This was chosen simply because it was issued in 1980, and this year is the eightieth anniversary of V.E. Day. A bit of a tenuous link, but I failed to find a card number eighty from a set I had not used before.
Our star player today is Peter Simon Barnes, who was born in June 1957. His career has included playing, managing, and commentating on football, and he is also probably remembered by some of our readers as the son of the 1950s Manchester City player Ken Barnes.
This item is slightly borderline in some people`s definition of "cartophilic", but you can find the footballer portrait without the wax wrapper, either peeled off, as intended, and then stuck on to something else, or cut round leaving a part of the wrapper on the back.
At which point I ought to say that I have shown both images the right way up for easy reading, whereas on the original the wrapper would have been turned to the left, so that the "card" is stuck behind the "SQUAD" word which appears at the top on our picture. In fact, you would be lucky indeed to find the wrapper and card in this easy to read a condition, for it was not issued round cards like usual bubblegum wrappers were, instead it was rolled around a silver foil paper that contained sweets rather like fruit gums, but harder, with an outer shell coating and an inner that was soft and chewy - and each packet included a mixture of assorted flavours, either blackcurrant, lime, or strawberry (none of which would have appealed to me)
A complete set was twenty-six footballers, and they were to be stuck on a special wall chart. This may amaze our younger readers, but the wall chart was free, you only had to send in a coupon with your name and address, and some stamps to pay for the post and packing, which was the grand sum of 20p....
Mind you that was just four pence more than three rolls of the sweets, which retailed for 8p a roll.
Trebor Ltd. first appear in our original British Trade Index part two, and though this set is not there it shows they had form as to the style of this set, for they are described as "Bubble Gum. Wax-paper issue". However this book only covers sets from 1955 to 1965, and ours is later, late enough to be included in our next part of the British Trade Indexes, namely part three, that covers issues up to 1986, it is not there either - though section 1 of the Trebor listing does state it is for "Wax-Paper issues", though only those in the 1950s and 1960s.
I will see if I can find them as a New Issue in our magazine by the time the newsletter comes out!
After this, at the end of the 1980s, Trebor was bought out by Cadbury-Schweppes. And in 1990 it was renamed to Trebor-Bassett.