• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Sweets

M

mr mick

Brummie babby
Rosie, thank you. The wife is so happy someone else remembers them! You are probably right about the bubble-gum and the years too (old grey matter gets a bit boggled!!!)She and her sister also collected the cups. Oh happy days. Would love to see a picture of them. Maybe that will come later. Many thanks .
 
Astoness said:
yes viv thats them..it must be ove 20 years since ive seen them..
Click to expand...
Everything tasted good in a pub garden on a hot summers night when you were allowed to stay up late. I loved eating crisps in the dark looking at chains of seaside fairy lights or looking at gold fish ponds in the dark. Did you make rude noises with your straw when you reached the bottom of your Britvic pineapple? And at the milk break at school.'The next one to do that will be sent out!' Sluuurp sluuurp. As you gave her an angelic look.
 
Hit it on the nail Nico, Country pubs at night with the parents (we're talking aged 8 - 13 here, cos by 14 I was in pubs without their knowledge). Yep, a summers night, up extra late, grasshoppers doing their thing, clinking of glasses inside the pub, the whiff of fag smoke and beer on the air .... magical. Viv.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
Remember those edible letters getting back to the sweeties? I never got enough in my quarter to make many words. Pub gardens - I am talking 5 to 14 also but they knew I was at it. Bumper cans. Cidrex. The girls at the country discos always seemed friendlier. My parents had to suffer under tin lean to's full of spiders and get bitten by gnats while I just revelled at being outide in a world of my own with my Britvic and crisps. I used to ask for mum's lemon from her G&T. Nan would snort 'arm bit ta death cuz of yow!' (her having to suffer outside - good old Nan) and mum would rally and say 'well you didn't have to come mother' and got a Black Country hrmmmmph!
 
Most of these 1970s sweets I remember, but a few I don't. Look at those prices .... Viv.

ImageUploadedByTapatalkHD1420748438.528934.jpg
 
Reminds me of my pretend sweet shop, everyone saved me the wrappers, I used the chocolate that had cardboard in it. No sighn of a Rolo there Viv or Frys Chocolate Cream. I now how these adverts going through my head. I bought Twix because I identified withthe 2 young lovers meeting at the building site, and the lad with the collie for Tracker. I am much wiser now. I bet you sang the adverts as a kid too. Opal Fruits etc.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
In the sweet shops I got as a present I remember a glass bottle with imitation pasta in but it was sweet. I loved the weighing scales were they always red as mine were. I used to try and pack out the Cadbury's miniatures that someone gave mum as they fitted in my little shop. I was a sticker for things being to scale.
 
Feel really left out Nico. I never got one of those sweet shops though I vaguely remember them. My Christmas sweets were usually the liquorice collection, containing a pipe, a stick with a flat bit on the end (not sure what that was) a Catherine wheel and I think a liquorice cigar or cigarette. Alternately it might have been a selection of chocolate tools. And once I had the cadbury chocolate dispenser/money box. Penny in the slot and a cute mini chocolate in return. Loved those. I had selection boxes later on, but I don't know when they first came on the market. Viv.
 
thanks nico you have just bought to mind the sweet shops...i had one..cant believe i had forgotton about that..

viv do you remember the packets of sweet tabacco...looked like brown worms but tasted great..

lyn
 
Remember going with my Greataunt who worked at Cadburys, where you went in to a little office just inside the main gate on the left i remember and we got bags of rejected choch´s in brown bags. On anther note did a stall in the old indoor market sell broken biscuites and a stal that sold different types of loose nuts , not that i live in brum anymore bur was there last month and visited the market but did not see these 2 stalls did they not move from the ol indoor market ?
 
Sorry Viv I made you feel left out.But... I remember getting two tiny egg cups must have been bakelite with a tiny plate in blue with 2 tiny chocolate eggs in the size of a robin's egg. I remember a chocolate tool set and the chocolate money in a net bag. A flock Santa's boot with jellybeans in. As I was a symmetrical child I wondered where his other boot was.
I don't remember the tobacco but I do remember the sweet cigarettes with a pink end. I had a liquorice watch once and that vile (voile) rock at the seaside like bacon and eggs on a paper plate and giant dummies.
And for the Irish Brummies, when over in Dublin I heard a song about the old irish sweets. All I can recall of it was a sailor's chew, then Peggy's leg and broken chocolate, milk as well as plain, at Mrs Kelly's sweet shop at the corner of the lane. Except me and my mate sang Mrs Barrett's sweet shop as we fancied the Barrett girls. Happy days!
 
Got over me sulk Lyn 'cos I realised I was lucky to get any sweets. My dad was one of the 'must preserve your teeth at all costs' brigade. (He even used dental floss from the US many years before it was available in the UK).

Never liked those seaside novelties either Nico. Too sugary. And don't like candy floss, the smell alone makes me feel sick, even today.

Looked up the history of selection boxes and - lo and behold - Rowntrees sold them in the 1920s! But they were a luxury item of course and there were saving clubs for them. Some even had novelty clocks inside.

ImageUploadedByTapatalkHD1420882473.574519.jpg

These are the ones I remember. Wondering if 3/6 in the 1960s was good value?

ImageUploadedByTapatalkHD1420882519.555868.jpg
 
My selection boxes dwindled in quality to floppy plastic wrappers as I got older. The originals were much better and I loved the games on the back. I discovered that candyfloss in French is Barbe a Papa (daddy's beard) and we had a Barbapapa cartoon. The fairs used to sell big flat pieces of overly sweet nugat which I called nuggit. it was pink and white. The fair always had brandysnaps and white gingerbread.I also found sugar mice and sugar pigs far too sweet but I loved having them.I also liked the big fat cardboard tubes for say smarties and the different sized smarty tubes. We used to pop the ends out and make funny noises blowing in them. Did you? The smartie tube playground orchestra. doo dee doo! You could get tiny square boxes and big ones. I don't have many teeth now and suffered terribly over the years.
 
I know I posted it before but, My nan sat knitting in the afternoons on school holidays and stuffed me with half circular chocolate eclairs, which I thought were called chocalatey Claires. They were in a brown wrapper with a shiny gold bit on. Softer than the normal double ended wrapped eclaires which were harder. She also stuffed me with mint toffees and Callard and Bowsers. Peanut brittle and tray toffee with a taffy 'ommer.
 
I loved those eclairs Nico! They used to stick to the roof of your mouth. Might have been Parkes? Can't eat toffee anymore, serves me right for eating so many sweets then!
Selection boxes in those days had proper full sized bars not "fun-size".
rosie.
 
I didn't know that Rosie we don't give our grandchildren sweets. The grandson doesn't like them at all. I thought they were normal size bars. That's advertising for you brainwashing you in to paying more for what's supposed to be fun. Some sweets didn't always do well. I remember you could get Cadburys Milk Tray in a bar. That didn't seem to catch on. Then they changed Picnic to Marathon. I remember getting a Royal Mail letter box with chocolate buttons in I kept that for years it was money box with a sort of key in the bottom. I also remember white chocolate buttons with coloured hundreds and thousand type little balls on, I hated them. They were sold loose in jars. I think I got a lot because Nan loved sweets and I had lots of aunties and uncle and grannies. I think some of them were Nan's cousin but in those dayd every one older was aunty or uncle out of respect. And a lot worked at Cadburys.
 
My mum worked at The Candy Store at the junction of Kingstanding and Tresham Roads in the 1970s. (Despite the name, the shop also sold groceries like bacon, cheese etc). My mum often brought home those trays of Sharp's toffee with the 'amma' Nico. Didn't like the toffee with Brazil nuts, it seemed a funny combo to me when I was young. I kept those hammers that came with the trays for years and years. In fact I probably still have one somewhere. Not in the least bit useful, except for smashing up toffee! Viv.
 
The taffy 'ommer came in useful when I had a realistic toy farm and the gates and barn doors were held on by pins as fine as a dressmaker's so I used one to tap them back in. I still have my great gran's taffy' 'ommer though it is much bigger. I didn't like Brazil nut toffee either ot tray toffee with currants and nuts in. Weired combination as you say.

Nan got her sweets as a girl from a confectioner she called Taffy Coopers.

Looking back I think the sweet cigarette ends were red not pink as I said before. I hated it when you opened them and they were broken.

I didn't like the sugar coated boiled sweets shaped like a fish from the market sold loose. They were too big, made me cough and gave me ulcers. and to quote great gran, ragged your tongue. I also choked on a large hard boiled sweet shaped like an orange segment and nan turned me upside down by the ankles and thumped (which did nothing) and my mum dislodged it with her long finger nails. I never ate one since.
 
here you go viv lol..and i believe that the shop where your mom worked is still there
 

Attachments

  • toffee.jpg
    toffee.jpg
    49.5 KB · Views: 14
Thanks Lyn. I think the toffee 'ammer' was a good selling point, like a free gift. Afraid I'm a gullible consumer, so was my mum. Good to see the Candy Store is still there, it was a pretty big shop for a local shop. The owners lived above it (Mr and Mrs Stanworth).

Nico, sweet eating can be so treacherous! I had a similar incident when eating a Trebor Sherbert while roller skating. Hit a raised pavement and felt like I was choking to death on the dusty sherbert.

At the shop my mum worked at they sold the usual penny sweets like Mojos, Black Jacks - 4 a penny I think - flying saucers etc. But they also sold a seashell with some fruity, hard gel in it which you licked all day. Another weird one, don't think they were around very long or was this a local thing? Anyone else remember them? Viv.
 
I don't remember a sea shell only sweet shrimps. They made false teeth and half horizantal bananas out of the same ingredients too. Fruit salad whch was a chew. It would have been a child's dream with a mum who worked in a sweet shop Viv. I couldn't touch now what I used to eat, like lemon bon bons.My face is wrinkling as I type. Nan wouldn't let me eat sweets whilst out playing I had to 'sit still and eat it!' Unless I went to the shop for an errand, was allowed to keep the change and snuck one. Usually a love heart. I wonder if you can still get the little triangular white paper bags?
 
Not seen those paper bags for a long time Nico, but with the revival of old-fashioned sweet shops they might make an appearance again. Just searched for the seashells thinking there's no chance of finding them, but hey, just found some! And they were German. Interestingly I think the lady owner of my mum's shop was German descent (not 100% sure about that, but think her first name was Heidi or Trudi) so maybe that's how they got hold of them. By the way, the shells weren't edible, only the fruity stuff inside.

ImageUploadedByTapatalkHD1420984159.598621.jpg

For more info here's the link.

https://candyaddict.com/blog/2005/12/15/name-this-candy-german-seashell-cola-candy/

Viv.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top