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Sweets and sweet shops, early 20th century UK

What sweets and sweet shops were like in Victorian times and the early years of the 20th Century. From the previously unpublished written recollections of the webmaster's mother, edited by the webmaster. Sweet shops were also known as confectioners.

Inside early sweet shops

When I was a child in the early 1900s, sweet shops were popular, particularly for children.

Reconstruction of a Victorian / Edwardian sweet shop in Milestones Museum.
Items that one might expect to see in the reconstruction seem to be missing, for example scales to weigh out the sweets, but they are in the following image.

Early 1900s-style confectioners' scales for weighing out sweets. These were lightweight versions of the scales used in all shops at the time.

Manufacturers' sweets were sold from large glass jars stored on show on shelves behind the counter, as shown in the above photo. It was amazing how many different flavours and colours there were and accordingly how many different glass jars were on display.

These jars were quite heavy, but the shop assistant would lift them down and use the scales to weigh out whatever customers wanted. For children she would then tip the scale pan into a cone of twisted newspaper. Adult's sweets went into a white paper bag, usually with the name of the shop printed on it. This done, she would have to lift the heavy jars back up. Sometimes there was a short ladder which could be slid along a rail to get to the right position.

The range of sweets on sale

Sweet shops, like many other shops in the early 20th century were family owned which meant that some of what they sold was made on-site and not necessarily quite the same as in other sweet shops. For example, the sweet shop nearest my school sold triangular bags of broken wafer biscuits with a marshmallow fish on top.

There was another corner sweet shop which always had a large tray of home-made toffee on the counter. The shopkeeper would break it up with a small hammer and lift pieces out with small tongs.

Most of the sweets were flavoured and coloured sugar, made by dissolving the sugar in water, adding the colour and flavouring, boiling it until it was thick and letting it cool to solidify. In fact, these sweets were known as boiled sweets: bull's eyes, pear drops, humbugs, etc, as labelled on the jars. It never occurred to anyone that sugar might be bad for our teeth. We children normally bought an ounce at a time and occasionally, if we could afford it, 2 ounces.

There were also liquorice sticks, but we never bought chocolate as it wasn't around much if at all.

Sweet shops also sold tiger nuts. We children particularly liked the tiger nuts because they were so sweet, but they often had insects and grit in them. Surprisingly we never minded the insects at the time, but the grit could give teeth a nasty jar.

In the 1950s my husband suddenly announced that he hadn't seen tiger nuts for ages and as he had liked them so much as a boy, he was going to try to track some down. When he did, he came back and said how horrible they were and how he couldn't imagine how he had ever liked them.

Liquorice sticks, photographed in the Apothecary Hall of the National Botanical Garden of Wales. They are dried plant roots.

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