Page 18 - Pharmacy History 22 Mar 2004

Glycerine and black currant pastilles
by Geoff Miller
Of all the glycerine and black currant pastilles, the best known are perhaps those of Allen and Hanbury. The firm of Allen & Hanbury dates
back to 1715. In that year, in old Plough Court, Lombard Street,
in the City of London, Silvanus Bevan, an apothecary and Quaker, opened his shop. William Allen became proprietor at the close of the eighteenth century and forged a link with the Hanburys by marrying as his second wife Charlotte Hanbury.
The firm made a great variety of different pastilles, including Voice Jujubes, `a useful and agreeable stimulant before speaking or singing’, and throat pastilles, one variety of which contained menthol, cocaine, and red gum. In the beginning of the 20th century narcotics such as cocaine were popular ingredients in over the counter cough preparations. Nowadays the alkaloid codeine is still an ingredient used to calm the coughing urge. But not cocaine, too dangerous and addictive.
In the Allen & Hanburys Wholesale List of 1912 there are dozens of different products. One of them was the famous A & H glycerine and black currant jujubes or pastilles.
The designation depended upon whether the medication was oval or rectangular. The making of the pate de jujube was then a French art.
The firm secured the help of a French firm for making the product around 1850.
Allen & Hanbury were taken over
by Glaxo in 1958. The Allenburys brand of glycerine and black currant pastilles has been sold to the Swiss Doetsch Grethei company, which now produces and markets the pastilles under its own name. At first, from 1930 on Doetsch Grether were the Swiss distributors of the Allenburys black currant pastilles. Then, in 1974 Doetsch Grether purchased the rights and started production themselves while G1axoSmithKline stopped the production of the pastilles
A hundred years on and still going strong !
in London.
From 1983 the designation Allenbury was replaced by the designation Grether.
The conglomerate G1axoSmithKline owns through various mergers several cough lozenge brands which were previously competing independent products They may still be competing or the parent company may drop them if it does not fit into its overall marketing strategy. It all depends sometimes on which brand is turned over to an advertising company for a big promotional push.
While nowadays drugs and confectionery come mostly in bags and cardboard boxes, they were sold at the end of the 19th century and up to recently in metal containers for protection against humidity.
Tins that contained cough medications usually land in the household trash. Some may serve as containers for buttons, needles, screws or such things. Some arrive eventually at flea markets from where they find their way into private collections and even into museums.
Metal containers are often the
only tangible remnants of small manufacturers of cough lozenges. Such old English metal containers of up
to 90 years of age are in surprisingly good supply at sources serving mostly
British and American collectors of old tins.
‘Tins’ meaning metal boxes are made of tinplate. The term `tin’ meaning the container is thus a misnomer as the metal containers were not made from solid tin, but from sheets of iron or steel coated with a thin layer of
tin applied by dipping the sheet into molten tin or, in a later development, by electroplating.
Early tins up to 1850 were made by hand and cut from standard-sized sheets of tinplate. They were made
in small workshops from tinplate brought from South Wales. The production of early tins required little skill, shapes being very basic, and few tools were required. Wages were low and because most of the work was unskilled, it could be done
by women.
In early hinged tins from the late 1860s, printed paper labels were glued onto the metal, a procedure which was employed for a long time after other methods were in use.
Further Reading
Metal boxes for cough lozenges Dr Henri C. Silberman.
Pharmaceutical Historian Vol 13, No 3 September 2003.
18 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 2 ■ no 23 ■ July 2004