Who hasn’t eaten a piece of
Thornton’s Special Toffee or had a Thornton’s Continental chocolate or
Cappuccino Egg melt on their tongue? All stories start somewhere and the
Thornton’s story started in Sheffield in 1911 when travelling confectioner
Joseph Thornton opened up a sweet shop. Could he know how successful it would
be? No, not really as he carried on with his job and entrusted his 14-year-old
son Norman with the running of the corner shop. He told him to “make this the
best sweet shop in town” - and that’s what he did. Here I am at the home where
Norman and his brother Stanley lived with their mum and dad.
Thanks to the inviting shop window displays and
quality products it wasn’t long before Norman was opening a second shop and a
small manufacturing base. After Joseph's death in 1919 the business was passed
to the two sons. Norman ran the front end of the business while Stanley (who
studied food science at Sheffield University) dealt with the manufacturing.
They didn’t get on, argued regularly but both accepted the other was effective in
their role. J. W. Thornton Limited was formed in 1921 and by the end of the
Second World War the Thornton lads had 40 shops.
In 1988 the business was floated on the stock
market and nowadays there are 500 retail shops (400 owned, the rest are franchises.)
In 2015 it was bought by Italian chocolate company Ferroro for £112 million and
has an annual turnover of approximately £200 million.
It all started here at 64, Fitzwalker Road, a
suburban area south east of the city centre. I’m not sure how long the
Thornton’s lived here as when they opened their second shop they moved there.
They lived “overth’ shop” and worked in the basement, testing recipes,
hand-dipping violet creams, hand-rolling sweets, boiling mint rock over a gas
fire in the basement. Good to see where the empire started. I did a salute and
left.