Smith Kendon

tinned music

A few days ago, while listening to a wonderful series called English String Miniatures, I suddenly had a craving—hear me out—for Smith Kendon “travel” sweets and wondered where they had gone since I last saw them thirty years ago. Smith Kendon travel sweets came in large, robust tins that looked like they should contain something much more precious, or at least more slowly consumed, than mere hard candy. The tins vastly outlived the sweets, and I just bought one on eBay for the memories.

I do not remember the exact packaging inside the tin, but I picture a circular paper ruffle with a hole in the center like those in tobacco tins, and a paper disc under it when first opened. Removing it revealed a nest of square boiled sweets smothered in fine caster sugar. Boiled sweets tend to stick to each other. The white powder prevented that, and also obscured their color and therefore flavor, introducing some randomness in what you picked.

My favorite assortment was Lemon and Lime. Citrus has always been to me a sort of harmonic flavor scale, ranging from orange at the low end to yuzu at the top, via citron, mandarin, lemon, lime and kalamansi, with some added polychromatic chords like blood orange (cotton candy), bergamot (lavender) and grapefruit (sulfur). The citrus fruits best known to me in the old days were, of course, lemon and lime. Years ago limes used to be rare in Europe and have only recently become a supermarket staple. I always felt that limes stood in relation to lemons as pears do to apples and as a C⁶sus⁴ chord does to a C major triad.

The tin of defunct sweets came to mind specifically when Pamela Harrison’s Suite for Timothy (1948) came on. The harmonies of the first movement’s jaunty tune felt like a simple lemon song given a fresh coat of modernist lime harmonic paint. The music seldom lands exactly on the expected yellow square, going instead to a green one to the side. Much British light music between the wars and until the 1950s enlivens folk tunes with sour harmonies, giving the feel of a familiar task performed with rebellious impatience. It suggests confined joy and eccentric goings-on in the privacy of your little detached home.

The labels on Smith Kendon tins could have served as a cover illustration for an LP of the English String Miniatures series. Their frumpy calligraphic cursive, a style familiar today in the logo of Clarks shoes, recalls the days when lettering was done by hand, before Letraset ended it all in 1959. The sweets are illustrated, because no photograph could achieve the heroic, stylised effect of paint. Its depiction of humble hard candy as gems served the ennoblement of the ordinary rather than the search for the extraordinary. That spirit, described by Cocteau as “searching for a fresh spot on the pillow,” was still alive but fading fast when I arrived in the UK in 1970.

The last fifty years have seen the obliteration of what used to be called Light Music, and of the state of mind that desired it. Light music is often—wrongly, in my opinion—assumed to provide light relief. I believe the English variety is instead a form of understatement. Understatement works if it is understood that, in another place and another time, a passionate feeling might be called for. It stands in for emotion when emotion would disturb the flow of conversation.

English Pastoral music was full of poignant passion of a private kind, fueled by short hot summers, the brevity of life, and long walks in sunken paths. That sort of passion, often disparaged as “elegiac” or “easy lyricism” is still present in the background of light music of the period. You can hear a muffled echo of the grandeur of Vaughan Williams and the heartbreak of Finzi within those little ditties. Unlike the Tallis Fantasia, however, you can whistle them, enjoying them as background when played by the hotel orchestra, tasting lemon and lime as if they were musical Travel Sweets.