can after can. I got completely wasted and quickly found myself in a fit of giggles. Years later, I thought it was because the ingredients included a little pear cider, but it was probably just a sugar rush.

  30. Sun Pat used to do a jar of processed cheese spread. The advert was a ginger kid in a blue plo neck jumper with the sun shining out of the jar. I distinctly remember seeing it above a freezer in Bejam

  32. Can you still get Maynards Soft Nougat (the pink and white one) in Britain? It must have been ten years since I last saw it in a Swedish shop. I used to bloody love that one, especially the large packet, around 25 cm or so of fluffy goodness…I would go visit my older sister once a week or so around 1980, ride my bike there over the large hill that stood mid-way between our two surburbs and reward myself by stopping at the candy kiosk on the road at the top of the hill. I’d buy two large Soft Nougats and ride down the hill to my sister’s place, where we’d spend the afternoon listening to the radio or reading books, while chewing on our slabs of nougat. It would always annoy me that my sister ate so slowly that she always had 80% of her nougat still uneaten when I had finished all of mine!

  33. When we were courting my wife was known as the Cherry B girl ( that was all she drank ).
    Disgusting stuff really.
    She has now graduated to good Bordeaux wine and Aperol Spritzs. Much more expensive sadly.

    • That’s a cracker, @bobness. I had TMTCH down as a bit worthy, but right now as songs about the 70s go, I prefer it to the efforts by Denim and Luke Haines.
      Great to see an image of Richard Allen’s Suedehead book in the video. In around ’88/9, a pal and I did a big feature on 70s football for a magazine called Blitz, and amongst the interviewees were Malcolm Allison and Stan Bowles. We met up with Stan at a pub in Brentford ( we went for a curry after), and, bizarrely but appositely, there was a shelf full of Allen’s books, from the bestsellers (the Skinhead series) to the obscure (Demo, all about dodgy lefties, Knuckle Girls, Sorts). I asked the landlord if he fancied selling them, and he let me have the lot for an english quid.

  36. Ice Magic. Chocolate/ toffee sauce that went properly firm on your ice cream, almost like an Easter egg. More recent versions work ok, but they’ve never got as hard as Ice Magic which was wonderful stuff. It also came in a very distinctive conical pot with a sort of sauce blob shaped lid. Hopeless for cupboard storage, but quite attractive all the same.

  37. I vaguely remember a conical icecream pot with bubble gum at the bottom – cant remember what it was called.
    And then there was Bazooka Joe bubblegum – magic stuff.

  38. My favourite biscuits were Gypsy Creams, but they haven’t been made for years.
    One firm did try and create a substitute called Romany Creams, but even that pale shadow of the original has disappeared.

  40. Moving away from food, such an obvious area, I miss from the charity shop a good selection of New English Library paperbacks, perhaps a Herbert, Van Vogt or Heinlein with a green, yellow and purple Bruce Pennington cover.

  41. Nedver available in the UK as far as I know, even though they were made here, I had a great liking for mint Rolos. Brought a large consignment home with me after I visited my sister, who was living in Germany in the early 80’s.

  44. Commando comics at the newsagents in the early ’60s.
    And some Sci-Fi comics that I can’t remember the titles of.
    Once I’d stopped being totally fixated on sweets, quite a bit of my pocket money was squandered on comics.

  47. Those Airfix* series one kits in bags**, with a folded paper header. Hung up on a pegboard. By the time I was aware of them, the header featured Roy Cross’s brilliant artwork, rather than a cartoony line drawing.

    * Airfix as a brand are, of course, very much still with us, producing state-of-the-art kits.

    ** Which were disastrous for point of sale, as you could prod them; the blister packs that replaced them weren’t much better. They are now in small boxes. I’m very much of the Airfix ‘baggie’ generation.

  48. Ferguson TVs. British is best. I worked for them in the mid 80s in Enfield, also supplied “Baird” TVs to Radio Rentals. I think there was another re-badged brand that I can’t recall. There was a very nice reliable 14 inch portable TV that had excellent picture quality. Otherwise our main products were 20 and 22 inch (the latter being superior), I think there may well have been a MASSIVE 26 inch set too.

    Being on the staff we were allowed to take sets home for “extensive home trials”, at least that was on the paperwork we handed to security as we removed sets from the premises.

      • The soundcard of my PC plugs into a Yamaha ‘shoebox’ CD/radio/amp thing purchased 13 years ago on behalf of my employer for ‘research’ (so I could take the lid off and have a look inside, not sure I ever did). They’re both on a desk ‘liberated’ from the office between the firm going bust on a Saturday and the auditors arriving on the Monday morning to take an inventory. Ditto the chair I’m sitting on, and boxes of test equipment in my garage. We were like kids in a sweetie shop.

  50. I misread the name of this thread as “Bygone Bands’ and ignored it because it I thought it’d be a big list of YouTube clips (the same rule of thumb applies to any thread with an alliterative 20-word title). So coming in late –

    The Museum of Brands in Notting Hill is a magical place. It’s got boxes and wrappers chronologically from the Victorian era and it’s set up so you have to follow the timeline. Everyone has the same experience when they go there – you wander through the first aisles with some vague interest. Even early on you see proto-versions of products you know, like Brasso, which hasn’t changed its livery in 150 years.

    Then you glance at a particular showcase, a different one depending on your age, and you come to a dead stop. It’s your childhood encased in glass. You can hear the rustle of the wrappers. You smell Christmas and your mum’s hair. You resolve to get in touch with that distant cousin you haven’t seen in years. You stand there, 12 years old, with your mouth open and tears in your eyes, until someone younger gets bored and makes you move on. A few cases later you watch them do the same.

    • There’s a lot of this rotten old crap fascinating stuff in the Streetlife museum in Hull and the Castle Museum in York. I’m more interested in that than I am in horse carriages and the like.

  52. Perhaps our Caledonian cousins remember the luck tattie, my ex partner told me about them. They were quite a size, solid white fondant covered in cinnamon powder, they had a small toy inside that as the fondant melted whilst chewing would appear on the tongue, because of the choking hazard the toy was removed.

  53. Not just brands but a whole industry – TV rental:

    Granada (“Great service you get, renting your TV set from…”), the rhyming slang-tastic Radio Rentals, Rediffusion and no doubt others not springing to mind.

    Hard to believe these once battled it out via prime-time TV ads and were a fixture of every High Street. No doubt you can still rent a TV somewhere, if you want one. However as it has become something that is sometimes hard to even give away, I’m guessing that the market must be small.

    • See above, worked on stuff for Radio Rentals. My first VCR was 13.95 a month, was as big as a house. Loved it, I simply couldn’t believe one could record something off TV and keep it forever. I later got a better one via the “extensive home trials” method. Wish I had kept my Live Aid tapes (and transferred them to digital).

  54. Kardomah Cafes. Who’d have thought, in the days when Mellow Birds was the height of UK coffee sophistication (fancier even than Camp Coffee), that tea shops would soon be brown bread (not that there as any brown bread produce sold in them)? There’ll never be a paean to Caffe Nero that can touch this midget gem, though:

    Going slightly off-piste with the Kard theme, Newcastle’s Handyside Arcade was the saturday afternoon home for a couple of decades to all the youth cults, and its finest shop was The Kard Bar, where beautifully obscure posters, badges and vinyl could be unearthed/discovered. As far removed as it gets from these days where if you have a conversation about some product or other it’ll be flashing up on your internet before the day’s gone.

  55. 2 items come to mind:

    1. Individual Fruit Pies – was it Lyons who made them?

    2. Palm Toffee – toffee bars with a flavoured stripe – Banana, also a dark chocolatey one with a white stripe. Awful for your teeth but great tastes.

  56. Sherbet Dabs. A piece of toffee on a stick and a bag of white sherbet to dip it in and then suck the sherbet off (missus). And Barrett’s Sherbet Fountains.
    Also those coarse crystals of coloured/flavoured sherbet you could buy by the quarter pound and make your tongue go a funny colour.
    And what was that crystalline stuff in small, rather expensive, packets that crackled and fizzed when it met up with the saliva in your gob?

Leave a Reply