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Chapter 5

Pull the Other One

IN 1840, whilst visiting Paris, Thomas J. Smith, a baker of wedding cakes from London, came across sugared-almond sweets wrapped individually in small squares of waxed paper. Returning home, Smith began selling these French ‘bon bons’ from his shop in Goswell Road, Clerkenwell.

With the sweets popular with his female clientele, and further inspired by Chinese fortune cookies, Smith began slipping love mottos inside the sweets’ wrappings. As popular as the bonbons were, sales dropped off after Christmas, and so, the following year, he wrapped the sweets and motto in a small tube, including either a charm or trinket.

Further encouraged by the crackle of a log fire, Smith then increased the size of the tube, and added two strips of thin card coated with saltpetre. Commonly found in gunpowder, the saltpetre created a small bang when the strips of card were pulled. Eventually the bonbon sweet was replaced with a small gift and, in 1860, Tom Smith’s ‘Bangs of Expectation’ were launched: the Christmas cracker was born.

By 1900, Tom Smith’s factory was thought to be selling over 13 million crackers a year.

With Smith long passed on, in 1963 the company moved to Norwich, where it continued to make more than 40 million crackers a year; placed end-to-end, long enough to form a ring around the moon.

No longer just for the ladies, aside from a joke and a paper hat, this is what you might expect to find inside a box of crackers:

Miniature Spyglass

Pretend you are Inspector Clouseau with a miniature spyglass. If your eyesight is going, perfect for reading the joke that came with it.

Miniature Compass

…that permanently points North-North-West!

Plastic ring

With this plastic ring, I thee wed.

Miniature playing cards

Anyone for gin rummy?

Miniature screwdriver

For those holiday DIY jobs!

Curly fish

Read the fortune of every person around the table with a thin red curly fish.

Miniature Shoe Horn

Perfect, if you happen to be one of the seven dwarfs.