Collector

JULIAN TYSOE SHARES HIS LATE FATHER’S RATHER CHEESY COLLECTION.

My father, Gus Tysoe, was born in 1938 in Worcestershire, England. (He was actually named John Jeremy Tysoe, but took the name Gus when he became an accountant, because he thought his other names were too boring.) In his later years, he became interested in family history, and would spend time pottering around Worcestershire graveyards and record offices, helping people around the world with their family research.

My father was also a bit of a hoarder. Before he died, his only request was that we look after three things: his stamp collection, his magazine collection and his cheese label collection. They all took precedence over his cat.

I don't remember my dad as a great cheese lover, but I do remember that Saturday evening ‘tea’ in the ’70s and ’80s at my grandparents' house always involved processed cheese spread. My mother describes it as a “wartime tea”. There would always be Laughing Cow or Dairylea triangles, and the weird Primula processed cheese that came in a squeezable metal tube, like toothpaste. At home, Sunday evening dinner often had cheese, but usually cheddar or Stilton.

I have vague recollections of looking at my father’s cheese label collection as a child. It was kept in a room that was optimistically called "the study", but was actually a damp, dark, undecorated room under the stairs that was mostly full of junk. After he died and we’d cleared his house, I looked at the collection and was struck by the colourful designs – made in the 1940s and ’50s, when the UK still had rationing and was presumably rather drab – so I decided to scan them and share them. I’ve tried researching them. People sell old cheese labels on ebay, so collecting them seems to be a hobby for some, and the Wellcome Collection in London has a small number of cheese labels in their catalogue.

Most of the labels are English, but there are a few Italian cheeses in there, too, and a few from other countries. I know there was an Italian delicatessen in Worcester, so they may have come from there. I also wonder if Dad traded labels by post with other collectors, although how they would have done that before the age of the internet, I don't know!