Swan Vesta

Swan Vesta is a brand name for the most popular brand of 'strike-anywhere' matches currently available in the UK, shorter than regular pocket matches they are particularly popular with smokers and have long used the tagline "the smoker's match" although this seems to have been replaced by the prefix "the original" on the current packaging.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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Swan Vesta matches are manufactured under the House of Swan brand (http://houseofswan.com/) which is also responsible for making other smoking accessories such as cigarette papers, flints and filter tips.

History of the brand

The ‘Swan’ brand began in 1883 when the Collard & Kendall match company in Bootle on Merseyside near Liverpool introduced ‘Swan wax matches’ [1] these were superseded by later versions including 'Swan White Pine Vestas' from the Diamond Match Company, these were formed of wooden splint soaked in wax. They were finally christened 'Swan Vestas' in 1906 when Diamond merged with Bryant and May and the company enthusiastically promoted the Swan brand. By the 1930s 'Swan Vestas' had become 'Britain's best selling match' [2] the brand is now owned by the Swedish Match company. Indispensable for smokers in Britain due to a ban on gas lighters and otherwise widely used for lighting gas heaters and cookers, the immediately recognizable Swan Vesta box appears in the first Wallace and Gromit animation A Grand Day Out thinly disguised as Duck matches, one of which Wallace uses to light the fuse of the rocket that flies them to the moon.

References

*http://www.protimient.com/MatchBoxLabels.pdf
* BBCi, Matches: a story of light and dark http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A805349>
* Phosphorus: from urine to firePart 2. From cold fire to instant lights - the history of the matchPeter E. ChildsUniversity of Limerick, Limerickhttp://www.ul.ie/~childsp/CinA/Issue61/TOC25_Phosporous.html