Newsletter - 2026-04-18

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MONTY [trade : gum : O/S : Netherlands] "T.V. Stars" - set one (1966) 67/69

Today we are going to start with someone who a lot of people think is fiction, but he is not - though our card does not show him, it shows someone pretending to be him.

The actual person was called Eliot Ness, and he was born today in 1903, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Norwegian family who already had four children, and a bakery. However they made sure that their children had a good education, and our man ended up at the University of Chicago. 

When he graduated, in 1925, he got a job, an odd one, investigating people who wanted credit. He found this interesting, and intriguing, but what he really liked was finding out that one of the people who had applied was not entirely, or not at all, being truthful. 

In 1926 he met a lady called Edna Stahle, who had a brother, and he was working at the Bureau of Investigation He encouraged our man to quit checking credit and start chasing criminals, and, by the sound of it, the prospect was too good to turn down. He also married Miss Stahle, in 1929, by which time he was working at the U.S. Treasury, on prohibition cases. This led him, less than a year later, to join the squad who were out to get Alphonse Gabriel Capone, a "bootlegger", or smuggler of illegal alcohol. He was wanted for a few more things beside that, but it was thought this would be the best way to catch him.

That squad was six men strong, and they were heavily vetted to make sure that they were not corrupt in any way - and it was called "The Untouchables" because none of them had anything that could be used against them by way of leverage or blackmail; they also had to swear an oath that they would never be bribed. And in 1932, Eliot Ness was one of the men who guarded Al Capone as he went to jail in Atlanta, but not for bootlegging - for tax evasion

In 1932, Eliot Ness was promoted to Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau, and he became the last one, for Prohibition ended in 1933. He then became involved with ensuring that people in Kentucky and neighbouring states paid due tax on their home made brews. Then in 1935 he moved to Cleveland, where he was put in charge of safety; and though that sounds a little tame, Cleveland, at the time, was a pretty heavy "mob" area.

In 1938 he got divorced, and went through a bit of a rough patch. That seemed to settle down when he met a new lady, who at the time was working in fashion, as a model and artist, and after they were divorced, in 1945, would become an illustrator, and actually quite a famous one, still calling herself Evaline Ness.  He married again, not long after, to another artist, called Elisabeth Seaver, and they adopted a son, his only child. 

Eliot Ness died on May the 16th, 1957, aged just fifty-four. He had been working on an autobiography, called "The Untouchables" which was published posthumously the same year. That means he never got to see the finished work, nor see it converted into a film, called "The Untouchables", released in 1987 with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness, or a television series, also called "The Untouchables", which began in 1959.

That brings us to our card, and to Charles Langford Modini Stack, who played Mr. Ness in that television series, which went on until 1963, and for which he would win an Emmy. 

He was born in Los Angeles in 1919. His mother chose his name which his father hated, and changed to Robert. When he was a year old they divorced, and his mother took him to live in Italy. They later came back, and his parents remarried, but his father died when "Robert" was ten. 

At first our man was heavily into sport, and he wanted to make that his career, but he could not choose which one he wanted to specialise in. Then, when he was twenty, he visited Universal Studios and they offered him a screen test. That went well and he made his first film, "First Love", which was released in 1939, and hit the headlines by being the first film to show Deanna Durbin being kissed - by our man. He made a few more films with her later, but less controversially. 

During the Second World War he was a gunnery instructor in the U.S. Navy. After the war he was much in demand, usually playing pilots or cowboys. He got married in 1956, to an actress and model, and the former Miss Tacoma and Miss Montana, called Rose Marie Bowe, who had appeared in several films, and modelled for Gil Elvgren. The role of Eliot Ness came along in 1959 and he freely admitted it was not one of his favourites, and he felt that the story was never really developed, so that every week it was more or less the same. In hindsight, that is the truth of even high profile crime fighting, it does take a lot of work to reach a result that will stand up in court, and, for that, the series was an honest portrayal, much more so than series in which a criminal is traced and captured in the space of a single episode. Perhaps to keep him on board, he was given 25% of the profits, which was a much better deal than he had imagined, because the show was syndicated worldwide and there have been many re-runs. And in 1968 he returned to a similar role, in "The Name of the Game", where he was a federal agent turned true crime journalist - but that only lasted until 1971. 

In the late 1970s he took a part in a film he thought was simply a bit of fun. This was the anti-war war epic "1941", directed by Steven Spielberg. The audiences loved it, though, and it gave him a whole new career in comedy films. It also got him another role, as the presenter and narrator of a tv series called "Unsolved Mysteries", which ran from 1987 until 2002. 

In the October of that year he was hospitalised for prostate cancer, and on May 14th 2003 he died, at his home, with his family, of heart failure. He was eighty-four years old. His wife outlived him, and only died on January the 20th, 2019, aged eighty-six

I am beginning to break my self-imposed rule, and allow newsletter cards to be home pages, especially if, as in our case, the set comes first of all, on Saturday. 

This set was the first to be issued, and is the largest set of all, series 2, 3, 4, and 5 only being of fifty-five cards - but sadly none of them have any wording on the reverse, or any idea of which set they are from. 

• Series 1, our set, was issued in 1966, and contains
       cards   1 to 27 - "The Man from Uncle" (but named as "U.N.C.L.E." alone) 
       cards 28 to 42 - "Batman" 
       cards 43 to 65 - "Flipper"
       cards 66 to 69 - "The Untouchables" (but named as "Untouchables-Onkreukbaren").
   
• Series 2 was also issued in 1966, and contains The Saint, Thunderbirds, Zorro, The Fugitive, Love on a Rooftop and Mission Impossible
   
• Series 3 was issued in 1967, and contains Daktari, The Monkees, Mannix, Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Peyton Place, Gentle Ben, The Avengers, High Chaparral, and Zorro
   
• Series 4 was issued in 1968 and we featured that in our newsletter of the 14th of March 2026 as the diary date for Wednesday the 18th of March.
   
• Series 5 was issued in 1970, using silver foil. It is quite scarce.

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James PASCALL Ltd [trade : confectionery : UK - London] "Devon Flowers" - "complete set" only, no red square (1927) 4/30 - PAS-060.B.a : PBS-5.B.a

This is an odd day indeed, because I discovered it was Primrose Day, and though we have had a fair proportion of cards that were issued by Primrose Confectionery, we have not featured the jolly little flower that is so glorious to see amidst the countryside. And I presumed that today marked when they reached their peak, perhaps even that this was the day, in times gone by, that coach parties left the big smoky towns to go and see them. 

It turned out to be nothing to do with any of that, for Primrose Day marks the passing of a Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who died today in 1881. Apparently it was his favourite flower, and after his burial, in Hughenden, every year, on the anniversary of his death, starting in 1882, people would flock there and leave primroses on his tomb. And they also left primroses on his statue, in Parliament Square, London - right until the 1920s, when it started slowing down, I suppose because less and less people remembered him.

In actual fact we are not entirely sure that he would have enjoyed the adulation, or even the primroses, for it was only Queen Victoria`s word that they were his favourite flower, she sent him bunches of them, especially after the death of his wife, and in couple of his thank you letters he reportedly said that he liked them, but I have not been able to find the word "favourite" ever uttered, or written, by him. However, she then sent a wreath of primroses to his funeral, and a note, which said "His favourite flowers from Osborne", and this was when the media of the time picked it up and ran with it.

Then, in 1882, Sir George Birdwood got involved. He wrote a letter to The Times Newspaper, saying how he had noticed a great rise in sales of primroses leading up to the anniversary, and that he hoped St. Stephen`s Club (a noted meeting place for conservative party members) would be similarly festooned. We are not sure either of these things were true, but by the following anniversary The Primrose League had been created.

The Primrose League aimed to continue Disraeli`s dreams and to make the public more aware of what the conservative party stood for. It was indeed hoped, but not openly stated, to attract more voters to their side as well. It allowed women to join too. Its motto was "Imperium et Libertas", which had two meanings, the obvious "Empire and Liberty" and the subtextual "Power and Freedom". Members were entitled to wear a badge, of a primrose, with the letters "PL". They turn up a lot in boxes of mixed badges, something I used to find surprising, but no longer will, since in writing this I discovered that by 1910 there were two million members, split between full members, generally richer folk, who had to pay half a crown a year, and associates, who paid what they could afford, sometimes as little as a few odd pennies. 

The First World War was the turning point, for this did more to give women the vote than anything else, and it also allowed them to become full members of the conservative party, not just Primrose Leaguers. But the League did continue, right until December 2004, and it has since, just a couple of years ago, been re-registered at Companies House, as seemingly a separate entity, nothing to do with the conservative party, though we are not entirely sure why.

As far as the actual primrose, featured on our card, that bears the rather unfortunate name of Primula Vulgaris, or the common primrose. Though some prefer to call it the English Primrose. It is a perennial, which means it lives more than two years, and its flowers arise from a cushion of leaves.

It is a Spring flower, at least in the northern hemisphere, which is where we get the name of primula, from the Latin "primus", or first. The most usual colourway has yellow blooms, though you can get white and pink - and there is a sub species, in the Balkans and South West Asia which runs from light pink to purple. 

Its earliest cartophilic appearance seems to have come in 1888, in America, in Duke`s "Fairest Flowers in the World", rather a play on words, because as well as the botanical "flower" there is a lady`s head, and the head on top of the primrose is Mrs. Langtry. I am rather surprised at this, for I would have thought someone ought to have given her a lily, after her own christian name, and even more so as only one lily is included in the set, the rather off-puttingly named "dragon lily", whose floriferous form is topped by the head of a Miss Engel. Now research failed to find Miss Engel, and my thought, that it may be the actress Jeanne Eagels was dashed when she turned out to have been born only in 1890. 

The next two appearances of a cartophilic primrose also came from the other side of the world, and, once more, has a female head atop it. I say "they" but they are both the same card, at least on the front, and almost on the back, but they come from that curious time when the British American Tobacco was coming into prominence, and if you look closely you will discover the 1895 version is branded for the American Tobacco Company, whilst the  1903 one is branded for the British American Tobacco Co. Ltd. You have to look closely though, because the basic back design is otherwise identical. And both are known as "Flower Girls". 

That leaves the honour of being the first card to simply show a primrose to go to W.D. & H.O. Wills, with its 1913 second series of "Old English Garden Flowers", in which it is card 19. It is also the first card with a description of a primrose, which reads as follows "PRIMROSE. Primula vulgaris. A low growing hardy herbaceous plant that is found wild in the hedge-rows and copses of Great Britain. Propagated by division of the plants as soon as they have finished flowering, or by seed sown in a frame in spring. Likes rather heavy damp soil and a shady position, There are a number of garden varieties, some with double flowers. Height 6 inches."

Our set comes along almost fifteen years later, and there are three versions, described in our original British Trade Index as : 

• DEVON FLOWERS. Sm. 67 x 35. Nd. (30). ... PBS-5
  
       A. Back "Send complete set, or 100 assorted cards ....."
  
       B. Back "Send Complete set for presentation...."  
  
            (a) without
  
            (b) with red square overprinted embodying letter "A".

Now this is rather confusing.

Firstly, there is not really any way to tell when these versions were issued. We could say that they said from the outset, as is implied by "A", that the presentation casket of chocolates would be sent for either a complete set, or 100 various cards,and then, when stocks ran low, only allowed the chocolates for a complete set of cards. But we could also say that at first they only allowed complete sets as the exchange and then got little interest, so widened the criterion, as is implied by "B". 

As far as the red square, I have no idea, I have seen none and found nobody with one. It is possible that all the cards sent back with the casket of chocolates were marked, to prevent them being resubmitted, but what the "A" stood for in that case I cannot fathom.

By the time of our updated British Trade Index there had been a few discoveries, and that text reads :  

• DEVON FLOWERS. 1927. 67 x 35. Nd. (30). ... PAS-060
  
  Base of back
                             
       A. "Send complete set, or 100 assorted cards ....." (James Pascall 23 mm)
  
       B. Back "Send Complete set for presentation...."  
  
            (a) with
  
            (b) without letter "A" in red square overprinted. (James Pascall 22 mm)
  
  No.19 is found with caption "Meadow Saffron - Colchicum Autumnale (a) normal (b) these words reversed

The strange thing here is that the order of the with and without the letter A have been transposed, bringing the "with" forward to B.a -which is the opposite of the earlier book

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TYPHOO [trade : tea : UK] "Scenes From John Halifax, Gentleman" (1931) 14/25 - TYP-560 : SUM-14 

 Today marks the two hundredth birthday, not of our character, John Halifax, Gentleman, but of his creator, who was born at Stoke on Trent in 1826.

She, and indeed she was a lady, was christened Dinah Maria Mulock. Her father was a minister, and seems to have had periods of reasonably secure finances and times of great penury, which affected his health quite badly. By the time she was thirteen, she was living in London with her mother, writing the occasional poem and being delighted when they were published. However, just six years later, in 1845, her mother died. Her father did not want her back, and there is not a word of what happened to any of her siblings. 

Probably because of that, she decided to stay in London. She had several friends, and through them she met a writer called Camilla Toulmin. All these afforded her great encouragement to continue with her own writing, and from 1846 she was being regularly published in magazines and periodicals, including "The New Monthly Belle Assemblee", a magazine which was primarily fashion news, but also published short stories. Some of these pieces were one offs, but some were expanded and made into other, longer novels

Her first novel is often said to be "The Ogilvies : A Novel", published in 1849. This is not strictly true, but it was her longest ever work. and ran to three volumes. Her first book was actually "Michael the Miner" written for the Religious Tract Society, in 1846, and she had just published a book called "Cola Monti", about a young Italian of that name who moves from his village to a large town and starts a journey towards becoming an artist.

Our book, "John Halifax, Gentleman", was first published in 1856. By then she was thirty years old, and living in Hampstead. The novel is set in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, an area she had visited but not lived in, and that led to some inaccuracies, though because of the fame the book brought to the area she has a memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey.

Card number 9 of John Player`s "Characters From Fiction", issued in 1933, tells us that "John Halifax, Gentleman, by Miss Mulock, afterwards Mrs. Craik (1826-1866), first appeared in 1857. This fine novel was planned in 1853 when the authoress was staying near Stroud, Gloucestershire; the town of Tewkesbury is the "Norton Bury" of the book."

It is a simple tale, set in the Industrial Revolution, about an orphan, who is kind of adopted by a Quaker tanner, Abel Fletcher, of Norton Bury after helping his invalid son, Phineas, who is the narrator of the book. John Halifax teaches himself to read, write, and do mathematics, and is given a job as a clerk in the tannery. Eventually our man becomes Abel Fletcher`s apprentice, and accompanies him on a brief stay in the country, where he meets a man called Mr. March, who has a daughter, Ursula, with whom John Halifax falls in love, though it is hopeless, for she is only to marry a gentleman. When Mr. March dies, it becomes ever more hopeless for the two lovers to meet, in fact he thinks of emigrating, but somehow the two get together and everything goes wrong; she has a child, who is born blind, the tannery fails, a rival diverts the stream that powers the mill. However this act of vengeance proves his salvation, for he finds a way to run the mill with steam. He prospers, moves to a big house, and becomes a magistrate, treating less fortunate people with kindness and understanding. And both he and Ursula die together, quite peacefully at the end of the book. 

In 1865, when she was thirty-nine years old, Dinah Mulock was married, to George Lillie Craik, the nephew of the famous Scottish writer and literary critic. Soon after their wedding he was asked if he would like to become a partner in Macmillan and company, the publishers, and he agreed.

Four years after this, as they had no children, they offered to adopt a small child that was found abandoned in their locality, and they were accepted. They christened her Dorothy, and she went on to marry twice, the first time in 1887, to an Alexander Pilkington. Sadly Dinah Craik did not live to see the wedding, as she died, of heart failure, shortly before it was due to take place. The wedding also ended sadly, in divorce in 1911, though it did produce a son, named John Mulock Pilkington. Some time later, Dorothy married again, to a Captain Richards, who lived at Macmine Castle in Ireland.  

As for John Halifax, Gentleman, it was made into a silent movie in 1915, with Fred Paul as the leading man and Peggy Hyland playing Ursula. It was remade in 1938, but only titled as "John Halifax". The stars this time were John Warwick and Nancy Burne; the most exciting thing about it was that it was one of the first performances of Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude McDowall, who would later keep his surname and shorten his forename to Roddy. 

Our set was issued in 1931, which, like the John Player card, is right between these two films, but surely too far between either to have had any bearing on the decision to convert it into cards. However the back of our card tells us that if you were a Ty-phoo user, you could send away for a 5/6 volume of the book, with four coloured picture pages, for just 1/11, plus proof of purchase, which was to cut out the price from the cardboard box, either two proofs from half pound packets, or four from quarter pound packets. 

Now in our original British Trade Index this issuer is listed as Sumner`s Typhoo Tea, hence the "S" code. It is catalogued as : 

• SCENES FROM JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN. Back inscribed "921/931". Nd. (25). ... SUM-14

However in our updated British Trade Index there has been some changes. I looked back in the other three volumes of the original Trade Index set and it was not recorded in any of those, but suddenly the text in the updated volume reads :

• SCENES FROM JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN. 1932. 102 x 36. Nd. (25). Vari-backed, 12 backs, as listed at HT-123, plus "Ty-phoo TEA is the genuine ... small ground tea" ... TYP-560

That HT-123 reference is confusing at first for it refers to another set, but if you read on it actually says : "This listing also applires to the set "Homes of Famous Gentlemen", (TYP-390) and 11 to "Scenes from John Halifax, Gentleman", less Nos. 1,3,6 and 7."

So as not to confuse you I will list just those cards some time over the weekend

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BARRATT & Co. Ltd [trade : confectionery : UK - London, England] "Famous Footballers" - Series A.4 (1956) 37/60 - BAR-325 / BAR-72.4

Our next subject is George Arthur Rowley, Junior, who was born today in 1926, one hundred years ago, and is therefore our first centenary of the week.

He was born in Wolverhampton, the third son of a semi-professional goalkeeper in a nearby local league, and his early talent was encouraged, so much so that he was selected to play for England`s schoolboys team, but he never played, because the Second World War broke out. Instead he stayed at school.

In 1940 he left school and found employment at a sheet metal factory, making war equipment, and we know not what, yet. However his older brother, John Frederick, who had been old enough to go to war, and fight in Normandy, got him a trial at Manchester United, and that secured him a place on their team, as well as a match, just four days after he turned fifteen, making him, to this day, the youngest ever player for that team. And, as you must be wondering, because I was, apparently the youngest ever player in a senior level match was Eric Godpower of Liberia, who made his debut aged just ten years and eleven months! 

By the way looking for John Frederick Rowley got me absolutely nowhere, because he played as Jack. He was born in 1918 and his first card was the extraordinarily rare Football Snaps` "Famous Footballers", a set of 96 cards, in which he was number nine.  And he appears on thirty one other cards, whilst our man appears on only seven. 

Arthur Rowley went on to play several more times for Manchester United but was then moved on to Wolverhampton Wanderers, as a guest player, and then to West Bromwich Albion, where he turned professional in 1944. But four years later he was sold to Fulham,  and after just one season he was on the move again, to Leicester City. 

This is when he made his first appearance on a card, our card, number 37 of Barratt`s "Famous Footballers Series A.4", but not until 1956, the year that he represented England on the "B Team" against Switzerland. The same photo also appears on card 44 of their 1957 set, "Famous Footballers A.5", but the text is slightly different, removing any mention of his brother, Jack, and adding the facts that "Last Season Leicester City won promotion into the First Division", and our man "scored 44 goals - the highest in Div II"

His next cartophilic commemorations were also in 1957. The first of these, at least in alphabetical order, was Cadet Sweets` "Footballers", though this is actually two sets, for one version has a number, his being number 10, and the other does not. However it is not a simple case that the numbers were omitted, as though the text is the same on both versions, it has been enlarged to fill the gap that the number had occupied. The third card was card 47 of a set called "Football Stars", issued by D.C. Thomson with "Adventure", the boy`s magazine. We do not know which of these came first, in date order but we might, when I have added all the newsletter cards to the index and start working on adding the text from the magazines, because that information could be in the New Issues Reports.... 

He struggled initially at Leicester City, simply because he replaced Jack Lee, a very popular player who had just moved on to Derby County. But our man was a likeable guy, and a great footballer, so slowly the crowd got behind him, so much so that when he was sold in 1958 there was much grumbling, and many calls to sack the manager, so many that the manager did indeed get the sack. In fact this was rather a shame, as our man had wanted to leave, for he had been offered the job of player-manager at Shrewsbury Town. He then moved on to manage Southend and several other non-league clubs, before retiring for good in the mid 1970s. 

Just after that he must have been thrilled to see himself remembered as card 317 of the Sun newspaper`s "Soccercards", and with quite a pleasing portrait too. Here he is part of the "All Time Greats" section, and the text tells us he was a "Burly centre-forward who holds the aggregate goal-scoring record with 434 League goals. In a career that started in the first post-war season and ended as player-manager of Shrewsbury Town in 1965, Rowley holds the highest scorer in a season record for Leicester with 44 in 1956-7 and at Shrewsbury holds both the aggregate record and top scorer in a season record."

There is one thing slightly wrong in that description, for he actually stayed on as just manager, not player, of Shrewsbury Town until 1969. 

Something you may not know is that he was also a keen cricketer, and represented Shropshire at county level. And I tried to find a cricket card to throw you off the scent, but I could not. 

He died on the 18th of December, 2002, aged seventy-six - four years after his brother, who had died on the 28th of June, 1998, aged seventy-nine

Now this set is rather lengthy to describe so that will have too wait until tomorrow. 

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COPE Brothers & Co. Ltd [tobacco : UK - Liverpool and London] "Vilde Dyr og Fugel" / wild animals & birds (1907) 19/?? - 

An odd one now, for today is #NationalNarwhalDay. 

The narwhal is a seldom seen, ancient beast, with a spiralled horn akin to a unicorn. Their home is in the Arctic, Canada, Greenland, and Russia, many fathoms below the ice, and they migrate, en masse in the summer, for breeding purposes. 

They were first catalogued by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, using a term from old Norse, Narhval, which means the corpse-whale, for two reasons; firstly its grey, shroud-like colour, which whitens as they age, and secondly, its summer practise of laying completely motionless atop the waters to get the sun on its skin. The technical name for them is Monodon monoceros, which means, in Greek, that it has one tooth and one horn.  It seems to have no living relatives, but is similar to the beluga whale - so similar that they are known to interbreed, successfully - and it seems that at one time these two were one species, which somehow split off, perhaps when the land masses changed, for they are that old, possibly as many as eleven million years old. In fact the beluga whale is also known as the white whale, another link to their original closeness.  

As for its unicorn "one horn", that is mainly seen in the males, which is probably how its purpose has come to be regarded as a weapon. Some males grow two. And some lady narwhals also grow them, though they are much smaller. The "one tooth" is not strictly correct, as they have two, but they are very small and often joined together, it is easy to see how Mr. Linneaus was mistaken there.

As for cartophilic narwhals, most people seem to think they only began with a most curious spotted creature which was shown as part of Liebig`s "Strange Animals" in 1912. However our card predates that by five years. Our set was also issued twice, once with a back in English and once, as we show here with a back in Scandinavian. This is not the only Scandinavian set, either, there were several, and ours is recorded in our original World Tobacco Issues Index with the following header : 

2.B. THE `CONTRABANDO" ISSUES. Danish language issues. Except for set C132-42, the series have the same fronts as the equivalent English Set in 2.A above, with backs reprinted in Danish.

In case you were wondering, set C132-42 is a set of Scandinavian actors and actresses, black and white, with plain backs. 

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Joseph MILLIAT [trade : food : O/S - France] "Productions Autour du Monde" / products round the world (1930s) 1/?

Drink up, for we are almost half way to closing time. And, in honour of today, you had better make it a Krombacher, a Warsteiner, or a Beck, for today, and every April the 23rd, is #GermanBeerDay. 

There is very good reason for this event, and it dates right back to 1516, when something called the Reinheitsegebot was introduced across Germany by Duke Wilhelm IV. This was a law, which had been effective in several regions of Germany, and it basically forced brewers to only use pure ingredients, at the time just water, barley, and hops, and nothing else. There seems to have been two reasons for this, firstly because there had been a rash of beer corrupting, when all manner of items were added to the brew, some of which were actually toxic, and secondly because at that time beer was often enhanced with wheat or rye. Now that was also used for making bread, the price of which had been continually rising, due to brewers buying up the wheat and rye. 

Now we have to stress at this point that there is a difference between beer and lager, and also between what we now know as wheat beer, because today, although the Reinheitsgebot was never repealed, wheat is again allowed into beer, so long as it is labelled as being a weizenbier or a weissbier.

Yeast is also allowed, not because of any change to the law, more to the fact that when the law was passed the advantage to adding yeast to beer was still to be discovered. Those advantages were only discovered in 1857, by Louis Pasteur, at which point it was simply pencilled in to the Reinheitsgebot.

It was not until 1993 that the law was legally revised to say that German beer is only to consist of water, malted grains, hops, and yeast. 

Now Joseph Milliat made all kinds of food, and we know that the film stars were issued with pasta. 

This set is really well coloured, but there is a problem, most usually, which our card has escaped, and that was the fact that they could be redeemed for prizes, and though the cards were returned, they had a pattern of punched holes in them, which is rather annoying. 

We do have a list, as follows : 

1.  Biere (Allemagne)
2.  Choucroute (Alsace)
3.  Tulipe (Hollande)
4.  Pasteque (Orient)
5.  Orange (Algerie)
6.  Datte (Maroc)
7.  Grenade (Espagne)
8.  Cacao (Mexique)
9.  Vanille (Antilles)
10.  Banane (Gabon)
11.  The (Japon)
12.  Riz (Chine)

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CLOETTA [trade : confectionery and nuts : O/S - Sweden] "Sportsmen" (1933) 59/158

As our parting shot, we close with another centenary, and that is of the 1926 F.A. Cup Final, which brought together 1923`s winning side, Bolton Wanderers, and newbies to Wembley, Manchester City, though they had actually played in a Cup Final before, way back in 1904, when it was held at Crystal Palace.

In fact, now I look it up, that 1904 Cup Final was Bolton Wanderers vs Manchester City, and Manchester City had won, by a single goal. 

I can also tell you that the first appearance of Bolton Wanderers was in 1894, when they lost to Notts County by four goals to one, at Goodison Park. 

In 1926 the semi finals saw Manchester City beat Manchester United by three goals to nil, and Bolton Wanderers beat Swansea Town by the same result. 

That brought Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers to the final, which started well for Bolton, as they were favourites, and they won the traditional coin toss. All but one of their field had also played at Wembley before, in the 1923 Cup Final, and won; the newbie being Harry Greenhalgh. 

By all intents and purposes it was a good match, and there was no time that a clear winner could be judged, but luck came just fourteen minutes from the end, when David Jack scored what would be the only goal. That meant that Bolton Wanderers won the cup, and the honour of being the only club to win at Wembley for a second time. 

As for the goal scorer, David Bone Nightingale Jack, he was born on April the third, 1898, in Bolton, son of another famous footballer, Bob Jack, player with many teams and manager of Plymouth Argyle You may think it curious, then, that his career began at Plymouth Argyle, at least according to his "rookie" card - number fifteen of Magnet Library`s "Real Photos of Famous Footballers", issued in 1922. However his next appearance on a card, the same year, in D.C. Thomson`s "Cricketers and Footballers", tells us that he was brought up in Plymouth, and that is explained by the fact that his father became Plymouth Argyle`s first ever professional player in 1903. That card also adds another team to his career, for it says he "Assisted Chelsea during the War".

It was almost certainly his father`s influence that got our man a trial with Plymouth Argyle in 1919, shortly after which he joined the team. He was then aged twenty-one, quite late in life, and that is explained by the fact that he had served his country during the First World War, in the Royal Navy. Now if he was able to "assist Chelsea" he must have been based within London, rather than out at sea, so I will have to do a bit more digging, though he has quite a common name, it may take some excavation... 

Now we have to say, at this point, that there seem to be no cards of him at Plymouth Argyle, they all show him after his move to Bolton Wanderers, where his father had also played, which took place in 1920. He played most of his career there, almost three hundred matches over eight seasons. And in his first appearance at a F.A. Cup Final, in 1923, he had also scored a goal, becoming the first player to ever score one at Wembley. 

That probably caused his call up to the England Squad, in 1924, and he remained a stalwart until 1932, appearing in nine matches, captaining four, and scoring three goals. But in 1928 he left Bolton Wanderers and moved to Arsenal; it appears he did not want to, but he was a valuable player, probably their most valuable, and Bolton was in a bit of a monetary crisis, so accepted the offer, by Arsenal, of what, at that time, was a record fee - ten thousand, six hundred and forty seven pounds, and ten shillings. The reason for the high figure was not so much his playing ability, though, it was more that Charlie Buchan had retired and Arsenal were having great difficulty filling his shoes.  

Now after a lot of research, at least on the part of one of my football contacts, they have come up with the certain knowledge that his Arsenal "rookie" card is not, as usually reported Major Drapkin`s "Sporting Celebrities in Action", dating from 1930, but Barratt & Co.s "Football Stars", those curious cartoon caricatures on jet black backgrounds, issued in 1928/29, as two series - the first version of which sees him named for Bolton Wanderers and without any colour on the card but black and white, and the second version of which has him named for Arsenal, with the shirt coloured in red.

He stayed with Arsenal until he retired, in May 1934, after winning his third League Championship medal. But he did not hang up his boots, as he went on to manage Southend United, Middlesborough, and Shelbourne, in Ireland, leaving them only in April 1955. And, sadly he did not live long after that, dying at the age of sixty, on the tenth of September 1958.