Wednesday 2 December 2009

To continue

It must have been in 1950 or, more likely, 1951 that Whitbread's introduced a new marketing ploy. They selected 50 of their pubs and produced miniature copies of the signs of those pubs, each pub having a supply of its own miniature signs to be given to customers. Those miniatures were printed onto thin sheets of tin, 2" x 3", with just a minimum of detail on the back. It didn't take long before we schoolboys had started collecting the miniatures. Being printed onto tin, the pictures were particularly susceptible to scratching, so we protected out collections by wrapping each miniature in a sheet of toilet paper. Izal was the usual brand, probably because it was the most commonly used (no doubt price had something to do with that). None of this soft namby-pamby stuff we use nowadays, Izal was smooth and shiny on one side, slightly rough and matt on the other. And it was stiff, so it was easy to fold around the inn signs.

And I have just discovered that Wateringbury had at least two more pubs.

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