The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 272 No 7296 p516
24 April 2004

An interesting social survey of the 20th century and an entertaining read

‘The unfolding years: memoirs of a bourgeois childhood’, by Edward Blackwell. Pp vi+178. Price £9.99. London: Athena Press; 2003. ISBN 1 884401 184 4

Blackwell’s father, who finally became sales manager of Genatosan, had been a proprietor pharmacist driven to selling his pharmacy in Basingstoke during the 1930s depression. It was in 1930, indeed, that the Pharmaceutical Society’s Council banned advertisements in The Pharmaceutical Journal for pharmacists that offered salaries of less than £200 per annum.

Edward Blackwell became an accountant and businessman. He was born in 1923, 18 months later than me, so was a close contemporary. Surprisingly, many of his experiences were distinctly similar to mine. Like me, he had a Construments set (an optics educational toy) and with other boys formed a Construments Club. I established a similar club, but with the grandiose title “The United Science Club”. It had tendencies, like Edward’s, of an explosive nature, with similar effect on ceilings. Safety was not an obsession in those days! Another of our common continuing interests was airships. It started with the R101 disaster of 5 October 1930, which made a deep and lasting impression on both of us. Only a few years ago, I visited privately the R101 shed at Cardington.

And, in our youth, we both wrapped medicines in sheets of white paper. I remember it as Demy (in other word, printers’ paper). Coincidentally, Edward gained a Demyship in natural science at Oxford.

The book forms an interesting social survey of the 20th century, and an entertaining read for pharmacists old and new.


Robert Blyth

Robert Blyth, now retired, was editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal from 1961 to 1986