It’s summer (allegedly), and all around the country, small vans are driving around residential estates playing music out loud — and people are smiling when they hear it.
It’s the familiar jingle of the ice cream van, and hearing it the other day made me wonder — why are they allowed to play music in the first place. It’s such an odd thing when you think about it, as no one else would be allowed to do that.
Is there an ice-cream van exemption from noise pollution? After all, it is an offence to use a loudspeaker in the street (section 62 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974), and there is a specific noise pollution laws that make it an offence to create a noise nuisance — so why are ice-cream vans not being slapped with fines by cash strapped councils?
Before I progress, I am not against them. The oddity of it suddenly struck me, so I dug in.
It turns out that there’s a specific regulation that governs the use of music to advertise what are classed as “mobile food vendors.” Although it was introduced when there was a wider range of sellers than today, it now applies almost exclusively to ice-cream vans.
So long as the van sells “perishable commodities for human consumption, ” they have a specific exemption from the noise pollution rules, but within some limits.
The ice cream van can only play its jingle between noon and 7pm, so no ice creams before lunch or after supper. There’s also a general regulation that the loudspeaker can only be used to advertise the food for sale — by means of the familiar jingle. So an ice cream van can’t, for example, play political slogans during an election.
There isn’t a rule about what sort of jingle should be played, although Greensleves tends to be by far the most popular simply because of its familiarity. However, in 1999, there was talk of ice cream vans switching to pop songs, but there was a backlash as people seemed to prefer the familiar childhood sounds that evoke memories of grabbing money from a parent and rushing out to find the van.
To reduce the jingle becoming annoying, there’s also regulations about how loud they can be (below LAmax 80dB at 7.5 metres from the van) and consideration should be given to closely packed houses on narrow streets.
Also, the jingle should last no more than 12 seconds — just in case you’ve ever wondered why they play for a short time then go silent — and never more than once every 2 minutes and also not more than once every 2 hours on an individual street.
That’s also why static ice cream vans can’t play their jingle as they would breach the 2-hour rule, and why only the vans driving around a residential estate can do so.
There’s even a rule that the ice-cream van jingle shouldn’t be played within 50 metres of a place of worship on their allocated days of use — so nothing outside church on Sundays and presumably avoid the Synagogues on Friday afternoons.
It’s quite a complicated formula to enforce, and I’d wager that it has never been enforced and, likely as not, would never need to be. Imagine being the council noise officer telling an ice cream van that they were on the same street less than 2 hours ago and shouldn’t have played a jingle.
Not to mention, having to be the council official who tells kids they can’t have ice cream because the van driver has been fined.
Ice cream vans are surprisingly old. They emerged initially as static vans that sold penny-licks in the 1870s, but the first motor ice cream vans appeared as early as the 1910s, albeit initially to be driven between static locations.
It has been hard to pin down when they started playing musical jingles, but it seems to have started in the 1950s.
In 1950, an ice cream van vendor was fined for sounding his “musical hooter” too loudly in the summer evenings, and there are a number of aricles in 1950/51 about motorists being fined for sounding their van horns to attract attention.
The breakthrough in switching from the van horn to actual music seems to have been in April 1952, when Rose Monfredi*, fed up with being fined for sounding the van’s horn, decided to fit a music box to the van.
She drove around Shefield playing Auld Lang Syne, with the music automatically stopping when the van stopped. After being stopped by a police officer, she was fined £1 for “using a noisy instrument on a Sunday to the annoyance of residents.” When filing her appeal, the defence counsel noted that none of the residents had complained, but that the police officer who stopped her had previously complained about the noise of church bells so might not have been entirely impartial in the matter.
She won the appeal, and thanks to the publicity she received in the news at the time, it seems that the idea of playing a musical jingle to advertise ice cream was swiftly taken up by ice cream vendors elsewhere, along with complaints and fines until regulations were introduced to settle the matter.
The jingle as we know it today seems to have been inspired by the fairground sounds where ice-cream vans were often to be found. The fairground organ made its way into a small phonograph-type machine, and the ice cream jingle was born.
Today, it’s usually a small box with dials for the various tunes.
Anyhow, if you’re at home with the kids and they hear the sound of the ice cream van, you now know that you have at least two minutes to distract them before they hear it again and repeat their demands for a 99 cone.
*She might not have been the first, as I found a reference from April 1951, but it is unclear if it was a musical jingle or a horn. However, she seems to be the person who sparked the upsurge in their use, thanks to the publicity at the time.
