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Huntley and Palmers

In 1822 Joseph Huntley opened a small biscuit baker and confectioner shop in London Street, at number 72. As London Street was often used by the stage coaches, and the Crown Inn was opposite, Joseph Huntley soon started selling his biscuits to the travellers on the coaches. The biscuits did not last long in the busy bustle of a coach journey, as they were packed loose and soon broke. Joseph then thought of an idea of how to save breakages and to keep the biscuits fresh, by putting them in a metal tin. His younger son, also called Joseph, worked in the ironmongers shop, selling all sorts of metal goods. He was persuaded to make some tins into which Joseph and his other son, Thomas, put the biscuits they had made. Joseph’s tin boxes became the foundation of the firm Huntley, Bourne and Stevens, who made biscuit tins which went all over the world.

By 1830 Huntley’s biscuits were moving by the canals all around the south of England. But in 1838 Joseph Huntley had to retire because of bad health, and Thomas did not have his fathers good sense of business. In 1841, Thomas joined with George Palmer who had just finished his apprenticeship at milling and baking. George Palmer was a man of enterprise and skill, but as a Quaker could not go into the professions. Instead he turned to improving the biscuit making process. He quickly doubled the size of the bakery and began to introduce machinery. In 1846 the company moved to bigger buildings in Kings’s Road, and began to use steam powered machinery made by William Exall, a Reading Iron Founder, to make biscuits.

The company continued to develop, making a wider and wider range of biscuits. By 1860 the company was the largest biscuit maker in England and produced over 100 different types of biscuits. Thanks to the colourful and well designed biscuit tins which kept the biscuits fresh, Reading biscuits were sent all over the world. When Thomas Huntley died in 1857, two more members of the Palmer family joined the company, William Isaac and Samuel, and the firm changed its name from Huntley and Palmer to Huntley and Palmers. The firm soon needed even bigger premises and land to the north of the Kennet was purchased and a new factory, complete with its own railway lines connecting to the main line was built.

At the turn of the century the firm employed over 5000 people, and for many years it was the largest employer in the town.

In 1951 Huntley and Palmers had merged with Peak Freans to become Associated Biscuit Manufacturers Ltd. In 1961 the company had been joined by Jacobs. In 1972 it was announced that biscuit making at Reading would stop. In 1976 the biscuit ovens stopped being fed fuel, and biscuit making came to an end. The making of biscuits was moved to factories in the north of the country.

Huntley Boorne and Stevens continued to make the tins for the biscuits in their factory in Church Street. up until 1969 when they moved their factory to Woodley.