Exotic Packaging: Blue Bird Luxury Assortment Tin

Blue Bird, a brand owned by Harry Vincent Ltd of Hunnington near Birmingham (England, not Alabama), used to make toffee. The company no longer exists and no-one now makes Blue Bird toffee but I remember it from my childhood.

You used to be able to buy a small block of rock hard toffee with a little hammer. The toffee was so hard you had to hit it quite hard to get a shard small enough to pop in your mouth.

This tin is massive. I happen to have a 250g bag of small Swiss chocolates and imagine that 250g of toffee would be about the same size. So, using this highly unscientific method I deduce that you could fit at least a kilo of toffees in this tin, possibly 1.5k.

Actually, it looks far more like a biscuit tin. But aside from someone selling a similar looking tin on ebay described as a "biscuit tin" I can't find any evidence that Harry Vincent made biscuits. And in fact I can't find any images online that look exactly like.

As long as I can remember this tin has been used by various family members to store photographs. I think it came from my grandmother.  Almost all my photographs are on the computer now of course. There are only 17 left so I had better scan them soon. And the tin is not in good condition so it has to go. I'm not going to be sentimental about it.

The image on the lid is called Halting at an Inn by J L E Meissonier and it's owned by the Wallace Collection in London. The Wallace Collection is one of London's lesser known museums but I highly recommend it if you have the chance to visit. It's free to get in, and there's a great restaurant.

But back to the tin. I don't think the picture on the lid would encourage me to buy either biscuits or toffee. And oddly, I don't think I ever looked at it properly before today. It's always been there so I never looked. Well, it has gone to a better life in recycling land.