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.)
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| 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!)
