Quake-Up Camberwick Green — Action Transfers

Quake-Up Camberwick Green, 1974 [PR211]

I must admit that, rather embarrassingly, for some time I believed these PR211 transfer sheets came with Camberwick Green Toothpaste rather than Quake-Up cereal — even when Nick Symes attempted to dissuade me.

Original photos courtesy of Nick Symes

I tried to wield Occam's razor (well-known for its bluntness) to show that both promotions would have used the same transfers — Letraset being particularly fond of this dastardly trick — but in the end an experiment in parallax persuaded me that there were two different sets, with PR211 (which after all, would have been printed in 1974 — not 1972, as it says on the transfer sheets themselves) belonging exclusively to Quake-Up.

Original photos courtesy of Adrian Allen

We've deduced there must have been eight sheets, of which (thanks to Nick & to Adrian Allen) we can show you the above five.

Original photos courtesy of Nick Symes

The reasoning behind this deduction is based on the text on the pack:

Front panel:

"4 FREE Camberwick Green Character Transfers in this pack"

Side panel:

"© Quaker Oats Limited, Year of First Publication 1974"

Back panel:

"Free inside! Camberwick Green* Action Transfers"

"There are 16 Camberwick Green characters available on Action Transfers: you'll find 4 of your favourites inside each Free Transfers pack. You can use them to decorate your letters, cards or drawing books. You can put them on paper and draw your own pictures around them. You can decorate your pencil box. They'll go on most surfaces almost anywhere. Or you can transfer them onto the special scene from Camberwick Green shown below. There's plenty of space in front of the Town Hall!"

"*© Gordon Murray Promotions 1974"

Looking at this information & the transfer sheets themselves, each sheet must be supposed to have two 'characters' (dogs & vegetation apparently don't count). So there would have been two sheets in each pack of cereal, & (sixteen divided by two…) eight sheets in total.

Now aren't you glad you didn't give up on your PhD in Rocket Science? But…

Back to Uni…

…Because here's a twist (as usual).

Andrew Boxall got in touch to say he had (among others) an uncut sheet for this promotion, & sent this photo. He knew how much I love an uncut sheet!

Original photo courtesy of Andrew Boxall

"Hooray!" you say, because now we can see what the missing three transfer sheets look like. But you speak too soon; did you forget the twist? Count carefully (or trust me — I've counted several times already): there are only seven different transfers on this sheet.

What's going on? There are supposed to be sixteen characters. If you count them all up, & include the dog, you only get fifteen. If you include the flora & fauna, you get nineteen.

It's as if someone let Google AI be in charge of this promotion…

It may be that one transfer was designed to be very rare (although how avid were Camberwick Green collectors going to be back then?), & it only appeared a couple of times on the bottom row of the sheet, which appears to have been cut off. Perhaps this is the very reason it was cut off!

If so, then I can't show you the eighth transfer sheet. But here, thanks to Don Richards' photo, is one of the other two: