The History of Sweets

 “You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jelly beans…….” Ronald Regan, 1981

For this Christmas article we will be looking at the history of confectionary.

Way back in 2000 BC the ancient Egyptians developed a taste for sweet things and would blend fruits and nuts with honey. Marchpane, very much like marzipan was a favourite with wealthy Tudors; they would model it into sculptures of animals and castles which they called subtleties, along with preserved fruits, gingerbread and sugared almonds.

For centuries, liquorice had been used for medicinal purposes but in 1760 George Dunhill who was an apothecary chemist in Pontefract combined it with sugar and created the Pontefract Cake. Even today Pontefract Cakes (top left) are embossed with a picture of Pontefract Castle.

Turkish Delight (middle left) appeared in the 18th Century, its origin isn’t known but it was certainly produced in Turkey and Persia (now Iran), but it wasn’t until 1940 that Fry and Sons introduced their milk chocolate covered rose flavoured version that was according to their 60s adverts ‘full of Eastern promise’.

1848 saw the introduction of chewing gum, when it was sold by New Yorker, John B. Curtis who boiled spruce tree resin and coated it with corn-starch to stop it sticking.

Kendal Mint Cake (bottom left) is said to have been invented in 1869 when Joseph Wiper left a pan of glacier mint boiling overnight. By the morning it had turned cloudy and solidified. Wiper’s great nephew inherited the business and marketed the mint cake as a high energy snack, which became popular with explorers and mountain-eers. The Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1914 made room for it in their baggage and Sir Edmund Hilary and his team carried it to the top of Mount Everest in 1953.

In 1858 a case of mistaken identity caused the death of 20 people from arsenic poisoning. As sugar was so expensive, it was often mixed with cheaper substances or ‘daft’ and this inferior product would be sold on. ‘Daft’ could be a mix of powdered limestone or plaster of Paris, but on this occasion a druggist in Shipley mistakenly added arsenic trioxide – all are white powders, but the arsenic hadn’t been labelled properly and the mistake occurred.

In Bradford in 1858 William Hardaker also known as Humbug Billy sold sweets from a stall in the market. Hardaker had bought the sweets from James Appleton who had combined forty pounds of sugar, twelve pounds of arsenic trioxide, four pounds of gum and some peppermint oil to make peppermint humbugs – each sweet contained enough arsenic to kill two people.

Of those who purchased their sweets from Humbug Billy 20 people died and a further 200 became severely ill with arsenic poisoning. Everyone involved was charged with manslaughter, but there were no convictions.

With the Industrial Revolution came the mass production of modern sweets, although they did remain very expensive at the time.

Fruit Pastilles were introduced by French confectioner August Claude Gaget, who developed them for Rowntree’s in 1881 and they are still in production today. Rowntree’s was founded in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree who was joined by his brother Joseph in 1869.

Liquorice Allsorts came along in 1899.  The story goes that Bassett’s salesman Charlie Thompson, accidentally tripped over and dropped a tray of samples, mixing up the sweets. Bassett’s mascot is Bertie Bassett who was invented by Frank Regan, a copywriter who created the figure out of the allsorts sweets. Also, by Bassett’s is Dolly Mixtures that came along in the 1920s. It’s not known exactly how they got their name, but it is speculated that it originates from the time of the British Raj in India.  Dhal is a mixture of beans, peas and lentils of different sizes and colours, similar to the multi coloured fondant and jelly shapes of cubes and cylinders of Dolly Mixtures or Dhal Mixture. Or maybe it was named after one of the company’s most successful salesmen’s daughters, Dolly.

Christmas wouldn’t be the same without a tin of Quality Street which were introduced in 1936. Each tin contained a variety of 18 sweets which were produced by Mackintosh’s in Halifax. They were named after J.M. Barrie’s play Quality Street which was very popular at the time. The company used characters from the play in their advertising and packaging.

Also released the same year was Rowntree’s Dairy Box, with an early advertising slogan of ‘She’ll love it if you bring her chocolates, She’ll love you if they’re Dairy Box’.

The following year, Rowntree’s introduced Smarties, they had been making “chocolate beans” since 1882, but they were renamed Smarties. These sweets came in eight colours.

1939 would have seen the introduction of Polo – The Mint with a Hole, but the outbreak of the Second World War delayed it until 1947. Sweets and chocolates were rationed from July 1942 and carried on until February 1953, with everyone over the age of 5 being entitled to just 200g or 7 oz per month.

During the 1950s Pick n Mix, was given its official title by customers who shopped at Woolworths, after the counter was added in the 1930s and would remain until the shop’s closure in 2009.

Retro Sweets of the 1980s saw Flying Saucers, Fizzy Cola Bottles, Back Jacks and Fruit Salads being some of the nation’s favourites.

What are your favourite sweets? In the process of writing this article I sampled many of the named sweets, all in the name of research!

I would like to thank all the readers of bay a merry Christmas and I will be back in 2023 with further interesting articles.

Copyright - The Bay Magazine Winter 2022