Happy 40th birthday to M&S’s ‘gin in a tin’
Cast your minds back, if you can, to 1986. A different era. The nation rejoiced as a jolly redhead married the Queen’s favourite son. Britain had a cast-iron prime minister who looked set to go on and on, with nary a dent to her patent leather handbag. A first-class stamp cost 17 pence; the average family home only a little more. There was a Big Bang in the City and a larger one at Chernobyl. And, in the nascent ready-made drinks market, something similarly seismic happened: Marks & Spencer launched the bevvy that spawned a thousand imitators, the ‘gin in a tin’. This epoch-defining moment passed me by at the
