I look back now with gratitude that my Dad found stable and long term employment in an industry with a future and not coal hewing, steel making or shipbuilding, once the staples of the industrial northeast of England.
Bakelite Ltd., Aycliffe
In a moment of genuine levelling up, the post war government realised the potential of the site of the redundant Royal Ordnance factory at Aycliffe and decided to transform the site into an industrial estate. Bakelite Ltd, who had a factory at Tyldesley near Birmingham announced in September 1945 their intention to open a new factory at Aycliffe to produce Bakelite moulding powder, urea-formaldehyde resin moulding compound, unsaturated polyester resins and PVC.
My Dad started there in the late 1950’s and joined during a time of growth in the plastics industry; on the up as the the traditional heavy industries were entering a long and strife ridden decline. The new town of Newton Aycliffe grew alongside the burgeoning industrial estate.
Dad worked with extruding machines, fabricating PVC pipework for all manner of applications; making bends and joins and such like. He worked there for all the time I had been alive and for some years before right up to his retirement.
Unusual PVC Applications
The industry brought home the bacon for my parents and three boys. That’s not all it brought home. Idiosyncratic applications of PVC found their way to our home too.
It all started when my Dad made me a money box at work. No ceramic shop bought pig for me, nor something fashioned out of wood. Instead, a short length of dark grey PVC pipe, capped at the bottom by a lighter grey cemented in disc of PVC. At the top end was the stopper; another disc of PVC with a metal handle screwed in. This was my pocket money jar for years. When I shook it the coins inside made a distinctive metal on PVC rattle. It was unique and I grew very fond of it. I wish I had it still.
Then there was the PVC bird table and PVC bird ‘box’ that Dad made. I think I can count one one hand the number of birds that used these amenities. They were well made but completely alien to the local garden birds.
Through my early years I became familiar with names such as Bakelite, BIP (British Industrial Plastics) and BXL (Bakelite Xylonite), then later Extrudex, Uponor and Norsk Hydro. Some of these names appeared on Dad’s weekly payslip. Others he talked about. When the payslips disappeared and workers were paid directly into their bank accounts, I lost track of who he actually worked for.
The manufacturing of plastic remained a mystery to me until comparatively recently when an inevitable convergence occurred between my enthusiasm for photography and a retrospective look at my Dad’s working life. This retrospection triggered memories.
The Smell of Bakelite
Our family camera when I was young was a Kodak Brownie Cresta III made from high impact polystyrene and Bakelite. The black Bakelite, or polyoxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride (chemical formula (C6H6O-CH2OH)n), if you like, gave off a distinctive smell. The grey plastic polystyrene rather disappointingly didn’t smell of anything. In fact, the smell of Bakelite is an early memory. I recall the phenolic whiff of warm electrical plugs and those round light switches that provided satisfying resistance and a wonderful clunk noise when flipped.
The Cresta camera left in the sunshine would begin to give off the distinctive smell too. My personal favourite though was Bakelite cups placed under castors to prevent chairs sliding around or making dents in carpet. I took to sniffing the mottled brown cups while lying on the living room floor before the burgeoning habit was nipped in the bud by concerned parents.
Right: Kodak Brownie Cresta III of 1960. Black Bakelite body and grey polystyrene removable top. Acrylic lens and finder. This camera is also a British Kodak model made at Harrow.
In the cold light of day I find the Cresta to be a so-so mass produced Kodak that wasn’t competitive when new, but with both my parents now gone it is loaded not with 120 roll film, but memory and love. I expect the camera was tossed away in the trash in the days before we recycled anything. Thankfully, many were made, so I now have a replacement that I take a sniff of now and again.
Photons and polymers
My retrospection triggered something else in me; a fascination with the early history of plastic and also its application in photography. Inevitably it turned me into something of a collector of cameras and associated ephemera. Hoping to instil some discipline into my collecting and not end up with a willy-nilly glut of snappers with no thread running through the collection, I fixed focus on a 50 year period between 1889 to 1939.
Celluloid and Bakelite
I chose 1889 as the start date as in that year Eastman Kodak brought flexible celluloid roll film onto the market, the key to unlocking the door to cheaper, smaller cameras and bringing the joy of photography to a new and large class of amateurs. I chose an end date of 1939, the start of WWII, as it brought an abrupt end to a lot of camera manufacturing across the world, as makers on all sides of the conflict changed their output to the war effort.
Over the coming months I will be showcasing Bakelite cameras and early rollfilm models from my collection. I will also throw in the findings of ongoing research I am doing into the early synthetic plastics industry in Britain.
Today we have a troubled relationship with plastics. They are so ubiquitous we barely notice them any more. The modern world is simply not possible without all the applications that sophisticated modern plastics are put to; but now we see that there is a price to pay for the inappropriate use and careless disposal of plastic. We have lost respect for these wonder materials.
