Philip Marriage sent me this glorious collection of firework labels. He said, “If these look as if they’ve been buried or blown up and burnt, it’s because they have!”
“This box of Brock’s bangers was a left-over from my teenage years, preserved in a tin box in the garage for past sixty years. These firework labels give a snapshot of a time when the cry of ‘A penny for the Guy’ was any child’s means to purchase a packet of tuppenny bangers.
I kept them because they possess the unsophistication of another era, bought not only for their visual appeal but primarily for the power of their explosive content.
Brock’s Fireworks go back a long way, founded in 1698 and manufacturing in Islington before moving to Whitechapel in 1815 where their factory blew up in an accident. They moved to Hemel Hempstead in 1910 just down the road from Redbourn in Hertfordshire, where I lived for a decade after I was married in 1968.”
Philip Marriage
You may also like to take a look at