Although the ice lolly was patented by Walls Ice Cream a hundred years ago, in 1923, the story goes that it was invented by accident nearly 20 years before that, when an 11-year-old kid in America called Frank Epperson, happened to leave a glass of flavoured water outside overnight. The next morning, the stirring stick he had used to dissolve the flavoured powder had frozen upright - he yanked it out, the frozen drink came too, et voila, the birth of the lolly!

Techlickolour Times

Although the ice cream van was put on the road in 1929, initially by a New Yorker called Tom Carvel, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the full technicolour imagination of the ice cream world took flight, with all manner of designs of both the ice lolly itself, its shiny paper cover and even the stick, with its riddle, or puzzle or joke.

“The worst bit was when you licked the dry bottom of the stick by mistake!’ - a Spring Chicken remembers

Then there were the food technology improvements that led to ‘layers’ of flavours, like in the Zoom, then the choc ice chocolate shell, the ‘sugar strands’ and add-ons like the studded hundreds and thousands on the famous Fab.

But it was the ever-more brightly-coloured wrappers which caught the eye in both the vans and in the newsagent open-topped freezers - and these required a proper knack. Remember the ice lolly novice of all our childhoods who attempted to pull off the cover prematurely and ended up crossly peeling off small sticky strips of stubbornly-adhering paper?

We lolly-veterans knew that first you had to put your mouth to the open, bottom end of the wrapper and blow gently, to free the paper from the icy, sticky body of the lolly in one perfect piece. Then it was simply a race against time between head-freeze from eating the ice lolly too fast, and sticky meltwater down the hand from eating it too slowly.

Expertise in this skill meant that lolly wrappers often survived intact… which, in turn, meant that collectors such as Robert Opie, our very own Spring Chicken guru of branding, were able to amass quite the homegrown collection of ice lolly papers.

What’s more, at the seaside in the 1960s, Wall’s installed special ‘wrapper-only’ ice cream bins that were made from metal grids, meaning that a careful scoper like Robert could look through and pick and choose at his leisure, opting for the best-preserved and filling the gaps in his lolly lexicon.

Today, Robert has a collection of around 200 wrappers, so we can share a colourful ride into the past with the pop-art paraphernalia of the popsicle.

Our Favourite Childhood Ice Lolly: A Spring Chicken Top Dozen

Fab

Ice-cream in the middle, encased in strawberry ice at the bottom and capped with sprinkles and chocolate, that familiar three-striped favourite, as advertised by Lady Penelope herself! Yes, it was 1967 and Thunderbirds was F-A-B, meaning that it was Forward All Boosters on all things Fab. And nothing was more fab than the Fab, last year described as the ‘Nation’s Favourite for the Past Fifty Years, now produced by Nestlé, who bought out Lyons Maid..

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Space Age Britain: Sky Ray and Zoom

If Fab was the girls’ favourite, then for space-obsessed boys, it was a race to the stars with the rocket lollies: Sky Ray: like a rocket “With Four Great Flavour Stages” (Strawberry, cola, orange and lemonade) and Zoom, also with flavour layers and its distinctive rocket ship moulded shape.

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The Woppa

Who remembers Willy Woppa, the falsetto voiced cartoon character who advertised Wall’s Woppa ice lolly in the 60s?

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It’s not a name that would be used in today’s more cynical times, but the brightly coloured Woppa lives on in our memories, with all its back-of-wrapper free comic offers, competitions to win brand-new Raleigh bikes, puzzles - the Woppa Wonder-Wots - and its collectable range of flavours: like the Screaming Red Woppa (strawberry) or the Wonder Woppa (orange).

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Then, of course, there was the ‘funundrum’: my older brother’s favourite word of the early 70s, meaning a funny riddle…

‘What do you call a cross between a sheep and a kangaroo? A woolly jumper.” - Wall’s Woppa Funundrum 1969

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Wall’s Funny Faces and Funny Feet

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The Funny Faces are shown here, as part of Robert’s collection, and Funny Faces were hugely popular in their own right but the novelty of biting off a pink big toe never really ebbed, putting Funny Feet just ahead for us children.  The appeal of eating feet in ice lolly form was always a slight mystery to the grown-ups: my own mother would shudder and grimace if ever I asked for one. So popular were Funny Feet with kids of the 70s that, after they were discontinued by Annoying Grown-Ups in the 1990s, there was a campaign to bring them back, with Walls caving in to popular demand with a relaunch with Iceland in 2021.

Strawberry Mivvi

It was simple, it had very little in the way of psychedelic wrapper design and it came in several different flavours, like pineapple, orange and raspberry but for us Spring Chickens, it was the Lyons Maid Strawberry Mivvi that just sometimes hit the spot. Perhaps it was the combination of the thirst-quenching fruit juice ice outside covering the simple sweet satisfaction of the vanilla icecream inside.

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The Crusader

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As a combination of the Italian owner Toni and Bell from Bellissima, Italian for most beautiful, Tonibell was the name on top of thousands of ice cream vans, originally in rather military looking blue but then taking on their distinctive Barbie pink in the 1970s. Of course, originally, Tonibells were merely the conveyors of the ice creams they made, most of which Wall’s saw off in the competitive years of the 60s and 70s. One Tonibell own-brand best remembered by the Spring Chickens was the Crusader. Why Tonibell chose to call their strawberry and pineapple ice lolly, with choc dip and sugar strands, after a bloodthirsty Christian soldier of a thousand years’ ago, is beyond us, but it’s only as hilariously unPC as their Green Genie and Midland Counties’ Chocopotamus!

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Red Arrow

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Not only did the Red Arrow have a playstick that doubled up as a catapult when combined with a rubber band, but it also contained a cardboard template that could be turned into your very own Red Arrow aeroplane - for free - complete with a suitably 70s style stern warning, ‘NEVER, EVER, point the model near anyone when launching it!’.

“I was always envious of the boy in the playground who had a Red Arrow.” - a Spring Chicken remembers.

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Kinky

At first, lollies were named simply after their flavour - Mini Milk, Orange Maid etc - but these gave way to the more modern 60s preoccupation with the new and the eye-catching - what self-respecting junior hepcat wanted a boring old Lemonade Fizz when you could discover what a Kinky tasted like?

‘A riot of big tastes! Crunchy hundreds and thousands going kerrrr-razy over stripes of vanilla and strawberry icecream!’ - voiceover on Wall’s Kinky advertisement 1969.

The Kinky did transcend its psychedelic otherworldliness and came down to earth with other promotions, like the chance to win your very own hovercraft, sized for kids, which hardly seems possible these days…

Did you win a hovercraft? We need to hear from you if you did!

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Jelly Terror

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In 1973, Wall’s launched a range which marked a departure from flavour-names and high-level concepts like the Kinky in a moment which marked a shift in lolly marketing aimed directly at the children who were their best customers, not their parents: the naughtily crimson-staining Red Devil, the cute pet dog beaming on the cover of the Freckles, the psychedelic Freak Out and the Jelly Terror.  It had a vanilla outer layer around a strawberry jelly centre that could ‘bleed’ out very satisfactorily, topped with chocolate. So far, so yum, but the brilliance of the Jelly Terror lay in the drawing - a marvellous monster with no fewer than ten arms/legs/tentacles, crazily-swirling eyes and fangs. It looked like something that a kid could have drawn on their school exercise book - a daft-clever graphic also used by the rest of the range to clever effect… we children couldn’t get enough of them.

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Super Spy

Cashing in on the 1970s obsession with James Bond, the Super Spy was a purple coloured Cola flavoured water ice filled with strawberry flavoured water ice.

‘When the lolly’s finished, the game’s just starting!’ - Super Spy slogan

But once past the lolly itself was when the fun began. The lolly had a “code stick” with stencil holes only showing part of each letter of a word punched in one end of the stick. Once the lolly had been eaten then other holes were revealed at the other end of the stick. When the two sets of stencil holes were marked in pen or pencil, a secret word appeared. Playground trade in the different codewords was, our Spring Chickens report, brisk and profitable!

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Mini Milk

Small but perfectly formed, Wall’s Mini Milk was the one we always tried to persuade our parents was the healthy option and that therefore we could have one every time the ice cream van came by. ‘It’s tiny,’ we’d carol, ‘and it’s full of calcium and it clearly doesn’t have any E-numbers in it because it’s so pale and natural-looking so it’s positively good for us.’ Clearly, the bigwigs of the ice lolly world agreed because where many 60s and 70s and 80s lollies have been consigned to the ‘toxic hazard’ bin of history, the Mini Milk survives in the 2023 Wall’s family, along with the Calippo, Solero, Twister and Cornetto.

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And now for something completely different…

Talking of which, why not look how Wall’s Ice Creams are advertised today….