A lost poem by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes, which was written on the back of a chocolate wrapper, sold at auction yesterday for £575, five times its estimated price.
The five-line poem dates back to 1987 and was one of three written in response to an appeal by the St Andrews Tunnocks caramel wafer appreciation society.
The confectionary has been a Scottish institution for decades, selling two million bars a week. Its cult status among St Andrews university students may be partly because the firm supplies them with a crate of free bars every term.
The St Andrews appeal was a charity fundraising stunt. Two of the wrappers have disappeared, but the one sold yesterday at Bonham's, London, was originally bought by a student who is now a doctor.
St Andrews, Scotland's oldest university, wanted the wrapper back as a star exhibit for its new museum, but was heavily outbid.
Alastair Work, assistant principal at St Andrews, who is closely involved in the museum project, said yesterday: "I am very disappointed, but I am pleased that after all these years it has turned up, and I hope it brings joy to the new owner."
The poem reads:
St Columbus ate a heifer
then wrote a psalm on the hide
Good News!
So I ate a Caramel Wafer
and rhymed on the wrapper's inside.
Mr Work, a founder of the Tunnocks caramel wafer appreciation society, urged former students to ransack their homes for the other poems. Somewhere there must be two more red and gold wrappers, with the immortal lines
To have swallowed a
crocodile
Would make anybody smile
but to swallow a Caramel Wafer
is safer
and the more characteristic Hughes terse bleakness of
Where the Devil can't get
He sends the Old Woman
