Yeatman & Co

Did You Know?

• Yeatman & Co was established by Israel Edward Woolf in 1857 from 119 New Bond Street, Stepney, initially selling yeast powder.
• By 1884 the company had diversified into baking powders, flours, cordials, custard powder, egg powders, curry powder, flavouring essences, disinfecting powder and insect powder.
• Yeatman's Delicious Jelly Tablets were exported to Australasia.

History of H J Packer & Carsons

Edward Packer started the business in 1881 at Armoury Square in Bristol, with his sister and brother later joining him. In 1884, the family brought in H. J. Burrows, and the firm became H. J. Packer & Co. The partnership ended after a year, leaving Burrows as the sole owner. Within another year, Burrows sold the company to Caleb Bruce Cole for £950. Sales took off from 1894, and in 1901 the company moved to a custom-built factory in Greenbank.

Between 1903 and 1912, sales jumped by 250%, driven by two-ounces-per-penny chocolates aimed at children and popular items like Packers Chocolate Mixers. In 1908, the company bought Glasgow-based luxury chocolate maker Carsons and launched the Bonds of Bristol brand for high-end products. Carsons' Glasgow factory shut down, and production shifted to a new plant in Shortwood, near Mangotsfield, Gloucestershire. By the early 1920s, the company was Britain's fourth-largest chocolate manufacturer, with over 2,000 employees, and introduced Milk Crispets.

Carsons Chocolate was taken by Sir Ernest Shackleton on his expeditions. The company's fortunes faded around the start of World War II. In 1955, it revived the Packers brand with new items like Summit chocolate bars and penny sweets such as White Mice and Sweet cigarettes. By 1961, Carsons' production moved to Greenbank.

Carsons became the biggest British maker of chocolate liqueurs sold under the Famous Brands name. In 1962, H J Packer was renamed Carsons Ltd. The company still struggled, losing £39,000 by 1963. It then fell to James Goldsmith and became one of the founding parts of his conglomerate Cavenham Foods in 1964.

History of Hollands of Southport

John Holland, who had trained under his uncle James Ford, a confectioner in Ormskirk, came up with a fresh method for making creamy toffee in the 1890s. He worked from premises at 23a Cross Street in Southport, a gift from Ford. His most popular product became Everton Toffee. During World War I, the company opened a new factory on Virginia Street.

In 1927, John Arthur Holland took over as factory manager, and the business began trading as John Holland & Son in 1932. By 1936, John Arthur Holland was in charge and introduced the brand slogan Best on Earth. A fire in 1940 damaged the doctors, but after World War II the firm grew, shipping to the United States for the first time in 1953. A year earlier, in 1952, John Arthur's sons, John Arthur Junior and Peter, took control, and the company was renamed J A & P Holland.

It went public on the Liverpool Stock Exchange in 1953, and the Virginia Street factory got an extension the following year.

As the toffee market began to shrink, the brothers decided to grow by buying up competitors. Their first big acquisition was Coq D'or Chocolates in 1959. In 1960, they bought Fillerys Toffees, a premium toffee maker with ties to Marks & Spencer, followed by Casket Confectionery and London-based Walters Palm Toffee for £385,000. Later that same year, the company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and had taken over more than 20 firms. Expansion continued in 1961 with purchases including S. Parkinson & Son, Harper Paper for £1.25 million, Mackay Brothers (Confectioners) of Edinburgh, and George & Son (confectioners and wholesalers) of Southend-on-Sea. The Daily Mail dubbed Holland the world's largest toffee manufacturer, and by 1965 it ran 33 wholesale warehouses.

In 1963, John Arthur Holland Junior created a soft toffee, launched as Chewzits (later rebranded by Cavenham as Chewits). But the company paid no dividends in 1963 or 1964, as many of its subsidiaries struggled. Independent shareholders clashed with the Holland family, and in 1965 James Goldsmith's Cavenham Foods launched a takeover bid. The Hollands fought it but ultimately lost.

Cavenham Confectionery Ltd

Carsons was joined by Yeatmans, which produced the Goodies and Selesta sweets, along with J A & P Holland, the largest toffee maker in Britain, and Paramount Laboratories, known for Cadet Sweet sweet cigarettes. Together they created the Cavenham Confectionery division within Cavenham Foods. The division's offerings included Famous Names, Chewits, Hollands Toffee, Fillery's Toffee, Walters Palm Toffee, Ewbanks Liquorice, Dr Who & The Daleks Sweet Cigarettes, Royal Doncaster Butterscotch, and Parkinsons Boiled Sweets.

Production was consolidated by shutting many subsidiary factories, focusing on Carsons' Greenbank site, Holland's Southport factory, and Parkinsons' Doncaster plant. In 1967, as Cavenham Foods faced financial trouble, James Goldsmith formed a 50/50 partnership between Cavenham Confectionery and Perrier's confectionery business, which owned the Menier and Lindt brands. The following year, the venture exported $750,000 worth of goods to the United States and acquired the Elizabeth Shaw brand and its recipes.

The Perrier partnership ended in 1969, and Cavenham Confectionery was sold to Conwood SA for £1.2 million, a company split equally between Cavenham Foods and Conwood Corporation, though it was soon bought back by Cavenham Foods. In 1981, as part of James Goldsmith's dismantling of Cavenham Foods, the division's management bought the business for £8 million and renamed it Famous Names Ltd.

Greenbank factory site

After the factory shut down in 2006, locals successfully blocked the first developer’s plan to turn it into flats and houses, seeing the building as a key piece of Bristol’s industrial heritage. This fight had the backing of George Ferguson, who had previously transformed an old Bedminster tobacco factory into a major arts and creativity hub known as the Tobacco Factory. Yet by 2012, the site still sat empty because everyone involved had failed to come up with a second workable and acceptable plan.

More details live on an archived community group site for the chocolate factory. By late 2013, the building had gone back to Clydesdale Bank, and the Generator Group started planning its future. In August 2014, Generator South West put forward a plan for open spaces around a new development of flats and houses. By 2016, the project had hit plenty of snags.

The developers asked to be let off the legal requirement that 30 to 40 percent of any development be social housing, arguing that the extra cost of restoring old historic buildings made the plan financially unviable. The community action group ACORN campaigned against this backtracking on social housing, pointing to Bristol’s ongoing housing crisis and severe shortage of affordable or social homes. Generator Group then worked with Bristol City Council to create 36 shared ownership homes alongside the private housing.

The first homes ready for people to move into in 2021 were these shared ownership units. For details on what’s planned for the undeveloped 1950s factory block, you can search the city council’s planning archive.