Duresco

 

I have a long list of industries in Charlton and, not sure which one to do next.  So I picked out one at random - turned up with Duresco.   The factory was some way along the Riverside towards Woolwich with an address in Herringham Road – which surprised me a bit.  I knew Duresco were paint manufacturers but not much more.  However ‘Duresco’ seemed an awfully familiar name in relation to pots of paint – it turns out to be all about white paint.

 

The works is described in two pages of John Smith’s History of Charlton and he says a lot about its more recent history but nothing much about its origins.  He mentions that it manufactured paint under ‘licence of J.B.Orr, of Widnes, Lancs.’  I learn from other sources that he was John Bryson Orr and that he had founded a large works at Widnes.  In trying to track down some details about him I am overwhelmed with information about Widnes. Obituaries to him go on and on about the Widnes Works and say nothing about Charlton at all.  However in 1881 he appears on the Greenwich census living in a really nice house in Beaconsfield Road with his family and he is described as a ‘colour manufacturer’.   To be perfectly honest that has turned out to be almost the only piece of firm information about Orr and Charlton. Everything has been a mass of ‘shifting sands’ of contradictions and uncertainty.

 

Orr was Scottish having been born in 1840 in Blantyre, Lanarkshire and was a Scottish Presbyterian.  He did an apprenticeship in Glasgow with a firm of oil men and dry-salter’s.  He studied chemistry at the Andersonian University in 1861 – this is now the University of Strathclyde but was set up originally to only provide ‘useful learning’.  He began to experiment with the manufacture of ‘lithopone’.  He went to the Continent on ‘colour business’ acting as a war correspondent for a Glasgow newspaper in the Franco Prussian War.  In 1872 he set up a works in Glasgow to make Lithopone and in 1896 founded his Widnes works making ‘Orr’s Zinc White’.    No mention at all of Charlton – and a gap of twenty two years between his Glasgow Works and his Widnes works.

 

Lithopone is a ‘generic name’ for a white pigment produced through ‘co-precipitation and calcination of zinc sulphide and baryium sulphate’. It is said that it had been invented by a Belgian called Leger in 1871 but this is disputed.  Other people talk about a French inventor, G.F. de Douhet.  However throughout the 1870s Orr was ‘dueling patents’ with Thomas Griffiths who also seems to have had some input into the Charlton works although, of course, that probably depends om whose account you are reading.   Griffiths is said to have painted a gate post white with his mixture but at sunrise it turned black and turned white again at night.

 

What this is all about is the manufacture of white paint which is not poisonous in the way that earlier lead based paints were. In 1879 Orr is said to have changed the name from 'lithopone’ to ‘Charlton White’. While Griffiths had ‘Patent Zinc White’.  When Orr opened the Widnes works he called ‘Orr’s Zinc White'. It all seems to be the same stuff

 

All of the source material I have about Orr says that he came to Charlton in 1879 but John Smith said that the manufacture of Lithopone began in Charlton in 1872 - years earlier. I don’t know where John got this information from but he had access to local authority records which I am unable to see, which may have included inspection records as well as rate book information.  He says it was made ’under licence’ to J.B. Orr of Widnes. He says that it was the first domestic oil-bound washable water paint, later called Duresco and that the Charlton works management became the Patent Silicate Paint Company.    I will try and ignore the discrepancy in the dates given of when the Charlton Works opened and when Orr went to Widnes.

 

What is definite is that The Silicate Paint Company (proprietor J.B.Orr & Co.)  Opened a big new factory on the riverside at Charlton in 1879 – and  the size and grandeur of it have taken me rather by surprise. They clearly had some sort of press launch because I have found many extremely detailed reports of this works.

It faced onto the Thames ‘and thus brings the works not only into connection with the Metropolis but likewise with all parts of the world where a ship can sail’ and  ‘in addition to the great silent highway there is a railway running within a short distance’.  They were on a plot of two acres and the big buildings of the works were designed by Ernest Turner of Regent Street – an architect who seems well known for laundry design and may have specialised in industrial buildings.  The contractors were Messrs Vernon and Ewing. It cost about £25,000 to build and looks huge, in publicity drawings.  There are some long and detailed accounts of the processes carried out here as well as descriptions of the buildings.  Outside and parallel to the wall, and internally, are tram rails running between departments and the Riverside pier.  From the pier paint was being sent all round the world ’huge drams of paint for the Indian government… non corrosive paint for the ironclads of Germany'.

 

In one article Orr is described as ‘the company chemist’ and what is made in the factory are ’the specialties of the old firm '. This includes Charlton White – as well as anti-fouling paint, and petrifying liquid for damp walls, non poisonous marine paints, Charlton Lakes and Pulp colours.  However – just to make things difficult some articles about the new works say that what they are making is Griffins Patent White for Messrs Griffiths, Fletcher and Birdie and described as ‘remarkable’.

 

The Charlton works was said to have been set up to manufacture Duresco. The works name was not changed to this until the 1930s but it seems to have been a trade name alongside ‘Charlton White'. It is said to be a preparation of Charlton White submitted to a ‘secret process’.  It dries out ‘fat and is solid, washable and not poisonous’. It is sometimes described as ‘distemper’. The whole point of these paints – and their major selling point – is that they were non poisonous 'and possess no deleterious effects whatsoever’... ‘Charlton paints contain no lead, arsenic, etc’.

 

This was clearly Orr’s works despite the apparent manufacture of paint to Griffiths’ patents and I assume the earlier lithopone works nearby was his too – but I have found nothing out about it, and I’m not even sure of the site.  Orr was clearly living in Greenwich in the 1881 census and then went off and founded the Widnes works in 1897.  I assume therefore that there was some sort of disagreement at Charlton which is why he went to Widnes.  Everything I can find written about him – mainly obituaries - is put into the context of the Widnes works and Charlton is barely mentioned. He is described as a Widnes hero ‘deservedly earned a place in the world pioneers of industry’.  They say he began his business career in Widnes where he ‘built up a large and important industry’ – no mention of his twenty five previous years running factories in Glasgow and then Charlton.  Looking at Widnes however his ‘Vine Chemical Works’ was established very late among the numerous chemical works there and was very far from the largest.  It had good rail access – with rails down to the Mersey but no actual waterfront – as distinct from the Charlton works with its own Thames jetty.  (and, no, I  am not going to be rude about Widnes although the last time I was there, it was only because I was lost - and couldn’t find the way out, driving round and round in circles - I am sure it’s a very nice place).

 

The Charlton works remained in production for over sixty years and into the 1960s.   Newspapers report the usual events as everywhere else.  In 1909 there was a fire which had begun in the drying room caused by overheating - the Shooters Hill and Greenwich brigades both attended, they were led by Supt Dawson from New Cross and the fire was speedily extinguished. Such incidents happen over the history of most works, and it is the most excitement you will find.

 

From 1938 they worked with the Air Ministry on camouflage paint and produced vast quantities of it throughout the Second World War. In the 1950s lithopone was phased out and new types of paint made, but the firm's equipment was old and not technologically competitive.