Kirriemuir’s most famous son, J M Barrie, is best known now for Peter Pan or The Boy who would not grow up (1904), but in the 1930s his play, Quality Street (1901) was just as familiar. Set in the Napoleonic era, it told the story of a respectable spinster, Miss Phoebe Throssel, who poses as her own flirtatious niece, Miss Livvy, to win the hand of a former suitor, Captain Valentine Brown, who had just returned from the war. Premiered at The Valentine Theatre in Toledo, Ohio on October 11, 1901, it transferred to London’s Vaudeville Theatre on September 17, 1902, where it was a huge hit, running for 459 performances. It enjoyed many revivals and tours, especially in the period leading up to the Second World War.

Harold Mackintosh’s vision was that his new product should evoke a sense of nostalgia for the old days by deploying sentimental and romantic imagery. He also wanted to impress on both shopkeepers and the public that it was a quality product. The two ideas conjoined neatly in Barrie’s successful play, its title giving the sense of quality and its two leading protagonists providing the sentimental romanticism.

Launched in 1936 as Quality Street, the tin design featured two characters, Major Quality and Miss Sweetly, loosely based on Barrie’s Captain Brown and Miss Throssel. When the advertising campaign made its debut on the front page of the Daily Mail on May 2, 1936, their parts were played by Tony and Iris Coles, the children of the campaign’s manager, Sydney.

Quality Street went on to become a phenomenal success, partly due to the quality of the product but also because Harold had cleverly found a way to bring the taste of Chocolate to the masses. In the 1930s chocolate was still an exotic and expensive treat and had not supplanted toffee and boiled sweets as the go-to form of confectionary for many. By adding a small number of chocolate-based sweets with chocolate coated toffees and fruit creams, Mackintosh made Quality Street more affordable than a box of chocolates would have been while giving many their first taste of a proper chocolate.

There were eighteen different flavours in the original tin, and over the years many have come and gone, the announcement of each year’s selection generating much comment and excitement. While the transience of the likes of Gooseberry Cream, Apricot Delight, and Fig Fancy might not have been mourned, the Green Triangle, one of the original flavours, is still enjoyed to this day. The flavour that made the biggest immediate impact, though, was the caramel swirl, so much so that it became product in its own right, packaged in a tube, named Rolo, and launched in 1937.

In the Quality Street circles I move in, there is always a surfeit of fruit creams left at the bottom after the initial feeding frenzy has subsided. It is not just a consequence of taste but an illustration of an uneven flavour distribution, as Stephen Hull demonstrated on November 29, 2020, when he revealed the results of his audit of an unopened box. He found that out of the 85 sweets there were just four each of purples, green triangles, and orange chocolate crunch, but eleven each of Toffee Pennies and orange cremes.

My secret is out. By going for the Toffee Pennies, I am playing the numbers game!