In a county known worldwide for boot and shoe making, it’s sometimes hard to convince that ever-consumer-conscious world that we can make anything else!
For instance, forget the rest of the universe, how many Northamptonshire folk know that here we have at least 1,000 businesses associated with the motorsport industry? Or that 21,000 people are engaged in that industry? Or that it is worth some £2 billion. Or that the FIA Formula One British Grand Prix alone brings more than £44 million into Northamptonshire according to official Silverstone figures?
So now let’s boast about some of our former and less hi-tech industries of which most Northamptonshire people know little or nothing. Like soap, for instance. I’m grateful to Rushden & District History Society’s Research Group for their help and the pictures.
Andrew Austin Ltd, of Rushden, started life as a boot manufacturer; by 1893 he was also manufacturing shoe ink. Then by 1909, in his factory in Wellingborough Road, he added polishes and stains. In 1925 he applied for permission to build a bigger factory in Irchester Road where he planned to expand his soap-making enterprise.
Austin’s company went on to make household and toilet soaps as well as laundry products. The toilet soap proudly used nothing but pure vegetable products. They even made something called ‘Soaprise’, a sort of cleaning paste “in noble round tins such as the good housewife loves to see”.
Even though the company successfully made quite a range of products, it ceased trading at the end of the 1940s.
It was Northamptonshire’s important lace-making industry that led to the establishment of the unlikely business of pin-making. The industry here was certainly equal to Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Devon in output. So a lot of lace meant a lot of pins!
Three villages had pin making factories: Milton Malsor, Hardingstone and Long Buckby. By 1925 all trace of the industry had disappeared.
The pins were simply lengths of wire without a head. Lace workers made heads for their own pins by using things like sealing wax or dried Goose Grass seeds.
The pins were stuck into the lace cushion and the cotton was weighted with hand-crafted bobbins.
Pinmaking had always been an important industry in England, in fact it was protected and no foreign imports were allowed by law.
In 1874, David Lever was listed as being a pinmaker in Long Buckby, he was part of a large family who owned all three of the Northamptonshire pin factories.
The Lever family employed both men and boys and a skilled boy could make up to sixty pins in a minute, one each second! The making of a single pin involved eighteen separate operations, which were entrusted to eighteen separate workmen. So one of the factories here could make thousands of pins in a day. They were made of brass wire that was hit with a hammer to heat it up, then immersed in beer to cool it down! I wonder if that’s all the beer did.