Whitworth's Spice of Life Cookery Book

This being an Internet image of the recipe book that BH bought around 1970. Her copy having been much used, much annotated and now being rather battered. I even think, from time to time, of buying her a new one, new to her that is, but I think that would rather spoil things.

A book that gets mentioned from time to time in these pages as can be seen at, for example, reference 1. A book which talks about Whitworth's flours and Whitworth's dried fruits (for example, sultanas) and nuts (for example, almonds).

As often, the apostrophe provides a bit of interest. This book is old enough to still sport the apostrophe and I seem to have been careful to use one in the blog. So blog search for 'whitworth' finds things, while search for 'whitworth's' draws a blank. While google search for 'whitworth's' tells me that it has actually searched for 'whitworths', while giving me the option of searching again for what I had actually asked for. And when I do that I get all kinds of Whitworth's, including one Sir Joseph Whitworth, the (armaments) engineer who, inter alia, founded the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, to be found at reference 2. No connection with the flour or dried fruit people that I can see.

The flour and dried fruit people that we knew under the name of Whitworth's has been rebranded Whitworths and appears to have moved sideways into the dried fruit based snacks and sweets market, dumping flour somewhere along the way. Grazing snacks and on the go snacks.

But there are still Whitworth's into flour, as can be seen at reference 4. Is this a different lot, a different branch - or did what we used to know as Whitworth's break up into its constituent divisions, perhaps as a result of some family feud, the sort of family feud which pops up on ITV3 from time to time. One lot want to modernise and the other lot want to hang onto the heritage. Often precipitated by the mysterious death of the principal, of the head of the family.

I then move onto hunting the book down. Perhaps I will buy a replacement after all. Asking Bing for 'whitworth+recipe+book+pink' produces a whole lot of pictures of pink cakes and pink cook books - but not this one. While asking Google for 'whitworth+recipe+book' turns up a much more heterogenous collection, including various versions of the cook book I was looking for, amongst a selection of others. Including the very one, snapped above. Although when I click on it, I get taken to Amazon who only offers the image posted previously at reference 5. While reference 6 includes an early sketch for the present post.

Abebooks offers me a 2/6 version, as opposed to the 3/0 paid by BH, from 1940, so a few years older than ours, for nearly £20 from a store in Canada. A store which says the book came from the very place where Whitworth Bros are to be found now, that is to say Wellingborough. From which we deduce there was a split.

Comparing the price hike with inflation over the period is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=whitworth.

Reference 2: https://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/.

Reference 3: https://whitworths.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.whitworthbros.ltd.uk/.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/more-whitworths.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/royal-rhubarb.html.