Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Here comes the Bakerman

After all the recent posts about timber framing, a contrast and a little light relief.

A while back I did a short series of posts about stick-on signs on shop windows. One of these posts showed a sticker in Bromyard for Procea bread, and around the side of the window, only just visible in my photograph, was another Procea sticker showing a character, called the Bakerman, that the company used in their advertising. One reader asked to see more of the Bakerman, but I did not have a more revealing image from the Bromyard shop. Yesterday however, looking on my phone for something else, I remembered that I'd taken this photograph on the way to breakfast (a rare but cherished treat, the full English) in Cheltenham. So here is the loaf-bearing Bakerman, standing out against the yellow background that Procea used to catch the eye. Short he may be, but his loaf is large.

Can the Bakerman really have been here since the 1970s, when the brand was bought by Spillers? If so, his survival is a bit of good fortune, although not as accidental perhaps as the collection of reflections in my rapid-fire photograph – a little of Cheltenham's Regency architecture, plus a 1960s block abutting it (itself an architectural leftover from the heyday of Procea), a curvaceous street lamp, and the other Procea sign on the opposite side of the doorway. All caught in a moment as my mind was briefly distracted from thoughts of bacon, egg, mushrooms, and toast.

Bromyard, Herefordshire

 
Stick-ons: 2

Another trawl through my archives threw up this window sign from Bromyard. The photograph is a few years old, so I’m not sure if the sign is still there. When I took the picture it was already time someone took this damp and dilapidated building in hand, though of course I hope that if they did, they managed to restore the flaking “BREAD” sign and perhaps even preserve the blue and yellow Procea one in the window.

Procea bread began in New Zealand as Procera and was sold a lot in Britain, where the name was changed to Procea, until the company was bought by Spillers in the 1970s. Procea was advertised a lot in the 1950s, when the use of a kind of informal script lettering for the brand name became common. This sign is later – the script seems to have got thinner and slightly more refined as the years went on. The name was often accompanied by a slogan, of which there were many. Brown bread was fortified with wheat protein: “The meat of the wheat”. The stuff was so good that it was a case of “Once tasted, never wasted”. “Procea Brown is so much Better it deserves a capital B.” “You never have a stale loaf problem when Procea’s your daily bread.” And so on.

Customers were exhorted to “Buy it where you see the Procea Bakerman”. That’s him, just visible on the side of the window in my picture. There must have been thousands of Bakerman stickers on bakers’ windows in Britain in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Now they are few and far between.