See here for more stories from the remarkable year of 1847.
Clerkenwell, East London, Christmas Day, 1847
In centuries to come, the legend would circulate of how the young London confectioner had sat by his fireside ruminating on how to sell more of his delicious French-style bon-bons to the Yuletide shoppers. The packaging was good, the contents were undeniably delicious, the price was perfectly reasonable.
And yet something was missing.
Lo! a loud crackle from the log fire sizzled into his ears, and there appeared unto him a moment of divine inspiration.
A bang.
That’s all that was needed. When people are celebrating they love a good bang.
And so it was, the story runs, that Tom Smith invented the Christmas cracker.
Tom Smith’s tale is in fact a little less cosy than that. It began in 1830, when, shortly before the coronation of William IV, the six-year-old from Newington, Surrey, started work at a baker’s and ornamental confectioner’s shop in central London.[1] The shop may well have belonged to his father, also named Thomas and also a confectioner, who was fated to appear twice before the London Court of Bankruptcy in 1840.
In early 1847 Tom, now twenty-four, felt sufficiently confident to go it alone, establishing his own ornamental confectioner’s shop at 11 Frederick Place, off Goswell Road in the east London village of Clerkenwell.[2] Clerkenwell Green was then a popular meeting-place for the growing numbers of Chartists demanding a radical democratisation of Britain’s political system. Perhaps Tom Smith’s customers included Charles Dickens, who knew this area well and banked at the nearby Finsbury Savings Bank; Clerkenwell Green was where Fagin and the Artful Dodger inducted Oliver Twist into the delicate art of pick-pocketing in Dickens’s masterpiece, published as a serial during Smith’s teenage years.
Tom Smith was by now a skilled master of sweet manufacturing, primarily fondants, praline chocolates and gum pastilles. He had also learnt how to craft wedding cake ornaments, devising his own innovative decorations as he went along. One of his best-selling sweets was the bon-bon, a sugared almond wrapped in a twist of colourful tissue paper.
With his business established, Smith found a wife, Martha Hunt, with whom he had six children. On their wedding certificate of 1848 Smith described himself as a ‘commercial traveller’, suggesting that he was a man determined to find a market beyond the confines of his shop. He needed to find a way to distinguish himself from his rivals, because by 1853 Smith’s shop in Goswell Road was only one of fifty-five confectioners listed in The Shopkeeper’s Guide to London. There were two others in Clerkenwell alone, but daily life there was beginning to change dramatically as the first of some two thousand Italians moved into the south-west of the parish during the early 1850s.
By 1860 the Smiths had moved to Bronte Cottage, a three-storey Regency building opposite Hampstead Heath.[3] At some point in the preceding years he had purchased the working idea of his snap-cracker from Tom Brown, an experimental chemist at Brock’s Fireworks in south London. Brown’s design ensured that when two people, adult or child, pulled at either end of one of his crackers, the friction from two saltpetre strips within would produce the desired snap.
Smith’s company had moved to 320 City Road, London, by the time his ‘Bangs of Expectation’ crackers were first offered to the public in the run-up to Christmas, 1860. They evidently sold well, because he soon moved his business once again, this time to three adjoining five-storey buildings in Wilson Street, on the south side of Finsbury Square. Here he employed seven men and sixteen women.[4] He also began marketing his crackers as ‘cosaques’, because the snap they made was said to resemble that of a Cossack cavalryman cracking his whip.
The family was still at Bronte Cottage when Tom Smith died of stomach cancer in 1869 at the age of forty-six. The ‘King of Crackers’, as he was later dubbed by the press, was buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.[5] Martha moved to 105 King Henry’s Road in Primrose Hill, and her three teenage sons, Tom, Henry and Walter, took on the family business. (The pink, five-storey house on nearby Albert Terrace, which inspired the location for Dodie Smith’s 101 Dalmatians, was built in 1847.) The boys performed with aplomb and by 1877 the Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist was applauding ‘Messrs. Thomas Smith & Co:.
‘ for producing the most sumptuous and astonishing costume cosaques of any yet attempted. They are simply magnificent in their general appearance in the boxes, and of faultless excellence when their contents are displayed … [Smith’s] rank among the largest, best, and most deservedly popular of cosaque makers … [and are] always among the first to introduce new and elegant novelties.’ [6]
By the middle of the 1880s the company was one of the biggest wholesale confectioners in London, offering more than five hundred types of sweet of different shapes and flavours. It was also Britain’s leading manufacturer and wholesaler of crackers, offering eight styles, complete with love mottoes and surprise presents. Year after year the Tom Smith crackers became ever more popular, and his sons reacted accordingly, ensuring that there was something different for the advent of each new Christmas season. The love verses evolved into puzzles and drawings, eventually becoming today’s annual ordeal of dreadful jokes. Walter, the youngest son, also oversaw the introduction of paper hats.
The name ‘Tom Smith’ is now owned by the IG Design Group (formerly International Greetings PLC), which uses his name for branding purposes.
However, an annus horribilis burst upon the Smiths in March 1889. Shortly before the premature death of the younger Tom Smith, a two-hour inferno of unknown origin gutted two of the company’s three buildings in Wilson Street, as well as the adjoining premises of Messrs Samuel and Sons, harmonium manufacturers.[7] One imagines it must have been a particularly sparky fire. Fortunately the confectionery itself survived, and the factory was hastily rebuilt, as it was again after two further fires in 1902 and 1928. The business also had its own printing operation, Smith, Val Rosa and Company, established in the late nineteenth century for the printing of Christmas cards, catalogues and box labels, as well as external contracts.
When Martha died, in 1898, her sons erected an elaborate drinking fountain in Finsbury Square in her memory. Eight years later the Smiths received their first royal warrant. In 1953 the business merged with Caley Crackers and moved to Norwich, but the company – no longer run by the family – went bankrupt in the late 1990s.
Among the company’s most prized possessions was a diamond engagement ring posted to the Smiths by a gentleman in 1927, along with a ten-shilling note to cover the cost of placing the ring in a special cracker for his fiancée. Unfortunately, he failed to provide a forwarding address, and, because he never contacted the company again, his ring was never collected. Alas, if you are that gentleman, you’re too late: the ring is not part of the Tom Smith Archive, now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and I’m afraid nobody seems to know where it is.
Imgard’s Candy Canes, 1847
The first documented use of candy canes in the U.S. is attributed to August Imgard (1828-1904), a German-Swedish immigrant from Wertzlar, Germany, who settled in Wooster, Ohio. In December 1847, the 21-year-old tailor decorated a blue spruce tree with all-white candy canes, paper ornaments, apples, candles, nuts and popcorn. He had a tinsmith make him a tin star for the top of the tree. For a long time, he was credited with being the first person to bring the Christmas tree to America but this is not so.
Christmas Tradition
Christmas was a full blown, week-long party in the Georgia Age where it was all about getting sozzled, watching the pantomime, snogging each other and public festivity. Then the boring old Victorian came and made it all about religion and charity and family, dragging the event into church halls and domestic dining rooms. Prince Albert and Queen Adelaide are wrongly credited with bringing the Christmas tree to Ireland. The first documented use of a Christmas tree in Britain occurred in 1800 when Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, decorated a yew tree for a children’s party at Windsor Castle.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Maria O’Brien who stuffed Tom Smith’s cracker with such rich contents and to Peter Kimpton (thekingofcrackers.co.uk) who helped me pull it open.
Further Reading
Kimpton, Peter, Christmas Crackers: Tom Smith’s Magical Invention, Woodbridge (Suffolk): Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015.
Footnotes
[1] Thomas Smith’s age is given as 27 in the 1851 census, at which time he and his 25-year-old wife, Martha, are living at St Mary’s in Islington, London, with sons Thomas (2) and Henry (10 months) and servant Eliza Collingham. Two more sons, Walter and Francis, and two daughters, Martha and Pastcella, followed.
[2] Elizabeth Lomas, in her Guide to the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 240, states that Tom Smith acquired the patent for the cracker in 1847. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired the Tom Smith group archive in 1998.
Thomas Smith, confectioner, of 11 Frederick Place, is listed in The Shopkeeper’s Guide to London (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1853). In 1847 a Thomas Debenham Mills used this same address to patent a measuring machine, according to Newton’s London Journal of Arts and Sciences (London: W. Newton, 1847). Mills was recorded as a cabinet-maker at the same address in the Post Office London Directory (1843).
[3] This house was also home to the landscape artist Walter Cristall and, later, to Mary Hill (1870–1947), a popular local watercolourist. Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead, A Report on the Work of the Library Service in Hampstead (London: Libraries Committee, 1956).
[4] Details from the 1861 census.
[5] He was referred to as the ‘King of Crackers’ in the London Echo on 10 December 1885. His death was registered at St Luke’s Church, Old Street, in January–March 1869. However, it was reported that, because the churchyard was overflowing, he was buried in Highgate Cemetery. In the 1871 census Martha, Thomas and Henry were recorded as ‘cake-ornament makers’.
In 1858 Tom had been recorded as a teetotaller. National Temperance League, The Annual Report and Register of the Members of the National Temperance League for the Year Ending December 31st, 1858 (London: National Temperance League, 1859), p 33.
[6] Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist, vol. 17 (1877), p. 252..
[7] Times (London), 8 March 1889, p. 8.