So we end our week`s tribute to the Turkey with this set, and hopefully after this you might regard them with more affection and understanding, and not just as dinner. I also managed not to use cards that treated this noble bird so, and there were a couple of cards that I was offered which were rejected on just those grounds.
Cerebos Ltd was actually registered in 1894, by George Weddell, and he believed it would revolutionise the salt market, because before that time salt was sold in blocks much as you get to leave in a field and allow a horse to gnaw on, much as the cook would attempt to chip a bit off to add to their cooking pots. It was not thought possible to have salt in a container, just to sprinkle on food at the table, and actually it was not, until the advent of Cerebos` design, which included anti-caking agents, (in actual fact, phosphates) which prevented the Sodium chloride crystals from forming into a solid block.
In 1902 there is record of the dissolving of a partnership between George Weddell, Elizabeth Mawson, and Joseph Wilson Swan, of Newcastle upon Tyne. They had been known as Mawson, Swan and Weddell and had plied the trade of chemist and druggists in that city. And they had also sold the revolutionary salt. In fact in their advertising, and for some time, they had been able to say the salt was "....ordered by hundreds of Doctors as everyday food." But from that point, George Weddell was going it alone - though in actual fact he had already set up another company, Cerebos Salt, and had been running it since 1894. And he registered it as a Limited Company on the 28th of November 1903, with codicils that he would be entering into other countries to sell it, and also be buying salt wells and works, both here and abroad.
Not long after that he started to buy up works, starting in 1904 with the Greatham Salt and Brine Works in Hartlepool, which he made his HQ, presumably to prove that he made the salt all himself, at his own works. He already had plenty of brands, not just the Cerebos Table Salt, but Cerebos Baking Powder, Cerebos Cooking Salt, Cerebos Health Salt, Cerebos Pepper, and Pepsalia Digestive Salt. He added a lower cost brand, not so heavily or carefully refined, in 1907. This was called Saxa Salt. And the following year, perhaps by accident, he invented Bisto gravy powder. We know that from 1923 Cerebos also had a factory in Acton.
This card must have been printed for a French branch, but we know very little about that. We do know some of the other cards, which seem to suggest it is only birds - these are :
- Barbezieux
- Canards d`Aylesbury
- Cochinchinois fauve
- Crevecoeur
- Dindon Bronze - Dindon Cambridge
- Houdan
- Wyandotte