Well, hopefully anyone reading who had been a schoolboy in the 1960's!
I couldn't get enough of them, I was addicted to them. In each pack you got a few cards, a piece of bubble gum and "Confederate dollars"! There were 87 different cards in the set, dramatic bloodthirsty artwork on the front and a press report on the reverse, they were currency for swopping in the playground, and when I'd collected them all I sent off for the album. I poured over them for years but when I left school I forgot about them, until one day I gave them away. And I have regretted that ever since!
Until recently, when a random ebay advert popped up in my newsfeed for a complete set, I clicked the link and sure enough I could get all 87 again for just £144. YIKES! Nostalgia is a powerful emotion but not THAT powerful!
Happily there were several lots of cards on offer and among them was a seller offering reprints of the entire set for a much more manageable £16.99 available in 3 sizes, I opted for 110mm x 75mm which is 50% larger than the original cards. If you remember the similar Battle News cards covering WW2 they've also reprinted them, and I'm pondering whether I should get a set?
In the meantime I'm very pleased to have the Civil War News cards, I don't know what I'll do with them but they are an itch scratched. I remember every single card vividly, the images are so powerful, I think they will provide inspiration for conversion ideas and perhaps wargame scenarios, we'll see.
I'd always assumed they were imported from the U.S. but the cards state they were printed in England by A&BC (American & British Chewing Gum Ltd.) A firm originally set up in 1949 by four soldiers demobbed from the British Army, who opened a factory in Cricklewood to serve the post war craze for bubble gum. Their first set of cards were issued in 1953 to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and in 1959 they teamed up with the Topps Company of USA to produce and distribute Topps cards in UK, so that's where the American iconography came from.
