All posts material: “Sauce” and “Gentleman’s Relish” by Ronnie Barker – Hodder & Stoughton in 1977
Health For All

Ronnie Barker’s Comment: In 1890, when there was no Trades Descriptions Act, advertisers would claim unlimited powers for their products, both improving and curative. You could grow a hundredweight of hair in three weeks, or put five inches round the bust in a fortnight, simply by rubbing on cream. Soaps were plentiful and varied (Brown Windsor, which is now a soup, was once a soap!) and their advertising artistic rather than down to earth. Here is a reproduction of one of these advertisements:
Two Girls, in some far wooded chine
(Hush, lest we interlope)
Bathe in the Rhine
Their forms divine
With GOODWIN’S TOILET SOAP
The Summer sun, like golden wine
A sky of Heliotrope
The salty brine –
Her thoughts incline
To GOODWIN’S TOILET SOAP.
The cleansing shower of rain so fine
Umbrellas at the slope –
A bath at nine
That smell of pine!
It’s GOODWIN’S TOILET SOAP.
Make cleanliness your life’s design
(For while there’s life there’s hope)
Come rain or shine
For Auld Lang Syne
Use GOODWIN’S TOILET SOAP.
And since this text is one of the best lures I’ve seen in a long time this add will serve as this weeks “Lure of the Mad Men” post as well – Ted
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