A Goodison Tradition returns: The Toffee Lady

The translocation of Everton Football Club from Goodison Park to the state-of-the-art Hill Dickinson Stadium is not merely moving home; it represents a key moment in the architectural and cultural heritage of the club. 

From this weekend onwards, an official Toffee Lady will be present at every home game – greeting supporters in the Plaza, pitchside and in the Family Stand, handing out Everton Mints and posing for photos as part of the matchday welcome.

As the club seeks to forge a new identity rooted in the old docklands alongside the River Mersey, the preservation of key heritage markers assumes a renewed significance. Few traditions are as unique, and as symbolically meaningful, as Everton's Toffee Lady.

This weekend, that tradition is being officially reinstated by the club, offering a tangible link between its 19th-Century origins and its 21st-Century future.

Reintroducing the Toffee Lady (plus occasionally a Toffee Girl) at Hill Dickinson Stadium allows the club to honour and protect one of football’s most timeless and iconic matchday traditions, ensuring a treasured symbol of Everton’s identity and heritage continues into a new era.

The Mints vs The Toffees

A key point of historical distinction, often missed in anecdotal retellings, is the consistent deployment of the Everton Mint as the item for distribution, over the actual caramel toffees. 

Everton Toffees were probably created by Molly Bushell during the 18th Century in her famous shop on Everton Brow. But, when Everton moved to Goodison Park in 1892, they were nearer Mother Noblett’s shop, which produced the original Everton Mints. Noblett’s sweets became the ones distributed at matches, cementing the mint — not the toffee — as the matchday tradition, although it's unclear exactly when this tradition began.

For many years, the production of the distinctive but strangely black-&-white striped Everton Mint was synonymous with the famous Liverpool confectionary enterprise:  Barker & Dobson. Established in 1834, the company became one of the city's foremost sweet manufacturers, with its substantial factory operations further establishing a commercial link between local industry and the football club's identity.

This was a pragmatic choice that perhaps spoke volumes about the early matchday environment, where wrapped hard-shelled mints were aerodynamically superior to sticky, irregularly shaped toffees for crowd distribution. Their simpler and more uniform structure possibly allowed for safe and efficient dispersal from the peripheral Goodison cinder path, over the white boundary wall, and into the massed terraces of Evertonians.

Thus, the ritual’s enduring power is not defined by the specific type of sweet, but by the act of its distribution, possibly symbolising in better times a sweeter union between the club and its supporters?

The challenge facing Everton in their new home is how to transport the intangible spirit of Goodison Park into a modern, geographically distinct edifice by the River Mersey. Heritage traditions serve as the cultural catalyst necessary for this transition. The return of the Toffee Lady is, therefore, a deliberate act of heritage preservation and transfer to the new location.

By reintroducing this traditional ritual now, at the new Hill Dickinson Stadium, the club is effectively stating that, while the architecture may have shifted from traditional Victorian brick to modern steel, aluminium and glass, the essential character of the institution — its heritage — remains unbroken.

The Toffee Lady's re-emergence may therefore be portrayed as not merely a piece of theatrical nostalgia, but a carefully considered cultural bridge, ensuring that the tastier memories of Everton's past can be literally and symbolically shared with the newer and younger fans yearning for a promising future.

 

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