This clue here is the horse`s name Blue GUM, which refers to the original form of the sticker, where it was just a piece of paper and you had to apply your own stickiness. Also to the fact that many early advertising cards were pressed into another use and stuck down adorning all manner of scrapbooks and other items. The same set does have a horse called Glue, but I dont want to think about that, I just hope he raced really well and saved himself and I will never google it. And don`t you tell me!
The most popular early glue was made of flour and water. You mixed the flour and a little salt with water and mixed it into a paste. There was no cooking, but you had to wait until it dried. This was not a great glue for thin papers but on the thick advertising cards it was fine for it seldom showed through or wrinkled. Some early recipes used milk, but that surely would have gone off and smelt?
Before "racing" on, some people have asked why when a set is issued in Australia, like this one, we have UK as the country code. The answer is that the code is designed to send you to the right part of most dealer catalogues and lists, and all the Wills brand issues usually follow the home issues within the UK section.
Its first appearance in a reference book is Wills part 3, where it is described as having "Fronts lithographed in colour, backs in green, with descriptive text. Australian issue, about 1906" . This is a guess, based on the text, for it does not appear in the lists of issue dates that appeared in the Wills Works Magazine. Our reference book also says that "All cards are found with backs reading from opposite sides", which basically means that there was a bit of a mix up at the printers and when they put some of the sheets of cards in they were upside down. It cannot have been just one sheet out of place because finding those fifty cards and bringing them together would be a very hard task, so there must have been enough to make it fairly easy to gather up a complete set of that error printing. Unless these came from one uncut sheet, and when compared to cards in someone`s collection it was discovered quite by chance?
Our original World Tobacco Issues Index of 1956 does not mention the upside down text variation at all, which is a bit sad as it says that there are three printings, each with a different brand, and that means that we now do not know which of these was the one with the upside down texts. Anyway the brands were :
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A) Capstan
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B) Havelock
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C) Vice Regal
It also links to RB.21/200-75, which is the original British American Tobacco Reference. That adds more back designs and other issuers, namely :
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D) Anonymous issue with letterpress on the back
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E) "Cameo" issue
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F) "Old Judge" issue
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G) "Vanity Fair" issue
They also added that the "Cameo" issue came through American Tobacco of Australia Ltd, via "Cameo Cigarettes", and that "Old Judge" and "Vanity Fair" cigarettes, which they believed were possibly sponsored by American firms Goodwin and Kimball. However according to our Australia and New Zealand Reference Book RB.30, "Cameo" was an offshoot of British American Tobacco, and they even give it the code B116-241. They do not seem to list an American Tobacco of Australia at all, so they are a mystery.
By the time of our updated World Tobacco Issues Index there has been a bit more information again. They say that "Cameo" was a brand issue with no company name, retailed between 1900 and 1906 in Australasia and elsewhere. This suggests the set was also available in New Zealand, but "elsewhere" is not of great help! They add that "Cameo" was originally a Duke brand, but control passed to British American Tobacco in 1902, which means that it must have been an overseas brand. Under British American Tobacco it issued three sets of cards, "Beauties - Curtain Background", "Beauties - Lantern Girls" and our set.
As far as "Old Judge" and "Vanity Fair", they also passed to British American Tobacco at the same time
Now as far as Blue Gum, I can find nothing. There is quite a bit in the racing annals about his brother Blue Spec, shown in this set as card 46/50, also out of Specula by True Blue, for he won the Perth Cup and the Kalgoorlie Cup, the top races in Western Australia, and he won the 1905 Melbourne Cup in the fastest time ever to that date.He then appears to have gone to stud, and it says he sired two big winners and others. Our card even admits that Blue Gum had "No winning performances to end of 1906". Perhaps they thought he would rival his brother, and if he did they would be able to look miraculous.