18th
September 2025
Next club meeting 6th October –
A talk by Dr Julian Baker
of the Ashmolean Museum titled "Money in Byzantine and medieval Albania
and Epiros”.
Meetings are held at the Abbey Baptist
Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.
A Note from the Treasurer
The club subscription has been held at £20
for the coming year and subscriptions are due now! Please remit as soon as
possible.
Club membership cards can be collected at
the meeting.
September 2025 Meeting
At our meeting on 1st September
the club received a thoroughly entertaining talk from Ross Farmer on The Glory
of Advertising.
Ross said collecting is addictive, and in
his case collecting started with a ginger beer bottle and digging for old
bottles. Ross is the Chair of the Surrey Bottle Club. However, his main passion
is for advertising material and it was the unearthing
of an enamel advertising sign while bottle digging that triggered his interest
in collecting advertising media.
His first exhibit was a green top
stoneware King & Barnes beer bottle, the name the reminding customers of
the brewers and the green top enabling their products to be easily
distinguished from those of competitors.
Ross emphasised that in times past
advertisers could and did lie e.g. smoking Craven A cigarettes and drinking a
lot of Guinness is good for your health!
Some of the items on display were
miniatures of products, used by salespersons both for promotion of their
products, but also enabling potential purchasers to see how and where their own
names and slogans could be added to the full-sized product.
On the display were many and varied items
used to attract purchaser attention, some straightforward, some designed to be
a collectable series, some with sub-liminal advertising:
Paper maché dog – Scratts dog biscuits
One of the rarest items – the 5 boys Fry’s
chocolate picture
Cupiss (horse and cattle items) printed
their own posters
Carlton ware items advertising Guiness
A selection of showcards for Bryant &
May wax vestas, Imperial Tea, Camp Coffee
A very patriotic flag-waving showcard for
Plasmon biscuits depicting Shackleton at
the
South Pole.
A practical display item was the Cherry
Blossom shoeshine box
Several different cigarette and tobacco
tins were on display, and a number of
speciality tins such as that for Cowan’s toffee with shaped packaging
to
encourage buyers to return until all packaging shapes had been
collected.
Canisters providing string for
shopkeepers, but with sub-liminal advertising labels
on them e.g. Camp Coffee and Peek Frean biscuits.
Small child items promoting school and
sports items. Again, encouraging series
collection while imprinting a producer message e.g. bat, racket and
folding rulers
Useful items such as a folding tin
calendar as a freebie to shop-owners and shoppers
alike. A Capstan tobacco tin on card calendar was a similarly useful
item.
A model light bulb boy from 1935 that
would be displayed in an electrical shop or
department
Boxes displaying dummy tin chocolate bars
advertising the confectionary brands.
Poster advertising the Picture Paper –
appeals to royalty and paupers alike.
Can you spot some of the items described
above in the pictures below?
