How breweries played their cards right
Playing cards have long been used to promote beer. And now, says Andrew Burnyeat, they are becoming collectors’ items
Adolf Hitler and scantily-clad women are hardly the words you’d expect to read at the start of an article about brewery playing cards.
Yet Hitler is depicted in a card issued during World War Two with a derogatory reference to his past life as an artist. Strange to think that had Hitler won the war, the author of a humorous brewery playing card could have faced a dark fate.
As for the scantily-clad women, well they have appeared in all kinds of advertising through the ages and brewery playing cards are just another form of advertising.
Breweries began issuing playing cards around the start of the 20th Century when games such as cribbage and bridge were popular in pubs. They were the forerunners of pool, darts and watching satellite television.
Certain card games such as cribbage were actually mentioned in various licensing acts as the only games to be played in pubs on which a wager was permitted.
Only bets of ‘small amounts’ were allowed, although no definition of ‘small’ was offered.
Quite amazingly, hefty sentences were meted out to working men of Victorian times for placing farthing bets on cribbage before it was exempted from anti-gambling laws, along with dominoes.
For the brewers, making playing cards and giving them to pubs was a cheap way to put images of their beer in front of the pub drinker.
They became collectors’ items because the brewers only issued about 20 cards a year, compared to the thousands that were issued by cigarette companies.
Because fewer .....
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Section : Collecting Beer
Page number : 61
