During the 1960s and 70s, there was only one brand of tea drunk in our household. Twinings, Tetley or Ty-Phoo didn’t get a look in. We were a PG Tips family. And we had no truck with those new-fangled teabags either. We bought our tea in packets. Our mum made it in a teapot, and each cup was poured through a strainer. Teabags didn’t make significant inroads into our household until the late 1980s.
One reason I can be sure of this – and, also of the sheer volume of tea we drank – is my collection of Brooke Bond picture cards. One card was given away free in every packet of tea: indeed, according to the legend on the rear cover of the 1965 collectors’ album of British Birds, ‘picture cards are given with Brooke Bond Tea, Brooke Bond Pure & French Coffees [and] Crown Cup Instant Coffee’. But tea was, I’m sure, by far the most popular source of supply for these small collectables (as a matter of interest, ‘tea bags’ were not mentioned specifically on the albums until the following year’s Transport Through the Ages).
The cards followed a format that had long since been popularised by cigarette manufacturers, sized roughly 2¾ x 1½inches. The front faces featured colour paintings, usually by noted wildlife artists such as C.F. Tunnicliffe and Sir Peter Scott, although the very first set, issued in 1954, had been photographic. On the reverse, printed in a distinctive blue ink, was an informative description of the subject. Albums, priced sixpence, were available from grocers’ shops, providing spaces to mount each card, alongside additional information and line drawings explaining aspects of the chosen subject in more detail. For the first eleven years, the series focused exclusively on natural history subjects such as birds, flowers and butterflies, and a solitary journey Out into Space, issued in 1956.
The first of these albums to find its way into our house was for the series Tropical Birds, issued in the autumn of 1961, when I was just six months old. I must have spent a lot of time leafing through the accompanying album, for it soon lost its covers and four pages, in which state it has survived, somewhat remarkably, to the present day. I can’t overstate how important this album seems to me now. Its glorious paintings of colourful, exotic birds were some of the first images that ever passed into my consciousness and to look at them today is to take a mind trip back to the age of six months. I would continue to gaze at these paintings – lovingly depicted by the aforementioned Mr. Tunnicliffe – for the forseeable future, and sometime in the 1970s was very happy to be able to buy a reprint of the album and a full set of cards. As a child, I had every expectation of seeing the likes of Bluebirds in our back garden, but global warming notwithstanding, I doubt this is ever likely to happen.
After Tropical Birds, we had a lull in collecting. I remember a lad down the street whose father had diligently compiled the sets of British Butterflies, Wild Flowers and Wild Birds in Britain as they appeared in the early 1960s, but we didn’t begin collecting again in our house until 1966. This year saw a minor sea change in the world of Brooke Bond cards. Transport Through the Ages was the first card issue not to feature a natural history subject, but its collector album, featuring exciting painted images of a space rocket, steam loco and cargo ship certainly appealed to my five-year-old sensibilities. Rather remarkably, we managed to collect the entire set of 50 cards. Given that the series ran for around six months, and the likelihood of duplicates, I have to conclude that we drank a lot of tea (much of it consumed by our Dad).
From here onwards, we followed every new series as it came out, although we never again repeated the full set feat of 1966. Transport Through the Ages was followed by Trees in Britain which, after Tropical Birds, remains my favourite set. Trees held a particular fascination for me, and even now my ‘mind’s eye image’ of most species is still the archetype depicted on the Brooke Bond cards. Each tree was shown in full leaf and blossom in one card, with the following card depicting leaves, fruit and seed heads in close up. Illustrations and descriptions were provided by Michael Youens, who would go on to provide the pictures for the the British Costume series two years later. I was much less taken with British Costume than I had been with the earlier issues, and the album was never completed. By 1968, Brooke Bond seemed to have abandoned wildlife subjects for good, with the years to 1971 covering subjects as diverse as heraldry (Flags and Emblems of the World, 1967), motoring history (1968), Famous People (1969), nautical history (1970) and the space race (1971). Collectors could send away for any cards they had failed to collect by the end of each series, and I clearly remember doing this to complete our set of Trees in Britain, but receiving back only one of the two or three cards we were missing. I wouldn’t get to see a completed album until I found one at a collector’s fair a couple of decades later.
1971 saw a return to natural history, with a series almost guaranteed to appeal to me – Prehistoric Animals. For the first time, though, I felt there was something lacking. I’d already seen some of the very fine dinosaur art produced by Rudolph Zalinger, the world-leading specialist in the subject, and by comparison, the Brooke Bond artwork wasn’t as characterful or appealing. The cards were well painted, but the album cover was a total let-down, with artwork that looked like a designer’s rough. It was an early sign of things to come.
1972’s set History of Aviation was in part revisiting familiar territory, as aspects of the subject had been covered in Transport Through the Ages. I was bought the album, and collected a fair few of the cards, but my heart was no longer in it. The following year brought Adventurers and Explorers and The Sea – Our Other World, a nicely-painted set focusing on the kind of territory being explored on television by Jaques Cousteau.
If I’d sensed the series were running out of steam, the next set confirmed it for me, with 1975’s Inventors and Inventions reaching an all-time low for Brooke Bond. This time, it was the cards themselves that disappointed, with artwork hastily rendered in a scamp-style line and ink wash technique. You could see bubbles where the ink had dried. It was all a far cry from the thoughful illustrations of artists like C.F. Tunnicliffe, who had a passion for their subject. Inventors was clearly the work of a journeyman ‘commercial artist’ who apparently invested none of the time or interest in his subject that had made the sets of Tunnicliffe, Youens and others so appealing. I hated Inventors... on sight, and on revisiting it ahead of this article, found my opinion unchanged. The only interesting visual came in the form of the album cover, which featured a photograph of some model caricatures of inventors from history, that looks suspiciously like the work of Spitting Image creators Fluck and Law.
Sadly, there was worse to come. Following a temporary return to form with Wonders of Wildlife, 1976 brought Play Better Soccer. Horrors! What on earth were Brooke Bond thinking of? Some of the earlier series may have erred a little on the side of academia, but the subjects were always of universal interest, and could be categorised under the heading ‘general knowledge’. Now, here was a set aimed only at football fans. It was a misjudgement, and the artwork struggled to improve on the low benchmark set by Inventors…
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Declining standards: the artwork on these 1970s sets was well below the quality seen in earlier series. L-R: Inventors and Inventions, Play Better Soccer, Police File (which came with an album introduced by Shaw Taylor) |
If I’d been losing interest before, I was almost done by this time. Disappointed at the contemporary series, I turned to collecting some of the sets I'd missed back in the 1960s, with reprints including Wild Birds in Britain, African Wildlife and Freshwater Fish. Curiously, not all sets were available this way. Meanwhile, 1977 brought Police File, and another series of cards painted in a slick, modern style: fine for film posters or the covers of cheap novels, but it wasn’t what I wanted to see on Brooke Bond cards. Vanishing Wildlife (1978) was an improvement, but the paintings were still a long way below the high watermark of the early 60s, and the subject had already been covered, definitively, by the respected naturalist Sir Peter Scott back in 1963. 1979 brought Olympic Greats, and a return to photographic images, not seen on Brooke Bond cards since 1954. Woodland Wildlife was similarly photographic, but we’d stopped drinking Brooke Bond tea by this time, and the only examples of these later sets in my collection come from a job lot I acquired somewhere down the line.
The glory days of Brooke Bond card collecting were well and truly over by the mid 80s, with series now including the likes of Chimp Stickers (1986), Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (1991) and The Secret Diary of Kevin Tipps (1995). The appearance of the famous chimp characters on the collectable cards marked a new nadir for the series which had always steered well clear of making any connection with the PG Tips TV commercials. Clearly, lesser minds were now in charge of marketing at Brooke Bond, and it’s hard to think of a worse example of ‘dumbing down’. The number of cards in each set had gone down from 50 to 40 by the late 70s, and was now reduced even further, with the very last ‘collectable’ set (1998’s International Soccer Stars) comprising a mere twenty cards. What had started out as a laudable exercise ‘offered in the interests of education’, had become a dreary commercial endeavour, dragged down by inane subject matter and repetition.
I still own pretty well all of the collectable era of Brooke Bond albums, many of them complete. In addition, I have many loose cards, and recently decided to sort them into sets. In doing so, I noticed the tendency for certain cards to appear in clusters, whilst others were absent altogether. In a typical set, one might find as many as six examples of one card, and this was from a randomly collected pile of cards going back through the decades. There’s only one explanation for this ‘clustering’. Clearly, someone in the production line was pulling out certain cards so as to restrict their numbers, whilst other cards had their print runs extended. This explains why our missing Trees in Britain cards could not be supplied when we sent off for them in 1967: the print run on those cards had fallen short. It was a win/win situation for Brooke Bond: hold back cards to keep customers buying more tea, then charge them again to complete their sets.
Brooke Bond albums were issued in their thousands and accordingly don’t have huge value today. Even early sets like Bird Portraits (1957) can be had for just 99p if you’re prepared to shop around on ebay. There are, of course, sellers who hope for as much as £50 for the same set, but they’ll be relisting for a long time to come.
Whilst certain sets have dated quite badly – Famous People, History of the Motorcar and The Race Into Space (which envisaged a manned landing on Mars by the mid-80s), the wildlife subjects continue to be as relevant as ever, if not more so, and represent some of the very best of their kind. I’m sure they will continue to be collected long after the aberrations of the 80s and 90s have been long forgotten.
And now, after all that, I think it’s time for a cup of the tea you can really taste…
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