Scrap Book Project – Robertson’s Jam and Golly Badges

My Nan worked at the Robertson’s jam factory which was on Barmerston Road in Catford, South London.  They used to make Golden Shred marmalade and a range of jams and had, what many might say now, an inappropriate golly as the company symbol.  We used to have golly badges and they are collector’s items now but I haven’t got them anymore because I rashly swapped them for something else (I can’t remember what exactly) when I was about ten years old and that’s real shame.

We used to have quite a lot of marmalade and jam (blackcurrant was my favourite) and to get a badge you had to collect paper gollies which were behind the label on the jar and when you had ten you could send away for a badge.  Later you could get little pottery figures instead.

Robertson’s introduced the Golly in the early 20th century when John Robertson on a visit to the southern states of America noticed young children playing with little black rag dolls with white eyes, made from their mothers’ discarded black skirts and white blouses.  He was so intrigued by the popularity of the Golly that he thought it would make an ideal mascot and trade mark for the Robertson’s range of products and the idea of Golly trade mark was accepted by the Company in 1910.

The most valuable and collectable enamel badges now sell now for up to a thousand pounds each but with over twenty million Golly badges sent out over the years most are only worth a few pounds or so but it’s not about the value or the money I just wish that I still had them!  You can’t get them anymore because they were discontinued on 23rd August 2001 and you can’t get Robertson’s jam either, because in 2006 the brand was sold to Premier Foods and in 2008 they announced that it would discontinue the Robertson brand the following year.

  

Christmas Day

The other Christmas that I remember was when I got my first train set.  This was at my other grandparent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time.

Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery.  There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself.  He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock.  But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning.  The reason for this was quickly discovered.  Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education.  Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!  My brother Richard is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

Christmas Eve

“Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all thirty feet tall.”  Larry Wilde

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus.  In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after.  I can remember one of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside.  One year, I was five years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the street lights outside even with the curtains drawn there was just enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents.

Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that I had got the cowboy outfit that was top of my Christmas present list!  It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming.  For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days.  In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out.

Granddad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process.  After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon.

There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year.  This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today.  Granddad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure.  There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.

Life was a whole lot simpler then and expectations much lower!

Robertson’s Jam and Golly Badges

My Nan worked at the Robertson’s jam factory which was on Barmerston Road in Catford, South London.  They used to make Golden Shred marmalade and a range of jams and had, what many might say now, an inappropriate golly as the company symbol.  We used to have golly badges and they are collector’s items now but I haven’t got them anymore because I rashly swapped them for something else (I can’t remember what exactly) when I was about ten years old and that’s a real shame.

We used to have quite a lot of marmalade and jam (blackcurrant was my favourite) and to get a badge you had to collect paper gollies which were behind the label on the jar and when you had ten you could send away for a badge.  Later you could get little pottery figures instead.

Robertson’s introduced the Golly in the early twentieth century when John Robertson on a visit to the southern states of America noticed young children playing with little black rag dolls with white eyes, made from their mothers’ discarded black skirts and white blouses.  He was so intrigued by the popularity of the Golly that he thought it would make an ideal mascot and trade mark for the Robertson’s range of products and the idea of Golly trade mark was accepted by the Company in 1910.

The most valuable and collectable enamel badges now sell now for up to a thousand pounds each but with over twenty million Golly badges sent out over the years most are only worth a few pounds or so but it’s not about the value or the money I just wish that I still had them!  You can’t get them anymore because they were discontinued on 23^rd August 2001 and you can’t get Robertson’s jam either, because in 2006 the brand was sold to Premier Foods and in 2008 they announced that it would discontinue the Robertson brand the following year.

  

A Life in a Year – 25th December, Christmas Day

The other Christmas that I remember was when I got my first train set.  This was at my other grandparent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time.

Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery.  There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself.  He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock.  But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning.  The reason for this was quickly discovered.  Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education.  Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!  Richard of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

A Life in a Year – 24th December, Christmas Eve

 

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus.  In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after.  I can remember two of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside.  One year, I was four years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the streetlights outside there was enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents.  Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that I had got the cowboy outfit that was top of my Christmas present list!  It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming.  For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days.  In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out.  Grandad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process.  After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon. 

There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year.  This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today.  Grandad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure.  There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.

A Life in a Year – 23rd August, Robertson’s Jam and Golly Badges

My Nan worked at the Robertson’s jam factory which was on Barmerston Road in Catford, South London.  They used to make Golden Shred marmalade and a range of jams and had, what many might say now, an inappropriate golly as the company symbol.  We used to have golly badges and they are collector’s items now but I haven’t got them anymore because I rashly swapped them for something else (I can’t remember what exactly) when I was about ten years old and that’s real shame. 

Robertson’s introduced the Golly in the early 20th century when John Robertson on a visit to the southern states of America noticed young children playing with little black rag dolls with white eyes, made from their mothers’ discarded black skirts and white blouses.  He was so intrigued by the popularity of the Golly that he thought it would make an ideal mascot and trade mark for the Robertson’s range of products and the idea of Golly trade mark was accepted by the Company in 1910.

The most valuable and collectable enamel badges now sell now for up to a thousand pounds each but with over twenty million Golly badges sent out over the years most are only worth a few pounds or so but it’s not about the value or the money I just wish that I still had them!  You can’t get them anymore because they were discontinued on 23^rd August 2001 and you can’t get Robertson’s jam either, because in 2006 the brand was sold to Premier Foods and in 2008 they announced that it would discontinue the Robertson brand the following year.

Christmas Past

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus.  In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after.  I can remember two of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside.

One year, I was four years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the streetlights outside there was enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents.

Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that I had got the cowboy outfit that was top of my Christmas present list!  It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming.

For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days.  In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out.  Grandad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process.  After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon.

There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year.  This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today.  Granddad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure.  There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.

The other one that I remember was when I got my first train set.  This was at my other grandparent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time.  Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery.  There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself.

He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock.  But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning.

The reason for this was quickly discovered.  Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education.  Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!  Richard of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

Snow at Christmas is deep-seated in British culture, and most of us (except bookmakers) look forward expectantly to Christmas Day with scenes depicted on traditional Christmas cards and in works like Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, but the truth is of course that Christmas is rarely ever white any more.  The myth of snowy Christmases has its origins in the colder climate of the period 1550 to1850 when Britain was in the grip of a ‘Little Ice Age’ and therefore could be confident of snow at Christmas.  Winters were particularly persistent and severe but it is now nearly two hundred years since a frost fair was last held on a frozen River Thames in 1813.

The trouble is that for most parts of the UK, Christmas comes at the beginning of the season for snow and wintry weather is more likely early in the deepening cold of January.  White Christmases were more frequent in the 18th and 19th centuries, even more so before the change of calendar in 1752, which effectively brought Christmas day back by twelve days.   There have only been six white Christmases since I was born in 1954.  I can remember it snowing on Christmas Eve 1970 because I was walking to Midnight Mass at Hillmorton Church and according the Met Office the last white Christmas was in 2004, when snow was widespread across Northern Ireland, Scotland, parts of Wales, the Midlands, north-east and far south-west England.  I can’t remember that!

Every Picture Tells a Story – Benidorm c1960

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain…. Roads, the radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”                                                                                                                                           Norman Lewis –  ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.  After paying the rent on the first floor Catford apartment Grandad used to spend most of the rest of his wages on Embassy cigarettes, Watney’s Red Barrel and in the Bookies so perhaps he had a secret source of income?  He does look like a bit of a gangland boss in some of these pictures or perhaps he had a good system and had done rather well on the horses.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well.  Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

World Heritage Sites

Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the image