Margarine, Soap & Detergents
Oddly enough soap and margarine are rather closely related, both use similar materials and imports have always been a requirement. The associated companies operated a number of railway vehicles, bringing coal to the factory as well as transporting the British sourced materials used in manufacture. One example is Joseph Crosfield and Sons Ltd of Warrington, south of Manchester, this soap making firm operated a number of railway tanks for vegetable oils, in the mid 1950s they built some 24 ton tanks fitted with steam heating coils for transporting fats (either animal or vegetable).
As far as I can tell the both soap and margarine companies used railway company wagons for delivering the finished product, but there may have been some PO vans in company livery.
The bulk of the oils used were imported, typically in large wooden barrels, and from the 1920s to the 1950s steam wagons were used to transport them from the quays and warehouses at the docks to the factory. By the 1930s small electric trucks were fitted with simple screw-drive cranes to lift and carry these large casks (both on the docks and in the soap and margarine factories). Some oils were provided by the seed crushing firms in the docks, which could be shipped out in tank wagons or barrels.
To lift the barrels using a standard crane they used a loop of chain with two hooks on it (called barrel hooks these were used for all sizes of barrels, see also 'Wagon Loads & Materials Handling - Materials Handling - Crane Hooks and Lifting Aids for an illustration). A big crane can lift multiple barrels using these hooks as shown below. The vegetable oil barrels I have seen photographs of all seem to have light coloured ends, usually with some large but cryptic markings on them, seldom arranged neatly.
Fig ___ Palm oil casks as seen in soap and margarine works
Although oils were also shipped in bulk from the later 1920s numbers of these large barrels in the yard would be a feature of both soap and margarine works up to the early 1960s, thereafter bulk supplies replaced them fairly quickly. As noted above however some soap and margarine companies operated their own railway tanks wagons, these were used to carry both vegetable oils and fats to the works. Oddly they do not seem to have made much use of the tanks for advertising their products, the markings being confined to the company details. The pre war soap company tanks appear slightly smaller bodied than the petrol tanks, but I could be mis reading the pictures. The example below left is one of the Lever Bros fleet, they had quite a number of tanks for transporting vegetable oils from before the First World War (although a lot of these were internal use only transporting vegetable oils between the various works in the Port Sunlight complex). The example below right is a Joseph Crosfield & Sons tank from the immediate post war era, with the simple markings prevalent at that time.
Fig ___ Pre and post war vegetable oil tanks
One odd cargo was copra, the dried kernel of the coconut plant, which contains about 60 percent by volume 'coconut oil'. Copra was shipped in bulk and in bags, it is not very dense so the bags tend to be large with a slightly 'knobbly' appearance as shown below. One of the problems with copra are the small 'copra bugs' they live in the stuff, they are almost impossible to eliminate and can be very troublesome.
Copra, or rather the coconut oil it contains, is valuable stuff with many uses, including soaps, margarines, butter and milk substitutes, candles etc. Once the oil was recovered the residual dry material, 'copra meal', was pressed into pellets, put into 100 pound sacks and sold on to animal feed millers.
Margarine
Margarine is made from fats and ends up as an oil and water emulsion. It was invented in 1869 by French chemist Hipplyte Mege-Mouries to win a competition set up by the Emeror napoleon III to find a cheap butter substitute for the army. he called it Oleomargarine, the name was soon shortened to margarine. By the 1870s margarine was being made in several countries, but opposition from the domestic butter manufacturers saw a series of controls applied to its colouring (basically you were not allowed to pass it off as butter). In 1871 the inventor sold out his patent to the Dutch company Jurgens which combined with another Dutch company Van den Bergh to form the first commercial margarine company (later this firm became part of the giant Unilever).
The original process used only animal fats, but by the 1920s vegetable fats were being used as part of the mix. Technically the difference between oils and fats is that the former are liquid at room temperature, if you pass hydrogen through the oils, in the presnce of a nickle catalyst, you can turn them into fats, called hydrogenated fats. It was later found that if the process was not carefully controlled there would be another byproduct called 'trasn fats' which are thought to be dangerous, so hydrogenation has been used less since the 1980s. Some vegetable oils (palm oil and coconut oil) are semi solid and are used as-is in margarine. Margarine is also produced as a fairly solid material called 'shortening' for use in cooking.
In the 1980s the Milk Marketing Board introduced Clover, a blend of cream and margarine (an idea from Scandinavia where it was introduced in the later 1970s), and others have followed this lead.
Palm oil is a constituent of both margarine and soap, which lead to the British firm Lever Bros merging with the Dutch company 'Margarine Unie' to form Unilever in 1930.
Modelling Margarine Factories
You will need enough space for a couple of sidings, each at the very least a foot (30cm) long in N Gauge, preferably 18 inches (45cm) and ideally a couple of feet (60cm). If space allows you can include a run-round loop as shown below. The factory buildings can be represented in low relief behind the sidings.
Margarine works had few characteristic structures, the early works seem to have been collections of generally low buildings, later establishments featured solidly built brick buildings three of four stories tall. The giant Maypole margarine works at Southall was certainly rail connected and had siding running into a covered building as well as more tracks run down just one side of the complex (there may have been tracks running to other part of the works as well).
One common feature seems to have been a pitched roof over a platform, presumably where outgoing goods were handled, a standard model railway platform canopy would serve, if space allows using two awnings, one behind the other, to give a larger covered area would be more prototypical. You should have a crane at one or both ends of the platform to handle larger loads.
The illustration below has been put together drawing on elements from a number of photographs of industrial buildings, but with reference to pictures of actual margarine works to get the general arrangement. The idea is to show how standard 'industrial' building kits might be combined to produce a 'typical' margarine works building. Most works were larger than this, but it represents a reasonable compromise for layouts set between the 1920s and the 1970s. All tracks are in the open to avoid problems uncoupling and coupling wagons during shunting.
Fig ___ Suggestion for a Margarine works main building
One thing you will need a lot of is barrels, and I do mean a lot, at least a fifty (and that is an absolute minimum). These were stacked on their sides up to ten barrels high in pyramids in some works yards, with other stacked on end two layers high. The barrels all seem to have had light coloured ends, white or possibly cream coloured and there seems to have been little variation, they were all about the same size (see illustration above). The incoming barrels were large and heavy so I have shown a large gantry crane in the yard as well, in the position shown this should not get in the way and it helps suggest a substantial works. This could be substituted by a simple, fairly large, 'yard crane'.
The layout as shown would need about 40 inches (100cm) using Peco streamline points, by eliminating the cross-over between the two sidings the layout can be reduced to about thirty inches (if you are really pushed for space you could reduce the whole thing to just over two feet, but that would be very compressed indeed).
Fig ___ Example of a simple Margarine works layout
The barrels of oils and fats arrive in the yard at the right, the barrels, cases and cartons of product are loaded into railway vans from the covered platform at the left. Other goods can be handled on the central loop lines when shunting is not in progress. The intention is to handle the oil tanks (if any) on the loop lines in front of the main building, adding some hoses from coiled metal guitar string would help set the scene. The loading platform to the left and the coal siding to the right can still be worked as the tanks can be shunted onto the lower loop line if needs be.
I understand that margarine was shipped out in wooden cases and in barrels, shops took the cases, cutting out an order by weight and wrapping it on the counter with grease proofed paper in the same way as they sold butter. Once cartons and pre-wrapped goods became popular in the early 20th century the bulk of the outgoing supplies would be in light timber cases, about two feet long by a foot square. These were eventually replaced by cardboard cartons but wooden boxes were still in use in the 1950s. They are easily represented by cutting (lots of) 4mm lengths from a 2mm square section length of stripwood. Each box was branded, adding this using a felt tip pen before cutting would probably be the way to go.
Soap
The word 'soap' comes from the process of boiling up 'fats' and 'bases', the process being known as saponification. The term soap covers a range of materials, some of which we would not recognise as soap, for example napalm is a soap and some industrial soaps would strip the skin from your hands. Household soap is made by boiling up fatty oils and fats with alkalis (the fats and oils used are made up of a fatty acid and glycerin (technically a 'lipid'), the glycerin is produced as a by-product of soap manufacture). Boiling animal fat mixed with wood ash (the alkali) in water was a common method in ancient times, although the soap was mainly used in textile manufacture rather than personal hygiene. Almost any fatty substance can be employed in soap-making, important animal fats were ox and hog, and common vegetable oils were cotton-seed and coco-nut. To make hard soaps some methods added resin. Cheap mottled and brown soaps were made using 'bone fat' (obtained by treating bones with superheated steam) mixed with crude palm oil in a process patented by Gossage in the 1850s. In England tallow and palm oil were widely used, in France they used olive oil to produce Marseilles or Castile soap and some British manufacturers adopted this method (this soap was widely used by calico printers and silk dyers). Transparent soaps can be made using castor oil.
The alkalis used were usually caustic lye solutions of their respective hydrates in water. By the later 19th century caustic soda was obtained direct from soda manufacture (see also Lineside Industries - Chemical Industries). Potash lyes were also bought-in but larger firms produced their own caustic from the carbonate.
The mix is boiled up and salt is added, as the soap is not soluble in the brine it is precipitated.
Modelling Soap Factories
Detergent
Detergents use materials called surficants which dissolve greases, detergent effects of certain synthetic surfactants were first noted in 1913 by by A. Reychler, a Belgian chemist. During World War One the Germans used detergents as an alternative to soap but after that war they were largely confined to industrial processes. After World War Two the US aviation fuel plants changed over to making tetrapropylene and household detergents began to appear on the market in 1947. The first product was a 'soapless shampoo'. Up to the 1960's they were more expensive than traditional soaps based on animal and vegetable oils and fats but as they contained no sodium they could be used with hard or soft water equally well. As well as the surficants detergents may also contain a wide range of materials from mild abrasives to scour surfaces to acids for descaling or caustics to break down organic compounds. In hard water areas they can add softeners and oidisers to provide a bleaching action and to break down organic compounds. In the late 1960s biological detergents appeared, containing enzymes which could dissolve proteins.
Using the products of the oil industry the detergent factories are not tied to the docks, although many were built close by the ports as they were set up by the soap makers (and that also tended to be where the oil was being processed). Peco offer a tanker in the livery of Albright and Wilson, a major British chemical company specialising in the field of phosphorus chemistry (see also 'Lineside Industries - Chemicals and Related Industries - Heavy Chemical Industry'). This was the world's biggest supplier of phosphates for detergents (although that application declined rapidly from the mid 1970s). The model is suitable for layouts set between the mid 1970s (when the Albright and Wilson bought the tanks) until the later 1990s (when A&W was taken over by the French company Rhodia).
British Margarine Manufacturers
I have not yet confirmed the names and dates of introduction of most margarine brands, Unliver's 'Blue Band' was on sale in the 1930s (at 8d a pound), and Stork margarine was also on sale in the same era (at 7d a pound).
Margarine factories are associated with the ports, although the first British factory was established at Godley in Cheshire based in an old hat factory in 1889. This works was operated by Broomer, then Otto Monstead Ltd (a Danish margarine magnate) which became Maypole Dairy and was taken over by Levers in 1914. This particular factory closed in 1921. Subsequent margarine factories were apparently all large establishments, in 1893 a big factory was set up in Southall by Otto Monstead Ltd and by 1912 laid claim to being the largest in the world. This factory was built from local wire cut bricks with Rhuabor glazed brick and other embellishments brought in from Wales to add the ornamentation. The works had both railway sidings (when built) and a half mile branch from the Grand Union canal to its own dock (added in 1912). The firm was later renamed Maypole Dairy Company, operating a nation wide grocery chain selling its own branded products long before supermarkets were thought of, the firm was taken over by the William Lever Company in 1914. The product was shipped out in large barrels and the works closed in the mid 1920s when it was deemed too expensive to change over to producing pre-packaged and cartoned supplies.
The Dutch firms Van den Berghs with a factory in Fulham & Jergens who had a very large factory in Purfleet merged to form Margarine Unie in 1927, which became part of Unilever in 1930). The factory at Purfleet in Essex was at one time said to be the largest margarine factory in the world.
The Cooperative Wholesale Society was formed in 1872 (the first co-op society was set up in Rochdale in 1843). The CWS opened a margarine factory in Higher Irlam near Manchester, which also sold 'Sutox' shredded beef suet. In the 1950s the CWS was selling Gold Seal and Silver Seal brands of margarine.
Fig ___ CWS tanker for oils and fats
I have found no references to any small margarine works in the UK although a firm was set up near Edinburgh in the 1880s, called (I believe) Craigmillar after the nearby castle. This seems to have been a fairly compact establishment, the factory was bought by Van den Berghs & Jergens in 1924 and the brand is now owned by CSM (a bakery supplies company which also owns Blue band margarine and trades in the UK as Arkady Craigmillar).
Lever Brothers (and Unilever) Founded in 1885 in Warrington as a soap maker. In 1916 they opened a works at Bromborough for their Planters margarine brand, in the immediate post war era this was the worlds largest oil refinery. At some point they bought out or opened a factory on the Wirral which became known as the Stork Margarine factory, although that was only one of its products. In 1922 they bought Walls, a sausage maker who had started making ice cream for the summer when sausage sales were down. In 1927 Planters (a lever Bros company) launched the first 'vitamin enriched margarine' called Viking. In 1930 they merged with margarine Unie to form Unilever.
Brands to trace more details on:
St Ivel Gold
Creamine were based at Inverness. The term Creamine was used on a United States patent in 1882 to refer to a combination of oleo lard, butter oil and cream with some sugar and salt mixed with sesame oil, benne oil, cotton seed oil or sunflower oil and coloured with annotoi. The word 'butterine' was then already in the dictionary for reconstituted butter (ie Margarine) but legislation had been passed to prevent the term being used. In 1929 the Lords decided to call reconstituted cream 'artificial cream' and rejected Creamine as an alternative.
Sunbrite were based at Kilmarnock, near to Glasgow in East Ayrshire, and were trading in the 1950s
British Soap Manufacturers
In England the development of soap manufacture was inhibited by taxation, often amounting to more than the cost of the product, this taxation continued until 1852 when Gladstone ended the tax (which was bringing in over a million pounds a year). In the later 19th century there were many soap makers, by World War One most were owned by just three firms, in order of size these were Lever Bros, Gossage's and Crosfield's. Many of the original brand names continued in use, many made at the original factories still carrying the company name.
Pears soap, set up in the 1780s, was an early industrial producer, using castor oil to make transparent soap. Pears merged with Lever Bros (see below) shortly before World War One.
Hudson's Soap was set up in 1837 in West Bromwich, initially producing soap powder, about twenty years later he built a factory in Liverpool, it was this firm that produced Omo washing powder. Hudson's merged with Lever Bros (see below) in about 1910.
In 1853 William Gossage (widely regarded as the most significant British chemist of the 19th century) patented a process for the production of caustic soda from sodium carbonate, in 1854 he set up to manufacture soap close to the lock leading into the canal that connected Widnes and St. Helens. Gossage built up a business with a reputation for good quality at a reasonable price (the factory in Widnes is now Catalyst, the museum of the chemical industry (open daily except Mondays). Gossage's firm also merged with Lever Bros.
Lever Brothers (and Unilever) Founded in 1885 in Warrington as a soap maker. By using glycerin and vegetable oils such as palm oil (rather than tallow) they produced a good, free-lathering soap, called "Sunlight Soap". By the later 1880s they were doing very well and set about building a new plant at what is now Port Sunlight where they built a 'model village' for their work force, actually this was really quite a large town. The original Lever Brothers soap factory at Port Sunlight covered 56 acres, by 1906 it covered 90 acres. By February 1895 the factory was producing 1600 tonnes of soap a week and this figure rose to 2400 tonnes a week in 1897. By 1914 over 60,000 tonnes of soap was being produced. As well as the above listed companies Lever Bros also took over Benjamin Brooke and Co in the 1890s as well as the Vinolia Co and Hodgson and Simpson. Over the next few years they bought Crosfield's of Warrington, Hazlehurst and Sons of Runcorn and Hudson's of Liverpool. They also expanded into foreign markets in Europe and America.
Vim scouring powder, Lux soap flakes (for washing clothes but also sold in some quantities to cloth manufacturers) and Lifebuoy soap were all established brands by 1900.
In 1925 Lever Bros bought out British Oil and Cake Mills, one of their main competitors (who made New Pin Soap).
In 1930 Lever Bros merged with the Dutch company 'Margarine Unie' to form Unilever, arguably the first modern multinational company. Soap and margarine both use palm oil, by merging the two companies gained the economy of scale. The Lever Brothers brand was retained for a time, especially in the US and Canadian branches.
See above for an illustration of a Lever Bros oil tank wagon
Joseph Crosfield & Sons, Limited The business was founded in Warrington in 1814, making soaps and later candles. By the mid-1830s Crosfield’s was producing around 900 tons of soap annually. In 1832 they were the 25th largest business in the list of 296 soap makers in England and Scotland that year. In the 1839s they began making their own alkali (and alum) at a works in St Helens. in the 1890s they produced the first dry soap powder (Hudsons had been first in the field with soap flakes, which Crosfield's had copied). The firm became increasingly involved in the chemicals business, in 1911 it was purchased by Brunner, Mond & Company. Brunners wanted to prevent Lever Bros going into the alkali business, Crosfields was sold to Lever Bros in 1919 as part of a deal in which Brunner did not make soap and Lever did not make alkali. The Crosfield name continued to be used however, there were some heated rail tanks built in the early 1950s for this firm (illustrated in Mr Tourret's book on Petroleum tank wagons, although I believe these tanks were for fats and oils). In 1997 it was acquired by ICI and in 2001, Ineos Capital purchased the company. The name Crosfield was finally lost as it was renamed Ineos Silicas and that firm became part of the PQ Corporation a year or two later.
See above for an illustration of a post war Crosfield oil tank wagon
H. Bronnley & Co. Founded in 1883 with a factory in Holborn (actually by one James Heilbron), they built a new factory in Acton (Middlesex) in 1904 which was still going in the mid 1950s.
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