F is for Follow-up - Lever Brothers

We looked at one of these two-years ago here but I had the fortune to see two together at Sandown Park courtesy of Mercator Trading, so took the opportunity to grab a little more on them both.

The UK's Lever Brothers (Progress, Sunlight, Vim) became the Anglo-Dutch Unilever some time ago (1929) and they have been in just about everything consumable, including a lot of premium issuers (tea, coffee, margarine, ice cream, and the washing powders that issued these), so while these certainly date from after the merger (1960's/70's?), the brand was obviously still a part of the UK arm, premiums found with Lever on the base can also be found with Primo in the same place; Primo was a European washing powder brand I believe.

The fact that they both owe much to Crescent figurines is also A) no accident and B) further sign of their having originated in the UK. They are quite chunky and toward 70mm which probably helps take them out of the 'straight' plagiarism zone!

Posed like-for-like on the left and more frontally on the right these are the two donors and you can see that they pulled from both the 54mm and 60mm sets from Crescent, adding a US/NATO type ' M1' helmet to both which further carries them away from the realm of piracy and more toward l'homage!

Corporate Stuff

Lever Brothers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers

Unilever - http://www.company-histories.com/Unilever-Company-History.html

Van den Berghs - https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Van_den_Berghs

When you read a headline like "Unilever to Acquire Ice Cream Business Owned by Kraft Unit of Philip Morris" you realise just how murky the corporate multinational world is! Philip Morris make cigarettes FFS!

Equally; there's some irony involved in posting this the same day a report by a cross-bench group of MP's is issued recommending the phasing-out (or outright banning?) of cartoon characters and promotions on cereal packets!

Apparently the Jolly Green Giant (Santa in his day job . . . think about it . . . "Ho Ho Ho!") will survive to promote his 'healthy' vegetables . . . even though they are syrupy, tinned vegetables with probably similar levels of sugar-per-spoonful as some breakfast cereals, while the world swims through an ever growing sea of guns and waste plastic - way'ta'go MP's!