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Chandy's nest of mahogany tables offer (1972)

© 2014-2025 Lewis Williams

www.lewiswilliams.com

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Seat belts and nests of tables - the strange world of Chandy special offers

We are now aware of two Chandy special offers, where you could send in your Chandy bottle tops to secure certain goods at apparently bargain prices. This page is dedicated to those two special offers.  If any more ever come to light the page will be expanded to include them. The items that you could obtain with these two Chandy special offers aren’t perhaps those that most readily spring to mind when one thinks of lemonade and beer shandy, but we suppose connections of sorts could be construed. In the mid-1960s Chandy was promoted as being the safe drink for thirsty drivers, so safety conscious drivers might well be interested in seat belts to fit to their cars. And nests of tables? Well they might be useful for serving Chandy on if unexpected guests called round!

It’s hard now to imagine a time when seat belts weren’t even fitted as standard equipment on cars, let alone compulsory to wear, but it wasn’t until 1967 that Britain required the fitting of front seat belts to new cars and later still that it required front seat belts to be retrospectively fitted to cars manufactured between 1965 and 1967. (In 1965 front belt seat anchorage points were required to be fitted to new cars. This information and other information in this paragraph comes from The AA Seat Belt Report here.) So, capitalising on the demand for seat belts for retro-fitment, Chandy offered via the mid-1960s beer mat shown here (click to enlarge) their car seat belts special offer where you could obtain a set of front seat belts for two pounds and nineteen shillings and six Chandy bottle tops, if you were willing to wait the 3 to 4 weeks you needed to allow for delivery. Clearly next day delivery wasn’t an option back then!

Click on the image to see it full size.

Fast forward to 1972, when for the not inconsiderable sum of £18.20 (which according to the website here is £224.66 in today’s money) and six Chandy bottle tops you could obtain a nest of three ‘Regency styled’ tables. See the advert shown here (click to enlarge) that appeared in the official programme for the Chandy 6-Hour Relay Race held at Thruxton on 13th August 1972.

 

We’ve no idea how many people sent off their cheques or postal orders and bottle tops to 8-10 Shad Thames, London S.E.1 for nests of tables, but we can say with certainty that nobody’s selling nests of tables out of a warehouse in Shad Thames these days. It’s a street in London close to Tower Bridge where one bedroom flats in converted warehouses now sell for about three quarters of a million pounds each.

Click on the image to see it full size.

Chandy's car seat belts offer (mid-1960s)

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