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Vintage Toronto Ads: Take a Troche on Me
Source: The Atlantic Monthly, January 1924.
For some people, it wouldn’t be right to start off a new year without a cold or throat infection. Exposure to the mass of humanity flooding city streets and shopping venues over the holiday season often means more than good tidings are spread to you. Medicated lozenges have long been among the options for temporary throat relief, even if their effects are fleeting.
Brown’s Bronchial Troches had been marketed as a cure-all for the throat since 1850. From the start they were recommended for those who relied on their voice for their livelihood. An ad from 1864 noted that “public speakers and singers should use the troches. They are invaluable for allaying the hoarseness and irritation incident to vocal exertion, clearing and strengthening the voice. Military officers and soldiers, who over-tax the voice and are exposed to sudden change, should have them.” We wonder how handy the troches were in the heart of battle during the American Civil War (during that era, the company also produced Brown’s Vermifuge Comfits, which were designed to treat children with worms).
It’s hard to say if the troches helped the oral abilities of Canadian distributor Harold F. Ritchie, who was described by Time magazine as a “squeaky-voiced little man.” From his headquarters on McCaul Street near Queen, Ritchie ran a food and drug distribution empire that had offices around the globe. Early in his career he earned the nickname “Carload Ritchie” for the volume of orders he took during his early days as a salesman, a field he was inspired to go into after observing those who sold products to his family’s general store on Manitoulin Island. Among the other products in his portfolio were Bovril and Eno’s Fruit Salts.
Ritchie was a workaholic who often stayed up until the early morning hours to close a sale. Business was his obsession, to the detriment of his health. Accounts indicate that on business trips he paused only to bathe and change his clothes, rarely exercised, and ate only when it occurred to him to do so (and then tended to overindulge). He insisted on meeting clients in person and preferred to travel by automobile or plane so that he wouldn’t be tied down to train schedules. Though his death at the age of fifty-two in February 1933 was attributed to appendicitis, doctors felt Ritchie worked himself into an early grave. The company survived and, through name changes and mergers, is considered one of the ancestors of the Canadian branch of GlaxoSmithKline.
Additional material from The Presbyterian Historical Almanac for 1864 (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1864), the March 6, 1933 edition of Time, and the February 23, 1933 edition of the Toronto Star.
