There is something wonderfully reassuring about seeing an Elizabeth Shaw Mint Selection in a museum, because it occupies that exact little space between industrial history and chocolate. With chocolate and youth, it’s easy to remember the boxes, the wrappers, the slightly formal act of offering one round after dinner and the delicate social calculation of whether taking a second mint would look greedy. Naturally, I would never have this problem, as I conduct all such matters with dignity, restraint and only occasional disgrace.
The Bristol connection is not quite as simple as imagining Elizabeth Shaw herself standing in a Bristol factory inventing mint chocolates. The brand began with Elizabeth and Patrick Joice, who started making honeycomb mint-flavoured chocolate crisps in the 1930s. The name “Elizabeth Shaw” combined Elizabeth’s own name with that of Page & Shaw, the confectionery firm where she had previously worked, so it’s not really as authentic as people might think which does feel a little sub-optimal.
The Bristol part of the story comes through the Greenbank chocolate factory, which became associated with Elizabeth Shaw after a series of mergers and moves within the confectionery industry. Bristol already had a long chocolate-making tradition, most famously through Fry’s, and the Greenbank site had its own industrial life before Elizabeth Shaw became the name most attached to it. The city of Norwich also had a chocolate tradition with Caley’s and Mackintosh.
There is also something very Bristol about the way this story sits between production, identity and reinvention. The Greenbank factory closed in 2006, and the old chocolate-making site has since become part of the city’s wider story of redevelopment. The Elizabeth Shaw lives on and I rather like that it’s currently owned by the Polish company, Colian Holding. And looking at this exhibit made me hungry, part of the reason that I went to Za Za Bazaar…..