Why we all still scream for ice cream

Then, as now, no day out was complete without an ice in your hand. David Behrens looks back to when treats came on trikes.

IT HAD been a staple of the English dessert since 1671, when the first dish was reportedly served at a Windsor Castle banquet for the Feast of St George.

But it was not until the Victorian era that ice cream became an everyday treat for the masses – and these pre-war pictures tell of a time when no day out was complete without one.

It was the invention of the ice-cream machine that made it possible to turn out brickettes for tuppence and tubs for fourpence and long before the age of the motorised truck vendors were playing their trade wherever there were tourists.

The first machines consisted of little more than wooden buckets filled with ice and salt and a rotating handle to mix the ingredients.

Not long afterwards, electric and gas refrigeration made it possible to store the ice cream for more than a few hours without using vast amounts of ice. A Swiss entrepreneur named Carlo Gatti is credited with making the product universally available in Britain.

Having settled in the Italian quarter of Holborn, London, he opened a waffle and chestnut cafe and then an ice-cream stall in Hungerford Market, dispensing “penny licks” – first in unhygienically reusable glasses and later in sugar cones that were ideal for eating on the go.

The first mobile vendors used tricycles to literally peddle their wares and in the inter-war years Wall’s could boast a fleet of 50, stored in a single garage.

In the three years between 1924-7, sales went from around £13,000 to close on half a million and the company later doubled the capacity of its dairy in Acton by constructing a purpose-built ice-cream factory in Gloucester.

It was one of their employees, Cecil Rodd, who was credited with having devised the slogan Stop Me and Buy One.

PICTURES: FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GEORGE W HALES PICTURE: CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES ONE FOR EACH HAND: From top, a woman on Brighton beach holding two enormous plastic ice-cream cornets – the brand was Antarctic; Kingston Regatta in 1921 and a boat on the Thames is dishing out ices; just before the outbreak of war, a vendor in waders sells Bailey’s ice-cream cornets to two women in the sea at Brighton; above, it’s 1937 and these two women enjoy their ices from tubs of waxed cardboard. OH, OH, ANTONIO: From a primitive-looking wooden cart, which was probably hauled by towing it behind a pushbike, a seller doles out his ‘pure ice cream’ to a group of children wearing their bathing costumes down by the River Thames in Putney, London, during the summer of 1932.

PICTURES: GEORGE W HALES/FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES/DAVID SAVILL/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY HOLIDAY HOOFERS: Top, donkeys crowd round a boy on the beach at Douglas on the Isle of Man in July 1938 to get a taste of his ice cream. Above, stop me and buy one... a tub of Wall’s ice cream was four old pence in 1935, a choc bar threepence.