Never knowingly undersold

From telephone-equipped hotel rooms to cars 'for lady drivers', the advertisements featured in COUNTRY LIFE in 1923 captured Britain's evolution, as well as the odd quack remedy, finds Melanie Bryan

- Melanie Bryan

A JOURNEY back in time to Britain in 1923 shows a country beginning to change rapidly after the horrors of the 'war to end all wars'. The BBC, formed at the end of 1922, dominated the headlines, becoming the first to broadcast live from cities and towns as far apart as Aberdeen and Bournemouth. The granting of equal rights made it possible for women to divorce men and, in science, John Macleod and Frederick Banting won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin. All progress, indeed, but glancing through the adverts carried in COUNTRY LIFE for the same year reveals a more intimate story of how the nation was advancing (or, in some cases, needed to advance quite a bit further).

Possibly the most alarming product to be promoted in the magazine was Clark's Thinning Bath Salts, which made a regular appearance throughout 1923. A sachet of the magical salts in your bath would ensure that 'all superfluous fat is dissolved through the pores of the skin'. How an inanimate object managed to determine what was necessary and what was superfluous fat will forever remain a mystery (but, oh, how I wish dieting could be this easy). The packets had the unequivocal 'Clark's Salts for Fat People' emblazoned on the front. If, however, you only suffered from corpulence in one part of your body, Clark's Reducing Paste which promised to eliminate only 'unnatural fat' was recommended, promising as it did to leave the user with one of a woman's chief attractions: dainty ankles.