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Consumer Services and Produce Councils
After spending some time looking at both the cooking with leaflets and the going metric ones, I noticed I had quite a few other similar leaflets in my possession, again brought back from my family home. In common with those, they are all issued by various marketing boards or councils.
Some of them even share the same address. For instance, the Mushroom Consumer Service and the British Farm Produce Council were both based out of Agriculture House in Knightsbridge. Others are dotted around a little bit further afield, like the Apple and Pear Development Council in Tunbridge Wells.
But I just have a small snapshot of these leaflets. Whilst my mum was an avid collector of pamphlets, I don’t believe she would have collected absolutely all of the ones available. It makes me wonder just how many other councils, bureaus, and consumer services there were back in the 70s, and possibly beyond. I had never considered the fact that there would need to be a dedicated mushroom consumer service before. Fascinating.
I’ve grouped the leaflets below by their publisher.
British Farm Produce Council, Agriculture House, Knightsbridge
Mushroom Consumer Service, Agriculture House, Knightsbridge
Was there a “Cold meals with mushrooms” guide as well?
The Wine Development Board, 1 Vintner’s Place, London
Metrication Board, 22 Kingsway, London
See the full set of going metric images
The Apple and Pear Development Council, Union House, the Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells
They clearly had the budget to produce a colourful guide!
The Cheese Bureau, 40 Berkeley Square, London
A glossy cover! Big cheese had big money by the looks of it.
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Coddiwomple
I’m reading a book called Creative First Aid at the moment, written by a couple of Australian authors. I spotted this paragraph on a page about playing “Walking Bingo”. It seems very definite about the word “Coddiwomple.” I’ve never come across it before and wouldn’t have had a clue what it meant, but it’s a lovely word to say out loud. Perhaps I should start using it?
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Going metric
As with my post the other day about the cooking leaflets, these are all leaflets that I saved when emptying my family home. They’ve been sitting on a shelf for the intervening years, but they’re just too fun to leave there. This batch is a bunch of leaflets all about the introduction of metric weights and measures.
Shopping in metric
Metric for shoppers
Some common metric weights and measures
The kilogram
I was a child when these were produced, and I remember that ounces definitely survived as a unit of measurement at home for quite some time. Even in our baking classes at school a few years later, we were still stubbornly sticking to imperial.
