Adams Confectioners Barmouth

This little pot, with its elegant green print, once contained meat paste. This was a popular foodstuff at the seaside resorts of Victorian Britain and later, and many of the larger producers were located at some of these resorts. The town of Southport in Lancashire seems to have been the source of most of the meat paste in the country if the number of their pots is anything to go by.

The largest of these producers were Springfield and G. W. Plumtree, both of Southport, and their pots are to be found all over the country. The popularity of collecting antique bottles and its associated pastime of digging them up from old rubbish dumps has turned up literally thousands of these little pots over the last forty years. The Barmouth pot is comparatively rare in the scheme of things.

The confectionery business was founded by Jane Richards Adams at her home in Llys Meirion, South Avenue, Barmouth, in the early years of the 20^th Century. In 1901 Jane was learning her craft in Cheadle, Cheshire, at the confectionery establishment of the Mallalieu sisters, Mary Ellen and Charlotte, and it would have been soon after that she returned to her home town to begin trading. Helping with the business was her sister Gwenfron, both describing themselves as ‘Confectioners & Pastry Cooks.’

The sisters were the daughters of builder and joiner John Adams and his wife Jane. Jane was born in 1877 while Gwenfron was the youngest child, being born in 1889. In 1912 Gwenfron married grocer Thomas Jones and she died at Melbourne House, Barmouth, on the 18^th of October, 1944, aged 55. Jane never married and passed away at the age of 74 at Hillside Nursing Home in Faversham, Kent, on the 11^th of March, 1951.