A History of Sweets in 50 Wrappers. Steve Berry

      ‘Hey Mr Bee, why are you buzzing around?’ A Baloo-influenced work ethic for the dole age via the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, circa 1979.

      The Eat Generation. Alternative caramel confectionery in the form of Caramac (1959).

CARAMAC

      Named after Halifax-based toffee tycoon John Mackintosh rather than the American beat poet author of On the Road, Kerouac – no, hang on – Caramac nonetheless seems to have had most in common with the iconoclast, hippie, jazz musings of the latter. First, for an entire decade or more, it defied all marketing logic by continuing to sell without a single commercial spot to its name. (Then 1991 saw a TV relaunch of the ‘I was here all along’ ilk, backed by a pointed, almost sardonic, version of the Tremeloes’ ‘Silence Is Golden’.)

      Second, there was something so gritty in the texture, a viscous fudginess in that original recipe which was so very redolent of melting, syrupy brown nuggets of street heroin. Caramac felt like the detritus, sweepings from the post-war factory floor of Rowntree’s production line, scooped up, tipped into a vat and boiled down into something altogether more… well, moreish. But, of course, it wasn’t. Far from a happy accident, it was a careful concoction of sweetened condensed milk, butter, treacle and so on, intended to replicate as closely as possible the experience of chomping through its cocoa-based cousins.

      In fact, like the best British home cooking, its appeal was driven by economics, austerity and nostalgia. Caramac was a stodgy Sunday sticky toffee pudding turned into a thin, anaemic bar. A bar that, for all the love and attention lavished on its preparation, could never call itself chocolate. Neither fish nor fowl, Caramac sought mainstream acceptance by arranged marriages to other, more established brands. Hence Carawheat, a Jacob’s biscuit covered in a golden Caramac layer, and a later Breakaway version. Though what really took the biscuit was the cheeky twenty-first-century hook-up with a certain four-fingered wafer snack (presumably because of the pleasing, nursery rhyme result). All together now: Kit Kat Caramac, give the dog a bone…

      Hey, have you heard the one about your statutory rights? Rowntree Mackintosh aims for the funny bone in a 1982 comic ad.

      Here’s looking at chew, kid. Triumphantly post-imperial Chewits (1965).

CHEWITS

      In 1965 corporate financier and asset stripper Jimmy Goldsmith, bored with outrageous takeover bids and fending off bankruptcy, boldly chose to move into the confectionery business. He formed Cavenham Foods, named after the family estate, from an amalgamation of the flagging Carsons & Goodies of Bristol, Parkinsons of Doncaster and Hollands of Southport.

      This last was at the time best known for its one penny Arrow bar (advertised in the ’70s by a precocious Bonnie Langford, almost certainly giving rise to the phrase ‘she can’t act for toffee’) but a new fondant chew would put the company – not to mention Barrow-in-Furness bus depot – firmly on the map.

      Chewits were stickier, more sugary and more solid than their nearest rivals Opal Fruits – so much so that they required special machinery from Germany to manufacture and wrap. A special technique was also necessary to smuggle them into your mouth unseen during double maths lessons. The earliest range offered a choice of strawberry, blackcurrant, orange or banana flavours and were packaged in a mottled camouflage design which made them look a little like military refugees from a particularly effeminate NAAFI. By far their greatest sales boost, however, was delivered in 1976 by the Aardman-animated Godzilla-like star of the ‘Muncher’ adverts.

      Alternative muncher monster name suggestions: Chew Hefner, Pepe Le Chew, Nerys Chews, Chiouxsie & The Banshees, Chewy Chase.

      In these, a giant Plasticine Pleistocene chewed his way through some b-movie spoofing scenery, before being quelled by the taste of the altogether more satisfying Chewits (wrappers and all), literally off the back of a lorry. Later ads highlighted the creature’s claymation capers at a selection of tasty international landmarks (the aforementioned bus terminus, the Taj Mahal and the Empire State Building) and a raucous rampage through wartime London, much to the chagrin of the local ARP warden.

      Chewits were popular with pauper and pregnant princess alike. In 1981 an expectant Diana was caught short of cash at a Gloucestershire sweet shop after unexpected cravings for a pack of the strawberry flavour – a story deemed bafflingly headline-worthy by the Daily Mirror. Meanwhile, the penniless tearaways of Merseyside knew exactly which bins to raid for misshapen and discarded rejects at the rear of the Chewits factory on Virginia Street. Let them eat cack, you might say.

      Jimmy Goldsmith became Sir James in 1976. In the midst of issuing writs for defamation against Richard Ingrams’s Private Eye, he moved control of his interests to Paris and privatised the confectionery and bakery businesses. Ironically, the Muncher dinosaur (renamed Chewie the Chewitsaurus by new owners Leaf in 1989) lived to fight another day, long after Cavenham and Hollands themselves became extinct.

      The original Dracula’s Secret, before it was classified ‘deadly’, to make it sound more scary.

COUNT DRACULA’S DEADLY SECRET

      Kids today, eh? Addled with filthy music, junk food and daft fashions, and well before they reach their teenage years. Why can’t they just grow up naturally, like we used to? I blame these raunchy new pop stars. Like that David Essex. And the Rollers, they’re wrong ‘uns. And as for that rag Whizzer and Chips...’ It’s the eternal refrain, but you heard it in the Daily Mirror first, when in the early ’70s they identified the ‘Weenies’, an ominous new, conspicuously consuming, old-before-their-time pre-teen generation. While perusing life-size posters of Kenny, these reprobates subsisted on a diet of Trebor Blobs, spaghetti hoops and ‘iced lollipops – especially the “frighteners” like Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret’. Horror again! The nation’s moral guardians would no doubt have preferred a series of ice lollies themed around the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme or Hard Sums, but it was not to be.

      The spine-tingling ice under analysis came from Wall’s: ‘a creation of “black as night” water ice with a concealed centre of ice cream as bright as the moon when it’s full’. Such florid descriptions were part and parcel of the horror genre of course, and someone in the publicity department relished being HP Lovecraft for a day. The design team went that extra mile, too: the following year, the Count was on the receiving end of the industry’s first focus-group makeover, after a panel of kids demanded he be made ‘even more deadly looking’ with an additional core of strawberry jelly. Food and fanbase in perfect, fiendish harmony.

      Children’s enthusiasm being the mercurial thing it is, though, the Count only saw a handful of summers before Wall’s saw fit to hammer a stick through his heart. You can’t keep a good vamp down, though, and he rose again in 1981, this time just as ‘Dracula’, but in glorious, chiselled 3D. ‘The first ever 3D lolly,’ in fact, ‘complete with protruding fangs and talons and appropriate strawberry colouring.’ This masterpiece of the ice moulder’s