Rachel Jardine's programme explores how many of today's grocery brands began life in the Edwardian era. She explained to BBC Four how she stumbled across a number of surprises when researching the film.
Making The Edwardian Larder has been fascinating. For many of these brands, there hasn’t really been an attempt to look at their emergence in their historical context.
Take Marmite. It was founded in 1902 and is regarded as an iconic British brand, but it is amazing how little information is out there about it. Even finding out who founded the company was difficult. But when you discover that two of the men who set up the company – Frederick Wissler and George Huth – were Swiss and German respectively, it suddenly makes sense. With increasing concerns about Germany in the years after Marmite was founded, it wouldn’t have been sensible to publicise foreign connections.
With so little history to go on, I wondered what I was going to be able to say about Marmite. Then I started to find references to it in vegetarian recipe books of the period. So I have concentrated on the way Marmite took off as a ‘meat stock’ substitute for vegetarians.
All the products in the programme have their surprises. The Edwardian period is the moment when food brands come into their own. Packaged food had been around for quite a while (the first packaged tea, Horniman’s, came out in 1826) but it’s a different thing to create a true brand. That’s about a combination of product, packaging, and public perception. So real branding came into being in about the 1890s, and by 1900 it was really taking off. In the Edwardian era you see products becoming heavily advertised, recognised by the public and sold across Britain. This is the moment when food manufacturers began to understand how to manipulate people’s perceptions – targeting the working classes or seeking to appeal to the middle class woman with aspirations (as with Perrier, which was promoted by The Daily Mail).
The Captain Scott story is perhaps the most exciting for me. Whilst searching for information on one of the more obscure brands, ‘Lemco’ – a beef extract made by the company which created Oxo in 1900 – I was surprised to find it mentioned in books about the explorers Scott and Shackleton.
When I looked at the official accounts of the expeditions, they contained eulogies to the wonders of various branded foods. The great Edwardian explorers realised that they could use their fame to get free supplies for their expeditions. Scott’s team actually posed for cheesy publicity shots, holding mugs of cocoa or tins of baked beans. This sort of mutually beneficial arrangement still exists today - a real Edwardian innovation.
Scott even visited factories to see products packed up for his 1910 British Antarctic Expedition. When the explorers unpacked at their base camp in Antarctica, employees of Fry’s Chocolate had put good luck notes in the cases of cocoa. Scott’s hut still survives in Antarctica, stuffed with Edwardian packaged food – not just a monument to Scott, but also to the birth of commercial sponsorship.
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