You can’t give a baby booze, to quote Vic and Bob.
Oh, you can with this one, it’s “temperance”, non-alcoholic “Kops Wine”. Kids wine. Edinburgh Evening News, 13th November 1924
Plus, a slagging off in 1891 for temperance “Kops Ale”, below. They are making a joke on the old phrase “a good wine needs no bush” which means, I think, that a good product doesn’t need to be advertised or promoted. “Kops” was so rubbish it didn’t only need a bush, it needed a whole copse (do you see what they did there?)
It doesn’t sound like it was much “kop”! Haha! Well, that’s a better joke than the one below anyway. Lichfield Mercury, 10th July, 1891
Brighten up your lino by painting it with “Darkaline” stain.
Hull Daily Mail, 4th May 1932
Judging by a number of posts about attempting to remove 1930s “Darkaline” stain from wooden beams and the like, on DIY talk boards, it seems it did indeed provide a very lasting, highly-polished finish. It possibly contained shellac to give the hard-wearing shininess.
For other shiny floor options, why not just spray some wax on your floor?
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
The modern equivalent for me is attempting to cover shoes with “protector spray” from the shoe shop, which provides a helpfully lethal, friction-free surface coating for the floor.
Anyway – no wonder a public information film had to be circulated about the dangers of the “fatal floor”. “Polish a floor? You may as well set a man trap.”
A public information advert on how to get rid of rats during the Second World War. They were eating food supplies and so “were doing Hitler’s work”
Aberdeen Journal, 19th March 1941
I find myself quite uncomfortable with this advert. I suppose because this wasn’t a million miles away from German anti-Jewish propaganda itself, which used the rat analogy. The fact that the rat has a little Hitler face instead almost emphasizes that for me. I wonder if that reference was intentional at all?
I was rather taken by this advert for Seigel’s Syrup. It’s from 1902, but the swirling shapes and squidgy font could easily fit in with the design on a 1960s music poster.
Nottingham Evening Post, 24th December 1902
The book Patent Medicines and Secret Formula analysed branded pharmaceuticals and revealed the previously top-secret formula of Seigel’s Syrup consisted mainly aloe and borax. Aloe is still a very popular soothing ingredient of course, but Borax is more familiar to us now as an ingredient in cleaning products and insecticides. In fact, Wikipedia lists quite an interesting range of uses for borax – everything from mothproofing, making flames burn green, treatment for thrush in horses hooves, as a curing agent for snake skins and to clean the brain cavity of a skull for mounting. Useful stuff.
The text of that Patent Medicines book is fascinating. I especially like the particularly potent-sounding Grandmother’s Own Cough Remedy. That apparently involved rubbing liquid tar with hemlock (eek) and sugar, then adding alcohol and chloroform. I suppose the cough would be the least of your worries after that.
A 1903 advert for Fels-Naptha, a laundry soap. This is a nicely poetic demonstration of how text-based graphic design could be used to grab attention in a newspaper advert.
Here’s a 1930s example of what became known as “shockvertising“. It still works as an attention-grabbing technique – it made me gasp when I found it.
The Hawick News, 25th November, 1932
It’s a rather strong method of advertising from Brown of Myreslawgreen, an economical clothes shop. You need to read the small print to see what it’s really saying, and I expect everyone did read it – I can’t imagine many people blithely turning the page without investigating further.
“Every husband worthy of the name likes to see his wife and children well-dressed. It is a difficult problem these hard times, and our advice is – don’t KILL YOUR WIFE with worry trying to make ends meet….”
A lovely little advert from 1914 for women’s facial hair removal. The “Ejecthair” system makes big promises – “It not only causes the hairs to instantly vanish, but without pain or harm kills the roots absolutely and forever.”
Ideal for women with the unusual “Laughing Cavalier” facial hair pattern.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this blog (well, there’s a ton of things I’ve learned, in fact, everyday is a school day here) it’s that there’s an awful lot of people still interested in Owbridge’s Lung Tonic. My last post on the subject here is one of my most popular pages. It’s really a rare day that there’s no hits on that post, which I wasn’t anticipating at all. As far as I was concerned, it was one of those pharmaceuticals lodged firmly in the past, like the mercury-containing Blue Pills of another post.
But Owbridge’s was a medicine that people obviously remember taking and are googling nostalgically for. And so I checked when it last was available, and I was surprised that production only ended in 1971 – no wonder so many people know of it still.
One thing I have to say – the British Medical Association’s “Secret Remedies” book of 1909 that I linked to in my previous post states that an analysis of Owbridge’s shows the medicine to contain ipecacuanha wine, honey and, alarmingly, a quantity of chloroform. But the formula did change again over the years and so the version that people had in the 1960s was (presumably) not the same as that analysed in 1909. Having said that, I haven’t found anything to state what exactly the last incarnation consisted of.
Still, for those Owbridge’s fans still out there (although it is apparently a love-hate kind of memory, I gather), here’s some more vintage adverts I’ve found.
It sounds like there was some dispute going on here between The Pharmaceutical Society and patent medicines. “No one has the right to attach poison labels” to Owbridge’s, it says. That wouldn’t have helped business. The Aberdeen Journal, 14th January 1893
A double page advert celebrating the “thirty-third season” of Owbridge’s. The Yorkshire Post, 1908
“Please remember we can produce originals of all these letters”: The Yorkshire Evening Post, 1910
This 1914 typeface reminds me of the opening credits of a black and white “Carry On” film. Daily Mirror, 2nd November 1914
Emphasizing the honey in this advert (rather than the chloroform): Yorkshire Evening Post, 19th January 1926
Finally, a celebration of the 80th anniversary in 1954. It was around for nearly 100 years, just missing the centenary in 1974. The Luton News, 1954
A protest against the Temperance movement in 1920. The advert is saying that the only real effect of an alcohol ban, as was seen in the US, would be to prevent the working class from accessing booze – those with money would always be able to pay their hands on it. I agree that “a sober working class” was, no doubt, desirable by those in charge.
Lanarkshire Daily Post, 13th June 1920
And here’s a nice little picture of some members of the labour movement having fun – trade union delegates taking a break from the 1917 congress for a splash about on Blackpool beach. How great it would be if politicians did this at their party conferences now.
