Chesdale Cheese !

Advertising jingle with a lively tune. It has been heard for decades on New Zealand Tv, sung by two dancing cartoon dairy farmers, Ches and Dale. Legend has it that members of a 1970s New Zealand overseas trade delegation sung it, on an overseas trip, when asked to sing a New Zealand folk song.

"We are the boys from down on the farm, We really know our cheese There's much better value in Chesdale, It never fails to please. Chesdale, Slices thinly Never crumbles, Theres no waste. And boy, it's got a mighty taste! Chesdale cheese!" It's finest cheddar Made better!

Here is the score of the original tune, supplied by its composer Terry Gray.
Notice that the sung tune was modified by the Yoemen in the "mighty taste" line.

1K Midi

Cheese at Mangamahu

When I was a boy at Mangamahu, in the 1940s, I used to go across to the Mangamahu Store and watch Bob Cook cutting up the cheese for the grocery orders that the farmers had telephoned in on the spasm.

The store had no fridge, and the cheese was in huge ten pound wheels, hard and dry on the outside, and crumbly when he cut it into wedge-shaped slices. It quickly went stale in the farmhouse cupboards.

Sir Jack Richard Butland KBE (1896-1982), pioneer food manufacturer and philanthropist

Butland's Cheese

Jack Butland was a businessman who tackled this cheese problem by experimenting with additives. He finally found that adding small amounts of sodium or potassium phosphate would make the cheese smooth textured, like peanut butter. He sold it wrapped in aluminium foil, in an 8 ounce cardboard carton.

With the coming of refrigerators, plastic shrink wrap, supermarkets, and chemophobia, NZers have turned to big 1kg blocks of cheddar -"Mild, Colby, and Tasty" with no chemical additives- but Chesdale is still a popular export to countries where household fridges are rare, with sodium citrate now used as an emulisifer, and sorbic acid being used as a preservative.

TV Commercial

Click to see Nobby's full story board

Ches and Dale were drawn for static advertisements by Don Couldrey in the early 1960s. Nobby Clark, a 1960s graphic designer, illustrator and artist who had migrated out from England in 1952, says he was working on animated TV advertisements in Auckland at the time, and produced story boards for the Chesdale cheese adverts. And in 1968 Butland's advertising agency, Dormer Beck, commissioned a black and white tv commercial for Chesdale. The advert's producer was Sam Gardiner and Robert Jenkins wrote the words of the jingle.

Ches 'n Dale from a drawing by Brent Chambers in "The Great Kiwi Sandwich" Penguin Books (NZ) 2000

The lyrics were set to music by Terry Gray, who later became director of music for TVNZ. The song was recorded by an Auckland folk group, The Yeomen, in Mascot Studios in Ponsonby, Auckland.

The Ches n Dale cartooning was created at Sam Harvey Animations, the Auckland cartooning studio of Englishman Sam Harvey who later created the Goodnight Kiwi cartoon on TV2.

Included in the Ches n Dale cartooning team were Dick Frizzell and John Ewing. Dick Frizzell later became an iconic New Zealand "Kiwiana" artist while John Ewing, a former Disney cartoonist, formed his own company where he trained many animators, some of whom went on to work at Peter Jackson's Weta Studios.

Some of this information was supplied in Feb 2001 by Terry Gray, who for the past few years has lived in Wanganui. Mr Gray says he doesn't remember the Chesdale song as anything special; they were making lots of commercials at the time. He also noted that although the song is registered with APRA as his, he has not received any royalties for its use in recent times! A music publisher - Media Administration Services - apparently negotiates the mechanical rights to the work.

Ches and Dale were retired from television advertising in about 1975.

 

The Yeomen

They consisted of Brian Borland, Gordon Hubbard, Peter Carter. For a while I had the Yeoman confused on this webpage with a similar group at the time, the Convairs. My apologies.

In Oct 2005, Brian Borland of the Yeomen kindly forwarded this information.

"My name is Brian Borland. All members of the trio played on the track but the voices were Gordon Hubbard and myself. Gordon played 6 string Guitar, Peter Carter played tenor guitar and I played 5 string Banjo. We included the jingle as part of our floor show on a number of occasions.

"It was recorded by Bruce Barton at his studio in Eden Terrace.

"We actually did two Chesdale Jingles...one for "Colby Cheese". The lines were changed to ... "We've got news from Chesdale Cheese, Our Colby's back in town" .... the rest was the same except for the last line which was "it's the finest Colby, made better". When we made this jingle we decided we didn't like the lack of rhyme ...so we did an additional track for them that finished with ..."it's the finest Colby, gone mouldy!" I understand they took the joke in good faith.

"The Yeomen and the Convairs were friendly rivals. I was on Jim Sutton's 1ZB show last Saturday night with both Phil Seth and Johnny Bond from the Convairs. Peter Carter and Gordon Hubbard called in to talk about the "good old days".

"Make no mistake about it, Gordon and I are the original Ches and Dale. The jingle is in Te Papa (Museum) too.

The Mike Moore myth

There is a widely told story that the Chesdale Cheese song was sung overseas by Mike Moore when he couldn't think of "a NZ folk song."

Mike Moore's love of NZ folk song is well-known. On the 1987 LP "Bush Justice" by the Christchurch band Bushfire, Mike was the guest singer for their "Taumarunui" track.

However, when Max Cryer recently (Nov 2003) asked Mike Moore for details of this event, Mike explained that he has NEVER sung the song, either in NZ or overseas, and that it is TOTALLY UNTRUE that he led a delegation which sang it. He said he had vaguely heard something about it ..... but it wasn't HIM !!!

But Mr Moore has given details the story. Parliamentary Library archives have the transcript of a speech Mike Moore while he was Minister of Overseas Trade and Marketing, entitled 'Towards a New Zealand Identity ' and delivered at the opening of Air Force Recording Studio, Auckland, August 1988; in which he said

"I am reminded of a New Zealand Minister and a group of Dairy Board delegates at a function in Ireland, after which the Irish sang their songs.

When New Zealand's turn came, they looked embarrassed, sang a disjointed and inaccurate Pokarekare Ana, and then, inspired by a creative Dairy Board member, got up and sang the jingle 'We are the boys from down on the farm, we really know our cheese.' "

Max is now closing in on who the singers were. No Minister of Trade went to Ireland before Mr Moore made that speech. So it must have been a Minister of Agriculture who was with the Dairy Board group in Ireland, and it must have in the 1970s. But which year exactly? And which Minister of Agriculture?

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Multinational Take-overs

Chesdale cheese was made by Butlands Industries, which also made other sandwich spreads. In 1981, the Muldoon government allowed Kraft (a part of the Philip Morris multinational group of companies) to buy 49% of Butland, on the grounds that it would allow more NZ cheese to be sold overseas.

But Kraft failed to keep the promises it made before the Butlands takeover, which included wider markets, especially access to the United States. Instead, in August 1989, Kraft bought the remaining 51% of Butlands it did not already own.

In October 1995, having extracted all the profits it was able to, Kraft sold Chesdale to J Watties, a subsidiary of Heinz, another multi-national.

Cheez Toyz

In the late 1990s, the New Zealand Dairy Board aquired the Chesdale cheese brand. Capitalising on the international reputation of the well-known jingle and dancing farmers, it promoted Chesdale overseas as-

"CHESDALE; processed cheese for fun and nutrition."

One product was CHESDALE CHEEZ TOYZ. These were made for Arab children at an NZDB factory in Dammam, in the style of Kinder Surprises. Sealed packets with tasty snack and surprise plastic toys. However a check of the SADAFCO site in 2005 showed the cheese was now being promoted as Saudia Cheese Spread.

Back in NZ

Since 1997, We have also been seeing the old Chesdale advert on tv again, and Ches and Dale children's story books, as the original old-style Chesdale cheese packets appeared on the supermarket shelves again.

And in 2000 NZ Dairy Foods got scriptwriter Michelle A'Court to bring Ches & Dale to life. Her comedy sketches and stories, performed in shopping malls and stores by "big-head" actors, have brought a cheesy rural perspective to our towns.

Cheez Dale in Singapore

But the icons have been changed in Singapore. In 2004, Kiwi expat Robyn M Speed, living in Singapore, reported that Chesdale cheese slices were being sold there with the same jingle, but with Dale (and Ches?) drawn as dancing cheese slices. Her webpage shows a photo of a promotional coin purse she received with a twin-pack of Chesdale cheese slices. She was indignant at this mis-use of part of NZ's cultural history.

The Ballad Writers' Toolbox

Finest Cheddar NZ folk songs tell New Zealanders about themselves,to celebrate past achievements, enable us to understand who we are now, and help guide us into the future. The Chesdale jingle does that by summing up the essential character of much of the NZ export trade: good quality farming (farmer Ches), combined with innovative processing (cheese factory worker Dale). We have the same farm/tech combination of quality in meat-processing, wine-making, fruit-juicing, carpet-weaving, paper-making etc activities. The Chesdale cheese song has a really good tune that every NZer knows. But it only has one verse. Can it be "made better" with more verses ? Can you link the verses into a story ? Mail me with your effort.