And our third clue was again the subject, Fred YULE who was not only a popular radio star, but also a very well renowned gardener, whose name lives on in a delphinium and a lupin. You can read about his radio days at wikipedia - and his calmer times in the garden courtesy of Leigh Gardening. Strangely the radio piece mentions that his was the voice that stopped the traffic on “In Town Tonight” so I quickly went to the Churchman set we featured last week, but no, he is not there.
Yule isn`t really another word for Merry Christmas, it refers more to the Winter Solstice, though it has started creeping in to jolly cards for significant others with rather corny messages like "Say Yule Be Mine". And of course there is "Cool Yule", which means different things to different people, younger folk may think of the Bette Midler Album, but probably don`t realise the same song originated with Louis Armstrong in 1953.
These unusual issues, sixteen sets in total, were printed, in various shades of blue, on the inner slides of a packet of cigarettes, as we show here. One card, as here, was printed on packets of ten cigarettes, and two on packets of twenties. More often you find that the cards have been cut to the more usual rectangular cigarette card shape, something that was almost certainly done to make them easier to store and display.
There is a simple reason why these cards were issued in this way and it is all to do with the shortages, including paper and card, and indeed rationing which continued long after the Second World War; printing the cards on the inner slide, as part of the packet, did not exactly "save" paper, but it did make the stock they were allotted go further, and of course being printed in shades of one colour did the same for ink. In addition, whilst Carreras printed one card in the packets of ten cigarettes, if you bought the twenty size you would get two cards on your inner slide.
The sets started to appear in 1947, the first being "Film Stars". The next year, 1948, there were three sets, including one to celebrate the Olympic Games being once more held in this country, forty years after the last time. From 1949 two sets were produced per year, but in 1953 they only issued one, "British Aircraft". 1954 again saw two sets, "Zoo Animals", and its replacement, "British Fish", but that went from 1954 right into 1955, though it was the only set to have descriptive text, "on the long side panel below the bottom edge of what is the side facing card" (if anyone would like to translate this into proper descriptional terms please do - left and right are beyond me...) The final set "Famous British Fliers", in 1956, had the bonus of being printed in two colours, and it is very attractive for it.
Whilst some collectors might dismiss these, and consider them simply as package issues, they are a part of the cigarette card story, and also have another bonus, for several sport and media personalities of the immediate post war period are there, often making their first, last, or only, appearances.