Vintage 1940s-60s Elixir of Cascara Label 🧪 Very Rare, C Charnley, Grove Pharmacy

What Was Elixir of Cascara? A Bitter Bark, Sweetened Up in a Cheshire Chemist's 🌳

Size: 3 1/2" x 2" ~ New old stock, never applied to a bottle.

I like a label that's honest about its own medicine, and this one comes right out and admits the stuff was bitter. "A concentrated active and agreeable preparation of Cascara Sagrada, in which the bitter principle is covered by Aromatics." In other words: we know it tastes awful, and we've done something about it. It's an unused chemist's label from the Charnley family's shop in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England.

🏷️ Every Word on It

Under the big "Elixir of Cascara" headline, the label promises that the elixir "permanently retains its activity and can be taken for a long period without increasing the dose." Then comes the DOSE: as a laxative, 10 to 15 minims in water thrice daily; as a purgative, 20 to 30 minims or more, night and morning. A rule runs across the card, and below it the shop: CHARLES CHARNLEY LTD., Dispensing and Family Chemists, The Grove Pharmacy, WILMSLOW. It's black ink on cream card with rounded corners, and the type was pressed in so hard you can read it backwards on the blank back. That's letterpress for you.

🌳 Sacred Bark From the Far Side of the World

Cascara sagrada is Spanish for "sacred bark." It's the bark of a buckthorn, Rhamnus purshiana, that grows up the Pacific side of North America, and the settlers out there called it chittim wood and brewed the bark as a purge long before any doctor did. The doctors caught on in 1877, when Dr. J. H. Bundy of Colusa, California introduced it to the profession and Parke, Davis & Co. of Detroit started promoting it to physicians and druggists. It went everywhere after that, into the United States Pharmacopeia by 1890 and onto chemists' shelves across Britain, and the wild trees paid for it: they were stripped so hard in the early 1900s that the native stands took real damage.

The one thing everybody complained about was the taste, so the trade made "aromatic" versions to hide it. Britain's official 1911 recipe for Elixir of Cascara, in the British Pharmaceutical Codex, buried the cascara extract in glycerin, liquorice, cinnamon, aromatic spirit of ammonia and saccharin. Charnley doesn't say exactly what his Aromatics were, but that's the family his elixir belongs to.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

Two things on the label bracket it. First, the LTD. after Charles Charnley's name: the shop's adverts in the Wilmslow papers still say plain "Charles Charnley, Pharmacist" in September 1946, and the first "Charles Charnley Ltd" turns up in May 1949. Second, the minims. That's the old apothecary measure, sixty to the fluid drachm, and from March 1969 British chemists had to dispense in metric. So this one comes from somewhere between 1949 and the late 1960s.

🏪 The Charnleys of Grove Street

This was a family business with a long memory. A Charles Charnley was advertising as a dispensing chemist on Grove Street in 1875, and Slater's directory still has "Charnley Charles, chemist" there in 1911. The shop's working books are in the Wellcome Collection in London now: a recipe book signed "Charles Charnley, 16 May 1866" that runs on to 1940, and a prescription register from 1869 to 1925. Its phone number was 4X around 1909 and 59 by 1914, and a Stockport Advertiser notice of July 1938 still has Charnley at the Grove Pharmacy. When the business became Charles Charnley Ltd it kept the old Grove Pharmacy name, later opened a second shop on London Road in Alderley Edge, and took its turn on the Sunday chemists' rota through the 1960s and 70s. In October 1953 the paper reported the will of Charles Charnley, M.P.S., of Wilmslow, with many bequests. And in 1998 it called the shop the oldest chemist in town and talked to 87-year-old Charles Charnley, whose ancestors, the paper said, opened it in 1863. Their own labels said Est. 1864. Close enough for me.

🏘️ Wilmslow

Wilmslow sits about eleven miles south of Manchester, and it was little more than farms and a church until the railway arrived in 1842. Since then it has collected some interesting company: Lindow Man, the Iron Age body peat cutters found on Lindow Moss in 1984, now in the British Museum, and Alan Turing, who lived in Wilmslow from 1950 until his death in 1954.

✨ Why I Like These

Charnley's Grove Pharmacy labels are some of the most sought-after pharmacy labels around (Buyenlarge sells several of his designs as posters and canvas prints), and I'd always rather have the original. This one goes nicely with his Castor Oil and Glycerine of Thymol labels if you want to build a little Grove Pharmacy wall. They're unused new old stock, never put on a bottle.