Remember these.? All our yesterdays

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doctle
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by doctle »

I had a great aunt that never returned her Maine bottles so every few weeks I would gather them up and get the money for 10 Park Drive or 10 Embassy red. I wasn't the age to smoke.
Oh buggle
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

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doctle wrote: 02 Nov 2019, 08:24 I had a great aunt that never returned her Maine bottles so every few weeks I would gather them up and get the money for 10 Park Drive or 10 Embassy red. I wasn't the age to smoke.
Players Number 10 were the cheapo brand of choice for 10 year olds around our parts. If anything could put you off smoking for life it was that particular brand :-D

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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by doctle »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 02 Nov 2019, 08:28
doctle wrote: 02 Nov 2019, 08:24 I had a great aunt that never returned her Maine bottles so every few weeks I would gather them up and get the money for 10 Park Drive or 10 Embassy red. I wasn't the age to smoke.
Players Number 10 were the cheapo brand of choice for 10 year olds around our parts. If anything could put you off smoking for life it was that particular brand :-D

REgards Neil
There was a certain shop in the village where you could buy a "single" and a light. You got 1 Sovereign cigarette and 2 swan vesta matches. The matches would light easily on a wall or doorstep etc. Sovereign were awful, thin, short cigarettes.
Oh buggle
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by mickthemaverick »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 02 Nov 2019, 08:28
Players Number 10 were the cheapo brand of choice for 10 year olds around our parts. If anything could put you off smoking for life it was that particular brand :-D

REgards Neil
I'll second that!! If you were really rich one week you would elevate yourself to No 6!! And for Christmas B&H or Embassy!! However I managed to avoid No 10 and sentenced myself to 25 years of self abuse. Gave it up in 1990 on my initial retirement from BT. Must have a '30 years clean' party next year! :)
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by myglaren »

We had the Villa mob here. right bunch they were.
We didn't have Tizer in Whitby but my gran did in Doncaster. didn't like it.

We used to get Minster lemonade from the pub at the bottom of the street, really lemony, almost bitter.

Never heard of R White's until we moved to Washington, haven't seen that for years, on the other hand haven't looked either. Not bad but Minster was far better.

Haven't had a fizzy drink other than champagne for years but keep meaning to buy something to make Tom Collins with. Haven't had one since I was 17 but remember them being guzzlable.

As for fags, we bought Bachelor (cheapest) horrible things.
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

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myglaren wrote: 02 Nov 2019, 09:25 We used to get Minster lemonade from the pub at the bottom of the street, really lemony, almost bitter.
I suspect the pub could well have been one of Joshua Tetleys Steve. Minster were a subsidiary of Tetley and as far as I can work out based in Liverpool. Best I can do is a crate, a soda syphon, and a water jug.
screenshot
screenshot
Minster Minerals Wavertree Liverpool
Minster Minerals Wavertree Liverpool
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by mickthemaverick »

Furthering Neil's research I discovered the following extract from an ex-employee at Minster Minerals in Liverpool. Sadly the quality control may have spiced up your drinks a little more than you wanted!! :-D

TUESDAY, 8 APRIL 2008
Minster Minerals and the Little Red Book



My very first job was a paper round which paid me 7 /- 6d a week. Following a gentle hint from my dad I gave it to my mum for housekeeping in continuance of a long working class tradition. Both were pleased by the gesture, but mercifully it was returned.

After that, especially during my student years the part time job became paramount. I’ve worked delivering bread for ‘Mothers Pride’ bakeries and still remember the warm and sweet yeasty smell of the ovens and the diesel fumes of the vans, their engines running on dark winter mornings. I’ve queued for summer jobs at the Corona lemonade factory someway down Hall lane but the queues were always too long and I always got there too late.

The job which paid most money and which nearly destroyed my mind was the night shift in a bottling factory. Minster Minerals. I was put in charge of the capping machine which stood below a very large clock. The shift was 10 pm to 6 am, and my job was to refill the capping container when ever it ran low. This basically involved standing there, gazing from clock to capping machine and back again. The conveyer clinked and a thousand bottles passed; the caps in the transparent capper jiggled and slowly subsided like sand in an hour glass…The second hand ticked…You are feeling sleepy…sleepy…. It was crash course in self hypnosis – only when that happened the capping machine ran empty and hundreds of un-capped bottles passed on a conveyor belt that couldn’t be stopped.

The foreman screamed and you ran backwards and forwards in panic, taking off the uncapped bottles and re-filling the capping machine as fast as you could. Then back to the tick of the clock and a brain slowly dying.

There was one other person there with a worse job. Quality control. He had to sit by the side of the conveyor belt, scrutinizing each bottle as it passed, watching out for foreign bodies or a level of liquid that was more or less than it should be. He went quietly mad, putting in foreign bodies to give his job meaning. Cockroaches, wood-lice, some he even pissed in.

At last the foreman took pity on me. He put me in charge of a small forklift truck but this promotion ended when I ran over my own foot… Or was it me? Maybe Stephen King had once worked in Minster Minerals and shortly afterwards wrote Christine.
But the money was good, for those days, and I met interesting people. I met Tim, a casual teacher who worked when he needed money and spent the rest of the time wine-making and brewing beer, which he stored beneath the stairs. I met a Chinese student called Andy who was enamored of Mao tse Tung, and who handed round these little red books.

It was the height of the Cultural Revolution and about that time a Chinese Ship had berthed in Liverpool docks. It caused a great stir amongst the Dockers. The ship was festooned with banners and flags, its crew on all decks, singing and waving their books like handkerchiefs. The great proletarian revolution had arrived, much to the surprise of the Liverpool docker. ‘Daft (-expletive removed-)’ said with amusement, seemed the prevailing view.

Not really Liverpool's style.




Shortly afterwards the little red book began to circulate, discarded by contemptuous Dockers. I have one still as a curiosity. I probably also have a file in British security by virtue of this Chinese student whose name I can't quite believe was Andy. He told me you could get white leather bound copies of the works of Chairman Mao by writing to the Chinese embassy. I looked at the capping machine.

“I’m not spending my money on that!”

“No, they give them away if you’re poor.”

Hmm… A Homer Simpson moment.

The Keyton acquisitive gene took over. And I duly wrote my begging letter stressing my poverty and my undying admiration for the Great Helmsman. They didn’t seem that impressed, sending me another copy of the little red book. No doubt they learnt about my well paid job in Minster Minerals.

Post script
All jobs have their drawbacks. My friend Geoff Fimister had a job cleaning out the sugar tunnels in Tate and Lyles. When he emerged after a shift his hair was four times bigger framing his face in Afro-Candy-floss. Still, better than teaching.


Perhaps the lemonade was a little too bitter? :wink:
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by myglaren »

Maybe so Neil, It is highly likely that it was a Tetley pub.

Just had a look and there is no brewery linked to it now.
Surprised to see the butchers and chippy still there.
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

To complete your nostalgic journey on the tab front Steve :-D
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by myglaren »

Sure they were in silver packets.
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by mickthemaverick »

As far as I can remember Steve, Bachelors were always in the grey/blue and white packets. My mum used to buy 10 every couple of weeks so the packet was always on the sideboard. Lambert & Butler are the only brand I can think of in Silver packets, although they did have a black band round them with the name printed on! :)
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by doctle »

Sterling cigarettes were in a silver packet, double 10 flat style.
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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Sterling Cigarettes conjure up this memory for me.....

At school age 10 ish had various little jobs each day. Me and a friend had to wander about for as long as possible to check the rainfall guage and the various temperatures at the "weather station".

Melanie's daily task was the plum job of going to buy 20 Sterling Cigarettes at the sweet shop across the road for the teacher. He used to refer to it as his LSD (£'s shillings and pence). We never saw an ofsted inspector...ever!

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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

There were these "fake" batchelors, the packet design varies over the years, but this is a bit more silvery than the later ones

Image

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Re: Remember these.? All our yesterdays

Post by mickthemaverick »

I suspect we have a time difference issue here. My recollections are from the mid-late fifties onwards whereas it seems the "fake" ones were earlier. However since the Gallaher Group was based in Belfast there may be a difference in packaging for different markets? :)
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