WIMSOL BLEACH FACTORY, KEIGHLEY (1951) film no: 1175
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This promotional film shows the production of Wimsol cleaning products at their factory in Keighley. It includes research, production, distribution, selling and marketing of the final product as well as features a works outing to Blackpool.
(B&W)
Title: ‘The Story of Wimsol Ltd.’
Photographed by T Wilmore
Assisted by J W Collingwood
Lighting by J W Collingwood
Assisted by T Wilmore
Story and titles by T Wilmore
The film opens with an old factory surrounded by with rows of terraced housing.
Intertitle: ‘Raw chemicals collected and delivered into firms storage tanks by own tank wagon’
A man connects a pipe from the tank truck going into the factory.
Intertitle: ‘Empties being unloaded from one of the lorries, stripping caps from bottles before passing to the washing department.’
Crates of empty bottles are stacked in a warehouse. The old tops are removed, and the bottles are placed onto a conveyer belt.
Intertitle: ‘Bottle washing department where ‘cleanliness is next to good sales’
Women load steamed cleaned bottles from a conveyor belt back into the crates. They then go into a further cleaning process.
Intertitle: ‘Pipe lines from storage to mixing tanks which also feed vacuum filling machine’
A man adjusts the valves on some pipes, and there is also a large tank of chemicals which is being mixed. Next, women fill bottles from a machine.
Intertitle: ‘Capping and automatic labelling’
The bottles go onto a conveyor belt where women put caps on them. A machine then automatically presses the caps on tight. And at the end of a conveyor belt, the bottles are packaged back into the crates.
Intertitle: ‘The finished product rolls down the conveyor into the loading bay ready for despatch’
At the end of the conveyor belt, a man piles up the crates.
Intertitle: ‘Turpentine being filled, capped, labelled and cartoned’
A line of women perform these functions whilst someone sets up a cine camera to film them.
Intertitle: ‘Sudsol being made, then filled, capped and labelled.’
A man stirs a large vat of liquid with a wooden stirrer, and a line of women perform the other functions in the assembly line.
Intertitle: ‘Steam rising for soap pans bottle washing and firms general heating.’
A man stokes a fire in a furnace, and the resulting smoke can be seen coming out of a tall chimney.
Intertitle: ‘Vehicle maintenance and petrol supply, also part of the stores’
In a workshop a man works on a lathe, and another mechanic fills a truck with petrol. In the warehouse, a man checks the orders.
Intertitle: ‘leaving one of the garages lorries pull around for loading’
Two lories leave the garage and back up to the loading bay where workmen load the lorries with crates.
Intertitle: ‘After loading, part of our fleet leave to sell our products. WE HOPE?’
A line of lorries, all different shapes and sizes, leave the factory whilst a freight train passes by in the background.
(Col) Intertitle: ‘All the firm’s products are under the watchful eye of Mr Tetley, Works Chemist’
Mr Tetley performs various tests in a laboratory.
Intertitle: ‘Mr Perrin, Works Manager, responsible for labour, works production and goods delivery’
Mr Perrin is at his desk working on some papers.
Intertitle: ‘The problem after production is selling. Mr Shackelton Sales Manager is responsible for this task’
Mr Shackelton is also at his desk working.
Intertitle: ‘To help sales, various forms of publicity are given to our products at a yearly cost to the company of upwards of £15,000 on advertising’
There are various advertisements for Wimsol products like Sudsol and Atsol, one on the side of a bus. At an exhibition, a stall has a revolving model house demonstrating all the different uses of Wimsol products which are displayed on shelves. Inside the model are labels in each room: For Spotless Table Linen, Removes offensive smells and Refreshing for your bath. A cartoon shows a woman inspecting her washing hanging up on a line and a sparkling house with the caption, ‘Wimsol certainly cleans right through the home’, and ‘Wimsol 101 uses in the home’.
Intertitle: ‘The sale completed to shop and customers, this is achieved by efforts of all concerned’
A man unloads his lorries in the pouring rain, and inside a grocery shop, some of the products are on display. One of the employees of the shop serves a customer.
Intertitle: ‘After sales. Mr Crabtree Works Accountant with part of his staff, responsible form seeing that customers don’t pay their accounts twice. SOME HOPE.’
A secretary is working in her office answering the phone and typing, alongside other office workers.
Intertitle: ‘Mr Chapman, Director who is responsible for liaison between three factories and general co-ordination.’
Mr Chapman is busy working in his office.
Intertitle: ‘The morning mail which sets the wheels of our factories’
A postman arrives with the mail which is then collected.
Intertitle: ‘The Old Man who always whistles to warn all the employees that he is approaching.’
A man in a clean white overall looks through the post and issues instructions to an assistant.
Intertitle: ‘Hang out the washing on the Wimsol line’
Washing is on lines, hung out across cobbled streets.
Intertitle: ‘Broom time’
A woman sweeps a corridor.
Intertitle: ‘Parkwood Nightingales’
A group of women workers have a tea break.
Intertitle: ‘League of Nations’
A group of men stand outside by the gates and have a break.
Intertitle: ‘Picking a Living’
An old man digs earth with a pick and shovels it onto the back of a lorry.
Intertitle: ‘Pleasures’
In front of the busses, the workforce line up for the camera. The busses have been arranged to take them to Blackpool. The workers board the buses and depart.
Intertitle: ‘Treasures’
Various items of value are shown, including a clock presented to the Directors by the employees on 9th May 1951, in appreciation of the day spent at Blackpool.
The End
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This is one of a number of films made by companies in Yorkshire, big and small, aiming to promote and market their goods. Other similar films include the CEAG factory in Barnsleyin 1931, Wormald & Walker Blanket Mills in Dewsbury, from 1932, and Waddington’s Piano Factory in Scarborough, also from the 1930s. Often these would employ local professional filmmakers. In this instance the work in making the the film was shared between a T Wilmore
and J W Collingwood. It differs from the other films in showing not only the production process, but also the marketing of the products. Wimsol was later taken over by the well known Jeyes Fluid company before in turn being taken over again by McBride, both leading domestic competitors of Wimsol.
and J W Collingwood. It differs from the other films in showing not only the production process, but also the marketing of the products. Wimsol was later taken over by the well known Jeyes Fluid company before in turn being taken over again by McBride, both leading domestic competitors of Wimsol.
Wimsol were obviously concerned to portray the firm as being a family works, showing an outing to Blackpool. In this regard the film makes an interesting comparison with another similar promotional film made just after the Second World War, Parkers Mill, Bingley. This too shows the works outing to Blackpool, although in this case as part of the annual Wakes Week; which, as a chemical rather than a textile works, Wimsol’s may not have participated in – see the Context for Saturday Morning Out (1951-65) for more Wakes Weeks.
What really marks this film out though is the advertising and marketing aspects. In the aftermath of the austerity of the Second World War, and with rising living standards, products that were once almost exclusively for the more wealthy were now being bought by the more affluent working class. This film, made just at the beginning of the rise of TV, prefigures a major boom in marketing. Advertising through newspapers and billboards, and later cinema and radio, had been around for a long time. The branding of products was also something that goes back to the Victorian age. Names like Hoover become almost synonymous with the product itself, a vacuum cleaner – some examples of these can be seen on the History of Advertising trust website, References.
The film shows the still fairly primitive advertising ploys of the time: this was later to become much sophisticated during the 1950s, when advertising agencies, and the 'the Chicago School of Advertising"sprung up in the US – their world is portrayed in the TV series Mad Men, set in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the appeal to the housewife has remained ever since, even if it may have become a little more subtle – though not by much! The advertising of household products for cleaning chimes in with the huge growth in the chemical industry, especially of man-made chemical products. The breakthrough in the development of detergents for all-purpose laundry uses came in 1946, when the first detergent with a ‘builder’, an ingredient which helps the surfactant to work more efficiently. Phosphate compounds used as builders in these detergents vastly improved performance.
New social standards on health and hygiene were being introduced towards the end of the Second World War and in the post-war period, as with the Our Towns Report of 1943 which placed an emphasis on this, and the Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings. This last had a relatively large input from women, or at least consultation, through women’s organisations such as the Society for Women Housing Managers. These Reports concerned the layout of housing and the provision for toilets, space etc, rather than the use of cleaning products, but it all added to the new modern ethos of raising standards of hygiene. There was even a report of the Council for Scientific Management in the Home, which came out in the same year that this film was made.
The typical focus on women in the adverts, as seen in this film, can certainly be criticised for reinforcing stereotypes – as it extensively has been – but it did reflect the reality of who took responsibility for the home. It was also a time of the, near, universal use of what is called ‘white goods’: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators and similar household items which made for a cleaner lifestyle. It also made for much less domestic servants for the middle class: the national Institute of House Workers was by 1951 only a third of its pre-war size. At trade fairs household cleaning was becoming a big industry with model houses set up to show customers where to clean in their house with the Wimsol product. The Ideal Home Show, formerly Exhibition, goes back to 1908 when the Daily Mail set it up. It re-started in 1947 after a break because of the war – the show that year launched the first microwave oven.
1951 was the year of the Festival of Britain, introducing a more modern and technologically driven world. Cleanliness was a key component of this. In her excellent book, Alison Ravetz notes that the Festival had a giant sized exhibit on the housefly, and the massive use of DDT in the 1950s nearly wiped it out (p. 120). Products like those of Wimsol’s have contributed to a situation where cleaning the house takes much less time: as Ravetz also states, “Towards the end of the century it may be said that the ‘dirty’ home of earlier years has more or less disappeared, notwithstanding the huge amounts of TV advertising time devoted to cleaning and laundry preparations.” The vogue for a more minimalist house has helped to diminish the need for so much cleaning: houses in the 1950s were much more cluttered places, as a tour through the Geffrye Museum in London will show. There has now also been a reaction to the excessive use of potentially harmful chemicals, with the development of more environmentally friendly products.
The film provides a glimpse into the new world that emerged after the war, one which today tends to be taken for granted. The ideal home and an ideal lifestyle, with the ideal products to make it so, became an ideal for almost everyone in this period. It was a change that did not go unnoticed by cultural commentators at the time. One such, the Institute for Social Research established in Frankfurt in 1923, tried to come to grips with all these changes: in the economy, politically, psychologically and in the general culture. Its writers tended to be critical of these changes as introducing a pernicious, and all pervasive, ‘culture industry’. Two of their main figures, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, writing just on the cusp of these developments, in the chapter of their 1944 book, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, describe advertising as the culture industry’s “elixir of life”.
References
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1997.
Stéphane Pincas, A History of Advertising, Taschen, 2008.
Alison Ravetz with Richard Turkington, The Place of Home: English domestic environments, 1914-2000, Routledge, London, 1995.
Duration:
20 mins 53 secs of 47 mins |
 16mm |
 B&W;/Colour |
 Silent |
This film is an extract. To access the complete film please contact the Yorkshire Film Archive
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