Be a Good Chap and Tick That Box, Will You?

Last week I made a non-quiz related post about chocolate and in particular the chocolate tins sent by Queen Victoria to the British and Empire armies fighting in the Second Boer War (which is what we usually mean when we use the more general term, The Boer War). I’d hate to give you the idea that I think that the Second Boer War is anything to be proud about. I absolutely don’t condone war generally and I particularly don’t condone the Boer War. But I am interested in the ‘ordinary’ people who experienced that war and others and the way that they were treated by all sides. I explained the process by which I became interested in the tins in that previous post.

So, to recap, Queen Victoria sent a New Year gift of a tin of half a pound of chocolate to each of the soldiers. The chocolate and the tins were made by three quaker manufacturers – Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry. Not wanting to profit from war the three firms donated the chocolate. Victoria paid for the tins and for the cost of shipping them to South Africa. Incidentally, to her the cost of manufacturing each tin and shipping it to South Africa was 3d – 3 old pennies. Many of the soldiers so treasured the tins that they wanted to send them to their families back home. It cost them about five shillings to do so, a very substantial sum. An example of one law for the rich.

For all the cost, I guess a lot of soldiers did this, or at the very least looked after their tins carefully and brought them back home with them, because they’re not uncommon even more than a century and a quarter later. I have two, as I mentioned. The tins all followed the same design but each chocolate company had their own manufacturer, so even though the producers did not put their company names or logos on the tins it is possible to tell who made which one due to differences between the tins. I have a Rowntree’s tin and a Cadbury’s tin and I’m hoping to eventually acquire a Fry’s tin.

Fine, most of the above I covered in that previous post. Since I posted that I’ve been looking into the company that designed the tins, Barclay and Fry of Southwark. The company was begun by Robert Barclay in 1855. He’d started out by printing banknotes for Barclay’s Bank – I have no idea if he was connected to them or if this was just coincidence. When he joined with his brother in law John Fry they began developing the process of offset lithography. Again, I have no idea if John Fry was related to the chocolate Frys. They patented their process of printing on tins, licensed the patent and generally made rather a good thing of it.

The firm continued after the deaths of its founders. During the first world war several of the country’s biggest tinning firms collaborated closely and four of them, including Barclay and Fry, amalgamated into the Allied Tin Box Limited although each constituent company operated independently – a bit like Fry’s and Cadbury’s in most of the 20^th century. In 1922, the company was renamed Metal Box.

If you’re around my age, that name may well be known to you. On a personal level, I began teaching in Briton Ferry in 1987. Briton Ferry is part of the South Wales town of Neath, and not far from the school at all was a Metal Box factory. I hadn’t been in the school very long when Metal Box merged with French company Carnaud to become Carnaud Metal Box, or CMB.

Now, being that the best part of 40 years has passed since these events occurred my memory is a little sketchy, But as I recall, as part of the merger a decision had to be made as to what to do with the old Metal Box benevolent fund, or something of that ilk. What CMB decided was to do something to benefit the children in the communities where the factories were based. They offered to buy us interactive video software and equipment. Now, I’m not really sure why but it was decided that the English department and the Maths Department should participate in the whole rigamarole of choosing the software. Being the youngest in the English department at that time I was told it would be me, together with a member of the Maths department. This involved a visit to the factory and a guided tour. At the time we visited the factory as I recall CMB were trying to perfect a microwavable tin for baked beans/soup/you name it. Well, I guess they never caught on.

The second part of the process was an overnight stay in Telford, together with a couple of executives from CMB, a member of the Baglan schools’ IT centre and representatives from the other schools involved. Now as for the software, I think we got to choose 2 out of 4. I can only remember one of them. I think it was called Discovering Presentations, and it featured the late Mel Smith as Christopher Columbus. For the time it was actually pretty good. But.

The school was provided with one computer and one copy of the software.

That meant that you couldn’t use it with a whole class. Back in those days there was no internet. The school had one computer room and that was populated with BBC B micro computers which couldn’t have handled the software even if it had been available to all of them.

This meant that the best you could do was use it with small groups or pairs, who went off to the room opposite the library to use it unsupervised while the rest of the class got on with other work. In practice this meant that the use of the equipment and software was minimal.

Until executives from CMB asked the local authority if they could visit the school to see how their gift was being used. So this meant that the Headteacher made it pretty clear that we had to cobble together a unit of work based on the using the stuff. Actually I never minded this sort of thing. Making units of work always appealed to my creative side and it was one aspect of teaching that I always enjoyed. However, we had to also put together a fictitious protocol for taking turns using the equipment with our own classes, and to actually follow it for the few weeks leading up to the visit. This despite the fact that I would say that, because of the problem with using it with a whole class, the effect of all of this effort was frankly negligible. We weren’t doing it because we could see huge benefit for the children. We were doing it so that boxes were ticked to keep people in authority happy. Some things never change – they certainly didn’t through my career.