Posted by Peter Ceresole on June 14, 2003 at -1:22:49 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Pemmican; was Force posted by David Bamford on June 13, 2003 at 22:54:55:
Certainly they would have been eating corned beef. So did I when I was small- when we could get it in England. I absolutely loved it (along with dried eggs Yummmmm) and only ever encountered the real thing in '53 or so when a South African friend brought in a chunk of Biltong, hard as wood and wonderful to suck and chew. But you couldn't easily get stuff like that in England in the '30s- certainly not in Windermere or Coniston. In fact, outside of Soho, food in England was quite astonishingly parochial until quite recently. People's cultural lives were set in tram rails to an extent we find hard to imagine now.
But all those brands (Force, Navy Cut) were a familiar litany, the decor of all our lives, still in the '40s. When my mum first read the books with me I must have been four or five (going by the dates of the editions I still have in my bookshelf) and even though there was no television or commercial radio, the names all meant something to me- although stone bottles were a bit of a puzzler because Tizer came in glass ones...