Making Soap in

Dr James Gregory, Department of History, University of Plymouth May 2020 e.mail: [email protected] ​

That the consumption of Soap in England does not increase with population, wealth, commerce, or civilisation of the nation. That the people of England, high and low, consume a less average quality of Soap per head than they allow the convicts in the 1 prisons, or the paupers in the workhouses.

Who can deny my claim? Health’s truest friend, I cleanse the skin of rich and poor alike: Disease flies from me, as from mortal foe, From kingly palace down to cottage hearth, Are constant records of my service found. Each garment worn, by king, queen, knight, or peasant, 2 Bears witness of my power, my wondrous power.

As these two quotations indicate, soap stimulated some controversy in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the tax which had long been imposed on this important commodity was removed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, in 1853. This meant that English manufacturers were in competition with Irish soap-makers who did not have the tax. Into the early 1840s, soap makers were subject to regulations which controlled the shape and size of soap bars, the ingredients, the methods of boiling, and the specific gravities of the

1 Western Courier, 29 November 1849. ​ 2 Western Courier, 19 February 1851. The soap industry is referred to in previously ​ published local histories such as C. Gill, Plymouth a New History: 1603 to the Present Day ​ (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1979); see also the recent E. Hoblyn, Plymouth at ​ Work: People and Industries Through the Years (Stroud: Amberley, 2019). ​ 3 constituents. At the same time, the Excise was defrauded by industries using alternatives to soap in their processes, such as washing powders. The soap tax, unsurprisingly, was presented by lobbying English soap makers as a ‘tax on cleanliness’ for the poor, whose soap was taxed at a higher rate than the scented soap for the rich: 70% upon the cost of the raw materials for yellow soap, compared with 14% on ‘fancy soap,’ it was claimed. The manufacturers complained that 4 they were prevented from making improvements in the manufacturing process. Plymouth was a centre for soap making in this period, indeed, as part of an optimistic account of the development of Plymouth as a port in the conservative Western Courier in 1852, ​ the journalist claimed along side sugar refiners, lead works, ‘manufacturies for starch and soap 5 are constantly springing up’. While Plymouth soap making was never one of the major centres (, Liverpool and were the centres), there was a sustained history of soap manufacture over a century. This essay, written for Plymouth History month, briefly surveys the local history of soap in the Victorian era: some of the details have been offered before in standard histories of Plymouth from Thomas Moore and Llewellynn Jewitt, through to Crispin Gill; the information here also needs to be supplemented by archival work which, given the current ‘lockdown’, and closure of The Box, has not been possible. My reason for focussing here on soap, apart from its significance as a noted, and expanding, industry in the locality, and its place in a university course I have developed on environmental history, is the renewed awareness of the power of soap to make the world cleaner. Readers will be aware of the significant role that soap continues to play against diseases caused by bacteria and viruses.

Until Thomas Gill (1788 – 1861) established his factory in 1818, Plymouth inhabitants had obtained their soap from Bristol or London. Gill came from a family of bankers, and as well as making hard and soft soap, owned a limestone and marble quarry, and built houses, a 6 500 feet pier (at a cost of £27,000) and canal at after acquiring the land at a low price. He played a significant role in connecting Plymouth to the metropolis through Millbay Pier (inspected by the queen and Prince Albert when they visited Plymouth in 1846), the Great 7 Western Docks, and the railway. When he died, he was magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of

3 Following the Seventeenth Report of the Commissioners of Excise Inquiry (1840); with legislation ​ ​ passed, Act 3 and 4 Vict.c.49. So by 1846, J. Beckmann, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, ​ and Origins (London: Bohn, 1846), vol.2, p.107, on the former ‘vexatious interference ​ from the excise’ but ‘of late the regulations have been greatly improved and there is no superintendence of the process of manufacture which be conducted in any way and of any material’. 4 Daily News, 19 November 1849. ​ 5 Western Courier, 25 February 1852. ​ 6 T. Moore, The History of Devonshire, vol.1, p.569. ​ ​ 7 Hampshire Chronicle, 29 August 1846. See PWDRO, Ref 3259, for a plan of Millbay, port ​ of Plymouth c.1844, showing the pier, West Hoe Lime Quarry, Millbay Prison, Gills Soap ​ ​ Factory, the marine barracks, Eastern King Point and quarry. For soap making in relation to the port, see in PWDRO, Ref 3411, ‘, Plymouth’ which includes deeds, abstracts of title, bonds, licences and contracts relating to the Millbay Docks area including Millbay Soap & Soda Works, Victoria Soap Works, and the New Patent Candle Company Limited. . In his ancestral town (where he died), he owned Tavistock Iron Works. A Liberal, he 8 was MP for Plymouth 1841 – 1847, speaking ‘on commercial questions’. In 1848 the Plymouth soap makers were reported as producing 4,117,170lbs of hard 9 ​ soap. Gill’s Soap and Alkali Works Gill was only partially powered, despite his early ambition, 10 by steam. The waste product of ashes from Gill’s works was recycled as agricultural fertilizer. Moore’s history of Devonshire in the late 1820s recorded that it produced ‘many thousands of 11 tons of ashes yearly’ … at present they meet with a ready sale’. Gill and his son John Edgecumbe Gill also patented a process to make fertilizer from bones, a patent was signed in October 1848, although a partnership between them in soap making was also dissolved in 12 October 1848. A glimpse into the local networks for Gill’s business in this decade is provided by a press report concerning a representative for the firm in Devonport, Thomas Luscombe, 13 who received a snuff box from local grocers and tallow chandlers in 1840. Thomas Gill then 14 joined with Thomas Duncan Newton, to become ‘Thomas Gill and Co.’ The company was advertised as a registered company in 1855 with capital of £50, 000, hoping to sell 2000 £25 shares for a company which had secured a ‘valuable connection throughout’ the West of England: this action was stimulated by a rival soap firm attempting to take advantage of the new 15 Limited Liability Act of 1855, and sell shares. The firm became styled the Millbay Soap, Alkali and Soda Company as a joint stock company in 1856, though Gill remained the manager until health forced him to retire in 1860, when the manager became Richard Rundle. It produced yellow and mottled soap, and also cold 16 water soap, and best pale yellow (sold as primrose). The only ‘best’ household soap of the district was the motto, with a registered trademark of a rectangle quartered with castles in each quarter (the arms of Plymouth) stamped on the bar of soap ‘twice … No other Stamp, nor a 17 similar Stamp with other words added, is genuine’. Yellow soap was relatively cheap because of the use of resin with the tallow. In the mid-century, enclosed in a stone wall, the firm had about an acre of land. Much of the Millbay area was taken up by the factory, from the barracks and line of railway to the Great Western docks: the railway being used for loading and taking away the manufactured goods. Jewitt’s described the firm:

8 Western Morning News, 22 October 1861, p.2; London Review, 26 October 1861, p.540. ​ ​ ​ 9 J. R. McCulloch, A dictionary, geographical, statistical, and historical, of the various countries, places, ​ and principal natural objects in the world (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, ​ 1842), vol. 2, p.519. L.F.W. Jewitt, A History of Plymouth, etc, vol.2 (1873) ch.13 covers ​ ​ soap works alongside other manufactories. For the modern history, see Gill, Plymouth, a ​ New History. The candle works was at Sutton Road, the former site of Bryant, Burnell ​ soap works (Coxside), and engraving shows this with three tall chimneys. 10 Moore, History of Devonshire, p.569. ​ ​ 11 Moore, History of Devonshire, 1829, p.313. Records in the Plymouth Borough records of ​ ​ corporation property in this period include REF 1/689/13, 26 December 1826, lease on the Mill house, Mill and premises at Millbay and soap manufactory there. 12 Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette, 25 November 1848; T. and J.E. Gill’s specification improvements ​ in the manufactures of manures. AD 1848, Patent no.12,113. 13 West of England Conservative, 29 April 1840. ​ 14 London Gazette, 24 October 1848, 3816. ​ 15 The Economist, 1 December 1855. ​ 16 Western Morning News, 22 November 1880. ​ 17 See advertisement in their agent George Treffry’s Treffry’s Tea Warehouse Descriptive ​ List (Exeter: Pollard, c.1869), p.154. ​ They are the most extensive and important works of the kind in the West of England, and indeed are among the largest in the kingdom, and the machinery and general business arrangements are of the most modern and complete description, and enable, by a skilful arrangement, about twenty tons of soap per hour to be run into the frames. Household soaps of every kind, are produced in large quantities as are also those for manufacturing purposes, for silk throwsters and other trades. Toilet soaps, in all sizes and shapes of tablets, 18 etc., are also produced in every variety and of high quality.

The factory comprised the various buildings devoted to the making of and storing of soda, the store room for the raw materials for soda and soap making such as salt and resin, and various chemicals, and the rooms or sheds for the manufacture of soap. These included rooms for the melting and refining of tallow and oils, which were then pumped into ‘coppers’ (made of steel) in the boiling rooms, heated by steam from the 30 feet by 6 feet boiler. Due to the steamy atmosphere, the boiling room had an open roof. The soap manufactured here, and cooled in frames and coolers in the cooling room before cutting into bars in the cutting and drying rooms, and packing, ranged in price from 1 penny to 1 shilling per pound. In 1855 it was claimed the 19 firm produced 60 tons of soap and 50 tons of soda crystals. From having been a small-scale artisan activity in the eighteenth century, Gill’s Millbay plant exemplified the application of science and technology: as the Western Daily Mercury’s reporter said in November 1862, ‘we had ​ ​ no idea it was so strictly a scientific pursuit, and so little of a trade. It is amazing to notify how much soap demands from science’. At that point, the company was making a ‘peculiar coloured soap’ for the Victualling Yard. The Ordnance Survey map in this period shows the location of the works, which included all the sheds and shops necessary for supplying the business with fuel, 20 wooden boxes, the storing of timber, smithying, and stabling. The manager was John Rice in 21 the 1870s, with Philip K. Truscott the secretary. In the 1880s the firm reputedly produced 20

18 A photograph of the works appeared in Simon Parker, Jon Bayley, ‘Millbay Docks: Glorious pictures show bustling heart of Plymouth’s maritime community’, Western ​ Morning News, 9 January 2018. ​ 19 The Economist, 1 December 1855; but see Western Daily Mercury, 6 November 1862, ​ ​ ​ ‘seventy tons of soap and thirty tons of soda’ a week. The directors in 1856 were: John Burnell (merchant Mill lane, Plymouth), Eldred Roberts Brown (wholesale grocer, Abbey Stores, Finewell street, Plymouth), Edward James (starch manufacturer, Sutton road, Plymouth), Philip Loye (grocer, 4 Treville street, Plymouth), John Shepheard (grocer and commission agent, 6 Whimple street, Plymouth), Joseph Wills (wholesale grocer, Abbey Stores, Finewell street, Plymouth), Thomas Heynes (merchant, ), John Hoskins Budge, (grocer, Church street, Camborne), Samuel Pascoe (merchant, Pentreve, ), Samuel Elliott (merchant, Fore street, Liskeard), George Hoskisson (grocer and tea dealer, 236 High street, Exeter), and Nicholas Gillard (grocer and tallow chandler, Fore street, Kingsbridge), see Returns of the Number of Joint Stock Companies formed under the Act of ​ ​ ​ last Year with the Names of the Directors Number and Amount of Shares and the Object for which the Company was formed, p.4. Its first year reported a dividend of 10%, see Limited Liability ​ ​ Chronicle, 1 July 1857, p.246. ​ 20 See the PWDRO online catalogue, for REF 482/120, Plymouth Ordnance Survey Map, 1:500 1st Edition, Sheet No 80 [noted as 44], Millbay Barracks, Millbay Road and Citadel Road area. 21 W. White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of the County of Devon, p.1076. ​ ​ 22 tons of soap an hour. The factory chimney was something of a local landmark, being used by 23 pilots in navigating . Gill’s success meant that other soap manufacturers emerged. The linen draper Francis Alfred Morrish (1825 – 1892) established the Victoria Soap Works in 1858. Morrish, an active member of the Congregational Church in Plymouth and magistrate, had come to the town in the 24 1840s, originally as part of deputation of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The Victoria works were located near the floating dock. Their product was stamped with the name of the 25 queen and the address Millbay, Plymouth. Morrish’s firm specialised in toilet soaps and exported these and household soaps. Advertisements can be found in Irish in the late 1850s and early 1860s for the firm’s soaps and candles, ‘the most recherché and fashionable as well as economical soap for the toilet, in Almond, Rose, Windsor, Glycerine, and other beautiful varieties’. The Victorian soap company claimed that their brown and white oil soap 26 were ‘fast superseding every other’ in industry in the ‘great manufacturing districts of England’. The excellence of the Victoria soap works was recognized by jurors at the international exhibition in London in 1862, when they sent their pale yellow soap, ‘oleic acid’, and soft olive 27 oil soap. Their mottled soap was made from bone fat. Most of their other exhibited fats were ‘cold made; the modifications of cocoa-nut oil and tallow call for no especial mention’ the jurors’ 28 report stated. An advertisement noted:

THE ONLY MEDAL FOR BEST YELLOW SOAP Awarded by the Jurors of the International Exhibition, 1862, any English Provincial Manufacturer, was to the WEST OF ENGLAND SOAP COMPANY (LIMITED), The Jury having appended to the award “FOR EXCELLENCE OF QUALITY.” Laundresses all consumers are recommended to use this as the: Strongest, Best, and Cheapest Soap.

22 Western Morning News, 16 January 1930. For business records in the late nineteenth ​ century, see PWDRO, Ref 1228/698/1-2, Millbay Soap, Alkali and Soda Company Limited, list of shareholders, director’s report and accounts. rd 23 The Channel pilot. Part 1. (3 ​ ed; London: Hydrographic Office, Admiralty, 1869), p.79. ​ ​ 24 London Gazette, 20 November 1846, for dissolution of the linen drapery partnership with ​ Francis Edward Morrish. 25 Western Morning News, 21 April 1892. Morrish had also been director of the New Patent ​ Candle Company. 26 Northern Whig, 6 January 1860. ​ 27 The mode of making the yellow soap, which was also sold as honey soap because of the colour, ios provided in Philip Kurten’s The Art of Manufacturing Soaps, Including the Most ​ Recent Discoveries: Embracing the Best Methods for Making All Kinds of Hard, Soft, and Toilet Soaps ; Also, Olive Oil Soap, and Others Necessary in the Fabrication of Cloths; with Receipts for Making Transparent and Camphine Oil Candles (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1854), ​ pp.162-165. 28 International Exhibition, 1862. Class. I. Jurors’ reports (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), p.9. ​ To be obtained of all Grocers, Chandlers, &c. The West of England Soap Company, Limited, also obtained the only Medal awarded to any British Foreign Exhibitor for Brown Oil Soap, used Silk Woollen Cloth Manufacturers, and to which this Company have recently paid much 29 attention.

They were among the local firms assisting with fund raising for the Lower Street working men’s association in 1864: ‘two large tablets of olive oil and toilette soaps, each which were about three feet long by one foot breadth, and two inches in thickness. They also exhibited a large 30 assortment of soap, which emitted very pleasing odour.’ The soap factory was advertised for 31 sale in 1897, the premises described as ‘Four extensive FLOORS’. A more local market was provided by another Millbay company, the Imperial Soap Company at Martin Street, which also dealt in soda. The partnership of Robert Hooper Snow (Snow was listed as a tallow chandler and soap boiler in local directories from the 1820s), Joseph Maunder (sometime secretary of Millbay Soap, Alkali and Soda Co.), the tea merchant and grocer Felix Kelly and Charles Jago was 32 dissolved in 1874. The Coxside soap works of Bryant, Burnell and Co., ‘in active and profitable employment’ was established in 1844 by William Bryant, his brother James Bryant and John 33 Burnell. It burned down on 23 October 1850, the oil, tallow, and resin inside helping to feed 34 the fire which started in the engine house. The Victoria Soap Company purchased the soap works founded by Bryant and Burnell (and then styled the West of England Soap Works) in about 1864, removing the plant (presumably including the boiler, engine shafts, etc.) from Sutton

29 Western Daily Mercury, 2 October 1862. Their extensive range is documented in the ​ International Exhibition of 1862 catalogue, vol. 1, p.85: their toilet soaps were transparent ​ glycerine in pillars, shaving sticks and tablets, various perfumed toilet soaps, brown Windsor (treble-scented, musk, extra), honey, rose, lavender, elder-flower, turtle oil, almond and glycerine, sunflower oil, and soft soap. 30 Western Daily Mercury, 15 January 1864 ​ 31 Western Evening Herald, 4 October 1897. ​ 32 They sold ‘Millbay soap’ shares in 1870, Western Morning News, 12 May 1870, which would ​ ​ explain why the older Millbay Soap maker was keen to assert their own brand was ‘Gill’s original make’ and ‘genuine,’ e.g., Western Morning News, 12 April 1870. See Western Daily ​ ​ ​ Mercury, 21 April 1874. Snow appears in The Tourist’s Companion; Being a Guide to the Towns ​ ​ of Devonport, Plymouth, Stonehouse, Stoke, Morice (Devonport: Congdon, 1827), p.106; ​ Flintoff’s Directory and Guide Book to Plymouth, Devonport, Stonehouse, and Their Vicinities ​ ​ (Plymouth: Flintoff, 1844), p.131. Another maker was J. L. Thomas and Co., at Cattedown, in the 1870s: the firm is described in Kelly’s directory of Devon, 1902 as soap & ​ ​ candle manufacturers, proprietors of the ‘Alexandria’ oil, importers of petroleum and benzoline, oil merchants and lamp manufacturers, with works at The Shilhay. Head office was in Exeter. 33 The partnership was dissolved when James Bryant retired, becoming William Bryant, William Burnell and James Burnell, 16 October 1848, London Gazette, 17 October 1848. ​ ​ 34 Western Courier, 20 October 1850; Western Courier, 6 November 1850. ​ ​ ​ 35 Road. Its reputation seemed high in 1860, when one writer on chemistry included it among a 36 short list of the ‘largest and best soap factories in the three kingdoms’. The Millbay works established by Gill were the most extensive in the West of England. commentary provides a glimpse of the interior of the factory in the early 1860s, in the pages of the recently established Western Daily Mercury, as ‘Town Article No. II’, ​ ​

The same cleanliness and precision was to be marked throughout. No waste, no refuse, about in any direction; the very floors, though dark, were scraped, lest a particle of the crude soap should be lost. We noted this, and were told that the scrapings and wastage, if neglected, would form a very serious item of expenditure in the year, if treated in any 37 other way than as a material out of which good was to be extracted.

A fire took place at the premises in January 1862 – like the earlier soap fire at Bryant and Burnell’s, the fire was in the engine-house and it also brought out navy and military personnel to 38 help remove flammable materials such as casks of tallow and resin and extinguish the flames. By the Edwardian era, the Millbay soap which originated in Gill’s early nineteenth-century 39 enterprise was being marketed locally as ‘good old-fashioned’ soap.

The soap makers of Plymouth produced an invaluable item for cleansing body, clothing and general household (and institutional) cleaning in an age before chemistry and developed alternative synthetic detergents. They were a recognised feature of the Plymouth landscape. The Millbay factory was visible in the engraved bird’s eye view of Plymouth published in the Illustrated 40 ​ London News, 14 September 1872. Locally-produced and externally made soap would be bought ​ at a variety of places in the Three Towns. In the 1850s Oxford Street manufacturer Dietrichsen and Hannay’s ‘Rondeletia’ soaps and other items such as tooth brushes were sold at Roger Lidstone’s the bookseller in Fore Street in Devonport; and at Williams’ the chemists in

35 See Western Daily Mercury, 6 November 1862; advertisement placed by F.A. Morrish, ​ ​ Western Daily Mercury, 1 December 1864, ‘Some Plymouth Industries’, The British Trade ​ ​ Journal 5: 28 (1890), p.255; Worth, The History of Plymouth from the Earliest Period to the Present ​ ​ Times, p.253. Wilberforce Bryant had left the firm, see the testimonial in Western Morning ​ ​ News, 4 May 1861. In PWDRO archives, see Ref 73/87, West of England Soap Company ​ of Plymouth, Assignment, involving 1, The West of England Soap Company Limited of Plymouth and 2, The Victoria Soap Company Limited Of machinery, plant, goodwill and patent rights. This is dated 17 November 1863. 36 S. Muspratt, Chemistry Theoretical, Practical & Analytical. As applied and Relating to the Arts and ​ Manufactures (Glasgow: W, Mackenzie, 1860), vol.2, p.893. ​ 37 Western Daily Mercury, 6 November 1862, p.2. ​ 38 See Western Daily Mercury, 25 January 1862, p.3; notice of thanks, signed the manager, ​ ​ Richard Rundle, Western Daily Mercury, 22 January 1862 ​ ​ 39 Western Evening Herald, 30 July 1909. ​ 40 Illustrated London News, 14 September 1872, p.264, see ‘soap and chemical works’. The ​ page is accessible at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6OGqGbbhJbUC&pg=PA264#v=onepage&q&f =false 41 Stonehouse. George Breeze’s pharmacy on Union Street had a paragraph in the Western Daily ​ Mercury in December 1889 boasting of the ‘decorative effects’ of their displays including scented 42 soaps. Gill’s Millbay soap was advertised as ‘Sold by all Grocers in the West of England’: 43 grocers sold household and fancy soaps alongside candles and other items. Local newspapers, and posters plastered on walls and buildings around the Three Towns, advertised the national soap brands of the age, and also more local ones such as the Bristol-made ‘Puritan’ olive oil soap. 44

The Millbay Soap and New Patent Candle Co. of the early twentieth century was absorbed by Lever Brothers, makers of the leading national brands of ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Lifebuoy’ 45 soaps. The broader subject of the local history of hygiene and dirt I leave to another essay for the Plymouth History Month. But I end this brief essay with a couple of local details related to soap’s later history in Plymouth. The important sanitary role of Hoegate Street Baths, built in the 1930s, is preserved in a film from SWFTA that you can view on the BFI Player: filmed in 1968 (in the 1961 census, according to the presenter Andy Price, 18% of the houses in Bath lacked a bath): the council’s provision of laundry facilities and public baths can be seen in the film clip. 46 The soap the bather purchased for his or her soak was stamped ‘City of Plymouth’. Plymouth’s legacy of soap industry and soap usage is also preserved in the naming of Soap Street in 2018.

Notes

41 L. ‘Dramatic Sketches. No.1 On Taxation. Meeting of Soap, Light, Tea and Malt’, Western ​ Courier, 11 June 1851. ​ 42 Western Daily Mercury, 21 December 1889. ​ 43 Treffry’s Tea Warehouse, p.154. So, in Kresen Kernow, there are references to wholesale ​ purchases by the grocer Amos Jennings of Truro, reference X380/4, 1854 – 1861. 44 For the advert for ‘Puritan’ soap, by Christopher Thomas and Bros., see Western Morning ​ News, 3 October 1900. ​ 45 The twentieth-century records of the company are listed in TNA, LBL/ML, as held by Unilever Archives and Records Management. See also the description of correspondence in TNA catalogue, from Unilever Archives and Records Management, e.g., GB1752.LBC/187/5 on soap making issues in Plymouth and Exeter in 1925. 46 https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-hoegate-street-baths-and-wash-houses-1968-o nline