Crackers & Paper Hats: A Happy Christmas to you all.
Perhaps this is not the most obvious of Christmas pictures, but if you’ve pulled a cracker and put on a paper hat you have enjoyed the legacy of Tom Smith, whose wife and company are remembered in this memorial.
This water fountain states it was ‘Erected and presented to the Parish of St Luke by Thomas and Walter Smith (Tom Smith and Co) to commemorate the life of their mother, Martha Smith, 1826 – 1898.’
Thomas J Smith (1823-1869) invented the Christmas Cracker in 1847 and the company made enough from their sales and the paper crowns introduced into them by his son Walter to move to premises in Finsbury Square where they remained until 1953. The fountain dedicated to their mother was erected by Thomas’s sons Tom and Walter in 1898.
You can still buy Tom Smith crackers both in the UK and the USA and the company has “been the proud holder of a Royal Warrant to The Monarch since 1906” – including our current king, and you can view their catalogue online which also includes gift wrap, display units and tags, gift bags and cards. You can get some of them from various charities in boxes of six at around a pound a cracker as well as in various shops. However I suspect those they produce to be pulled around the royal Christmas dinner table are considerably more expensive.
On another site you can read a fairly detailed story of how the cracker came about – and my short summary based on this and Wikipedia.
Tom Smith began work as a small boy in a “a bakers and ornamental confectioners shop in London, selling sweets such as fondants, pralines and gum pastilles” and enjoyed making new “new, more exciting and less crude designs in his spare time.“
In his teens he set up his own shop in Goswell Road, Clerkenwell selling wedding cake ornaments and confectionery and on a trip to Paris in search of novel ideas in 1840 found the ‘bonbon‘, a sugared almond wrapper in a twist of tissue paper, and he began making and selling these in London. He had the idea of increasing sales by adding love messages in the wrappers.
Chemist Edward Charles Howard had discovered silver fulminate in 1800 and in 1802 Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli found a “a safe way of using it in amusements and for practical jokes.” I think schoolboys made use of it ever since (as I did) to put a trace on schoolmasters chalks to make a small explosion when they write on the board. I imagine whiteboard markers have made this obsolete.
Again according to Wikipedia, Smith bought the design and formula for the “snap” in his crackers from a chemist called Tom Brown who had worked for the Brocks Fireworks company. Smith added these to the now rather larger bonbons and sold them first as ‘Bangs of Expectation‘, later as “Cosaque (French for Cossack)”, but they became known popularly as ‘crackers’.
It was his son Walter, who took over the business after his father’s death in 1869 who first produced the cracker as we know it now, adding trinkets and paper hats, and these enjoyed a huge success, enabling him to move the business to much larger premises near this monument in Finsbury Square. In the 1890s it had 2000 employees and it remained there until 1953 when the company merged with Caley Crackers, then owned by toffee manufacturer John Mackintosh & Sons Ltd. The new joint company operated under the name of Tom Smith’s.
The picture to the memorial which celebrates both Walter’s mother and father is one of over 35,000 pictures, mainly of London, though also some of Paris, Hull and elsewhere. You can search the collection to find pictures of particular interest or browse the albums. As always, comments there are welcome on any of my pictures.
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