It takes the biscuit

Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them

- Matthew Dennison

MANY and various are the casualties of war. In 1913, a Reading-based ironmongery, Huntley, Boorne & Stevens, produced 518,000 fancy tins. Most were designed to hold biscuits and were commissioned by its sister company, Huntley & Palmers. Within a year of the First World War breaking out, production of decorative tins for biscuits had more than halved. Instead, government contracts kept the factory workforce busy: orders from the War Office for six million detonators and 536,000 tin water bottles. For the duration of the hostilities, the Huntley, Boorne & Stevens manufactured biscuit tin—including a rectangular model in the form of a sentry box on which, in 1910, the figure of a German sentry had been replaced with a Belgian—took a backseat to patriotic exigencies.

Rewind the clock half a century and the biscuit tin was a novel innovation. For many of us, a colourful, invariably dented, worn or tarnished biscuit tin is a shard in the bright kaleidoscope of childhood memories. A favourite biscuit tin usually occupied a space of its own on a shelf of a grandmother's pantry; it emerged into the firelight of the tea table or sat, tantalisingly within or out of reach, in the middle of a kitchen table, bright against scrubbed wood, jauntily at odds with patterned oilcloth, or marooned on an expanse of crisp white linen. It had a scent entirely of its own, the composite aroma of decades: within it lay not only biscuits, but a clutch of olfactory memories.