This film is one of many that have found their way to the Hull Local Studies Archive without much information on its background. The film is credited to C.R. Redfearn as the producer, but it isn’t known whether he was professional filmmaker or just a keen local amateur. It appears that the film was commissioned by Reckitt & Sons, although this isn’t known for sure, and may have been done under the initiative of Redfearn, perhaps an employee of Reckitt’s.   Reckitt & Sons Ltd was...

This film is one of many that have found their way to the Hull Local Studies Archive without much information on its background. The film is credited to C.R. Redfearn as the producer, but it isn’t known whether he was professional filmmaker or just a keen local amateur. It appears that the film was commissioned by Reckitt & Sons, although this isn’t known for sure, and may have been done under the initiative of Redfearn, perhaps an employee of Reckitt’s.

 

Reckitt & Sons Ltd was founded in 1840 initially taking over Charles Middleton’s starch mill on the south side of Starch House Lane. Isaac Reckitt, its founder, moved to Hull having had some success in Boston and Nottingham soon developed this into a business producing household products, especially cleaning agents. On his death in 1862 the business was left to his three sons, becoming Reckitt & Sons Ltd in 1879 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1888.  The most notable of the sons was Sir James Reckitt who became a significant local philanthropist, as did his son Sir Philip Reckitt, together with Thomas Ferens, one time Chairman of Reckitt & Sons Ltd.  Apart from the factory itself, the largest project that Sir Philip Reckitt developed in Hull was the Garden Village, also located in Drypool, with a bus connection to the factory.  They were especially helpful to the Hull Sailor’s Childrens’ Society – for more on the Reckitt family and Thomas Ferens see the Context for Seamen's Reunion (1936).

 

The company branched into pharmaceuticals in 1929, and went on to launch many familiar household products, such as Dettol in 1932. In 1939 it merged with the well known mustard producers, Colman, to form Reckitt & Colman, adopting this name in 1954.  There must have been some resistance to the change in name though, as the factory is still named as Reckitt & Sons, as it is in the title of this film, even though all this post-dates it becoming Reckitt & Colman. At the time that this film was made it was developing new businesses in Europe and North America, while it also continued to expand its markets in other parts of the world. One of its most popular products at this time was Reckitt's Blue, considered to be one of the first laundry whiteners. 

 

The factory was a major employer in Hull, and the factory at Dansom Lane was visited by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in October 1937. In July 1941 three quarters of the Kingston Works at Dansom Lane were destroyed in a bombing raid. The Hull City Archives has a long list of planning permission documents for the works during the 1950s. The company has since expanded through to Holderness Road and Mount Pleasant.

 

Computers were still a relatively new thing in business at that time. Arguably the most important pioneer was the mathematician Alan Turing, who had written a theoretical paper on computing in 1936, where he proposed his Automatic Computing Engine (or Universal Turing Machine).  But this was devised by Turing not as a practical machine, but as a way of solving a problem in logic set out by David Hilbert. Nevertheless, Turing went on to become one of the principal players at Bletchley employed to decipher the German Enigma codes during the war. He later went on to work in Manchester on the first fully electronic stored-program computer in operation.

This work fed into the first commercial computer being built by Ferranti, the Mark I, in 1951 – Stan Augurten provides a good summary of these developments, although with a heavy US focus. Unfortunately Turing did not live to see the fruits of his work, committing suicide in 1954 by eating a poisoned apple (laced with cyanide), becoming a famous logo. As a gay man he had been convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration (oestrogen) – homosexuality for men over 21, ‘in private’, only ceased to be illegal in England and Wales in 1967 (Gordon Brown made a rather belated governmental apology for Turing’s treatment in 2009).

 

To promote the development of computers the government set up the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) in 1949.   It was the NRDC that owned the prototype for the 401 model, taking it to Cambridge for further development. This became the prototype too for Ferranti's computers, which one of the Elliott brothers had joined in 1953. The NRDC also made computer science studentships available at Cambridge and Manchester universities, and supported the British Computer Society.

 

The 405 was a commercial computer produced in 1956 by Elliott Bros of London (merging with Associated Automation Ltd to become Elliott Automation in 1958). This brought out the more modern transistorised 802 in 1958 and 803 in 1959, both of which were process computers. Starting out as early as 1801, Elliott Brothers were the first British company to become seriously involved with digital computer technology. Elliott started its Borehamwood research laboratory in 1947.

 

As can be seen from the film, the 405 was a massive machine, requiring 10kW of power and an air draught to all the valve operated racks of cabinets containing 12 metres of the computer’s processing circuits.  The ‘input/output’ interface included an input compiler, paper tape reader, on-line punch, on- line tele printer, magnetic film output, a main control desk and so on. This enabled bulk storage on magnetic film. All put together this complex machine needed highly trained operators and a lot of maintenance. 

According to Copeland the 405 sold somewhere between 16 and 50 (References, p. 167), although the Our Computer Heritage website puts the number built as 30.  It would have cost something in the region of £125,000.  The NRDC purchased an Elliott 405 for installation at Siemens Ltd telephone works at Woolwich and the National Cash Register also bought one in 1959, to be used in calculating its pay, pensions and statistics. The Powerhouse Museum in Australia has parts from a National Elliott 405 that arrived from England, also in 1959.

 

By the early 1960s there were two dozen models of computers available from eight manufacturers. These different companies were to gradually merge together during the 1960s to eventually form International Computers Ltd (ICL) in 1968, an initiative of the then Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, to compete with the likes of IBM.  This was Britain’s only mainframe computer manufacturer having a workforce of 34,000, the largest computer maker outside the US.

 

As for Reckitt & Colman, they subsequently merged with the Dutch company Benckiser NV in 1999 to form Reckitt Benckiser.  This has became a huge corporation manufacturing and trading in surface care, fabric care, dishwashing, home care, health and personal care, and food – its Chief Executive earned £36,760,000 in the year 2008 to 2009: 1,374 times the wage of an average employee.  In 2006 it acquired Boots Healthcare Co. for £1.9 billion.  It recently came under investigation following a report on Newsnight concerning an alleged attempt to delay the production of a generic version of Gaviscon after its patent had lapsed. Reckitt still employs about 1,100 workers in Damson Lane, specialising in healthcare products, producing such well known brands as Nurofen, Lemsip, Disprin, Gaviscon and Dettol. In 2009 it received money from Yorkshire Forward for investment to expand the Hull factory. Its staff has raised large sums for the charity Save the Children.
 
(with thanks to David Pentecost of the Computer Conservation Society)


 

References

 

Stan Augurten, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers, Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1984.

Jack Copeland (editor), Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine, Oxford University Press, 2005

Basil Reckitt, The history of Reckitt and Sons Limited, Brown, .1951

Hullwebs History of Hull, Reckitt & Colman

J.W. Houlton History of the Garden Village Area

FTSE100 directors pay

Reckitt Benckiser plc History and current status, Answers

National Elliott 405 at the Powerhouse Museum

The Alan Turing Home Page

Simon H. Lavington, Early British Computers: The Story of Vintage Computers and the People Who Built Them

Computer Conservation Society special project website, Our Computer Heritage