The packet name and the older sweet family
There is no strong product-level origin story supplied here for Wham itself, so it would be daft to pretend this is a neat tale of a named inventor, a first batch, and a thunderclap over a Victorian sugar boiler. What we can say is that the modern pack sits within the wider British sugar confectionery world now connected with Maynards Bassetts, while carrying the Barratt name that sweet-shop customers recognise from gums, chews, lollies, and other things that made childhood dental appointments more interesting. In other words, the carton on the shelf is part of a larger, rather tangled British sweets family, not a single tidy origin myth.
Maynards, Harringay, and a very serious argument about wine gums
Maynards’ own story is better documented. In 1906, the company opened a purpose-built factory on Vale Road in Harringay, north London, with production associated with clean Hertfordshire spring water brought by way of the New River embankment. A few years later, in 1909, Maynards Wine Gums were introduced after Charles Gordon Maynard proposed them to the family firm. His father, Charles Riley Maynard, was a strict teetotal Methodist and was not immediately charmed by the idea of sweets named after wine. He was eventually persuaded that the gums contained no alcohol, which is both a useful clarification and a very British confectionery argument.
Before the big names got joined together
The Maynards business began earlier, in 1880, when Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom made sweets in a kitchen in Stamford Hill, Hackney. Charles’s wife, Sarah Ann, sold their products in a neighbouring sweet shop, which is a pleasingly practical origin story: make the sweets, open the door, sell them to the local community. The brothers formally incorporated the company in 1896. From there, Maynards grew from a north-east London concern into a well-known name in British confectionery, with the Harringay works becoming a significant local employer and later expansion including toffee production in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Why modern British sweets have complicated surnames
The reason a Wham carton can sit under a modern Maynards-related vendor name while still wearing Barratt identity is partly down to the way British confectionery brands have been gathered, merged, and rearranged over time. Maynards’ retail sweet shops were sold in 1985, and the company was acquired by Cadbury in 1988. It then became operationally linked with Bassett’s and Trebor around 1990, with manufacturing consolidated in Sheffield in 1991. Cadbury later became part of Mondelez International, and in 2016 the Maynards and Bassett’s names were brought together as Maynards Bassetts. Corporate family trees are rarely elegant, but they do explain why familiar old sweet names now often travel in groups.
The sort of sweet that survives distance
For British expats in Canada, Wham is not really about corporate structure. It is about the remembered violence of a fizzy chew against the jaw, the bright silliness of British sweet branding, and the peculiar comfort of seeing a name you last noticed beside a till in the UK. A 300g carton is useful for families, sweet tables, parcels, or the dangerous domestic practice of “just having one”. It belongs to that category of groceries people miss with surprising precision: not just sweets, but that sweet, in that style, with that memory attached. The Great British Shop keeps those small recognitions within reach, which is handy when nostalgia turns up demanding sugar.
