ARTICLES April 2016. For other articles see link below, at the bottom of this page
The CRESCENT CONFECTIONERY Co. Ltd
The Crescent Confectionery Company issued some of the rarest sports
cards known. Today their cards sell for up to £1000's each!
Yet, until now, collectors did not know that there
were, in fact, at least two Crescents!
The cards were not issued by the same
firm
but by different companies sharing the name.
The first firm thrived until 1926; the second vanished by 1931, yet they
left us with
two of the defining sports cards series
of the art deco era. The story has been largely unknown until now.
Thanks go to Doreen Hedley for her knowledge of the former firm, and
for some answers to the mystery of the latter.
Without her much of this article would remain
unwritten and these things unknown. Her photos beautifully decorate our
monotone
images of the cards that her great grandfather, and
his successors at Crescent, issued as gifts with their confectionery, 90
years ago.
When writing of the 1920s, the jazz age, the time of Howard Carter &
King Tut, and the very decade of Crescent cards, certain
similarities between that world and our own times emerge, not
least in the area of economics. Don’t worry! No boring stuff to come.
The Roaring '20s experienced deflation
(happening nowadays too) and boom & bust (we know something of that
also) and a massive
upsurge in the production of sports trade cards! Bathos aside,
this is true. Barratt, Bunsen and even Baines are testimony to this.
Baines
had been the Victorian & Edwardian powerhouse in
sports cards production. Baines re-launched shaped trade cards in
the 1920's,
to compete with Boys' Magazine, Battocks, Bunsen and
Crescent, in the ever more popular sports trade card market.
The 1920 photo below shows the factory, on The Crescent, in Salford, c.1910.
Most 1920s cards were issued with comics but Crescent cards came with
sweets, like those of Bunsen and Barratt.
The sports cards made by these firms
are a generally unrecognised miracle of flappers’ good fortunes - enjoyed
today!
By enormous margins these cards have made windfalls
for their erstwhile owners, and continue to do so for sellers.
Most
1920s trade cards were thrown away, lost or
destroyed. Surviving copies have come to be valued highly.
Issued with
sweets or pharmaceuticals, like throat lozenges, Crescent’s
small cards celebrated sporting greats of the time,
notably famous
footballers, and other subjects like famous people, military heroes,
uniforms & weapons.
This 1910 photo shows the view of The Crescent from the Crescent factory itself. Today, the University of Salford stands here.
The Crescent letterhead atop describes some of the
firm’s products, including a ‘chlorodyne lozenge’, which was sold
as an
over-the-counter cure for bronchitis. Are Crescent
cards perchance rarer than Barratt cards due to their association, in
some
cases, with unpopular produce? Lozenges for coughs don’t seem
the most attractive reason to spend pocket money to collect
football
cards. Moreover, these days the Crescent cough pastel would be more than
a little risqué. It was made of an arcane mix
of
laudanum, from opium, with cannabis tincture! No doubt today's multinational-controlled
pharmaceutical industry wouldn’t
approve of such ‘natural’ medicines interfering with its billions
in profit from patented artificial drugs designed to keep us... ill.
Cards issued by Crescent, especially the sports
cards, are some of the rarest, and, I suggest, the most under-valued
trade cards
on the market today.
Under-valued?
How can I suggest such a thing? Many readers will recall that a certain
golfer on a
Crescent
Confectionery Cigarettes card recently sold for more than £2,000
Sterling. See below for image. Well, I
suggest that it
sold at about the right price level considering the
world market for golf cards. Soccer cards by the same
issuer are under-valued
at only c.£100 each.
Undervalued because the market is bare of them, they cannot easily be
found and some, rather silly price
guides would have you think that
the cards are valued as lowly as... a set of car floor mats! The cards
were printed and
packaged in a major city (Manchester), as were Barratt & Co.’s
sports cards (London) yet rare Barratt cards of the mid-1920s
are seen
much more frequently. This must be due to better distribution & sales by
Barratt, a firm that seems to have also
succeeded in stamping-out the
competition, in the likes of Bunsen, the later incarnation of Crescent & other, similar
competitors
from the 1920s sweets’n’sports cards market.
above: examples of the 1923-24 footballers, Below, an example of what even a creased card can make in 2016 - £90.00!
The first Crescent Confectionery Company Ltd., ‘The Great Novelty
House’ as it branded itself, had made confectionery
for at least 30
years
under the guidance of its long-standing director, Mr.
John Jackson. He was a former travelling
salesman who did porridge
with hard labour in the early 1890s following a bankruptcy. Here John Jackson
is seen with
three of his children, sometime around the time of The
Great War
John Jackson turned his life around and left a legacy of success by
the time he retired, aged 76.
His successful firm had its roots as far back as 1897.
It had made and sold confectionery, cough cures and, of course, football
cards, the first series of which we now know and love as the Crescent
footballers. These cards are the ones with a
greenish-grey tint,
quality photographs and a decorative art nouveau pattern to the rear. They can
be dated to 1923-1924 by the
players and teams included, for example
Hammer’s legend, Danny Shea. The Crescent footballers card of
Shea shows the star
at Coventry City. Shea played for City during
1923-24. He had moved to Orient by late 1924. This card surely would not have
been designed nor print-set much later than the end of 1924, by when
Shea was back in London. The weekly football magazine
of the time,
Topical Times, was a great way of keeping soccer card printers, like
Crescent, up to date with the all team transfers.
John Jackson’s earlier firm Jackson & Hoyle Confectioners,
had long been based at The Crescent, along with his family, in
residence
there since 1891. During the years of Jackson & Hoyle,
Elizabeth Jane Nuttall, his wife, was in business herself, and
according
to a note in the London Gazette of 27th April 1897 The
Crescent Confectionery Company was listed as her firm!
Here she
is, in the photo below, shown with John Jackson
John Jackson outlived his wife by three decades. He retired in 1926
when their Crescent Confectionery Co. Ltd. ceased
trading. As John Jackson’s great granddaughter, researcher &
family archivist, Doreen Hedley confirms, "My mum…her
parents
and
siblings lived [with John Jackson, grandfather] at The
Crescent until approximately 1927 [by] when
they all left the factory to
live with her other grandfather, also in Salford.”
Doreen continues, “John Jackson went to
live with his [other]
daughter, at whose home he died on 10th
June 1929, aged 79.”
Ironically the cause of his death was bronchitis, for
which the Crescent chlorodyne lozenges had been intended to
aid.
In 1926 a new, private company limited by shares was
launched. It used the same name and it was based at the
same site yet it was neither the same company nor was
the Jackson family behind it.
The Crescent Confectionery Co. (1926) Ltd.,
as the second firm was called, produced two series of cards.
Both had plain backs. A series of 100 cards of
various themes (issued in sub-sets of 10s) featuring army, navy,
sportsmen and footballers, being the 8th series of 10.
Those ten cards included Sam Wadsworth of Huddersfield Town.
He dates this set because he moved to Burnley in 1929.
After 1930 a second
series of cards with plain backs was issued. We have come to know it as
the Sportsmen series.
There were 100 cards including Jack Carr (#3) of Blackpool. He
dates this, latter set to 1930-31 as he was at Boro until May
of 1930.
So, we can now, finally date the three series of Crescent cards, issued by the two firms:
a. 'Footballers' (greenish-grey printing, cards with decorous
printed backs) are from 1923-24;
b. 'General interest', i.e. various themes cards,
plain backs, numbered as sub-sets of 10s are from
1927-28;
and
c. 'Sportsmen', with plain backs, numbered 1 to
100, are from 1930-31.
Here are a few of the cards from the two later series, produced by the later Crescent company.
These images are not to scale.
Of what happened to this short-lived limited company, little
is known. It disappeared from the public record after 1930.
To survive pressure from Barratt’s it may have joined
Cadbury’s (see photo, below).
The factory in Manchester continued
to make sweets under the guidance of a former worker at
Crescent.
The doyen at Neureuter T. Manufacturing Confectioners,
Crescent’s successor in Salford, was, as Doreen notes,
“Toni Neureuter…she and her sister were at the [Crescent] factory when my mum and her sisters
were living there… in the early
1920s.”
Cadbury's Crescent, perchance?
There are many more images of cards and Crescent's history, and its founding family down this page so please do scroll down
copyright © Carl Wilkes 2016
©
Carl Wilkes is the creator and former publisher-editor of
"F.C.C.M."
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