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 3 - Football cards, Topps and the Beatles

Football cards

The concept of producing football cards came from Douglas Coakley. A&BC Gum began with an ‘All Sports’ series in 1954, a set of 120 cards which included 36 footballers. They followed this in 1958 with a set of 92 footballer cards, and thus began a run of 16 unbroken years of football card production. During this 16 year period A&BC produced both English and Scottish sets, and included special issues and giveaways with many cards e.g. paper pennants, small black and white photographs etc. For a list of all English A&BC football cards produced between 1965/66 and 1979/80 click here.

Douglas Coakley was responsible for the design of the cards, plus signing up the teams and individual footballers (his brother Tony can remember seeing signed permission slips obtained by Doug as he toured around the training grounds). Later on Tony’s son Sheridan, who created an in house A&BC Art & Development Department, joined him. A footballer series was produced every year in their thousands and therefore became the mainstay of A&BC.

In or around 1959, when the company was producing a Cricketer card series, the printers went on strike and only just managed to get the uncut cards delivered to the factory. That night there was a very serious fire at A&BC. After some time they managed to get back into production but they then decided to look for a bigger factory. A suitable factory was found in Harold Hill near Romford Essex, east of London where they remained for many years. They increased the factory footage many times and also bought the next door factory as the company expanded.

Topps and the Beatles

In 1962/63 Douglas Coakley approached Brian Epstein (manager of the Beatles) and his lawyer David Jacobs and obtained the rights and licence to produce cards with the Beatles images and signatures. A set of 60 cards were first produced and issued, with immediate success.

Information of the series success was passed on to Topps in the U.S. and A&BC gave them the photographs and helped to negotiate the rights and licence for Topps to produce these sets in America, leading to an enormous success there.

Around this time Topps saw that the A&BC Chewing Gum company was a good business, and decided to buy out Rudy Braun, which turned out over time for A&BC to be an error of judgement. This was just after A&BC's biggest year, mainly due to The Beatles Cards, the increase in sales of the Footballer series, and their other products.

Proceed to next Part

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