The Home

I include below four paragraphs from my chapter on the Home which illustrate some of the subjects covered. I begin with my father.

My father, Leslie, born in 1891, never told me what toys there may have been for him and his younger brother, perhaps a horse tricycle from G&J Lines, but more likely a wooden toy bought from a street trader. After 1900, they may have had a Mechanics Made Easy set and accompanying instruction manual. Frank Hornby, a Liverpool office worker, had been making perforated metal strips for his sons which could be connected by means of small bolts and nuts to make anything from model trains to bridges and cranes. The adoption of the name Meccano came in 1907, by which time Leslie had started work. One toy I am uncertain about is Harbutt’s Plasticine which was first manufactured in 1900. My doubt stems from my memory of my father’s extreme concern that my sister and I may walk it into the carpets; it was very difficult to extract from the carpet pile. For wealthier families, the main source of toys was Germany with manufacturers such as Steiffe for Teddy Bears and Marklin for tinplate. The British firm Bassett-Lowke designed and supplied clockwork trains, but often manufactured for them in Germany. Kenneth Brown in his wonderful short book, The British Toy Industry, suggests that the comparatively poor provision for British children was the result of the absence of childhood for so many working from an early age, but also the lack of disposable income on the part of so many parents. Both of these reasons reduced in influence as the century drew to a close.

My father lived a remarkable life, serving in two world wars, trading in Africa and planting rubber in Malaya. I write more in Dunkirk to D Day.

But back to the home.

In the late nineteenth century, many urban dwellers had moved away from baking their own bread or brewing their own beer, the latter because of the improving quality of water. Bread remained a core element of diet, and I remember my father’s fondness for it; it would be bought from the local baker. It is possible that the bread would be made with Smith’s Patent Process Germ Flour, which was re-named Hovis, following a national competition. Hovis flour was milled by S. Fitton & Son in Macclesfield and was soon made into both Hovis bread and Hovis Biscuits, which, in 1896, were being supplied to Her Majesty the Queen. It wasn’t only Hovis, Joseph Rank had been milling flour for use by local bakers since 1883 when he introduced milling by rollers rather than the traditional millstone. The London docks was the home to a good many flour mills, which made sense given the percentage of grain that was imported.

In Britain, as probably elsewhere, medicine had been largely herbal until the so called quacks began to peddle their ‘patent products’ of questionable value with some manufacturers spending huge sums on advertising. There is a wonderful nineteenth century advertisement for ‘Morison’s Pills – a cure for all curable diseases’. That is far from the whole story. The Pharmaceutical Society was formed in London in 1841, one of its founding members was William Allen who was a partner in the Plough Court pharmacy, whose origins can be traced back to 1715. In 1856 Allen joined his nephews in Allen & Hanbury which grew particularly through it renowned cod liver oil (not one of my favourite memories of childhood). Much later Allen & Hanbury would be bought by Glaxo Laboratories.

The native British chemical industry grew with the textile industry’s hunger for soap and dyes. The industry was made up for forty or so small companies operating on the Cheshire salt-field and neighbouring Merseyside, producing industrial chemicals such as soda ash, chlorine, sulphuric acid, bleach and explosives. Taken together they comprised the largest heavy chemical industry in the world. The largest company, Brunner Mond, took on a licence from the Belgian Solvay to produce soda in bulk and became part of the Solvay Group which loosely drew together users of the process in a number of countries. The competing Leblanc process had been embraced by Tennants of Glasgow which brought together the other Leblanc companies into the United Alkali company. The final decades of the century saw these two groupings seeking to embrace new competing technologies alongside chemical companies in Germany and the USA. In 1911 Lever Brothers were the major customer of Brunner Mond for Soda and this set in train a conflict which drew Brunner Mond into the business of soap production. In a story of great skill and diplomacy a situation that had seemed disastrous for Lever had by 1914 put the company in a position of great strength. It would be a British company to watch.

You can read much more in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.