Peter Alsop, Kate Parsonson & Richard Wolfe
Canterbury University Press
REVIEWED BY JIM SULLIVAN
Take an expert on design and vintage ephemera, a family historian with a love of literature, and an art and design historian with a bent for kiwiana.
Mix them well in generous pages with advice from a top-rate editor, sprinkle liberally with the best illustrations in your cupboards and then bind the ingredients in a hard cover book and you have something that is sure to please.
That is the recipe for one of the most attractive family/company histories of recent times which proves that good stories when well told can have their genesis in the most mundane of household items, in this case baking powder.
Not just any baking powder but the one that that became the most recognised brand with the best-known slogan: Edmonds ‘‘Sure to Rise’’ Baking Powder.
Kate Parsonson, a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Edmonds, tells the family story with justifiable pride as the company’s modest beginnings led to a major New Zealand manufacturing firm through the input of several generations.
Cockney Thomas Edmonds and his Yorkshire-born wife Jane arrived in Christchurch in 1879.
From running a modest grocery store Thomas moved to producing baking powder in paper bags and by the 1920s was able to build the landmark factory in Ferry Rd where he produced 1.5million cans of baking powder each year.
The famous Edmonds cookery books first appeared in 1908 and, as Otago University food historian Helen Leach’s research reveals, ‘‘it is the most successful cookbook series in New Zealand history’’. (Some editions were selling 150,000 copies). Behind this commercial success is a family noted for its probity and civic philanthropy.
Outside business, more personal family matters are discussed. The early death of Thomas and Jane’s son William and the couples’ support for the Theosophical Society and involvement with swindler Arthur Bently Worthington and his ‘‘Temple of Truth’’. Interestingly, the Edmunds’ daughters Gertrude, Irene, Beatrice and Lillie entertained the troops as the Cheer-Oh Girls during World War 1.
Naturally, the success of the products pouring out from the Edmonds factory is the main ingredient of the story and how they were developed, tweaked, and sold provides glimpses of our social history through booms, depressions and wars. The famous garden at the factory gets a well-deserved chapter and the battle for its survival is a ‘‘sure to rise’’ epic.
Gertrude Edmonds, a daughter of the founder, was born in 1891 and died in 1987. Sure to Rise says she died in 1997 but her 95 years were ample to provide a rich flavouring to the chapters covering the later days of the Edmonds dynasty.
There are generous slices of marketing and design history as Peter Alsop and Richard Wolfe explore the packaging and advertising of Edmonds’ products and these chapters provide probably the most extensive illustrated history of any domestic item yet published.
By the 1980s the company had moved into many other products and was earning $6.2 million a year in export receipts. Inevitably, the family involvement was diluted and the takeover vultures were circling.
By 1984 Brierly Investments were in control. Like many great Southern companies after mergers and takeovers, Edmonds saw their factory demolished and manufacturing moving north where today’s Auckland owner still uses a picture of the old Christchurch factory on its packaging.
Thus, for many South Islanders Sure to Rise has the sadness of a ‘‘rise and fall’’ saga, but having the Edmonds story told in such a fine book gives at least a heartening sense of celebration.
Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer
