A Jar of Date Jam

I always enjoy the adverts in old magazines as well as the literary contents, and indeed several of them have given me ideas for stories. This is particularly the case with classified ads, whose brevity often leaves room for mystery and speculation. But others are just faintly odd, or happen to catch my fancy.

In the Special Christmas Number of the sixpenny magazine The Hiker & Camper, Vol. I, No. II, Dec. 1931, which has on its cover two bright young ladies in overcoats, hats and scarves striding over a snowy field, there is a Classified Advertisement on page 39 as follows:

‘A NEW FOOD FOR HIKERS, RAMBLERS AND CAMPERS.—Dibs, the date jam made from pure clean dates, and manufactured from an old Arabic recipe for the first time in England. Send 3d. in stamps to pay packing and postage for free sample to Dibs Ltd., 26 D’Arblay Street, London, W.1’

The other advertisements in the column are mostly for cafes, hotels and guest houses. We are invited to stay with Miss Dagg of “Utopia”, Wonham Way, Gomsall, Surrey; or at The Sun Patch Cottage; or Hathaway Farm, Stratford-on-Avon, (‘next to Ann Hathaway’s Cottage’), which also offers ‘Catering in Ye Olde Barn’. We may also order a Campers’ Diary and join a Penship Club.

I must admit to a fondness for the fortunes of obscure foodstuffs. J C Squire once lamented that piccalilli had never been the same after the First World War, and this naturally made me wonder why this was so. Perhaps the supply of Zanzibar cloves had faltered, or the cauliflower florets were not so crisp. Or was Squire mingling the memory of the golden piccalilli days with the lost savours of youth?

Jams must have been all the rage in the Thirties. Squire’s literary journal the London Mercury also carried an advertisement for arcane preserves, prepared by a retired military man and his family in the West Country and available in breakfast jars for guest houses etc. They included loganberry and whortleberry as well as the more usual strawberry, damson and blackcurrant. 

But did many hikers, ramblers or campers ever avail themselves of Dibs, on a halt during a staunch tramp? Was it spread liberally between two thick slices of wholemeal bread, or eaten with a spoon straight from the jar? Surely there was a good chance of the exotic provender escaping, and getting all over the maps and the compass and the spare socks and the vagabonding volume by Edward Thomas, or R. Francis Foster, or Herbert W. Tompkins, and moreover staining the pages of their scrolled-up copy of the latest issue of The Hiker.

I wonder whether the makers had aimed at quite the right audience. Connoisseurs of fine food might have been a surer market. And I cannot help thinking that Dibs, though succinct and friendly, was not quite the right name for a date jam that you wanted to present as made from a secret Arabic recipe. I should have thought ‘Saladin’s Delight’ would do the trick better, with some further alluring phrase such as ‘A Taste of the Near East’.

That taste had been fostered by E M Hull’s sultry bestselling desert romance The Sheik (1919), also made into a film (1921) starring Rudolph Valentino in the title role. His name and reputation were still vivid enough over fifty years later for my own surname sometimes to be accidentally or mischievously amended to his. As I was a thin, bespectacled, shy and bookish boy, the contrast with the smouldering-eyed matinee idol was somewhat incongruous. Of course, in my maturity . . .

The zest for the Near East had also been fed by the tales and newsreels of the exploits of T E Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’), which gave a sense of dash and glamour to a weary public in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, especially when Lawrence attended the peace conferences in the early Twenties in white Arab clothes and headdress.

It seems unlikely that the manufacturers of Dibs could have got the legendary hero to endorse their date jam. He was chary of publicity (except when it suited him) and once sent even his friends a postcard: ‘To tell you that in future I shall write very few letters.’ Still, a cunning designer could have come up with a label that implied Lawrence without strictly depicting him, and a hinting title such as ‘Preserve of Arabia’.

There were many sequels and imitations after The Sheikh, and a similar surge of books and memoirs about the desert war. But the advert for Dibs date jam did not often reappear in further issues of the hiking journal, and the jam itself and the trade name do not seem to have survived into our own times. And now I rather want to know what Dibs date jam tasted like, and whether that old Arabic recipe survived. Rich and sticky and sweet, no doubt of it. I like to think there might have been exotic tints too: rosewater and sherbet, maybe, or cinnamon and cardamom.

Perhaps in some obscure backstreet of a provincial town there is a semi-forgotten celestial grocer’s shop pervaded by the aroma of tea, toffee and aniseed balls, where on a high shelf only reachable by a tapering step-ladder a jar of the original lost piccalilli and a jar of Dibs date jam converse together of old glories.  

(Mark Valentine)