Although the product has earlier origins, the company 'Bovril Limited' was created in 1889. Early bottles bear the company Registration Number and a Farringdon Street address, while later ones do not. Also, early bottles (pre-1900) don’t have embossed content in ounces on them.
Until about 1913-14, Bovril bottles were blow moulded and hand-finished… ie they have a tooled lip and the seam for the body of the bottle ends before the lip. After that, they were fully blow-moulded, and the seam will run through the lip at the top of the bottle. For your longer-necked bottle, the seam runs continuously through the lip, so that puts it later than 1913/14 and roughly pre-1930. Shorter necks began appearing in the late 1920s and had replaced long necks by the early 1930s. These plain-necked bottles would have had a cork closure, over-sealed with a paper label. It’s difficult to be more precise than that because the Bovril company used multiple glass suppliers and there is some overlap on styles for dating purposes.
The other bottle with the shorter neck is a little later. That style began appearing in the late 1920s, quickly followed by the addition of metal screw caps which had replaced cork closures by the 1930s. It’s fully machine made and ‘FGC’ is for the Forsters Glass Company of St. Helens, Mersyside (established in 1902) who were using O’Neill machines for bottle production by 1935. I would put it around that date.
For our American friends, I would just point out that the 'generic' datings based on bottle technologies which can be fairly reliably applied in the US don't always apply quite so reliably in the UK or other parts of Europe.
[PS: I used to be the group Technical Manager for the UK subsidiary of the American company that owned Bovril before it was acquired by Unilever. On one occasion, we opened up a discovered bottle that had survived intact from the 1930s. The contents were bacteriologically sound and still perfectly edible… if a bit stiff in consistency, dark in colour and strong in flavour.]
