The ice cream van is a fixture of the British summer: a van with a serving hatch that drives slowly around residential streets playing a tinny chime, at which children materialise from gardens demanding money.
The 99
The definitive British order: soft-serve vanilla ice cream in a wafer cone, with a Cadbury Flake pushed into it at an angle. Optional additions are raspberry sauce — universally called monkey’s blood, for reasons nobody can adequately explain — and hundreds and thousands.
Why “99” is genuinely disputed. Cadbury’s own historical position was that it referred to an Italian royal guard of 99 men, which nobody has ever substantiated. Other explanations point to an old shop address, or to a price in pre-decimal money. Cadbury has since acknowledged that the origin is unknown.
It is also, unavoidably, no longer 99p. Complaints about the price of a 99 are an annual British newspaper fixture.
The chime is regulated
The detail that surprises everyone. Under the Code of Practice on Noise from Ice Cream Van Chimes, made under noise legislation, a van may:
- sound its chime for no more than twelve seconds at a time;
- do so no more than once every three minutes;
- not sound it while stationary, except on first arriving;
- not sound it before noon or after seven in the evening;
- not sound it within earshot of a school during school hours, or near a hospital or place of worship in use.
Councils enforce this, and vans have been prosecuted. The rules exist because ice cream van chimes generate a genuinely substantial volume of noise complaints.
The traditional tunes are Greensleeves, Popeye the Sailor Man, Whistle While You Work and Just One Cornetto — the last being an Italian advertising jingle so effective in Britain that people believe it is a folk song.
Mr Whippy and the machinery
Soft-serve ice cream — lighter and softer than scooped, because air is whipped into it during freezing — arrived in Britain in the 1950s. The Mr Whippy franchise launched in 1958 and the name became generic.
A persistent story holds that Margaret Thatcher, working as a research chemist at J. Lyons before entering politics, was part of a team developing methods of incorporating more air into ice cream. The claim is repeated constantly and the evidence for her specific role is thin, but she did genuinely work on food emulsifiers there.
The Glasgow ice cream wars
The darkest chapter. In 1980s Glasgow, ice cream vans were used as fronts for selling stolen goods and drugs on housing estates, and rival operators fought over territory with intimidation and arson.
In 1984 a firebomb attack on a driver’s flat killed six members of one family. The resulting prosecutions and the long campaign to overturn two of the convictions — eventually quashed in 2004 — made “the ice cream wars” a permanent part of Glasgow’s history.
The decline
Numbers have fallen sharply. Fuel costs, low-emission zone charges in cities, competition from supermarkets, and the general decline in children playing unsupervised on residential streets have all bitten. The chime on a warm afternoon is now a good deal rarer than it was, and correspondingly more noticed.