TOY STORIES

Ed Karswell remembers collecting toys via the breakfast table.

Iwas reminiscing the other day about 1970s cereal pack offers. Niche I know, but as this is a collector’s magazine hopefully I’ll have your permission to continue. Cereal manufacturers would often do on-pack, mail away offers. All that was required were a number of coupons cut from said packs, a nominal amount of money, a stamped addressed envelope and a post box. If you think that sounds a convoluted way to acquire something ‘on offer’ you’d be right. The pressure I put on my family to finish a box of cereal they patently disliked just so I could cut out the tokens made me very unpopular. My mother in particular had already done the maths and thought it cheaper just to go out to the shops and buy the ‘special offer’.

One such offer I do remember was from Sugar Puffs. As I recall you had to cut the coupons off several packs as proof of purchase and let’s not forget the nominal coinage. Once in receipt of all this bumf Sugar Puffs would send you back one Corgi Police Range Rover… eventually. I say ‘eventually’ because it failed to arrive at the designated time. I must have taken this rather badly as over 45 years later it still pains the family to talk about it. It did arrive in the end of course and all was forgiven, which cannot be said for the rest of the family.

This incident led to a marked change in the way we ate our cereals. My mother decided that as the boxes were either being vandalised for the coupons or made into Dr Who dioramas she would decant our cereals into plastic storage containers. This freed me up to use the boxes, although watching my father wince whilst tucking into a neon bowl of golden nuggets never really left me. A trip to the dentist cemented his disdain as I was given yet another filling, followed by an earnest lecture.

I can now see why these mail away offers were always so convoluted. The cereal manufacturer would have to employ an outside supplier to handle the operation and distribution. The number of applications would be into the thousands, which creates its own problems. A good few of the entries would have had illegible return addresses and many more would feature a shortfall in either coupons or monies. With the manpower needed to process them, many orders were probably never fulfilled, and I doubt there were many parents who wanted to spend a morning on the phone to the customer care line in order to find out why Tracey’s pack of ‘Look-in’ badges hadn’t arrived.

My faith in mail-aways was however restored by the very last one I took part in. Kellogg’s, I recall, ran an offer for some bendy dinosaurs (…alright, you can laugh) which involved the usual routine of cut out coupons, money and the hope. I diligently handled all this myself - from coupons to money to stamp addressed envelope etc. Dad was very impressed which is probably why when the goods failed to arrive, he did actually phone the company customer care line to explain (at length) what had happened with regard to my bendy dinosaurs. The upshot was that they were very sorry that although I had submitted it on time, the offer had now ended. They would however have a scour in the warehouses of Britain to see if there were any remaining stocks to send me. From experience, I was not hopeful, after all they were a multinational cereal manufacturer and not running a bendy dinosaur shop.

I needn’t have worried. A few days later I received a rather large box from Kellogg’s which contained around thirty…yes, 30… bendy dinosaurs of all persuasions. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and neither could my parents. There was a compliment slip in the box that said something along the lines of ‘Hope these are OK!’. It was a heart-warming finale to what had become a sore point in the household. It was also a hats off to Kellogg’s who went the extra mile. Having worked with such companies in latter years I now realise somebody must have really gone out of their way to make this happen.

After this I concentrated on what must rank, to 70s kids at least, as the Daddy of all mail away offers. I diligently collected my stars, eschewed the temptation of the Mounties hut, laughed off the derisory books all the way to the 21-star prize of the free Palitoy Action Man. I didn’t have to ruin my teeth either, although sadly did ruin the packaging of many an outfit collecting the stars. It arrived on time too…. Now that was a real result!