What we can honestly say about its M&S story
There is no supplied product-level origin story for this particular M&S Bourbon Cream packet, so it would be a bit cheeky to pretend we know the first day it appeared on a shelf or the person who signed off the recipe. What we do have is the wider M&S story behind the name on the packet. Michael Marks established his first penny bazaar stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds in 1884, using a £5 loan from Leeds warehouse owner Isaac Jowitt Dewhirst. At that original stall, his slogan was “Don’t Ask the Price, it’s a Penny”, which is about as clear a retail proposition as Britain has ever produced. Thomas Spencer, born in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1851, had worked as a bookkeeper for Dewhirst’s wholesale company in Leeds before joining Marks as a partner.
From market stall to food hall habits
Marks and Spencer became the sort of high-street name that people shortened without asking permission, which is usually a sign that a shop has properly entered national life. The business grew from northern market roots into stores across major towns and cities, and became a limited company in 1903. Food was added to the M&S world from 1931, long after the penny bazaar days but still tied to the same practical instinct: make things clear, reliable, and recognisable. For much of the twentieth century, the St Michael name appeared across M&S goods, including food, before being dropped in 2000 as part of a wider rebrand. That is why older shoppers may still hear “St Michael” in their head even when the modern packet says M&S.
The own-label biscuit with a very British confidence
M&S food has always carried a slightly different sort of Britishness from the big biscuit manufacturers. It is own-label, but not anonymous. The packet says M&S, and that is doing a lot of quiet work. With Bourbon Creams, the format itself belongs to a broader British biscuit tradition rather than a single M&S creation story supplied here. The M&S version sits inside that tradition: familiar, neat, made for tea, and not especially interested in being turned into something with three fillings and a name that sounds like a nightclub. Its job is simple. Be chocolatey, be crisp, hold the cream properly, and survive long enough to reach the mug. Not all ambitions need to be grand.
Why Bourbons travel so well in memory
British expats in Canada often miss the oddly specific things. Not just “biscuits”, but the exact kind that lived in the tin. Not just chocolate biscuits, but Bourbons, with their rectangular shape and tidy cream sandwich. They were the biscuit you could get away with asking for because they were ordinary enough to seem reasonable, yet good enough to feel like you had won a small domestic victory. They turned up in lunchboxes, church hall tea urn situations, break rooms, after-school plates, and family parcels wrapped with enough tape to survive the Atlantic. A Bourbon Cream does not need to explain itself to anyone who grew up with a kettle nearby.
A small square of home, give or take the crumbs
There is something reassuring about a biscuit that has not had a personality crisis. M&S Bourbon Cream Biscuits are not trying to be breakfast, pudding, protein, or a lifestyle choice. They are cupboard biscuits, tea biscuits, “go on then” biscuits. For someone in Halifax, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, or anywhere else in Canada where the British biscuit aisle is more wish than reality, that matters. The packet brings a bit of the old food hall feeling with it, even if the weather outside is doing something distinctly Canadian. A sensible biscuit, a hot drink, and a few crumbs on the sofa: that is the quiet little sign-off from The Great British Shop.
