Based on experiences in Edgware, north London in the 1940s
Pre-packaged shop goods
Samples of goods sold in pre-packaged form - mainly
in tins, stone-ware jars and glass bottles. Photographed in the
Cambridge and County Folk Museum.
Much of the packaging of shop goods in my 1940s childhood was little
different how it was in the early 1900s, as described in my mother's
recollections of
shopping in the early 1900s.
The main difference was that more goods were arriving in the shops ready-packaged, although this was still
on a very much smaller scale than today.
Pre-packaging was mainly in tins, glass and stone jars, and there were
far, far more lidded tins around than there are today. It was never difficult
for my friends and me to get hold of an empty and reasonably attractive lidded tin for craft or to store trinkets. The
disadvantage of those tins, though, was that the colourful
outsides did scratch easily. My fancy-dress top-hat for the World War Two
street peace party was made from a custard tin.
Milk bottles. Detail of a screen shot from an old film.
Not shown in the above picture are milk bottles, presumably because milk was
perishable. Milk bottles were always made of glass.
Ridged and coloured glass poison bottle..
Liquid poisons were always sold in ridged glass bottles, so that even blind
people could tell that they were poisonous. The bottles were usually either
green or brown. I understood that anyone could buy
poisons as long as they signed a poison book, but there may have been
restrictions that I didn't know about.
Packaging at the time of sale
Many goods were weighed or measured out and wrapped specially for every customer,
just as they were in the early 1900s. Biscuits,
for example, were sold loose for much of my childhood. This presented
problems because they broke easily while being weighed out and in the paper
bags on the way home. In fact broken biscuits were sold off cheaply. It was very difficult indeed to keep
biscuits
crisp because they were continually exposed to the air in the shop before we
ever got them, because the
large supply tins had to be opened
every time customers bought biscuits.
Brown paper bags on a string - common in shops in the
1940s. Photographed in Fagans Museum of Welsh Life.
Paper bags
were the norm for packaging, and they came in several sizes, sometimes with the shop's
name printed on the front. There were white ones and brown ones. A wad of them hung on a string and
were torn off as
required. Paper bags had a very limited life. They disintegrated if they got
wet, either from holding damp produce or from rain, and they crumpled easily.
Boots the chemist wrapped goods up in brown paper parcels, tied with
string. This was extremely labour intensive, and was still going on in the
late 1950s when I had a holiday job there.
Brown paper roll used for wrapping purchases in Boots
the chemist shops. Photographed in Fagans Museum of Welsh Life.
Chemists made up doctor's prescriptions themselves. Pills were packaged in small
brown glass bottles, and liquids in larger brown glass bottles, invariably labelled
as 'the mixture', whatever happened to be in them.
This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as
Join me in the 1900's and is ©
Pat Cryer.
The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's.
