OBJECT OF DESIRE
Savour a biscuit… and be sure to save the tin! After all, you could be holding on to something worth more than a few crumbs
Cup of tea and a biscuit anyone? Two of the nation’s favourite things in one delicious sentence. We love our biscuits in this country: statistics show that no other nation buys and eats more biscuits than we do. Last year almost 257,000kg were sold, with the UK biscuit industry worth £3.4 billion. And further research suggests that 61% of UK households have a biscuit tin. So where did it all begin?
The somewhat unglamorous answer is in a Reading bakery, 200 years ago. In 1822, Quaker Joseph Huntley, whose shop was on the busy road from London to Bath, had the clever idea of selling his biscuits to hungry coach travellers. Ten years later, his son – also Joseph – began making tins in his ironmonger’s shop. These early tins – square 7lb or 10lb containers with glass-inset tops, designed to be placed on grocers’ counters – were sent worldwide.
When fellow Quaker George Palmer joined the bakery in 1841, the now world-famous biscuit and cake company, Huntley & Palmers, was born. By 1860 the firm had expanded into the biggest biscuit manufacturer in the world, turning out 3,200 tons a year. At the time, the journalist Henry Mayhew was surprised that mechanisation could produce biscuits: ‘It does seem hard to believe how it can be possible to fabricate “Ladies’ Fingers” and “Tops and Bottoms” by a series of cogwheels and cranks.’ But Huntley & Palmers succeeded and its earliest tin, ‘Ben George’, was commissioned in 1868 to celebrate the firm’s supply of biscuits to Queen Victoria’s household. The tin – named after Benjamin George, who first developed the transfer printing process for decorating biscuit tins – was designed by the Victorian architect and designer Owen Jones and featured the royal coat of arms with the firm’s branding. After this, Reading became known as Biscuit Town, with the Huntley & Palmers factory employing 5,000 people by 1900. Today, its tins are among the most sought-after.
Soon, companies like Crawford’s, Jacobs and Peek Frean sprang up, offering an ever-wider choice, and when the Licensed Grocer’s Act of 1861 allowed biscuits to be sold as individually packaged goods, demand soared, boosting the new trend for decorative gift containers that kept the contents fresh and protected.
Then, with the invention of offset lithography in 1877, it became possible for manufacturers to print onto complex metal shapes so that by the end of the 19th century, biscuit makers were creating tins in novelty designs. These included pillar boxes and planes, book sta
