Side-tracked by Jumbo...

I have to admit that one of the great joys of researching the Benson company is the side-tracking which often occurs when I'm looking at old newspapers on the British Library Newspaper Archive site.  Today, working my way through old copies of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, I stumbled across this:

It was December 1886 when 'Jumbo, the Great Mammoth Cheese weighing 4,172 lbs made from the milk of 3,300 cows... milked by over 300 dairymaids' was on exhibition at Lipton's Grocery Shop in Newcastle's Clayton Road, just round the corner from the Theatre Royal where the Bensons were appearing that week.

If the sight of a 'most wonderful and gigantic mountain of cheese' wasn't enough of an inducement to visit Lipton's: 'When being made numerous sovereigns and half-sovereigns - provided by Mr Lipton - were mixed amongst the curds.  The gold becomes the property of the lucky purchaser when the cheese is cut.'  

As always, the discovery of such a gem leads to a bit of further google searching, and I soon discovered that Sir Thomas Lipton's cheese was in fact a mere crumb in giant cheese terms, dwarfed in 1893 by the Mammoth Canadian Cheese sent by rail to the World's Fair in Chicago:

So heavy was this cheese that it actually smashed through the floor of the exhibition building!  In Perth, Ontario, there is even a life-sized monument to it beside the railway line...

Lipton was a self-made grocery magnate and tea importer who was born in a Glasgow tenement but rose to be 'Grocer to the King' as well as a keen yachtsman, winning a host of trophies which are now on display in his home city.   His chain of grocery shops survived in the UK into the 1970s, becoming 'Presto' before disappearing into the vast Unilever empire.  His company name still survives as a tea trademark.

Jumbo the giant cheese was mentioned again in the advertising columns of The Evening Chronicle a week later:

when 'contractors' were needed for 'digging operations' on the cheese! Extra sovereigns and half sovereigns were added to the cheese as a 'Christmas treat' before the cheese was cut.  The extra NOTICE:

'Mr Lipton will not be responsible should anyone be choked by the sovereigns or half-sovereigns while eating the cheese'

suggests that someone may well have tried that particular trick!  

I've failed to find any photo of Lipton's shop in Clayton Street although the building still stands - it's a British Heart Foundation charity shop now.  However, Newcastle Libraries have this image of Lipton's in 1920's Byker  (just down the road from the Byker Grand Theatre where FRB had laid the foundation stone and given the first performance on its stage.)

Newcastle Libraries  https://www.flickr.com/photos/newcastlelibraries/4091031058/in/album-72157622716564955/

How much more exciting does that look than a modern supermarket?

(I have had a very successful Bensonian day too - I forced myself not to attend to the cheese until I'd done a couple of hours of digging of my own!)

Snowbound

'View' (??!!)  from the window Tuesday morning

They're calling it 'The Beast from The East'.  It is a Siberian weather system which has all of the UK in its grip and which is causing road, rail and communication chaos. It must be bad: for the first time in a 27 year teaching career, I've had snow days - normally, we're too close to the North Sea Coast for the snow to make much of an impact but the last three days have seen almost constant snow and temperatures well below freezing. 

As someone with a natural tendency towards hibernation, the chance to stay in doors, huddled under my newly-completed patchwork quilt, and comfort-eat has been a real delight.  Feeling like an intrepid explorer, I've only been as far as the nearest post box and the 24hour garage over the road since Tuesday, coming back with bread and soup and Jaffa cakes and vowing not to stir forth again until I can see pavement.  I've done lots of work for work, and so I think I might spend the rest of today Benson hunting.

We're actually cossetted from the weather these days - winters in the past were often much colder and snowier than this.  What would it have been like, moving the Company from place to place in the extremes of a bad winter?  Less than a minute of Googling found me at this British snowfall table, and the temptation to try an match it up to the data base is proving irresistible!  I'm quite sure FRB would have simply soldiered on, regardless of any blizzard!

I also remembered a book I'd downloaded onto my Kindle several years ago but which I haven't read yet. Snowbound is a collection of short stories written by Bram Stoker, famed author of Dracula as well as being Sir Henry Irving's right-hand man.  A Touring theatre company, travelling by train, finds itself stuck in a snowdrift somewhere in Scotland.  To pass the time, while they wait to be rescued, they tell each other stories.  First published in 1908, it sounds like exactly the thing I need to sit and read as I wait for the snow to go...

Stay warm and safe!

UPDATE!

Finished Snowbound last night: some interesting ideas about how one might start a 'safe' fire in a railway carriage using props and basic theatrical equipment - amazing what one can achieve with a 'thunder sheet'! Some interesting stories particularly those told from a backstage perspective. Too many attempts to reproduce dialect in non standard spelling does make parts hard going. However, the highlight was the story about the Star Trap. This stood out as having been much more carefully thought out and considered. All in all, a pretty good book to read when actually snowbound!