Why can't we buy them any more? (Reminiscences of obsolete products)

Member Name: GentleGenius

Product:	Reminiscences of obsolete products
Date:	21/11/08 (1020 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They were tasty, they worked, they had charm, grace and character

Disadvantages: No longer available

Somebody once said that as soon as you find a product you really really like, they stop making it.

During the course of my life I've seen a lot of products come and go; some I've been glad to see the back of, and some I miss desperately and wish they were still around.

I just thought I'd have a little delve into my memory bank and see what I could come up with for DooYoo, and have a little natter about a few of the things that as far as I'm aware, have vanished from our shops and can't be bought any more - so here goes.....and I hope there's some nice memories in there for at least a few of you.

1) AQUA MANDA TOILETRIES

Being in my late teens in the early 1970s, and being a fringe-hippie to boot, I was one of those people who when I wasn't reeking of patchouli, I positively stunk of Aqua Manda. I didn't really use the soap and talc much - mainly because I'd receive enough for Xmas and birthday presents of other brands to see me through from one year to the next, but my friend and I would go shopping every Saturday down Southend High Street, and buy a little handbag-sized bottle of orange-scented Aqua Manda cologne - a tiny bottle would last us about a week. The design of Aqua Manda packaging was a little hippie-ish - a brown bottle which was the same length all the way up, then with a very thin neck. It had a flat brown lid, and the label on the bottle showed drawings of oranges with green leaves attached. The box was brown, and of the same design as the bottle label. With hindsight, maybe Aqua Manda didn't smell all that good, but it was considered cool if you wandered around smelling of oranges. A couple of years ago I bought a fairly large bottle of Aqua Manda from E-bay, but I don't think it was authentic, despite the seller's claims that it was the real thing....there wasn't even the remotest hint of orange on opening the bottle. The memory of Aqua Manda for me centres around wearing hot-pants, wet-look dresses, smocks, sock-boots and going to places like Kensington Market, Biba and Southend's good old faithful hippie pub, The Top Alex (locally and affectionately known as "The Alex").

2) BE-RO FLOUR
A short description here, as being quite young when it was around, I never used the product personally. My strongest memory of Be-Ro Flour was that not long after my Dad met my Stepmother and they moved in together (1963/1964), when I stayed with them weekends, my Stepmother would make a recipe from the Be-Ro Flour cookbook called meat roll. It involved making pastry with Be-Ro Flour (of course any flour would have done!), then spreading a mixture of mince, chopped onions & carrots, and peas over the pastry - moistening with a little gravy, then rolling it up like a Swiss roll, then baking long and slow in the oven. The result was rather puddingy, but really tasty. For some reason I associate it with going to the dentist, but I have no idea why.

3) NORSKA ANTI-PERSPIRANT
Back in the late 1970s, and my specific memories of Norska are from the summer of 1978, this anti-perspirant appeared on the market. I only ever used the aerosol one, and was fascinated by the bright lime green can. Simply because I liked the look of the container, I bought some one day and from the first squirt, was hooked. The smell was truly amazing - a strong pine fragrance that was really fresh and just mmmmmm! I can't remember how efficient it was as an anti-perspirant, and may never have found out anyway, because as I recall, firstly the summer of 1978 was very unsettled and cool so it's unlikely that I got overheated, plus the product was around for such a very short time, that when the following - and mightily sizzling - summer of 1979 was upon us, you couldn't buy the stuff any more. I'd just love to be able to smell that lovely pine again.

4) FRY'S FIVE BOYS CHOCOLATE
We go right back to my very early childhood for this one. I can remember a few times a week being taken to a little sweetshop close to where I lived, and my treat for the day would be a bar of Fry's Five Boys chocolate. I clearly remember the wrapper - it was white with red writing, and on the front and back, there were images of a boy's face repeated five times, each one showing a different emotion. The boy's haircut was very 1950s (sensible!! lol), and I can remember on one image the boy was crying....that used to bother me, so I'd concentrate on the happier facial expressions. The bar was quite thin, but delicious, creamy chocolate, and the inner wrapper was white greaseproof-style paper. I think people older than me would probably remember the Fry's Five Boys Chocolate wrapper having a different design.

5) MIKKI MILK DRINK
Am I the only person who remembers Mikki Milk Drink? All of my friends who are of the same age as myself and from the same childhood home town, just don't have any memory of it at all. Mikki Milk Drink was sold from a chilled dispensing machine in a turning off Southend High Street during the 1950s and very early 1960s. It was quite (for those days) expensive, and to get a bottle you had to put a shilling into a slot on the machine, and a glass bottle full of the delicious milkshake would be dispensed. The top had to be removed with a bottle opener, and there was a device on the dispensing machine whereby you could just flip the cap off and it would drop into a little waste disposal section at the bottom. Once opened, this gloriously rich chocolate smell would rise up from the bottle, and on having a good slug, the milk was thick, rich and extremely, extremely chocolatey. I've never in my whole life since then, tasted any kind of chocolate milk drink that comes even remotely close to being as delicious as Mikki. The Mikki dispensing machine was torn down in about 1963-ish when the town planners began to rip Southend apart in the name of re-vamping.....sadly I never saw the product again. If there are any Southenders out there who are aged 54-ish or over, do you remember that Mikki dispensing machine? It was just by York Road Market, on the corner of Grover Street (which is now Chichester Road) and York Road, at the back of M&S.

6) COFFEE CRISP CHOCOLATE BAR
I think I may have spoken a little about Coffee Crisp in one of my earlier reviews on DooYoo. This neat little bar of chocolate was around in the mid-1960s, just for a short while, and it then (in about 1967-ish) vanished without trace. It was a smallish elongated bar of heaven, wrapped in dark brown paper with gold writing. The chocolate was delicious, with little toasted rice pieces inside, and the most authentic coffee flavour contained within any chocolate you could wish to taste. Whereas most chocolate bars cost 6d, this was I believe 9d - a whole 3d more, but in those days 3d was worth a lot more than today's equivalent (around 1½p). The demise of Coffee Crisp was good cause to hold a wake I think....and I'm just so sad that they've never made a re-appearance.

7) HEINZ BEANS & BACON BURGERS
Heinz Beans & Bacon Burgers first hit the supermarket shelves sometime in the very early 1970s, and I think they were withdrawn from production in approximately 1980-ish. I remember the TV advert for them well - can still hear the jingle in my head, although I've forgotten the words. Climbing up on the back of Heinz Sausages & Beans (which you can still buy), Heinz Beans & Bacon Burgers came in the standard blue-ish/green coloured tin. Inside, wedged at random amongst the beans, were these soft-textured, dark pinkish coloured little burger type things that claimed to be made of bacon....the bacon flavour was fairly authentic, so maybe the claims weren't too far from the truth. I used to love eating them with chips or on toast, and they were excellent for a late night snack when I'd come home a little worse for wear, starving hungry, yet not in a fit state to perform any task requiring more effort than opening a tin and heating the contents.

8) PHENSIC and ASPRO PAINKILLERS
I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to when these two pain-killing products vanished, but my strongest memories of them are from the late 1950s, and throughout most of the 1960s. I can't remember what the Phensic packet looked like, though I do have a vague recall of something blue and white, but I can remember Aspro tablets came in a pink box with dark blue lettering, and inside of the box were little pink coloured cellophane strips containing the tablets. This was before the days of bubble-press tablet packaging. All the adult females in the house I was brought up in seemed to have permanent headaches, and virtually every surface wherever you looked, was covered with packs of Phensic and Aspro. I doubt if their effectiveness was greater than any other painkillers on the market, but for some reason they were highly favoured in our house.

9) TIFFIN CHOCOLATE BAR
I can't remember who made Tiffin (maybe it was Rowntrees, Nestle or Cadburys?), and if my sense of recall is accurate, I think it came in a white paper outer wrapper, and the inner wrapper was thick-ish white greaseproof-style paper. Tiffin was a large-sized chocolate bar, containing crispy biscuit pieces and raisins inside, very similar to Country Style (which followed some years later and I believe is now defunct), plus very similar to Raisin & Biscuit Yorkie. The chocolate was superb, and I could, even as a child with a much smaller stomach than I now have, devour a whole one of these without batting an eyelid. I wasn't really much of a sweet-eater when I was small, but what I did like I'd gorge on with gusto. I think Tiffin Bar vanished maybe in the late 1960s - possibly the very early 1970s - and though Country Style and Raisin & Biscuit Yorkie came close, they didn't quite mimic the wonder of Tiffin.

10) SPANISH WOOD
Spanish Wood could be bought in most little sweet shops, and you'd order a pennyworth or a tuppennyworth. The shopkeeper would climb on a small stepladder, pull down a large glass jar with a screw-top lid, and pull out these sticks of what actually was liquorice, yet had the appearance of pale brown twigs. I didn't eat these myself as I can't stand liquorice, but I can remember my friends would go crazy for them. I'm not sure when they vanished from the sweetshop shelves...maybe they went on for longer than I thought, as amongst my circle of friends back in those days, it wasn't good for your street cred to be seen buying those types of confectionery past a certain age. Once you hit your teens you had to pretend to be grown-up, and grown-ups just didn't eat things like Spanish Wood.....well, they probably did, but we chose not to notice.

11) NEILSON'S ELDORADO ICE CREAM
Like Mikki Milk Drink, Neilson's Eldorado Ice Cream is something that I'm astonished people of my own age don't seem to remember. Though it was marketed as Neilson's, I believe this ice cream was made by Wall's. The last time I saw Eldorado Ice Cream was in 1965, and it just seemed to vanish off the face of the earth - shame, as it was truly delicious....loaded no doubt with all sorts of chemicals and additives, but we didn't care about things like that in those days. Eldorado was a cylindrical shaped wodge of very yellow-coloured ice cream, that would be taken from a freezer (oh, how I loved that muted thud noise those old-fashioned freezers in shops made when they were slammed shut) and placed inside a suitably shaped cornet. The ice cream had an almost gentle buttery flavour, and held its shape well....being slow to melt, even on the hottest of days. The world of ice cream suffered a sad loss the day Eldorado vanished from our sweet shops, and I still miss it, even now.

12) SNOPAKE
When I first started working in an office upon leaving school in 1969, typists used to bash away on old manual typewriters, using carbon paper for copies of what they had typed. In general, typists were much more accurate in those days; firstly because they had been taught how to type properly, and secondly because it was so difficult to correct a mistake without having to re-type the whole letter/document. Snopake was the first of the typists' correction fluid brands that I remember, and was pretty much the same as Tippex and Liquid Paper. I can't recall exactly what the outside of the bottle looked like, but I do remember that it had a rigid wire piece inside, sticking up towards the lid, that would take off the excess fluid from the brush before you began painting the white stuff over the typing error you'd made. Snopake went hard much more quickly than Liquid Paper and Tippex, plus it had a terrible smell. If you accidentally inhaled too much of it, you'd go on a mini high! I think I saw the last of Snopake in or around the early to mid-1970s, when Liquid Paper took over....later to be replaced by Tippex.

13) SKIPPY CHOCOLATE BAR
I have a feeling that Skippy was a rather short-lived chocolate bar, and my memory of it is very misty. I think it vanished when I was aged about 5 or 6, and I can remember a friend of my Dad's would bring me one round (together with an ice lolly) each week when he visited us. Skippy was a fairly small, elongated bar - I can't remember what the wrapper was like or how much it cost - which was made of a chewy sort of toffee mixed with wafer, and coated in quite thick milk chocolate. Though the bar was small, it was a lot for a little girl to eat, and I remember my sister helping me scoff them. The chocolate was incredibly tasty, though I wasn't mad on the chewy stuff in the middle.

14) FLAVOURED AERO BARS (coffee, strawberry, lime, lemon)
In the mid-1960s, Aero Bars went through a phase of being produced in all sorts of different flavours. The ones I remember specifically were coffee, strawberry, orange, and lemon & lime. The minty ones I believe had already been around for a few years, and it's sad that the other flavours seemed to have a short consumer life....although I do believe the orange one hung around for some years afterwards. I wasn't too keen on the lemon & lime flavoured Aero, but the strawberry, orange and coffee flavours were absolutely superb....much better (in my opinion) than the minty one was and still is. I've always wondered why the makers of Aero don't re-introduce those flavours, as I feel sure they'd go down pretty well nowadays.

15) FRY'S FIVE CENTRE
I think over the decades, Fry's Five Centre chocolate bar has come and gone more than twice, and the last time I remember eating one was about 20 or so years ago. My strongest memory of this chocolate bar is from my very early childhood - I was sitting in my high chair, so I must have been extremely young, and my sister was eating a Fry's Five Centre, feeding me little bits of it too. Suddenly she screamed in pain....she'd chewed on a drawing pin that was embedded into the fondant filling. The only other thing I remember about that incident was her being relieved that it was her who'd eaten that mouthful containing the drawing pin and not me, plus a couple of weeks later, Fry's responded to her letter of complaint by sending a massive box of mixed Fry's products in compensation. Fry's Five Centre was a dark chocolate bar, long in shape, with a rounded surface. The bar was divided into sections, each section containing a different flavoured fondant.....orange, lemon & lime, strawberry and raspberry. Though I'm not a great fan of plain chocolate, I really would love to have a Fry's Five Centre again....and I would imagine their modern-day health and safety practices inside of their manufacturing plants are much more stringent than they were back in the 1950s.

16) CADBURY'S MILK TRAY BAR
Oh yummy yummy yummy! Why don't Cadbury's make these any more? I can't quite remember when their production stopped, and I believe a few years ago there was a mostly in vain attempt at their re-introduction, but I never personally saw them in recent times on our sweetshop shelves. Cadbury's Milk Tray Bar used to cost about a shilling in old money, back in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and it was a standard-sized bar of chocolate as a base, and in raised pieces on the base were imitations of selected Cadbury's Milk Tray Chocolates fillings. I believe there was strawberry, caramel, hazelnut and one containing a delicious green goo - my memory stops there. These bars were quite substantial, despite their fairly small size, and it was always a race to see who got to their favourite centre first.

17) TOM THUMB DROPS
Seems like some people called these Fairy Drops, and other people called them Tom Thumb Drops...maybe it was a regional thing....in my own neck of the woods, we called them Tom Thumb Drops. These were sold in a little shop close to my primary school, and us kids would often pop in there on our way home and buy a little white paper bag, positively teeming with 2oz of Tom Thumb Drops for tuppence. These were very tiny little sweets, and were rather chewy. They were brightly coloured.....red, yellow, green and orange, and when you sucked or chewed them, a perfume flavour would fill your taste buds. One little bag would last for ages, because they were quite hard to eat. I'm not really sure when they disappeared from sale, but I'd guess maybe in or around the late 1960s/early 1970s.

18) DOODIES
I think I must be the only person in the world who remembers Doodies. They vanished almost as soon as they appeared, and I have never been able to work out why, as they were one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. My memory of Doodies is from the summer of 1967, when I'd spend the day with my Dad and Stepmother in Southend Central Market, where they had a stall, selling their own handmade cuddly toys. During the summer of 1967, a group of people travelled nationwide to various markets, promoting a new product called Doodies. One man promoting Doodies came to Southend Central Market, and set up a stall - complete with a deep fat fryer, and several huge plastic bags containing these dull mustard-coloured flat disc-shaped things. Each day for two weeks, he would heat up the oil in the fryer, and drop a small handful of these flat discs into the hot oil. They would sizzle and crackle, immediately rise to the top, cooking in just a few seconds - the man would then lift them out, drain off the excess oil, pile what he'd just cooked into a huge paper bag, and sell them for 6d a go. These Doodies were delicious hot or cold, and bore a strong resemblance to Quavers, but were not salted.....they were a lot nicer than Quavers too. Once the word spread about this man with his deep fat fryer in the market selling these delicious cooked on the spot crisp products, he had queues and queues of people lining up for them - and coming back for more. If they were so very popular, and I'm sure they were in other parts of the country too, why did we never see them again?

19) JAMBOREE BAGS
These were tacky little stiff paper bags of very cheap and nasty sweets. I can't quite remember the colour of the bag, but I think it's possible they may have come in different pastel colours. At my local sweetshop, when I was aged about 9, Jamboree Bags sold for approx. 2d (equivalent to less than 1p in today's money). The sweets inside the bags were very sugary, hard and crunchy - coloured in mostly pastels...I remember pale pink, lilac, white, yellow and pale blue. I think it was sweets like this which were responsible for my generation ending up in the dentist's chair more often than should have been necessary. The taste of the sweets was a mixture of a sherbet-like flavour, combined with something slightly perfumed. I'm not sure when they vanished from our sweetshops, or if any attempts have been made to revive them since, but they were still around when I grew out of that type of sweet.....approx. age 10-ish.

20) JUBBLIES
Ohhh even nowadays, when we get very hot weather, I can still yearn for a Jubbly. Most corner sweetshops sold them, and they could be found in the freezer with all the other ice cream and ice lolly products. Jubblies were huge pyramids of solid fruit-flavoured ice, packed in a waxed stiff paper wrapping with sharp corners, and the wrapping was very difficult to bite open. Once you'd managed to get to the ice pyramid inside, you could spend a happy hour or so sucking on it.....they lasted so very long. I think they probably cost about sixpence, and it was sixpence well spent, because Jubblies didn't just vanish a few seconds after you'd put them in your mouth. They took a long time to melt, because of their shape and solidity, and were every child's joy during the 1960s. I think they vanished in the mid to late 1960s, but I believe an attempt was made to revive them a few years ago; I'm not sure how successful that attempt turned out to be.

21) OWBRIDGES COUGH MIXTURE
Whenever I had a cold as a child, I always used to get a hacking cough with it. A huge comfort-zone was thus created by my Mum whereby I'd be sent to bed a little earlier than usual when I had a cold, after having been fed a slice of Woolworth's iced fruit cake and a glass of milk. I would then sit as still as I could whilst she liberally smeared Vick Vapour Rub all over my chest, then she'd measure out a little dose of Owbridges Cough Mixture into a small whisky glass, and top it up with not boiling, but pretty hot water. I'd then be told to sit and sip the mixture slowly before being carted off to bed. Owbridges Cough Mixture was very similar to how Venos was in those days....it tastes different nowadays....a thick-ish, dark brown, syrupy liquid that smelled strongly of menthol and camphor. Both Owbridges and Venos tasted lovely when made up in this way with a little hot water - I haven't included Venos here in my nostalgic list, as it's a product which is still available, albeit tasting different. I think my mum bought Owbridges most of the time, probably because it was cheaper than Venos. I loved the stuff so much made that way with hot water, that I could have drunk it just for pleasure.

22) VIROL
Virol was marketed as a health food, and was thick, brown-coloured sticky gunge in a dark brown glass screw-top jar. My mum swore by this stuff, and I had to have at least one big spoonful of it a day, but that wasn't a problem as I loved the malty taste. When I was a very small child, I didn't have much appetite and there was hardly anything I would eat, so my mum stuffed me up with Virol to try and help me get my nutrients. I can remember one day when I was aged about 6, she took me to the doctors thinking there was something wrong with me because I was so thin and had such a small appetite. After much questioning about my lifestyle, diet etc., the doctor concluded that I wouldn't eat because I was too full up.....full up with Virol!

23) KENSITAS & GUARDS CIGARETTES
Every Sunday morning I would be sent to the local shop to get my mum's cigarettes for the day, and her favourite brand was Kensitas. She would save the coupons inside the packets, and when it got close to Christmas or anyone's birthdays, she'd choose a present from the Kensitas catalogue and redeem the coupons for whatever item she wanted to buy. Occasionally she would buy Guards cigarettes, but I can't remember if they had coupons inside....I think she bought a pack of them once every so often as a little treat, because they were slightly more expensive than Kensitas. I can remember Kensitas in approximately 1965-ish costing 3/6d for 20, and Guards probably would have been around 2d or 3d more per pack. I can't remember what the Kensitas packet looked like, but the Guards packet was white, with a red strip down one side, and an image in black of a guard wearing a busby, and holding a gun upwards resting against his shoulder.

24) GREEN SHIELD STAMPS
My Mum used to collect Green Shield Stamps from various grocery shops and supermarkets. These were bright green coloured stamps with a picture of a green shield on the front, which could be collected and redeemed for various items....similar items to which you'd buy nowadays in Argos. My strongest memory of them is from the mid to late 1960s....maybe even slightly into the early 1970s, and my Mum would use them in the same way as she did the Kensitas coupons (mentioned above), to help with buying Christmas or birthday presents. There was a pawnbroker in Southend who would buy full Green Shield Stamp books paying 8/- (eight shillings - approximately 40p in today's currency) each, and when the cash situation at home was very tight, my Mum would frequently turn to this method of redemption to help with the weekly shopping, and when paying for the shopping, she'd get more stamps. I can't remember how many stamps the shops would issue for every £1 or whatever spent, but I loved to sit and stick the stamps into the books, and always felt a sense of satisfaction each time a book became full (sad, I know lol!). I believe drivers could get Green Shield Stamps at filling stations when they bought petrol, but nobody in our family drove....so we only got the stamps from grocers' shops and supermarkets.

25) PRETTY PEACH TOILETRIES
I can't be 100% certain, but I think Pretty Peach toiletries were made by Avon for little girls, and very young teenagers. Being older when Pretty Peach products first made their appearance, I felt it was beneath my dignity to use something intended for kids, but secretly I liked the talcum powder and I'd buy some from somewhere - can't remember where - and transfer it to a powder box, pretending it was a different brand.

26) SPANGLES
I wonder why all the attempts at restoring Spangles as being one of the UK's most favourite sweets, seem to have failed? In a way I don't mind this, as for me it enshrines Spangles back in my own past and keeps them as an item of nostalgia. I only really ate Spangles when I was very small, and even then a packet would last me for weeks on end. I believe back in the late 1950s they cost 3d per pack, and you could buy the fruity variety which were orange, lemon, strawberry and lime. There were other varieties available too, and though I probably can't remember them all, the ones that stick in my mind are the minty ones, Old English Spangles which had a strange taste, and the acid-drop flavour ones. To hark back to my DooYoo article where I reminisced about Southend and how it was back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a barber's shop in the centre of the High Street, at basement level underneath a wet fish shop. My Dad, amongst other kids' dads too, would take me along with him every time he went to this barber's for a haircut. The barber was affectionately known amongst the local kids as "The Spangle Man", because he kept a huge supply of Spangles (the fruity variety) on the premises, and each child who accompanied their dad on haircut day, would be given a packet of Spangles by the barber. Oh happy memories!

27) COUGH CANDY
Many local sweet shops sold Cough Candy in huge glass screw-top jars, and like most other loose sweets from the era of my own childhood, would be bought in ounces....the shopkeeper tipping an amount into metal scales (oh that lovely clanking sound as the hard sweets hit the scales), then pour the sweets into a small white paper bag. Us kids were happy with things like that....what went wrong? Cough Candy sweets were hard, boiled sweets, round, and bright orange coloured. They had a flavour all of their own which I just can't describe, and some people falsely believed they would cure a cough. Maybe they did, but I'm sure it was psychological. All the same, they tasted great and I miss them enormously.

28) CADBURY'S BAR SIX CHOCOLATE BAR
In the mid 1960s, Cadbury's decided to manufacture what was an obvious copy of Kit-Kat. If I remember rightly, Bar Six was slightly larger than a standard bar of chocolate, long, and narrower than Kit-Kat. Cadbury's chocolate has a distinctly different flavour to that which covers Kit-Kats, so the taste of Bar Six wasn't so similar to Kit-Kat that you could mistake the two for one another. I always found the wafer inside of Bar Six to be harder, less crispy, and rather more sickly than the one inside Kit-Kat, but all the same I did enjoy eating them occasionally. I'm not sure when Cadbury's stopped making Bar Six...maybe in the very early 1970s? I do believe Bar Six first appeared in or around 1964....perhaps 1965.

29) RIBENA FROMAGE FRAIS
In the mid-1990s I used to buy Ribena Fromage Frais a lot. They would come in single-serving cartons, four of them welded together, which could be detached and eaten singly. The flavours were blackcurrant, raspberry and strawberry, and the consistency was beautifully creamy. I find with most other brands of fromage frais there is a bit of an under-taste, but for me the Ribena brand tasted completely natural and pure. I think they were a little more expensive than the other brands, but I was prepared to pay for what I felt was superior quality. I was very disappointed when Ribena discontinued this line, and I haven't really enjoyed fromage frais since.

30) IDEAL EVAPORATED MILK
What on earth happened to Ideal Evaporated Milk? The last time I saw it was in I think the very early 1980s....it seemed to become scarce some time during the 1970s, and appeared to just gradually fade away. It was by far my favourite brand, as it had a strength of flavour and a sort of a 'bite' which the other brands of evaporated milk lacked, and still do lack. I don't ever remember seeing it in large cans...just little ones...but that doesn't mean to say the large cans didn't exist at any time. Often when I was a child, after our Sunday dinner we'd have tinned fruit with jelly, blancmange and Ideal Evaporated Milk. It seemed as if Ideal was the nectar of the gods (we never had cream as it was too expensive), and we'd also have it on our Christmas pudding and mince pies. Whenever my mum made porridge for breakfast (usually in the winter), if she had some in the cupboard, she'd make it with half ordinary milk and half evaporated milk (Ideal of course!), and it would come out lovely and rich, with a sort of a caramel flavour. I still use evaporated milk sometimes, but because of the demise of Ideal, I've had to stick to the brands which are nice, but don't have that special touch which was personal to Ideal.

31) PEPTO LEMONADE
In the mid-1960s, and only for a very short time, it was possible to buy a brand of lemonade called Pepto. This is another product that I'm surprised nobody so far of my own age seems to remember. It was cheaper than Corona and R Whites, plus tasted a lot better. In 1966 and 1967, it was a ritual each Friday evening for my mum to bring on her way home from work, fish & chips from the local chippie, two small bars of chocolate with strawberry filling and a huge bottle of Pepto Lemonade. I can't quite describe the flavour of Pepto - it did have a lemony-ness about it, but there was another unidentifiable and wonderful taste present. I do remember the bottle had an image of a pink elephant on the front.

32) ZING FIZZY DRINK
Zing I believe was around mostly from the mid-1960s through until the early 1970s. It was a lemon & lime flavoured drink, a nice green colour, and came in little bottles with old-fashioned caps on that you had to remove with a bottle-opener. The clearest memories I have of Zing is each Saturday when (in the mid-60s) I'd go shopping with my mum, we'd stop off somewhere and have a couple of slices of toast. My mum always had tea with her toast, and in the winter I'd have hot chocolate...but in the summer, I'd have Zing.

33) EMBASSY 45rpm RECORDS
Embassy Records were cheap cover versions of chart hit singles. In Southend where I lived, the only place I knew of them being sold was in British Home Stores. The label on the record was a dark, rich red colour, and the sleeve was white with a wispy pale blue design, and images of slightly darker blue musical notes. Whereas (and I'm looking at the early 1960s here, although Embassy Records were being produced in the 1950s) the proper, original recording of a 45rpm single record cost 6/8d, Embassy would sell their cover versions for a mere 4/6d. With hindsight I can say that some of the cover versions were so bad, that it was probably better to pay the extra 2/2d to have the real thing. Still a lovely memory though, and I believe Embassy ceased to produce these records in about 1965-ish. I can still now in my mind's eye, see 8 Embassy 45s stacked on the Dansette stem, dropping one by one to be played.

34) GALA PETER CHOCOLATE
Gala Peter was thought of as a classy type of dessert chocolate. Quite expensive at approximately 1/11d per bar - although the bars were a little larger than say a standard-sized Cadbury's chocolate bar - this not quite milk and not quite plain chocolate came in a tasteful brown and gold wrapper. It was the type of chocolate which you just (as a child) stood and stared at in the sweetshop, having been told it was for 'posh' people who 'ate chocolate for dessert' - a concept I could never quite get my head around when of such a tender age. I don't remember seeing Gala Peter Chocolate after about 1967-ish, so perhaps that's when its production ceased. I did treat myself to a bar once, and though it was quite palatable, it didn't quite live up to its claims of being a 'class' chocolate bar.

35) CREMOLA FIZZY DRINK CRYSTALS
Wow we go way, way, way back for this product. Fruit squash was too expensive for my Mum to buy most of the time, and she wanted to give me something to drink that was more interesting than plain water; bottled fizzy drinks were even more off the menu than was fruit squash, and were only bought on high days and holidays as an extra special treat. Cremola Fizzy Drink Crystals came in a little tin, with a lid that had to be levered off with the handle of a teaspoon - the tin was exactly the same design as the old Andrews Liver Salts tin. Inside were coloured crystals, about the same consistency as granulated sugar, and you had to put about 2 or 3 teaspoonsful into a glass of cold water. The drink would then fizz up mildly, and it tasted lovely - if not a little too sweet. I remember Cremola coming in orange, strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant and lime flavours, and I imagine that a tin probably would have cost less than a shilling. Very thirst-quenching and refreshing this drink was!

36) SMITTY PERFUME
In the late 1970s, every female seemed to drench herself in Smitty. It had quite a nice, but rather overpowering smell, and came in a (if I remember rightly) white box with red and black lettering. The product I believe was aimed at the post-hippie breed of female, kind of like a cosmetic stepping stone between the by then more or less defunct hippies and the ensuing punks. Smitty was ludicrously cheap....probably about £1.50 per bottle, and I can if I put my mind to it, still smell it in my imagination, to this day.

37) BLANCO SHOE WHITENER
When I was very little, I seemed to have a never-ending supply of white leather sandal type shoes. These shoes for little girls had thick rubber soles, rounded toes, and fastened with a buckle around the side of the foot just by the ankle. I have some wonderful memories of my Dad, every week, lining up my sandals along with white shoes that my Mum and Sister owned, taking a bottle of Blanco, and painting the scuffed, fading shoes, a bright white again. The newly 'Blanco'd' shoes would be placed on a sheet of newspaper to dry, with dire warnings not to touch them whilst they were still wet - our very inquisitive cat received the same warnings. Blanco had a distinctive smell that I can't really describe....sort of chemical-ish, a little like emulsion paint but not quite so strong. I have no idea when Blanco ceased production....maybe some time in the early or mid-1960s.

38) CRESTA FIZZY DRINK
Cresta ("it's frothy, maaaaaaaan!") was a very short-lived mildly fizzy drink which I only remember being around in 1971. I loved it, and whenever my friend and I went on our Saturday shopping trips, we'd stop off somewhere and have a good slug of Cresta before making our way home. Cresta came in strawberry, raspberry, lemon & lime and blackcurrant flavours, in screw-top bottles. When you unscrewed the bottle and poured it into a glass, it would froth up and leave a small head of foam on the top, like beer. It tasted divine, and at the time I believe was the second-most popular drink to Pepsi and Coke at their joint no.1 position, so why did it vanish?


Well that's all folks....I hope all that hasn't been too tedious to read, as it is rather a personal little reminiscence of now defunct products which have been in one way or another significant to my life in long bygone days.

Thanks for reading!

Summary: Just a blast from the past....!