WIMSOL BLEACH FACTORY, KEIGHLEY (1951) film no: 1175

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.

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.

History of Advertising Trust  
Soap and Detergent Association