Victorian
Canadian Red Indians, Shakers and Leigh, 1860
This article first appeared in the Parish Magazine in April 2010, and it tells a story that begins with an American entrepreneur and ends with the largest employer our village has ever known.
The tale starts with Andrew Judson White, an American who came to Britain and set up his own company in 1868. His flagship product was Mother Seigal's Curative Syrup, a patent medicine whose marketing was every bit as inventive as the Victorian age demanded. The syrup's recipe, customers were told, had been handed down from a tribe of Canadian Red Indians, and it was further claimed that the Pennsylvania Shakers had used the same formula in their own remedies. To put a friendly face on the bottle, the advertising presented Mother Seigal herself as a wise old German lady. In truth there was no such person: Mother Seigal was entirely an invention, and the portrait that gazed out from the label was simply imagined by an advertising artist.
Whatever the truth of the story, the medicine sold, and sold remarkably well. A J White's syrup, together with the pills sold alongside it, was shipped to customers around the world, and Britain was among the markets where the products found buyers. The business did so well that Mr White and his wife kept a house off Park Lane in London — a long way from the village, and a sign of just how profitable a good story on a bottle label could be.
The firm's story took a new turn in 1908, when a separate company was established. This new business, named Menley & James, was primarily registered in the United Kingdom and made medicines that were sold on to doctors rather than to the general public. It traded across the world for forty years, and by the 1950s it was producing more than a dozen different products, all on behalf of SmithKline and French, a company based in Philadelphia.
Menley & James came to Powder Mills in 1948, taking over a site that had become run down and which was then owned by the East family. The early days were modest: only five to ten staff worked there at first, using the old buildings on the northern bank of the site. Most of those buildings had been put up before the First World War, and indeed a surviving photograph shows one building that does not appear on the main map of 1916 at all.
Among those early arrivals was Margaret Spender, who was just seventeen when she started work at Powder Mills. She stayed for thirty-eight years and did not retire until 1994, a working life that spanned nearly the whole of the site's modern history.
Change came quickly after Smith, Kline and French Laboratories bought Menley & James in March 1956. The workforce grew, and the old Powder Mills buildings were progressively pulled down and replaced; two large towers were demolished in the mid 1960s. The factory turned out chemicals and medicines, and the site later became a research centre, passing ultimately into the ownership of Glaxo Smith Kline. The earlier industrial history of the spot should not be forgotten either, for a chemical company had taken over the factory site there as far back as 1856. From a fictitious German lady on a syrup bottle to a global pharmaceutical presence, Powder Mills has carried some remarkable stories — and it remains the largest employer the village has had.