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Between the Layers

A History of the Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society, (written by Alastair Work, the Society's founding President in 1987)

Preface

The Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society was founded in 1982 by a small group of students at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. It was unexpectedly successful and continued to amuse students and graduates for 25 years. In 2001, a Tunnocks Caramel Wafer wrapper turned up at auction in London, with a handwritten poem on the back by Ted Hughes. For a few weeks the Society was thrown into the media spotlight. A lasting legacy of that episode is to be found in the University of St Andrews museum, MUSA, where visitors can see one of only three Ted Hughes inscribed wrappers alongside other memorabilia of the Society's various follies. Not available in the museum are the letter from NASA in response to our request to put a TCW into orbit, nor the letter from HM The Queen nor that of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, sometime milk snatcher.

Between the Layers: A History of the Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society.

Once upon a time in a small town in Lanarkshire there dwelt a baker named Thomas Tunnock who kept a small shop. In that shop he made bread and cakes of mystical grandeur and the greatest of these were his Caramel Wafers. So irresistible were these wafers that folk from as far away as Galloway and Clackmannanshire came to sample them. And when they had tried them they came back for more and more and more of them until Thomas Tunnock felt compelled to raise a family to help him in the bakery and so there was Thomas Tunnock and Sons.

And then there came a great depression in that land and many of the inhabitants were forced to leave in search of new horizons and they took with them as many Caramel Wafers as they could carry in order to sustain themselves in their new homelands. And they settled in far-off places like Australia and America and England and there they met with much success. But they pined for the joys of their youth and particularly for Tunnock's Caramel Wafers and so the sons and daughters of Thomas Tunnock built a factory from which they sent wafers to all corners of God's Earth and to this day they continue to feed these select admirers with wholesome ingots of chocolate and caramel.

The disciples of Tunnock, whilst deeply grateful to their generous patron, were so widely dispersed that they never found a single voice of gratitude. That is until 1982 when a small group of scholars chanced upon the delights of this ancient delicacy in the Kingdom of Fife and the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society was born. Tucked away in a corner of that kingdom is the eccentric little town of St. Andrews, as far removed from the mainline of British life as it is from the mainline of British Rail. For centuries its noble inhabitants have been devising follies of such refined silliness that they have reached the very furthest ends of the earth. In the sixteenth century, for example, a society was formed by a man called John Knox to vandalise the city's churches and pull faces at its bishop. The idea proved so popular that within no time at all half of Europe was doing likewise. In the eighteenth century another society was formed for individuals whose sole pursuit was to chase small spheres through the dunes to the west of the city with nothing more efficacious than an inverted walking stick. To this day St. Andrews is a place of pilgrimage for the millions of Japanese and Americans who have chosen to emulate the idiocy of those few.

The Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society fits pleasingly into this tradition of eccentricity. Just how it came about has for a long time been a mystery, even to those closely involved, but now, with the help of painstaking research, scholarship and delicate hermeneutics, we have been able to construct a much clearer picture of the history behind this remarkable body of men and women.

Our story begins with the recent discovery of an ancient manuscript written in Carolingian minuscule on the reverse of a sheaf of Caramel Wafer wrappers. The wrappers have been analysed by experts and identified as 1982 design and the text is therefore held to date from the same year. The scribe has not been positively identified but the veracity of his account has been testified to by those few members of that generation of students who were sober at the time it was composed. The text reads as follows:

And it came to pass that on the sixteenth day of the tenth month of the year that was nineteen hundred and eighty-two, in the town of St. Andrews, which, according to God's universal plan, was located in the north-eastern part of that kingdom which is called Fife, a great feast was held. And a multitude gathered in that place which is called Gatty Two, where there was good wine and much merriment. And there was to be found amid that noble company a certain Man of Letters who was engaged in an Herculean struggle with the god, Bacchus. And it came to pass that this spirit, by his great guile and original gravity, overcame the Man of Letters and compelled him to seek the aid of a kitchen wall that he might continue to stand upright. And as he tottered thus upheld by only that goodly wall aforesaid, there appeared unto him a fair apparition who spake unto him saying, "Verily I say unto thee, o man, that thou art a sorry sight to behold." And he spake unto the apparition saying, "Forsooth, thou art an angel come to comfort me and to fill up my cup till it overfloweth." "Nay," quod she, "I am but a rustic maiden fair and thou art mightily pissed, yea verily I say greatly inebriated." "Rightly hastow spoken," quod the chastened Man of Letters. "What then must I do to make my ways straight?" "What you need is a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer," quod she.

At these words the Man of Letters fell down in a trance and they lifted him up and bore him hence to a place where he might sleep and not be disturbed. When the Man of Letters awoke he was sorely distressed and cursed the day he was born. So afflicted was he that even his friend the noble Man of Medicine could give him no solace. Then spake the Man of Letters from the depths of his distress, "Oh friend, companion of mine, pass unto me a vessel that I might vent my despair thereinto and then harken unto me for I have seen a great vision to bring joy and hope to all mankind." And he spake unto his friend the noble Man of Medicine of what had come to pass, beseeching him as a scholar of all that is good for the human body to impart unto him the knowledge of that elixir which was called a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer. "Forsooth, know I of them not," quod the Man of Medicine. At these words the Man of Letters was sorely vexed. "By Goddes teeth, call thyself a Man of Medicine, and yet thou knowest not of this great elixir? Who is it who can tell me what is a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer?" And his distress was great, yea very great indeed.

And it came to pass that on the third day he rose again from his bed. And the Man of Medicine came to that place and, seeing that the duvet had been rolled away, he rejoiced greatly and began straightway to prepare some coffee of the finest Kenyan beans for them both. And the Man of Letters spake unto him saying, "What is it that we shall eat with our beverage for I am greatly famished." "Alas," quod the Man of Medicine, "the guests have been many and the biscuit tin is bare." Then the Man of Letters rent his garment and cried to Heaven saying, "Oh triple woe!" Forthwith there appeared to them in that place the Rustic Maiden Fair. "Behold," quod she, "I come hither bearing you a wondrous gift of Tunnock's Caramel Wafers." And as she spake, she drew from her bag a richly coloured parcel. "Bestow unto us that which thou hast brought and that right soon," spake the Man of Letters.

"Pay heed unto thy manners," warned the Man of Medicine, "and join with us Rustic Maiden Fair, we beseech thee, in a cup of Kenyan coffee and we will feast together." So it came to pass that on the eighteenth day of the tenth month of the year that was nineteen hundred and eighty-two, the Man of Letters and his friend the Man of Medicine feasted together with a Rustic Maiden Fair and forthwith their eyes were opened unto the beauty of Tunnock's Caramel Wafers and they rejoiced and were glad. And when they had eaten, the Man of Letters mooted that they should honour the wrappers in which so fine a delicacy had journeyed thither, so he raised them up and fixed them to the wall of their chamber where they shone like as gold and rubies. Then the Man of Letters made a great speech saying unto them, "Blessed are the ..."

Here, the manuscript ends abruptly as if severed with surgical instruments, and so needs must that we rely on the oral tradition and the findings of archaeologists for the next part of the story. Legend has it that the two scholars mentioned in the 'Gatty' manuscript lived in a turret chamber which overlooked the links of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. We are also told that over a remarkably short period of weeks, they succeeded in wallpapering the entire room with Tunnock's Caramel Wafer wrappers. It is now widely held that this room was Atholl 309, a large room at the top of this once notorious student residence a short paper dart flight from the 17th green of the Old Course. Several pieces of evidence support this hypothesis:

1. A turret chamber is the sort of habitat that mad people traditionally prefer.

2. A team of researchers there found traces of chocolate and caramel on the walls and had them carbon-dated to within fifty years either side of 1982.)

3. An elderly Dundonian woman, who wishes to remain anonymous; let's call her Audrey, was once the cleaner on the top floor of the Atholl, a post she had been assigned after daring to challenge the formidable authority of the Hall's Domestic Bursar. Audrey told us that amongst the many horrors of her period of exile on the top floor, she most vividly recalls two scholars with extremely odd habits and a dazzling display of Caramel Wafer Wrappers. These recollections were clearly disturbing to her as she broke into a gibber and implored us to trouble her no more.

The next piece of evidence in our story is to be found in the journal entry of one Dr. Johnson for December 18th, 1982, some two months after the events chronicled in the 'Gatty' manuscript, in which the good doctor chronicles a journey made to the West of Scotland with his companion, a Man of Letters. Some scholars have confused this account with one dated two hundred years earlier in which another Dr. Johnson described St. Andrews as a place where, "... a student of the highest class may keep his annual session ... which lasts about seven months, for about fifteen pounds, and one of lower rank for less than ten, in which board, lodging and instruction are all included." This description clearly has nothing to do with our Dr Johnson's St Andrews, where it is a known fact that his comrade the Man of Letters could spend well in excess of that sum in a single day on Caramel Wafers and alcohol alone.

This is what our Dr. Johnson records in his journal:

18th Day of December in the year 1982AD: Following our agreed intention to make a pilgrimage to the town of Uddingston, I woke my colleague at an early hour on this crisp and sunny morn. Indeed he was complaining of such sore distemper that I feared our journey might be quite unpleasant. Nevertheless, we climbed aboard my carriage and proceeded in a westerly direction. My fears for my colleague were soon confirmed when he mistook the M8 for the M9 with the tedious consequence that what he proudly announced as the bifurcation for Uddingston led us to two cottages and a derelict petrol station. Mumbling something about vodka and coke and too many peanuts, he relinquished his navigational responsibilities and fell asleep.

The thrill of arriving in Uddingston is indeed hard to describe; at the outskirts of the town were signboards saying, 'Uddingston' and ,'30 mph', and there was a broken white line running right down the middle of the main street. Then we spied the stately grandeur of Tunnock's Bakery rising above the town roofs like a Norman Cathedral. We were greatly moved. I swept my Mini-Clubman majestically up to the factory door and eased to a halt alongside the modest chassis of Mr. Tunnock's personally registered Rolls-Royce. We alighted, sighing with awe, and proceeded with dignity towards the main door. It was locked. We wept.

Presently, stiffening our upper lips and swallowing our grief, we made a dignified retreat and resolved instead to take luncheon at Tunnock's New Tea Rooms across the road. There we were royally entertained and served an excellent feast of steak pie and vegetables. The charm of this establishment deserves some attention: the tables were spread with clean white linen and all the silverware bore the stamp of Tunnock's Bakery. The waitresses were of mature years but were by no means sluggish. Indeed their great energy belies their octogenarian frames. Most remarkable amid the features of this worthy establishment, however, was the mynah bird that occupied one corner thereof. The bird was utterly mute. Some maintain that its jaws were sealed with caramel but the truth is much more poignant: we were informed by an aged client of Tunnock's that the bird's predecessor had been a fowl of intense missionary zeal who had devoted her entire song to the proclamation of good news. The noble mynah senior was so enraptured by her first taste of Tunnock's Caramel Wafers that she sang their praise until her death. So it was that for a sacred period of years, from the corner of the Tea-rooms rang forth this mynah mantra: "Tunnock's Caramel Wafers, Tunnock's Caramel Wafers!" in that pure and matchless dialect which is South Glaswegian. On hearing this bird, many a weary traveller was directed to the Elysian bliss that accompanies one's first taste of Tunnock's. Many wafer-lovers contend that this worthy fowl was descended from one sent out by Noah to find hope for Mankind. Whatever its lineage, the bird's successor who sat there as we ate, had taken a vow of silence out of reverence for its illustrious ancestor. My colleague, the Man of Letters, much restored by his repast, shed salt tears at this morsel of folklore and ordered dessert. Declining the mouth-watering selection of cakes proffered by the waitress, we ordered two Tunnock's Caramel Wafers to be sent up, considering that our proximity to their fount of origin would afford us confectionery of unparalleled freshness. We were not disappointed. Carefully flattening our wrappers, as was our custom, we composed thereupon an epistle to Mr. Tunnock, announcing ourselves for the very first time by that now familiar title:

St. Andrews University Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society

We intimated to him our profound satisfaction with his biscuits, his tea-room, his mynah bird and the exterior of his factory, and we lamented that he had not been present to receive our visit personally. We concluded by wishing him a very merry Christmas and, begging an envelope from the adjacent newsagent, we posted our greetings in the pillar box at the factory gate to ensure that they would reach their destination safely. These things done, we parted company and dispersed to those heathen wastes which lie beyond the extraordinary town of Uddingston.

Modern readers will be puzzled by the fact that Dr. Johnson should make such specific reference to the good health of the octogenarian waitresses of Uddingston. After all, it is now a well-known fact that Tunnock's Caramel Wafers contain ingredients which promote physical well-being, mental agility and longevity. This matter was put beyond reasonable doubt in 1985 by the research of an associate member studying diet at Leeds Polytechnic. She discovered that a measured dose of E322 such as is to be found in a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer, taken regularly, can significantly increase one's life expectancy. It must be remembered, however, that in those early pioneer days of appreciation, the enthusiasts were acting on principles of gourmandise and aestheticism and had yet to apply the hermeneutics of science to their obsession.

It is worth noting at this point that several otherwise avoidable mishaps occurred because of their ignorance in the early days. The Man of Letters, on descending to the Home Counties, fell violently ill and, quite unaware that this was solely due to the sudden deprivation of Tunnock's Caramel Wafers, he remained bedridden for three weeks. Another early enthusiast, a belly-dancer from Fife Park, fractured her foot after neglecting to include the sacred biscuits in her Christmas dinner menu and, according to Dr. Johnson's journal, was unable to perform for a whole month.

At the beginning of 1983, StAUTCWAS membership numbered five: Dr. Johnson, the Man of Letters, a Rustic Fair Maiden, a Belly Dancer and the man known as the Smiling Tunnock. Within six months they were twenty, after ten months there were 125 and five years later, a peak membership of over 200 was reached. How did this happen? Two important events early in that year helped the Society towards its now world-wide status: during the Yuletide recess the mad scholars were sent a parcel decorated with the red and gold of Tunnock's Bakery and postmarked with an emblematic Tunnock's Van. Inside were sixteen shining ingots; freshly baked Caramel Wafers straight from the factory with a charming letter on embossed notepaper from the great Mr. Tunnock himself. They were greatly moved and news of this beautiful gift soon spread amongst the student populus. Prompted by a flood of enquiries, the five founding members established a tribute of twenty wrappers from prospective members which they stuck on the walls of their turret chamber as a testimony to their enthusiasm. In a few short weeks the room became almost completely red and gold. Then one evening when they were deep in consultation, there was a knock at the door and the University chaplain entered on a pastoral visit. When this holy man witnessed the great faith of these few and saw how they prospered, he blessed them and agreed to support their mission to spread the good news of Tunnock's to all humankind. Being himself a keen follower of Tunnock's vans (he is reported to have followed one down the entire length of the M8), this worthy man of the cloth was considered an ideal figure to intercede for the Society. He began right away to add the wrappers of his own family to their collection and the following year he became the society's first honorary member.

In the months that followed worshippers came from far and wide to pay their tribute in wrappers and to scrounge cups of coffee from Atholl 309. Great was their enthusiasm and great their appetite, and all of them effortlessly achieved the membership tribute. The collection grew to well over one thousand wrappers. It was not only enlightened individuals who showed their approval: the University Chemistry department was so delighted with this new element for their Periodic table that they made a bulk order for their coffee breaks.

If you are losing the will to live, read on, just a couple of paragraphs to go! However, if you are enthralled, you might consider deliving into The lost chapters where you can enjoy a longer route to the finish.

Membership of a body so esteemed as the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society brings many benefits beyond the narrow confines of undergraduate life in St. Andrews. Anyone who has worn a Tunnock's tie, T-shirt or badge in public knows what a conversation piece it can be. What a privilege it is to tell the story of StAUTCWAS to some inquisitive wayfarer and see their face melt into an expression of delighted disbelief! A place on the committee is a truly priceless asset on one's CV; it is a well-known fact that a certain founder-member was offered half a dozen top computing jobs on the strength of this alone. The world knows that it cannot afford to ignore those who have found the deepest sources of joy in life.

It would be inappropriate to end this tale with a conclusion because the story is far from over: in St. Andrews the society marches triumphantly onwards towards its 5th birthday, and the 21st century. Elsewhere, former members of StAUTCWAS and those many Tunnock's enthusiasts who have not had the fortune to be undergraduates in St. Andrews are gathering under the banner of ITCWAS - the International Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society. So the lunacy that began in a moment of inebriation continues to thrive and continues to spread. It is devoutly to be wished that whilst the freshness of caramel and the folly of youth are there to support it, the Society will never become crusty or set in its ways. Let us conclude simply with a few lines from the Society hymnal:

You'll find them in the corner shop,
The wrappers red and gold,
And when you taste them you'll know why
Each week three million are sold.

You can buy them for eleven 'p',
Which really saves you money,
And then just think how pleased you'll be
With a Tunnock's in your tummy.

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