Vintage 1940s-60s Blood Mixture Label 🧪 C. Charnley Ltd Grove Pharmacy Wilmslow Cheshire

What Was in a Wilmslow Blood Mixture? A Wilmslow Chemist's Blood Mixture, Formula Printed on the Label 🧪

Size: 3" x 1 1/2" ~ Little to no wear, never applied.

This label prints its formula to the hundredth of a percent, and by the time it was printed the law said it had to. The Grove Quality Blood Mixture from C. Charnley Ltd of Wilmslow, Cheshire, lists iron sulphate, magnesium sulphate, dilute sulphuric acid and a decoction of sarsaparilla right under its promise to cure a customer's complexion. And in the Wellcome Collection in London sit two manuscript volumes cataloged as the papers of "Charles Charnley of Wilmslow, Cheshire, Chemist," one of them opening with a register of prescriptions dispensed to named individuals. This is an unused label from the Charnley pharmacy's limited-company years, never put on a bottle.

🏷️ Every Line on the Label

• The Grove QUALITY, in white script and capitals on a dark brown band
• BLOOD MIXTURE
• An excellent remedy for Impure Blood, Pimples and Skin Eruptions.
• DOSE: ONE TABLESPOONFUL IN WATER AFTER MEALS THREE TIMES A DAY.
• Ferri Sulph. 1·04%; Magnes. Sulph. 6·25%; Acid Sulph. Dil. 2·08%; Dec. Sarsæ ad 100%.
• Prepared only by
• C. Charnley Ltd, in white script on a dark brown band
• Chemists / THE GROVE PHARMACY / WILMSLOW / PHONE 3059

The center panel is pale blue, the bands dark brown and the border cream, framed with dashed rules and rounded corners. The back is blank, but the type was pressed in hard enough that every line reads through the paper in reverse.

🧪 Reading the Formula

The Latin is dispensary shorthand. Ferri Sulph. is iron sulphate, known for centuries as green vitriol or copperas, and still used today to treat or prevent iron deficiency. Magnes. Sulph. is magnesium sulphate, Epsom salt, named for a bitter saline spring at Epsom in Surrey and used as a laxative. Acid Sulph. Dil. is dilute sulphuric acid. Dec. Sarsæ is a decoction of sarsaparilla, and "ad 100%" means the sarsaparilla decoction made up the rest of the mixture. Put together, the bottle held iron, a laxative salt and a little acid in a sarsaparilla base.

🌿 Bad Blood, Bad Skin: An Old Tradition in One Sentence

The label's promise carries a whole tradition of popular medicine in a single line: the belief that spots and rashes came from bad blood, and that the blood could be cleansed. Sarsaparilla belonged to the same tradition. In nineteenth-century America it was sold as a patent medicine, its advertisements promising help for skin and blood problems. In England the blood mixture had its own famous name: Clarke's Blood Mixture, created by Francis J. Clarke, a Lincoln chemist who served three terms as mayor of Lincoln between 1878 and 1885.

Secret formulas eventually drew a public reckoning. In 1909 the British Medical Association published Secret Remedies, analyzing what popular proprietary medicines cost and what they actually contained; it sold more than 60,000 copies within two years, and More Secret Remedies followed in 1912. The secrecy didn't last. By the late 1930s plenty of medicine makers were printing the recipe on the label anyway, because a remedy whose ingredients were declared got out of the old medicine stamp duty, and in 1941 the Pharmacy and Medicines Act made declaring them the law and the stamp duty came to an end. So a postwar label like this one puts its percentages right out front.

📚 Charles Charnley in the Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection in London holds two volumes cataloged together as MSS.8437–8438, "Charles Charnley of Wilmslow, Cheshire, Chemist." MS.8437, a clothbound volume of 242 pages, opens with a register of prescriptions dispensed to named individuals on pages 2 to 40, followed by handwritten and printed recipes for medical, household, cosmetic and veterinary preparations that run even onto the covers and flyleaves. MS.8438, a worn leatherbound book of 192 folios, is inscribed "Charles Charnley, 16 May 1866" and gathers medical, household, cosmetic, culinary, veterinary and horticultural recipes in several hands, with periodical cuttings and inserted notes. They are the working papers of a chemist with the same name and the same town as the firm printed on this label.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

The label dates itself by two little words and a phone number. C. Charnley Ltd and PHONE 3059 only ever appear together in the shop's newspaper ads from 1949 on. As late as September 1946 the ads still read "Charles Charnley, Pharmacist, Tel. 3059," with no Ltd, and in the early 1940s the stockist lists that print "Ltd" after other firms' names print plain "C. Charnley" for this one. By 1979 the number was Wilmslow 523059. So this is a late 1940s to 1960s label, not the 1920s it's sometimes called.

The Wilmslow paper fills in the rest of the story. Charles Charnley was advertising as a dispensing chemist on Grove Street by 1875, the shop's phone number was 4X around 1909 and 59 by 1914, and by 1946 it was "Charles Charnley, Pharmacist," at Wilmslow 3059. Sometime between 1946 and 1949 the business became Charles Charnley Ltd, and in time it added a second shop at 20 London Road in Alderley Edge. In 1998 the paper called it Wilmslow's oldest chemist shop and talked to 87-year-old Charles Charnley, whose ancestors, it said, founded the business in 1863.

🏘️ Wilmslow, Cheshire

Wilmslow lies 11 miles south of Manchester, with the River Bollin flowing through The Carrs park. The name comes from Old English: the mound of a man called Wīghelm. Before the railway came in 1842 the place was only a few farms and a church. The line changed that, and wealthy North West merchants relocated there, turning it into a Victorian town. Bank Square and Grove Street are the center of its shopping today, and at the 2021 census the parish had 26,213 people. In 1984 nearby Lindow Moss gave up Lindow Man, a preserved Iron Age body counted among the most important Iron Age finds in the country.

C. Charnley's Grove Pharmacy labels are some of the most sought-after pharmacy labels you can get, and big home-decor stores sell posters of many of them for hundreds of dollars, which gives you an idea of how collectible they are. I'm not sure about you, but I prefer to have the original.