A packet of cereal, a free offer and more Flags of the World

What I like about history is the way it comes in all shapes and sizes.

Now I have never been one for Kings, Queens and famous people who after all only shaped the past with the help of a lot of other people, most of whom were too poor, too illiterate or just too plain unlucky to get even a footnote in a history book.

And I rather think it is an approach which is shared by lots of other people who want their slice of history to be about the lives of people like themselves with just a century or too between them and their ancestors.

So here as much because its about my childhood in the the 1950s as anything are a selection of those products which appeared in our our house in Lausanne Road a full sixty years ago.

Many I think were bought by mum because I had been seduced by the give away toy although I know she ended up with one brand of soap powder for years because of the free plastic tulip that came stick to the side of the packet.

In the case of that brand of cereal it varied from the stamp collecting set to the plastic racing cars and the model divers.

Of these I have to confess the last was the most disappointing.

The idea was to add a little baking powder into a hole in the helmet and drop the model into a bowl of water where upon it would shoot to the surface in a cascade of bubbles.

Mine however just floated on the surface mocking all my efforts to make it work and reinforcing my German grandmother’s stern rebuke that “what you get for free isn’t worth a lot.”

And those 1 free promotions, just kept on coming whether it was the stamp kit, the boomerang or those plastic flowers.

Two decades earlier it had been the newspapers which offered giveaways, now it is that seductive offer of two for one which invariably looks good in the supermarket but ends up not being used up by the sell by date.

So give me the free offer, and the more plastic and tacky the better, just as long as it’s not the deep sea diver.

And somewhere lost for half a century and a bit will be my collection of Flags of the World, which were sold with a piece of bubble gum.

I wrote about them yesterday but couldn't resist returning to them.  They were part educational became a plaything and a medium of exchange in the playground and came with that thin slice of bubble gum.

It you were lucky the bubble gum was still a bit soft, but more often it was hard, brittle and flaky with a slight dusting of white powder.

It was pretty revolting stuff and powerful enough to give the cards a light smell of the gum that lingered long after the bubble gum had been eaten

Picture; adverts from Eagle May 30 1959, and Flags of the World, courtesy of 
Flags of the World, http://www.deanscards.com/c/716/1956-Topps-Flags-of-the-World