Out Into Space tea card set

Brooke Bond collectible reveals love written in the stars

A tea card depicting the then under construction Lovell Telescope is among those featured

This cosmic curio dates from the 1950s, when it was still common for cigarette and tea companies to tempt patrons back to a particular brand with the promise of ‘completing the set’ – as if caffeine and nicotine weren’t persuasion enough.

Out Into Space was a series of 50 cards included in packs of Brooke Bond and Co Ltd tea – now makers of PG Tips – which alongside Imperial Tobacco was one of the big in-packet collectible companies from the period.

My dad has dozens of completed books on various subjects – testament to the addictive personalities of my grandparents, perhaps.

This book is a spare from when he’d met my mum, pooled their worldly possessions, and realised she had inherited an almost identical collection. Clearly it was written in the stars.

Some of these spare sets have been carefully extracted and framed at my parents’ house, leaving one library of completed booklets – including this one – recently gifted to me.

A telling sign of the collection’s age is the blurb attributed to the ‘radio telescope’ card, which talks of one such giant structure being assembled in Cheshire, UK – the Lovell Telescope having been completed in 1957, a year after the booklet was published.

Tea and cigarette cards were issued on a vast range of subjects. Others sets I have include the reign of King George VI, native bird identification, radio and film celebrities, cricketers, and a wartime set on how to bombproof and gasproof your home.

While the descriptions in Out Into Space have an innocent, Vernian wonder at humanity’s place in a pre-Apollo era Universe, some of the others haven’t aged so well.

Indeed, while I love the artwork and how the sets serve as a time capsule of prevailing knowledge of their era, there’s a difficult strain of imperialism that permeates some of the collections – often with a foreboding eeriness.

A battleship series, for instance, rates Britain’s naval power against nations that would soon be at war with one another – many of the vessels depicted were destroyed months later.

Showcasing this set here makes me wonder what a 50-card set on the SKAO would look like, and what among the many technical marvels of our telescopes would be depicted.

I think, overall, 50 SKAO images would show how far the word has come, especially in terms of space diplomacy – depicting countries collaborating for a wider good in a way that the original tea and cigarette card authors and artists could never have envisaged.

And I think that’s something we can all drink to.