A&BC Chewing Gum Ltd. - a brief history

About this history

Earlier this year (2007) Nigel's Webspace was contacted by Mr Tony Coakley, one of the original directors of the A&BC Chewing Gum company. Now in his 80s Tony was one of founding members of the company in 1949, and stayed with A&BC until it's sad demise in 1974. In this article Tony helps to recall some of the history of A&BC Chewing Gum. This article is copyright and may not be reproduced without the permission of the author, Nigel Mercer - contact cards@littleoak.com.au.

This history has five sections:

1. Introduction and beginnings

2. Card production and Topps

3. Football cards, Topps and the Beatles

4. The end of A&BC Chewing Gum

5. Non-football cards and stickers produced by A&BC Chewing Gum, 1953 to 1974.

6. Football cards and stickers produced by A&BC Chewing Gum.

Part 2 - Card production and Topps

Card production

With the machinery that came from America A&BC started to produce gum with cards. They had remembered the popularity of the children’s craze for cards from before the War, and thought that cards would improve the sales of their gum. A short while later their first bubble gum was produced and included cards of Film and T.V. Stars, these were wrapped in a wax wrapper which included an imaginary dollar bill in the printing, hence the name “Dollar Bubble Gum”.

In the same year their printers suggested at the time of the Coronation to produce cards of the Queen with photographs by Dorothy Wilding as they had permission to produce these prints (a set of 24 ‘Royal Portraits’). This was controversial at the time as they were not of the Coronation and were seen as ‘cashing in’, though it did give A&BC publicity and increased sales.

With increasing sales A&BC quite rapidly outstripped the production capacity of their printers. One problem for the printers was their inability to collate the cards properly to try and avoid duplicates in the same wrapper; eventually A&BC cut and collated the cards themselves.

Alliance with Topps

The Topps Company was founded in the U.S. in 1938, and begun producing Bazooka bubble gum after World War II. In 1950 Topps began including cards in with their gum in an attempt to increase sales. In 1952 the then President of Topps came to England and, while there, visited A&BC Chewing Gum. According to the recollection of the Coakley brothers he advised A&BC that they were getting nowhere and advised a tie up with Topps under a licence agreement to produce some of their products. At the time A&BC ignored this advice and declined the Topps offer.

A&BC began to expand and after a further visit to America started making Ball Gum for the first ball gum vending machines in the country as well as for their other products. At this stage they were producing about 15 tons of gum each week. The company soon outgrew the premises in Cricklewood and around 1958 moved to larger premises at Colindale in North London.

In 1959 Topps again approached A&BC and this time A&BC were ready to listen. The two companies negotiated a licence for A&BC to produce Bazooka Bubble Gum and to reproduce some of Topps’ card gum series, starting with Elvis Presley, Flags, etc. A&BC also agreed to buy some old wrapping machines for the card gum and a new wrapping machine from Forgrove (U.K.) to produce Bazooka, after it had been sent to the States and modified, all very expensive. This then meant that after signing the licence agreement A&BC was committed to paying a percentage of their turnover of all products to Topps, and sticking strictly to the terms of the licence agreement.

Over the next 15 years A&BC continued to produce their own series of cards, increasingly focusing on the popular football cards, though they also produced the Topps U.S. series range of cards. Regardless of the source, all A&BC cards were printed in England. A number of A&BC cards are recorded as having the initials 'TCG' on the cards, and A&BC on the wrappers. This is understood to indicate where the cards came from Topps (Topps Chewing Gum) but were wrapped into A&BC packets.

Proceed to next Part

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