David Eggleton
Selling Britishness: Commodity culture, the Dominions and Empire by Felicity Barnes (Auckland University Press, 2022), 288pp, $49.99; Sure to Rise: The Edmonds story by Peter Alsop, Kate Parsonson and Richard Wolfe (Canterbury University Press, 2023), 310pp, $59.99
‘England is a nation of shopkeepers’, declared Napoleon Bonaparte, dismissively. In her shortish and heavily end-noted and referenced book, Selling Britishness, historian Felicity Barnes argues that, if so, it became a nation in which shop windows were filled with ‘British to the Core’ Canadian apples, ‘British to the Backbone’ New Zealand lamb and ‘All British Australian Butter’, all helping to promote the notion of a British Empire ‘on which the sun never sets’. Ultimately, she argues—by concentrating on peak Empire between the First and Second World Wars, and well before the decline and fall which ended ignominiously in Brexit—this construction of empire was a story of dominance and intimidation, hierarchy and exclusion, able to be deciphered from the iconography of its period-era mass-media imagery.
Iconoclasts, from writer George Orwell to mural artist Banksy, have, over the decades, steadily subverted the myth of British pan-imperialism offering the best of all possible worlds to a sea of small hand-held Union Jacks being waved by young children out in the three principal Dominions: Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Now, Felicity Barnes deconstructs the Panglossian optimism of heroic sons and dutiful daughters of Empire enacting the performative rites of ‘new Britons’, as expressed through the euphemisms of advertising copy and poster slogans. She uses the postcolonial frameworks of a variety of cultural theorists, including Edward Said and James Belich, to discover ideological battles fought primarily with foodstuffs and what they symbolised.
London may have been the ‘Head Office of the Manufacture of Modernity’, as Australian writer Louise Mack put it in the early 1900s: a city proudly showcasing commodity preeminence with displays of produce transported by cargo ships from far-flung reaches of the globe, but Barnes details how in fact it was a two-way exchange. The ‘imperial commodity spectacle’ wasn’t just ‘London calling’, with the Homeland benefitting from a producer periphery and a metropolitan centre. The producing Dominions were also the beneficiaries of ‘Britishness’, a particular myth of identity. All identities are to a degree fantasies or convenient myths: what matters is how they are manifested in pragmatic ways as power relationships.
The very word ‘British’ served as a clarion call. It was almost fetishistic in itself: a charm-word to open doors; and, after all, other imperialists circled in search of colonies: France, Russia, Germany, the United States. As much as flags, anthems and military displays, the production of food represented imperial endeavour, folding into a masculinist and white rhetoric of national destiny. ‘Commodity Britishness’, the exhortation to ‘buy empire’, was partly a Dominion invention, designed to strengthen ties that bind between kith and kin. But it was a message addressed to ‘white’ settler consumers only, extolling the ‘feminine’ virtues of technocratic domesticity and ‘scientific motherhood’. ‘Hygiene’ was another buzzword. Indigenous peoples, however—the original inhabitants—were locked out of this privileged realm, erased from the commodity spectacle.
London’s Empire Marketing Board posters showed Dominion landscapes as empty agricultural spaces, ready to be turned into the ‘apple orchards of empire’. New Zealand was portrayed as a pastoral Britain, while the reality of sweaty, dusty farming was concealed by soft-focus photographs of bucolic scenes. Produce was familiar, not ‘foreign’, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand all created widely-available recipe books, intended to reinforce a shared culinary repertoire: ‘Iced Scottish Cakes’, ‘Australian Boiled Eggs’, ‘New Zealand lamb pie’—essentially rebranding Homeland recipes, which were described as made from items produced by Britishers for Britons. Not only was New Zealand-bred lamb British to the backbone, New Zealand-domiciled sheep were said to graze on ‘English grass’.
A leading New Zealand advertising company of the time, Illiot’s Advertising Agency, founded by John Illiot, was front and centre in the promotion of such imagery. Replacing ‘wilderness’ with images of pulsing prosperity effaced the colonial past and Indigenous presence in the interests of progress: it legitimised colonisation. Farmers and other masculine figures were shown as commanding and heroic, their square-jawed attitudes a salute to the values of ‘Britishness’.
At the same time, the imperial gaze of British overseers surveyed the subject peoples of the various mandates, protectorates and colonies as possessions, their labour delivering exotic produce—sugar, tea, spices, cocoa—as tribute. In the advertising posters for these products, Indigenous labourers were often rendered as featureless blocks of colour, depersonalised. They were the spectres at the feast: when a recipe for ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’ was promoted as a Dickensian culinary centrepiece—‘the most popular recipe in the world’—it was celebrated as featuring ingredients from all three (white) Dominions. Ingredients from elsewhere, such as sugar, were downplayed.
The Empire Marketing Board closed down in the early 1930s as the Dominions took over their own marketing, and also introduced tariffs on some products made in Britain. Canada and Australia in particular were considered ‘hard and devious bargainers with little sentiment towards empire, except where it suited their nation and interest’. They both also bureaucratically suppressed their native peoples.
Barnes is right to highlight the exclusionary nature of commodity culture in settler societies. Indigenous people were not generally allowed proper representation, and their agency was restricted within the commodity spectacle; and if they did appear distinctly in advertising, as in New Zealand tourism posters, it was mostly as passive figures.
Yet, in a way, the author makes too much of such schematic reduction, relentlessly reading particular meanings into an international graphic style of capitalist advertising, while omitting, say, the critique of class tensions made by Karl Marx and others. Local people were often interacting in complex ways not inscribed in the official propaganda narratives.
Perhaps protocols of empire for those who were the putative ‘new Britons’ is better caught in the subtle or nuanced fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys or Christina Stead. Humble produce elevated into communal ritual and freighted with jingoistic significance is also food that dissolves into personal metaphors and individual memories on the tongue.
What happens to the products of a philosophy of empire after the empire has disappeared? Ubiquitous throughout New Zealand in the inter-War years as a reliable brand-name associated with comfort food, Edmonds, the company founded by Thomas Edmonds in Christchurch in 1887, is profusely and gloriously documented in effervescent colours in Sure to Rise: The Edmonds story, which is attributed to three authors, one of whom, Kate Parsonson, is a direct descendant of the firm’s founder.
This is a book about brand heritage, where early fortunes are entwined both with family history and the economic growth of New Zealand, and later on with the kitchen shelves of most New Zealand families, certainly during the twentieth century. As chef Al Brown puts it here: ‘I’m willing to bet that a majority of New Zealand homes have what I consider to be two Bibles, one reached for when they need spiritual guidance, and one reached for when they need a hokey pokey recipe.’
There’s nothing so Kiwiana, then, as an Edmonds Cookery Book. The first edition appeared as a giveaway in 1908, and food historian Helen Leach tells us that many ‘Edmonds’ recipes had been in print years if not decades before they mostly found their way into the various editions of the cookery books, ‘if they used as an ingredient a product that Edmonds made’. She adds: ‘It’s the most successful cookery book series in New Zealand history.’
There are reproductions here of recipes, of products and of baked goods: afghan biscuits, scones, sponge cake, all made to look delectable according to the conventions of their day. We learn of a 1960s kitsch recipe for Chicken Á L’Orange, made with Tang Instant Drink mix and cornflakes. The caption exclaims: How Perfectly Delicious!
The raw and the cooked, then, are illustrated by ephemeral advertising of the day, often in gaudy intense hues, making what’s shown resemble something quasi-miraculous. At the heart of the charismatic merchandise produced by the Edmonds company is the Edmonds Baking Powder tin, with its affirmative catch-phrase, ‘Sure to Rise’ and its emblem of a radiant sun: the whole label rendered in glowing yellow, bright orange and a rich red, together with black lettering.
Thomas Edwards emigrated from London to Christchurch in 1879 with his wife Jane and first set up as a grocer and then branched out into manufacturing his own baking powder and then manufacturing other baking products. Undoubtedly, he was one of New Zealand’s great early entrepreneurs. He supplied other merchants with tins of his baking powder on a sale or return basis: ‘never one tin was returned but instead they asked for more’. Edmonds had an instinctive gift for marketing. In nineteenth-century New Zealand there were at least a dozen different brands of baking powder being offered, but Edmonds outdid them all by streamlining production in a purpose-built factory, always using ‘first-class’ ingredients and emphasising the ‘purity’ of his product, and then marketing it in a distinctive container. But the winning touch was his incorporation of the catchphrase ‘Sure to Rise’.
‘Sure to Rise’ was a common expression in New Zealand, applied to property prices, river levels after rain, and the prospects of those with social aspirations: it was an affirmative, British-sounding declaration, but Edmonds was the first to make commercial use of the term in New Zealand. In 1911 he formed a partnership with Illiot Advertising Agency, which devised a highly successful series of promotional campaigns. By the end of World War I Edmonds was a household name. In 1922 the company moved into a new Art Deco factory on Ferry Road in Christchurch. Thomas Edmond described it as ‘a healthy, sunny, model factory,’ incorporating ‘ a setting of glorious flowers and cool green lawns’. His outlook was similar to that of well-known British industrialists such as the magnates William Lever and George Cadbury, who built model villages for their workers, and he supported the Garden City movement that originated in Britain. He also supported religious movements of the time such as Theosophy and Spiritualism. As his business expanded he became a prominent Christchurch city benefactor, his benign paternalism providing a park and a band rotunda for Sunday afternoon concerts, amongst other good works.
Edmonds died suddenly of a heart attack in 1932, aged 74, but the business model he’d created prospered mightily until 1982, when partly as a result of changing economic conditions and partly as a result of business diversification away from core products, the Edmonds company was taken over by the corporate raiders Brierley Investments. Assets were moved to Auckland and in 1990 the main Edmonds factory building was demolished. In 2002 the Edmonds brand was sold to the Australian food manufacturing conglomerate Goodman Fielder and so wholly swallowed up by the forces of neo-liberalism. But that emblem of Garden City civic pride, the Edmonds Band Rotunda on the banks of the Avon River, heavily damaged during the 2011 earthquakes was reopened in 2021.
DAVID EGGLETON is editor of Landfall Review Online.
Leave a Reply