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.
Reader Comments (48)
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2 Posted 28/11/2025 at 20:23:46
Well said.
3 Posted 28/11/2025 at 20:30:36
4 Posted 28/11/2025 at 21:52:18
You'd have all kinds of lawsuits from people claiming they'd been assaulted.
5 Posted 28/11/2025 at 22:06:37
Teeth wreckers, but only if you managed to catch one. I never did.
6 Posted 28/11/2025 at 22:14:12
I caught a couple of toffees in my young match-going days and will never forget how special it felt. Long may it continue.
7 Posted 28/11/2025 at 23:34:41
8 Posted 29/11/2025 at 00:13:32
9 Posted 29/11/2025 at 00:21:49
There is a web site " Liverpool 1207" which carries many articles on the history of the city of Liverpool. It includes one on the history of Everton Toffee from 1760 until Barker and Dobson took over Nobletts in the 1930's. just enter the site and search Molly Bushell.
10 Posted 29/11/2025 at 00:54:55
From a family of Liverpool supporters, I was born in Birkenhead so naturally supported Tranmere Rovers. Still remember the cup match against Coventry we won in the 60's, bedlam. Then around about 1967 or early 1968, one of my aunties asked if I wanted to see Everton. She and my Uncle had season tickets but he was a bigwig in Crawford Biscuits so often was working Saturday.
Aged 7, I found myself in this massive stadium (I thought Prenton Park was huge) and then the Z cars theme, my favourite program, struck up. As the teams walked out to a massive roar, there were women throwing sweets into the crowd. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, especially as I managed to grab one. Caught, hook line and sinker...
I know it must have been 1967 or early '68 because we played WBA in the cup final that season. I was so sick with anxiety, I had to go to bed with a massive headache and didn't see extra time.
Still it didn't work out too badly. I got to see the holy trinity, the great team of the late '60's. That still feels like a privilege.
I've not been to the HD Stadium but I plan too and I'll be up there all the quicker if the toffee ladies are back.
11 Posted 29/11/2025 at 01:07:48
12 Posted 29/11/2025 at 02:29:03
13 Posted 29/11/2025 at 05:12:38
14 Posted 29/11/2025 at 05:56:48
15 Posted 29/11/2025 at 07:00:22
It's a woman being paid to throw sweets around.
16 Posted 29/11/2025 at 07:17:14
Were you never seriously tempted any night, you know, in the same way some people enjoy a cigarette after?
17 Posted 29/11/2025 at 07:39:34
A challenge was issued yesterday, but normally I have no problem skipping past harmless pieces of little relevance... without comment.
This one doesn't challenge your understanding of the game and I can fully appreciate why it appeals to you.
18 Posted 29/11/2025 at 07:50:32
19 Posted 29/11/2025 at 08:01:41
For grown men and some women to watch men getting paid to kick a ball around!
Your point, sir?
20 Posted 29/11/2025 at 08:21:13
Try taking yourself less seriously.
21 Posted 29/11/2025 at 08:40:39
Mr Cliffe was a massive blue and coach of St Anne's and Blessed Dominic's under 11s and he took us all to my first ever game at Goodison Park -- v Brian Clough's Derby County in the League Cup.
God Bless Crawford biscuits!
22 Posted 29/11/2025 at 08:58:47
23 Posted 29/11/2025 at 09:14:20
We need to have a TW fella a TW lady and TW trans in unison doing their lap of the ground chucking sweets, sprinting past the away fans, banging and bouncing baskets, expressing tradition.
I went to hundreds of home games and never once got a toffee. Fecking bitch. She hated me. Even Darren Hind got two.
24 Posted 29/11/2025 at 10:41:03
I used to look forward to the Toffee Lady walking round the ground throwing Everton Mints into the crowd. I was lucky, I managed to get three over the years.
25 Posted 29/11/2025 at 10:42:19
Welcome back, Mrs Toffee Lady.
26 Posted 29/11/2025 at 10:48:52
27 Posted 29/11/2025 at 10:53:12
Mints or Ladies?
28 Posted 29/11/2025 at 10:58:08
That one may be difficult to revive though...
29 Posted 29/11/2025 at 11:24:17
Stick Gueye in a dress. His throwing technique proved impeccable at Man Utd.
Plus it would tick all sorts of boxes for the Woke diversity freaks.
31 Posted 29/11/2025 at 11:51:55
That slap from Gana Gueye last Monday reminded me of the film “In the heat of the night” when Sidney Poitier, playing the New York detective Virgil Tibbs visiting friends in a racially sensitive town down south, is slapped across the face by a white plantation owner and is immediately slapped back by the detective to the amazement of the sheriff played by Rod Steiger.
The owner says, “I could have had you whipped for that boy -- a few years ago!” Virgil just smiles. Sitting in the audience, I wanted Virgil to give him another one!
The other night, one slap was enough for me!
32 Posted 29/11/2025 at 12:16:08
I used to get these sweets on a regular basis when I used to get into the ground very early when I was a young child. No wonder my teeth are wrecked, maybe I should take Everton to court and get them to pay for my dentist!
33 Posted 29/11/2025 at 12:57:16
Shame the two didnt repeat your excellent description to the referee - claiming it was just a recreation of the movie scene to emphasis the PL's "No Room For Racism".
Missed opportunity.
34 Posted 29/11/2025 at 12:59:05
You could argue that the Toffee Lady would be a more apt (and commercial) image on the shirt rather than Rupert's
Tower.
35 Posted 29/11/2025 at 13:08:26
Crawfords, home of the blues? Maybe the reds all worked at Jacobs...
36 Posted 29/11/2025 at 14:22:59
It didn't trigger me. You did.
I don't mind you seeking me out but don't start bleating when you find me.
37 Posted 29/11/2025 at 14:46:16
Also, in parts of the North-West they use 'toffee' to mean basically any sweet. I've been offered Polo mints with the question “Would you like a ‘toffee'?”
I hadn't realised the Toffee Lady hadn't been at BMD until now. All for keeping gentler, kinder traditions going so it's a welcome reinstatement for me.
38 Posted 29/11/2025 at 14:49:43
39 Posted 29/11/2025 at 14:50:34
40 Posted 29/11/2025 at 15:13:27
41 Posted 29/11/2025 at 15:58:05
I used to love Everton Mints when I had teeth, I'm glad to see the Toffee Lady back.
42 Posted 29/11/2025 at 16:34:34
One thing, though... Virgil didn't smile after the slap.
Neither did Gana.
43 Posted 29/11/2025 at 16:38:03
That is a great movie.
44 Posted 29/11/2025 at 16:58:15
Welcome back.
45 Posted 29/11/2025 at 18:33:28
3-0 down to Newcastle at half-time, the answer seems obvious.
Get rid of these ladies once and for all.
46 Posted 29/11/2025 at 20:51:10
47 Posted 01/12/2025 at 18:58:37
48 Posted 01/12/2025 at 20:08:06
I think the last time may have been back in 2013, against Manchester City. But the evidence is pretty sketchy, and could well be wrong.
49 Posted 01/12/2025 at 20:45:07
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1 Posted 28/11/2025 at 20:05:12
I know many want a complete break from the past but things like Z-Cars etc are where we're from — and that includes the Toffee Lady!
Remember, without history there is no future.