Tag: children

Wake Up Your Liver Bile, 1950

Post author By Estelle
Post date October 8, 2015

Who among us can say with confidence that their liver is freely pouring out two pints of liquid bile into their bowels daily? For those in doubt (and living in 1950), there’s Carters Little Liver Pills. The very next year, Carter had to drop the “liver” from their name in the US as the Federal Trade Commission found that while they were an “irritative laxative” (with one of their ingredients described as “drastic”), they actually had “no medicinal effect on the liver”. I think you can still get Carters Little Pills in the US, but in the UK, Dulcolax is the modern version.

The mention of being “without Calomel” is reassuring. Despite the appealing-sounding name (which could derive from the Greek words for “beautiful” and “honey” due to its sweet taste), Calomel is actually mercury chloride. In the first half of the twentieth century it was used as a laxative, a disinfectant, a remedy for syphilis, and (anxiety-inducingly) as a teething powder for babies.

As you can imagine from a mercury compound, it was toxic. In the teething babies it could cause a type of mercury poisoning called “pink disease” which was painful and caused pink discolouration of the hands and feet. The mortality rate for pink disease was a horrifying 1 in 10. After discovery of the toxidity of the compound, it wasn’t used in teething powders after 1954.

WAKE UP YOUR LIVER BILE
Without Calomel – and you’ll jump out of your bed in the morning full of vim and vigour.

The liver should pour out two pints of liquid bile into your bowels daily. If this bile is not flowing freely, your food doesn’t digest. You get headaches and feel rotten. You get constipated. Your whole system is poisoned and you feel sour, slack and the world looks black.

Laxatives help a little, but a mere bowel movement doesn’t get at the cause. It takes those good old Carters Little Liver Pills to get those two pints of bile flowing freely and make you feel “up and up”. Harmless, gentle, yet amazing in making bile flow freely. Ask for Carters Little Liver Pills. Stubbornly refuse anything else. 1/7 and 3/10. Also new 3 1/2d. sizes.

Tags 1954, Calomel, Carters Little Liver Pills, children, disease, Mercury, pharmaceuticals, teething

1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

Kops Bairn’s Wine, 1924

Post author By Estelle
Post date September 26, 2015

Edinburgh Evening News, 13th November 1924

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.

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.

Tags 1924, children, Kop's wine, temperance

1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

Eat More Fat, 1937

“Atora puddings solve the difficult problem of children who dislike fat.”

Not a sentence I can imagine would be used in today’s advertising. These adverts are from The Children’s Newspaper, and it is true that children do need fat – apart from other things, fat helps in the development of brain cells. Did you know that the brain can contain up to 60% fat? (More in some people’s cases….) Fat is of course one of those food groups that was celebrated, then demonised, and recently started to be rehabilitated as a useful part of your diet. My grandma could eat a mound of fat – she preferred the fat to the meat – and she was slim all her life and lived to a good old age too.

“Medical testimony proves that the children – and adults – with weakly and “chesty” tendencies, who most need nourishing fat, are the ones who don’t like it.”

Oh, I do like the idea of eating suet puddings for the good of your health. I’m sure the 1930s style diet is worth a try. I’m quite tempted to try something along the lines of this blog, The 1940s Experiment, where a woman lost weight by following Second World War rationing recipes. I could try the 1920s-30s version, the typical diet from just before rationing came in (well, it sounds more fun anyway – apart from the Mice in Honey). Nourishing Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisps all round!

The Children's Newspaper, 8th May 1937 — The Children’s Newspaper, 8th May 1937

Tags 1937, Atora, children, fat, food, Vintage recipes

1900-1949

Infant with Smoker’s Heart, 1910

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 30, 2015

What a heartbreaking little story this is. It’s from the first issue of the Seventh Day Adventist publication Herald of Health in 1910.

Tags 1910, children, Herald of Health

Adverts Food & Drink Victorian Women

Mellin’s Baby Biscuits, 1892

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 23, 2015

An advert from 1892 for Mellin’s Food Biscuits, biscuits that could be used for weaning babies, or given to the infirm. They were marketed as a replacement for mother’s milk, and were made from cows milk, malt flour and and wheat.

I was intrigued by this testimonial, by an Alice Liddell. Surely not “Alice in Wonderland” Alice? But no, that was her maiden name, she was Alice Hargreaves by marriage, after marrying the cricketer Reginald Hargreaves.

Incidentally, I love these two pictures of “the” Alice Liddell, at the ages of 20 and 80. She looks like she was a fascinating lady.

Tags 1892, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, children, food, Mellin's Food Biscuits

1900-1949 Ephemera

The Joys of the British Newspaper Archive

Post author By Estelle
Post date January 20, 2015
2 Comments on The Joys of the British Newspaper Archive

Happiness (for me) is a browse through what is probably my favourite online resource – the British Newspaper Archive. It’s here.

I thought I’d mention it now because it’s a subscription-based site, and there’s a discount code valid until the end of January 2015 – enter “news01” and you get a month’s unlimited browsing for just £1.

Here’s a little article I found, local to me as it’s from The Liverpool Post in 1937 (and I am all about 1937 right now). It’s what initially seems to be a fairly modern scenario, in a way. A pupil from Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, sued his teacher for caning him, and he won his case. Then everyone remembered they were still in 1937, his teacher appealed, and she was successful in getting the conviction overturned.

You’re left in no doubt as to what general opinion might be, reading the language of the article:

“On the afternoon of January 12th, she warned him several times. When she went to cane him in the ordinary way, he turned away and she hit him with the cane three times on his pants. She did not lose her temper. The boy went back to his desk and sat down, doing his work much better afterwards.

Mr Roland Thomas, K.C., for the teacher, commented, “Teachers will go in terror of punishing children, if bruising of the ordinary kind is going to be taken as excessive.”

Tags 1930s, 1937, Birkenhead, childhood, children, ephemera, Liverpool, The British Newspaper Archive, The Liverpool Post

1900-1949 Ephemera War

Remembrance Week – George VI Thanks the Children of Britain, 1946

Post author By Estelle
Post date November 8, 2014
12 Comments on Remembrance Week – George VI Thanks the Children of Britain, 1946

Following on from yesterday’s post, in 1946 the children of Britain got their own “Thank you and well done”.

This was a printed letter from King George VI, sent to all schoolchildren at the end of the Second World War, recognising the fact that the whole of the country, children included, played their part.

“For you have shared in the hardships and dangers of a total war and you have shared no less in the triumph of the Allied Nations”.

The one I have belonged to a little girl called Diana Morcom, wherever she is now….

Tags 1946, children, George VI, Second World War