Blackpool rock: the perfect souvenir of a traditional British seaside holiday. One nibble on that stick of stripy sugar, and many a homeward bound holiday maker has been transported back to happy memories of their time by the sea. The fruity flavour, the mystery of how they make the tiny letters inside the stick, the little picture of the Blackpool tower on the label… All these elements make a stick of rock the sweetest thing to remember a holiday by. Blackpool rock’s nostalgic properties would have taken on a far more sinister air if nuclear had ever broken out, however. Thanks to chilling plans made by Lancashire County Council in 1983, survivors of a thermonuclear attack would have found themselves sucking on sticks of rock amidst radioactive rubble, the holiday memento having become one of their main sources of nutrition and energy. Far from reminding survivors of a pleasant jaunt beside the seaside, the sticks of rock would serve as haunting relics of a world lost forever in the searing heat of a nuclear fireball...
Lancashire's 1983 War Plan lays out clear instructions that the major rock manufacturers in Blackpool would be requisitioned by the authorities during the terrifying escalation to nuclear war, with their stocks of sugar and sweets placed under armed military guard. Businesses listed were as follows:
- Coastal Candy Company, Back Keswick Road, Blackpool
- Coronation Rock Company, Cherry Tree Road, Blackpool (still trading today as Candy UK)
- Palace Rock Company, Castlegate, Blackpool
- X.L Rock Company, Chapel Street, Blackpool (now trading as Rock Candy Kingdom)
- Phoenix Dock Manufacturers, Dorset Road, Cleveleys
Before we explore how these rock companies would have been transformed from end-of-the-pier treat producers to end-of-the-world survival snack suppliers, let's take a look at why sugar confectionery played such a pivotal role in nuclear war planning.
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| Rock makers at the Coronation Rock Company, 1980s |
Put simply — very simply, for I'm no dietician — sugar equals carbohydrates, and carbohydrates equal energy. Quick energy. In a post-attack world, survivors would be too busy collecting bodies, scooping up human waste and completing other delightful reconstruction tasks to sit down for a carb-laden meal of potatoes, rice and veg. In fact, any healthy foods that provided slow-release carbohydrates would be off the menu, for once stockpiled stocks had been eaten or rotted away, there would be no more produce to be harvested from the irradiated, toxic fields. With time and availability factors at play, war planners had to seek alternative sources of sustenance for survivors. Sweets, specifically hard candies, fitted the bill perfectly.
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| US Civil Defense Survival Candy, 1960s |
Easily and reliably preservable in large sealed tins, the citric acid-laced sweets would last indefinitely if stored away from contaminated air or radioactive fallout. That's longevity sorted. As for nutrients, although hard-boiled sweets might be lacking in vitamins to guard the long-term health of survivors, they would provide a quick source of glucose and carbs to combat any fatigue and improve cognitive function, thus ensuring efficiency in immediate reconstruction efforts. Sucking on a continuous supply of sweets would of course cause mouth ulcers and have the detrimental effect of painfully rotting the teeth; war planners weren't overly concerned with this, however... Sufferers of radiation sickness would quickly find their teeth dropping out of their bleeding gums, anyway. Problem solved, no dentists needed.
US war planners were particularly enamoured with the idea of candy for a nuclear conflict. As part of their mission to provide and equip fallout shelters for all US citizens in the early 1960s, they built up an enormous hoard of sugary delights that would make Willy Wonka Green with envy. The so-called 'survival candies', manufactured by the Job Charles Company of California, resembled peardrops in shape and colour, although by all accounts didn't taste quite as pleasant. Made by the millions, they were crammed into 37lb cans, welded shut and stacked in basements alongside other appetising delicacies, including 'survival crackers' and barrells of 'survival water'. Yummy. Thousands of the carbohydrate supplement sweets still exist unopened today, and occasionally crop up on eBay. Apparently, they are still edible, although I would advise against having a nibble: the artificial red dye used in their manufacture has since been banned after it was discovered to be carcinogenic. As if nuclear attack survivors wouldn't have enough to worry about.
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| US Civil Defense candies, dated 1963 |
Back in the UK, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) also saw fit to stock up on special wartime sweets, albeit not as fanatically as their stateside counterparts. While the UK did not provide any nuclear shelter space for civilians — politicians and the elite were a different story, naturally — they did have dozens of semi-secret emergency food buffer depots dotted across the country, which were kept fully stocked even in peacetime with bulk packages of flour, sugar, margarine, special hard glucose sweets and biscuits. If nuclear war had broken out, the emergency food would have been distributed to survivors when the local authority saw fit, at least fourteen days after the attack. Until then, people would have to rely upon anything they themselves had managed to scrape together during frantic panic buying before the war. Major companies with familiar household names supplied the buffer depot food reserves: sugar came from Tate and Lyle, while the glucose sweets came from Mars.
Several factors worked against the practicality of the MAFF buffer depots, however. Firstly, lack of space restricted the volume of food that could be stored; buffer depots were often nothing more than averagely-sized industrial warehouses, hardly big enough to hold sufficient food for a cul-de-sac, let alone an entire community, albeit one depleted by death. Furthermore, the likelihood that peckish rodents would gorge themselves on food stocks was high, as many of the polythene bags used to package the produce became damaged or torn during storage, exposing the contents to the inquisitive noses of rats. Sacks of sugar, if punctured, would also be vulnerable to rot, damp and mildew. Thus, it was widely predicted by the authorities that the stockpiled sugar would not tempt even the sweetest tooth when it were unwrapped after a nuclear attack.
As for the emergency glucose sweets, these were evidently not as well sealed as those in the US fallout shelters, as they too were extremely susceptible to decay. In 1988, a Doncaster buffer depot was broken into by a group of school boys. Thinking all their Christmases had come at once, they dived into the supply of sweets with gusto, eating to their hearts content. Alas, the sweets were almost forty years old, and the boys promptly found themselves with some very dicky tummies indeed. Clearly, further measures would have to be taken by government if their stockpiled sugary supplies were to be even remotely edible in an emergency situation. Here's where Blackpool rock companies came into the grisly picture.
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| Palace Rock Company stall, Blackpool promenade, 1950s |
While other towns in Lancashire might have been home to maybe one or two bakeries or confectioners from which sugar could be taken before nuclear war, Blackpool was unique in it's plentitude of requisitioning targets. As war loomed, MAFF agents would have swept in on the rock shops like seagulls on a doughnut, having been granted permission to do so under emergency government regulations. In a 1982 war game exercise (appropriately named Operation Hard Rock), the fictional requisitioning was authorised 12 days before the nuclear attack, with 'local authorities given the power to suspend certain peacetime functions and [...] to requisition premises and materials for civil defence purposes'. With their mission green-lit, the MAFF agents would have leapt into their military trucks, charged up the M6 motorway (which would incidentally have become an 'Essential Service Route' and closed to all civilian traffic) and headed straight for Blackpool promenade's rock shops. Staff members would be turfed out, owners would be made to hand over their keys: anybody who refused would be dubbed a 'subversive' and arrested.
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| Advert for Coronation Rock Company, 1987 |
Next, the sticks of rock, bags of sugar and any other sweets on the premises would be loaded onto trucks and taken to the nearest MAFF buffer depot, which by this point would be reinforced like a military compound, under constant armed guard and surveillance. Additionally, any cooking equipment in the rock factories would be stripped out and readied for use in makeshift post-attack emergency field kitchens. The Coronation Rock Company on Blackpool's Cherry Tree Road was particularly equipped for this, being the proud owners of a huge industrial warehouse where rock was 'still manufactured in the well-proven way on open gas fires, boiling sugar and glucose in gleaming copper pans.'
These pans would not be quite as gleaming when the Women's Voluntary Service dragged them out of the radioactive rubble that used to be Blackpool, however, ready to cook 'stew-type meals' for horribly disfigured nuclear attack survivors. The 1982 exposé Target North West stated that a 5 megaton bomb dropped on Manchester — 48 miles from Blackpool — would leave the inhabitants of the Vegas of the North with 'second-degree burns and severe blistering', coupled with broken limbs, open wounds and radiation sickness. The psychological and physical symptoms of stress, shock and grief would also plague the hoardes. This is the condition of the people who'd be shuffled into queues beneath the twisted, melted structure of the Blackpool Tower to receive their meagre ration of high energy sweets and rock. A jovial pick and mix party this wouldn't be, however, for the armed food distributors wouldn't be handing out the goods willy nilly.
Initially, rations would be prioritised for the classes of people who would be best able to rebuild a post-attack society: the young, the healthy and the strong. The elderly, infirm or sick would be given the bare minimum of food or, in some cases, nothing at all, having been abandoned to await their deaths after the nuclear attack at 'Casualty Collection Centres'. Thus, only useful survivors would be awarded food and high energy candy in return for completing the unpleasant reconstruction tasks assigned to them. Anybody who refused to work or who disobeyed orders would be punished by having their sugar supply halted, bringing weakness, starvation and death ever closer. By allowing dissidents to simply starve to death, dangerously controversial capital punishment could be avoided and precious bullets saved for rioters or more serious criminals.
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| The owners of the Phoenix Rock Company at a trade fair, 1980s |
Essentially, adults would find themselves reduced in status to that of children, promised sweeties as a reward for good behaviour by the all-knowing grown ups and punished for flouting the rules by having their privileges removed. This regression correlates perfectly with the predicted outcome of an all-out atomic conflict on modern society: as the biting cold and darkness of a nuclear winter spread across the globe, so too would humanity find itself plunged into a chilling new Dark Age. Deprived of readily available food, water and shelter, and suddenly robbed of the social connections and technology so necessary to modern living, survivors would be equivalent to children in a terrifying world they were uneducated on how to deal with.
When a child in a peaceful world is out of their depth and needs comforting, the gift of a favourite sweet from a parental figure can be just the ticket to sooth their worries and calm their fears. Alas for the child-adults of the post-nuclear war world, a brightly-coloured fragment of Blackpool rock would only stoke despair, sadness and apathy, being a bittersweet reminder of a world lost forever. The fun, togetherness and easygoing calm that makes a seaside holiday worth looking forward to — and life itself worth living, for that matter — would never again be reclaimed after they vanished in the flash of a thermonuclear fireball, reconstruction or no reconstruction. Could we blame a survivor for feeling hopeless as they gazed at the words 'WISH YOU WERE HERE?' or 'KISS ME QUICK' running through the centre of their sugar ration? Who in their right mind, after all, would wish to live out their days in an apocalyptic wasteland? By refusing to work and deliberately sabotaging their access to carbohydrate-packed sweets, victims could mercifully hasten their own death and escape the nuclear nightmare. KISS ME QUICK? Perhaps it would be preferable to kiss the world goodbye. Quickly.
By Rebecca Shaw
Sources
- Lancashire County Council War Plan, 1983 (accessed at Lancashire County Council Archives).
- Target North West, 1982, Robert Poole and Steve Wright.
- War Plan UK, Duncan Campbell.
- West Lancashire Evening Gazette, 13 April 1988; 28 February 1989.
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