By Appointment To The King according to the reverse of the box, which must make this 1920s. Designed to freight 48 tins of mustard at 2d each, the box is made of rough pine pieces nailed together and overprinted. Clearly cardboard was around but perhaps goods coming in from (or going out to) the empire needed something more robust. The design looks like it was done via a crude form of letterpress printing, it would be fascinating to see what sort of press they used to do this on. Boxes like this often had paper printed sheets inside the lids, so they could be put straight onto the counter. Maybe there was some sort of return to base scheme with the retailer and it got reused a few times. But you can see why people could find 101 uses for these boxes once their shelf life was over.
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