This week we continue with the theme of the Wycombe Timeline and look back at some of the food-related advertisements (ads) which appeared in the Bucks Free Press over the Christmas and New Year period in 1940.

Some of these ads were by shops in Wycombe promoting the products they sold.

Many readers will have found memories of Foster Brothers’ shop in White Hart St for example, which they might have visited with their mother or father to buy their school uniform.

Other ads are for the products themselves.

Do you remember Bisto for example, a meat-flavoured gravy powder, which rapidly became a bestseller in the UK after it was launched in 1908? I had to ask my wife if it was still available - of course it is she said, and promptly went shopping and came back with a 170 gram drum of the “gravy granules”!

And the drum is made from cardboard, with the only plastic part being the lid.