Goodbye Mr Wibbly Wobbly Wonder. Check it out:
(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) TO BERTIE Ahern as a boy, it meant 'either it was a birthday or Sunday'. To playwright Bernard Farrell, getting a pint brick of HB ice cream home for Sunday dinner in pre-fridge days involved a ritual of timing so precise it was like transporting uranium.
Once safely home, Farrell recalls, it was stored away under two cushions on the sofa to keep it cold.
'Bring home a brick after Mass,' the advertising slogan said. And, indeed, from the mid-1920s onwards, generation after generation of Irish households did just that - serving the weekly treat with a tin of fruit cocktail in the good times, on its own in the not so good.
HB, of course, stands for Hughes Brothers, but also for Hazelbrook, the name of the eponymous farmhouse on the luxury ice cream line the company now markets. But there was a real Hazelbrook farm - in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, where in 1926 a farmer called William Hughes started making ice cream - and there were real Hughes brothers.
This week the last of them, also called William, died peacefully at the ripe old age of 86. His death went almost unnoticed.
But an enterprise that started almost by chance - because grandfather Hughes' cows were producing more milk than he could sell to local housewives - was to become a success story and a national institution.
Hazelbrook's dairy was Ireland's first ice-cream factory.
And HB itself became Ireland's largest ice-cream manufacturer - a position it has maintained, in the face of fierce international competition, to this day - and the creator of such enduring national icons as the Golly Bar, the Brunch and the Wibbly Wobbly Wonder.
Today, the Hazelbrook farm is long gone, concreted over by suburbia. The original farmhouse was demolished brick-by-brick and moved to the Bunratty folk park in Co.
Clare, where it was rebuilt in 2001. The Rathfarnham factory itself survived until 2003, but it too is now gone.
Until HB ice cream came along, the dessert had only been made in Ireland in very small quantities in the kitchens of the 'big houses' of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. It was a rare luxury for the really wealthy.
Today, Ireland's per capita consumption rate of ice cream, about 10.5 litres a head, is the third highest in Europe.
WE ACTUALLY eat as much as the Italians, traditionally considered the real ice cream lovers in Europe.
And about 80 per cent of all ice cream sold in Ireland is HB's.
The first William Hughes had 'emigrated' from Co.
Meath in the 1870s and moved to work in Rathfarnham as a land steward on a farm. He and his wife Margaret always wanted a farm of their own, so, in 1884, they rented a farmhouse - which they called Hazelbrook - and the surrounding land.
The house was named after a nearby brook, which can still be seen today.
Eventually farmer Hughes got enough money together to build his own four-bedroomed house in 1898, which he also called Hazelbrook.
There the Hughes family grew up in a happy rural atmosphere - in those days, Rathfarnham was in open country, miles from the city.
William died in 1906 and his sons, James, George and William, took over the business and were the pioneers who eventually launched ice cream on an unsuspecting Irish public. The farm prospered under their control and the dairy herd was built up.
The Hughes family initiated the hygienic production and distribution of milk and started selling their milk in bottles - then a revolutionary concept - in 1912.
By 1924, the Hughes' milk business had grown so big they opened a brand new dairy for bottling the milk at Hazelbrook. Two years later came the prototype icecream factory.
Initially, because so few areas of the country had electricity, they had to concentrate on supplying shops that could install the free fridges given to them by Hughes Brothers.
Soon, the biggest customer was Woolworths, which in those days had a chain of stores around Ireland. The first one-pint ice-cream brick was marketed in 1933.
By 1938, just 12 years after the factory opened, it was selling GBP22,000 worth of ice cream a year, while the milk side of the firm was selling more than double that, GBP58,000.
However, World War II - and the declining health of James Hughes, the company manager - spelled the death knell for family ownership of the business and very nearly for the business itself. In 1944, bailed out by the Royal Bank of Scotland, HB became a public company.
William Hughes - he always preferred to be called just 'Bill' - was the only member of the founding family to retain any shares in this new company. He joined in 1950 as a director and became assistant managing director eight years later.
In 1964, the firm was bought out by an American food company, W & R Grace, based in New York. The previous year, W & R Grace had bought out another iconic local company, Urney Chocolates in Tallaght, a brand that has long since disappeared.
Three years after the U.S.
firm took over, Bill Hughes was appointed managing director. A huge new icecream factory at Rathfarnham was to follow, built in 1967 at a cost of GBP1.3million.
Then came the big split. In 1968, the two major dairies in Dublin, HB and Premier, did a swap. Premier took over HB's milk business and HB got Premier's ice- cream trade.
The Rathfarnham factory became a major exporter to the UK.
Bill Hughes became managing director of the Hughes Dairy business, by then part of Premier Dairies. However, he retained his links with both the dairy and the ice cream firms until 1982, when ill-health forced him to retire.
Hughes then went to live at Druid's Glen in Co. Wicklow, with his wife Georgina.
UNILEVER, anxious to protect its position in the British market, bought out W & R Grace in 1973. Between 1973 and 1990, the Rathfarnham factory launched a string of new products, including the Fat Frog and Viennetta and, in 1974, the legendary Wibbly Wobbly Wonder.
But it was too big to produce the purely local brands marketed by HB, such as the pint bar, Golly Bars and Brunches, and too small for economic production of brands such as Magnum and Cornetto for export markets.
In 2003, Unilever Ireland chairman Paul Murphy announced the closure of the Rathfarnham facility.
Today, the site lies derelict, awaiting development as a suburban shopping mall.
Hazelbrook farmhouse itself survives - albeit in Bunratty, where Bill Hughes visited his reconstructed childhood home in 2001 and declared: 'Going up the stairs I might have been four years old. It all came back to me.' But, most importantly of all, those uniquely Irish HB creations survive - the Wibbly Wobbly Wonder, the Golly Bar, the Brunch and, the daddy of them all, the pint brick.
The Story Of HB: 80 Years Of Ireland's Favourite Ice Cream, by Paul Mulhern and Kieran Fagan is published by Unilever, priced E29.50.
Copyright 2006 Daily Mail. Source: Financial Times Information Limited - Europe Intelligence Wire.
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