Before the food hall, there was a penny stall
The M&S story starts not with biscuits, but with a market stall in Leeds. In 1884, Michael Marks established his first penny bazaar at Kirkgate Market, helped by a £5 loan from Leeds warehouse owner Isaac Jowitt Dewhirst. His stall used the pleasingly blunt slogan, “Don’t Ask the Price, it’s a Penny”, which is exactly the sort of retail clarity modern life has largely mislaid. Thomas Spencer, born in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1851, had worked as a bookkeeper for Dewhirst’s wholesale company in Leeds before joining Marks. In 1894 he became Marks’s business partner, bringing office and warehouse sense to Marks’s market-stall energy. A biscuit packet is a long way from a penny bazaar, but the line is there if you follow it carefully.
Why Leeds and the market-stall world matter
Late Victorian Leeds was not a soft-focus shopping postcard. It was industrial, busy, practical and full of people who knew the value of a penny because they had to. Kirkgate Market gave Marks access to ordinary customers rather than drawing-room fantasy shoppers, and that matters when thinking about M&S food. The company’s later reputation was built around own-label goods that felt reliable, tidy and carefully specified. Food did not arrive in the business until 1931, so these Jam Sandwich Creams are not part of the founding scene. Still, they belong to the same broad idea: familiar things presented with enough order that you feel someone has at least been paying attention.
The St Michael years, and the packet name people remember
For much of the twentieth century, many British shoppers would have known M&S goods under the St Michael name. The own-label brand was introduced in 1927 and registered as a trademark in 1928, named after Michael Marks by his son Simon Marks. By 1950, almost all goods sold by Marks & Spencer used St Michael, and that stayed broadly true for decades. The St Michael name was dropped in 2000 as part of a wider rebranding, with food halls becoming M&S Foodhall. That is why a modern packet says M&S rather than St Michael, even if your memory of your mum’s drawers, school socks, knickers, biscuits or Christmas food still insists on calling the place Marks and Sparks.
Own-label food, but not anonymous food
M&S became unusually associated with own-label food in Britain, partly because its shelves were historically built around its own ranges rather than big outside brands. Food began in 1931, and the company developed a reputation for direct relationships with suppliers and British-made goods through much of the twentieth century. That does not tell us who first devised these Jam Sandwich Creams, and it should not be dressed up as if it does. What it does explain is why an M&S biscuit often feels slightly different from a supermarket copy of a supermarket copy. The packet is modern, the biscuit format is old-fashioned, and the whole thing has that calm M&S manner of looking as though it has already passed a committee.
Why this biscuit travels well in memory
Jam sandwich creams are the kind of biscuit that can make a British expat in Canada oddly specific. Not just “something sweet”, not just “a biscuit”, but the right kind of biscuit: crisp enough, sweet enough, with the jam and cream doing their quiet double act. It belongs with tea after unpacking the shopping, with parcels from relatives who know what you miss, and with cupboards that look more convincing once there is a recognisable British packet in them. M&S Jam Sandwich Creams carry more high-street memory than they have any right to, which is very British of them. A small pinkish jam middle can apparently do emotional administration. The Great British Shop understands this sort of cupboard logic rather well.
