One Of The Oldest Boxes Of Chocolate In The World Celebrated An English King's Coronation

"Life," as Forrest Gump once said before opening a lucrative chain of casual seafood restaurants, "is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you're gonna get." Case in point: King Edward VII might not have guessed that his reign, which followed the 63-year rule of his mother Queen Victoria, would be cut short after just nine years by pneumonia. And he certainly wouldn't have guessed that the chocolate boxes made to celebrate his coronation in 1902 would still be around over a century later.

One such chocolate box is currently sitting in the Scottish town of St. Andrews, best known for its university as well as the world's oldest golf course. It's packaged in a decorative tin sporting the faces of Edward VII and his wife, Queen Alexandra of Denmark. (This was back when royals still married to form political alliances.) They were given to a young schoolgirl named Martha Greig, who managed to avoid eating them. The chocolates were handed down the generations before they were eventually given to the St. Andrews Preservation Trust. 

Coincidentally, another box of chocolates from the coronation has also survived to this day; one which was gifted to a different schoolgirl, Mary Ann Blackmore of County Durham in northeast England, who similarly refrained from eating her sweets (this one made by Cadbury, that stalwart of British chocolate). The box was auctioned off in 2023 for £1,000 (roughly $1,353). It reportedly still smelled chocolatey.

As it happens, old chocolate boxes aren't just the domain of young British girls with Herculean levels of self-restraint. The famed Australian poet Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson (the guy who wrote "Waltzing Matilda") had in his estate a chocolate box he saved from the Second Boer War (1899 to 1902), where he was a war correspondent. The chocolates were discovered in 2020, and look to be in reasonably good condition for century-old candy. (Though, you wouldn't want to taste the expired candy yourself.) Another box of chocolates from the Boer War was found in an attic in Immingham, Lincolnshire.

The chocolates were a gift from Queen Victoria, although not a personal one. In 1900, she sent out boxes of chocolates to soldiers in the Boer War in order to boost their morale at New Year's. This was quite a controversial move, as all three of the major chocolate companies in the United Kingdom at the time — Cadbury, Fry, and Rowntree — were owned by pacifist Quakers who deplored the idea of profiting from war. Of course, it wasn't easy to say no to Queen Victoria, so they decided to donate the chocolate in unbranded tins (some of the chocolates were printed with their names anyway). We're sure most of the soldiers very much appreciated the gesture, even those who apparently didn't eat them.