Figural biscuit tins: a beautiful contradiction in terms
This rare Perrin’s Biscuits Figural Tin is expected to bring $1500-2000 at Miller & Miller’s auction this Saturday, December 7th.
Biscuit tins designed and painted to look like trucks were a beautiful, functional, contradiction in terms. Because these “figural biscuit tins” were, in the words of lithography expert Ed Locke, “beautiful, extremely well done… just outstanding,” and yet created to be used and abused by kids treating them as toys in the back yard and sandbox.
The latter reality is one reason that these exquisite creations are seldom up for sale – although Miller & Miller Auctions has an unexpected bounty for collectors in their December 7 auction: five figural biscuit tins, with three in vehicle-form, including the rare and highly collectible Perrin’s Biscuit bus, produced for a Canadian company and the Canadian market.
Miller & Miller Auctions has an unexpected bounty of figural biscuit tins in its December 7 auction.
Locke, who is an expert collector and dealer in lithographs, and co-author of The Charleston Standard Catalogue of Canadian Country Store Collectibles, says that lithographed biscuit tins became popular at the turn of the 20th century; almost always, the lithography was done by skilled artists in the United Kingdom. “They were very, very popular, especially in England,” he says. “And they had the best of the lithographers in England, especially when it came to working on tin. Their lithography was just outstanding.”
The tins took a turn toward the vehicular in the 1920s, when the lithography companies began to make transportation-themed biscuit tins for companies in England and Europe – and a few in North America, including D.S. Perrin & Company of London, Ontario.
The figural biscuit tins featured in Miller & Miller’s upcoming sale were made in England by “B.W. & M. Ltd.”. Barringer, Wallis and Manners Limited hit its stride in the early 20th century producing fine decorative tins for top-tier manufacturers. To keep itself afloat during the post-World War I depression the company began producing toys. Of the three vehicle-form tins featured, two were clearly made for Canadian consumers, one boasting the “Perrin Biscuits” brand name and the legend “Halifax to Vancouver”, the other advertising “Hunt’s Candies Ice Cream and Novelties - Toronto and Hamilton”.
Barringer, Wallis and Manners Ltd. hit its stride in the early 20th century producing fine decorative tins for top-tier manufacturers.
The Perrin truck, Locke says, is a rare find, for two reasons. “There are no more than a handful of these known,” he says. “They didn’t produce a lot of them,” because these lithographed vehicular tins were expensive to make, “and kids used them as toys.” That was the expectation, of course – these were intended as multi-use gifts, with sweet treats inside and a package ready for active use on the playground. But that is the very reason few have survived.
The Perrin truck, Locke says, is a rare find. It is up for auction this Saturday at Miller & Miller’s Advertising & Historic Objects sale.
So what makes them so valuable now? Although a relatively expensive product to produce, the figural tins were “always extremely popular,” says Locke, “and that is even more true among collectors today”. He adds, “The vehicle tins have a ‘cross-appeal’ with toy, advertising and tin collectors which makes them even more sought after”. Coincidentally, a rare McCormick’s Figural Truck Biscuit Tin sold through Miller & Miller Auctions earlier this year realized $4800. Locke sums it up: “Collectors just like the things…. they’re beautiful and so different from other [non-figural] tins,”
This rare McCormick’s Figural Truck Biscuit Tin sold through Miller & Miller earlier this year for $4800.
Lithographed biscuit tins were produced up until the 1950s, according to Locke, but this Perrin’s bus is much earlier. While not dated, it must have been made in the early 1920s, since such tins only came onto the market around 1920, and the D.S. Perrin company was acquired by its competitor, the McCormick Company, in 1926.
Locke says the Perrin’s bus currently up for auction is “a quite nice one”. He points especially to the fine images of passengers depicted in the windows of the bus.
Daniel Simmons Perrin was, not surprisingly, known as “London’s biscuit king.” Perrin (1833-1908) opened a small confectionary and biscuit store on Horton Street in London in 1863; the company grew in both national and international sales, eventually employing 500 people. The name was changed to the Canada Biscuit Company in 1926 when it amalgamated with the McCormick Company.
Today, Perrin’s biscuits are long gone; the factory where they were made was eventually abandoned. But collectors can still get a taste of a sweet, sentimental symbol of that era, in a rare and lovely lithographed, figural tin bus, bound from Halifax to Vancouver.
Story By Paul Knowles
Auction Details: Advertising & Historic Objects - December 7th, 2019. 9 am.
Live Auction Location: 59 Webster St. New Hamburg, Ontario. N3A 1W8
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