Vivian F Suter (1925-) - Works Manager - Newark Factory - British Glues & Chemicals

caution !! this is an initial draft ...

I keep these notes on my server so I don't lose them !!

 

 

The Newark Factory Gang -

Left to right ... can you add any information? -
Philip Purley (Newark Works Manager) - Dr Alan Jobling (Development Director) - Croid Sales - Croid Sales - Jack Beaumont (Croid Works Supervisor) - Nick Marcuse (main Board Director) - Harry Thompson (Wigan & Newark, Works Director) - Croda Polymers - Croid Sales - Ron Staff (Croda Paints & main Board Director) - Croid Supervisor - Unknown - Ron Gulliford (Croid Works Manager) - Dr W Edmund Fletcher (Croid Works Director) - Eric Duckmanton (Process Controller) - George Wakeham (Works Engineer) - Vivian Suter ...

Mr Vivian F Suter was born in 1925 and joined Quibell Brothers as a lab assistant Easter 1941 and was in charge as Works Manager when the Newark Factory was closed and demolished in 1976. He has recently been writing up his personal memories which are a fascinating insight into the factory at Newark -

Quibell Bros was part of British Glues & Chemicals, Ltd sometimes known as British Jews & Comicals due to the number of European Jews in senior positions. The managing director was Mr Israel H Chayen and the technical director was Dr Silberberger, known as Dr Sulphurburner because of his insistence on using sulphur dioxide as the best way to prevent loss of quality in hot, weak glue liquor. Initially we produced this by burning sticks of yellow sulphur in a closed vessel but later bought it from Brothertons as a pressurised product in cylinders almost 6feet tall and very difficult to move about.

I had first met Dr Silberberger at Newark Works in about 1941. I had recently joined from Magnus Grammar School as lab assistant but the Works Chemist had been posted to Drayton House and the assistant had been drafted in to the army. Dr S was a tall, large, old distinguished gentleman with a heavy, guttural accent. He was Jewish and spoke in a heavily accented manner. Due to his height he walked with a slight stoop. It was said that if he walked down the yard with his arm round your shoulders you were destined for great things in BGC. He did this with me but nothing happened and he retired before ensuring my success. I went into the RAF and he retired before my return.

Quibell Bros was founded in the early 19th century and when I joined it had a distribution centre on Castlegate and a factory on Winthorpe Road. It was hemmed in on three sides by the river Trent (actually a canal), the LMS railway from Lincoln to Nottingham and the main LNER line from King’s Cross to all places north. This line actually ran through the site with the factory on the river side and, on the other, the weighbridge, offices, laboratory, stores, carpenter’s shop and stables. There were no longer any horses but the factory odd job man used the stables to rear a flock of geese for Christmas. Access to the factory was a narrow, low tunnel under the railway suitable only for small to medium sized vehicles. Anything larger had to go over a level crossing on the main line and we held a key to the level-crossing gates. I can’t see that being allowed today. The laboratory was a train spotter’s delight and I saw all the named expresses of the day.
Quibs supplied grease, fertiliser, animal feed and glue when I joined. They had previously made and supplied a disinfectant. Their raw material was animal residues from butchers, abattoirs and fallen animals. Some would arrive on lorries from local collections and some in railway wagons which would often stay in the sidings with masses of flies and maggots everywhere and a fair number of rats. Every few months there would be an attack on the rats. There would be terriers and the tunnels in the railway embankment would be gassed but there were always enough survivors to need another attack a few months later.
British Glues & Chemicals was formed in 1920 from a combination of similar enterprises plus in 1933, a soap factory (Standard Soap) at Ashby de la Zouch which made luxury toilet soaps. At rare intervals we were able to buy some of their products. The group headquarters was at Imperial House, Kingsway, London W C and the registered office moved to Welwyn Garden City after the war. B Young & Co were at Spa Gelatine Works, Grange Road, Bermondsey. Young’s produced edible gelatine from cow hides and did all the research and development work under Mr Webb and Mr Downes. The Central Laboratory was at Gordon Street off Euston Road just behind the Quaker building, Friend’s Meeting House. The Chief Chemist was Mr Royston Barry Drew, an Australian.
The Newark factory was accessed by a lane from Winthorpe road. Just before the works was a pair of semi-detached old houses, on the left, occupied by 'Pop' Wilson with his son Jim and Jim’s wife. 'Pop' was an old style works engineer with no formal education but who seemed to know every nut and bolt in the factory and how to keep it all working. His son, Jim, was a large, fairly lazy individual but very skillful with instruments. He loved working on any old clock mechanism.
At the entrance to the works, on the left, was the weighbridge where I used to park my cycle and, on the right, was the office block, a low single storey brick building housing the general office, then a waiting-room, office manager’s office, works manager’s secretary, staff toilets and wash rooms, then the works manager’s office with a treacherous step down. Many individuals made an undignified entry. Outside of the general office was a lean-to with a punch card clock and racks of time cards for the workers. In the office were desks for three staff, usually young and female, and a telephone exchange. Initially there was only one external line and an office junior was supposed to connect all incoming and outgoing calls. Service was erratic because she had many other tasks. Later we had another external line.
Beyond the manager’s office was a wooden extension housing the Carton Store(stationery and records) then the laboratory and the joiner’s shop. Opposite was a lean-to for the office manager’s car, then a lockable wooden garage for the works manager’s car and a cycle shed for the workers. In the lean-to, as well as a car, was a small area for preparation of lab samples with a Christy & Norris mill so, occasionally, the car received a sprinkling of dust. Behind the weighbridge were half-a-dozen allotments and behind the offices was a large corrugated iron shed hosing the engineering and packaging stores. In the yard, by the tunnel under the LNER, stood an old house. Downstairs was the engineer’s office and upstairs belonged to the process controller. In effect he was the under-manager but the works manager would never sanction the use of this title. Round the back was a staff WC but no wash-basin.
Exiting the tunnel to the works could be hazardous. There should always be somebody on watch when shunting was taking place but he may be distracted or not always there. Trucks were delivered from the railway down a slope by gravity. They would arrive at the rail weighbridge at a fair speed with a man riding a stout stick jammed in the truck’s brake. Further shunting was accomplished with a wire cable and electric winches at each end of the sidings with two capstans round which the cable could be wound to reverse the direction of the pull. This was deadly because there were never enough men to guard the tunnel and the whole length of the cable. In those days, although there were government factory inspectors, money seemed to be more important than health & safety so the cable would be well frayed before being replaced. It had been known to break under load and lash about dangerously with the trucks out of control.
The factory was a collection of brick buildings with open yards, eventually roofed over with massive iron pillars and asbestos sheeting. All steam and hot liquid pipes were also insulated with asbestos paste, applied by hand and renewed when damaged.
Round the back, against the LMS railway, was the coal siding and four boilers with mechanical grates. Two were Babcock & Wilcox of 1930’s vintage but numbers 1 & 2 were much older. They were Niclausse boilers salvaged from a French warship, possibly during or shortly after the Great War. They were designed to raise a rapid head of steam but were not efficient so were only used when one of the B & W’s was off-line. A man would, all day, shovel coal from the railway trucks to an elevator feeding two overhead bunkers. This elevator would often fail causing absolute panic. No elevator – no coal – no steam – no production. The coal used was washed slurry from Bilsthorpe and Thoresbury collieries. The latter was the best but more expensive and not always available. It would arrive with water still dripping from the wagons so lab staff would have to sample the coal either whilst it was being emptied or sometimes by climbing into the wagons. It was tested for ash and moisture content, usually 15 to 20%, and the weight recalculated so that we only paid for the fuel and not the water. Bilsthorpe always had a higher ash content than Thoresby. During rail strikes we had to use road transport and strikes became so frequent after the war that we abandoned British Rail. Transport was arranged by Jack Masding whose family had a furniture removal business, with a florist’s shop at Beaumond Cross. They had just a couple of furniture pantechnicons but soon acquired a couple of tipper lorries and started hauling coal as well as delivering finished goods. He set up his office in the road weighbridge and eventually became a sort of transport co-ordinator for the whole group.

There were several instruments on the boiler platform and I spent many a long hour there changing charts, cleaning and inking pens, checking stack temperatures with a long, specially protected thermometer and re-calibrating the CO2 recorder. I believe it was made by Charles Gordon of Glasgow and contained a large quantity of mercury which had to be removed for cleaning at fairly regular intervals. It was based on the Orsat principle of absorption in caustic potash and then measuring the decrease in volume. I also used an Orsat which resembled a small wooden suitcase with sliding back and front. A hand-operated bellows drew in a sample of flue gas which was then persuaded, three times, through the caustic by alternately raising and lowering a bottle (of water???) The automatic instrument then had to be re-calibrated. We also checked the colour of the smoke using a Ringelmann chart which was a card showing various shades of grey. Whenever the Works Manager arrived on site and could see smoke he would phone me and tell me to find out why. Visible smoke is inefficient combustion. The aim was always to maintain a steam pressure of 180psi and the safety valve would blow at 200psi and if the Works manager was on site, another call to me 'Why'? There was a fairly steady base load to run the steam driven electricity generators but other factors were extremely variable - intermittent demands from the IWEL plant (Industrial Waste Eliminators Ltd), calorifiers on the degreasers, pressurising of the bone glue digesters but the real problem came when an evaporator was turned on after maintenance. The mechanic was supposed to notify the stoker, in good time, but often failed to do so and down would go the pressure and all the lights would dim, including the works manager’s office.
All four boilers had moving, mechanical grates and the stoker would regulate the steam produced by controlling the speed of the grate and the depth of coal admitted. The amount of primary air blown upwards through the grate had to be just enough to ensure that no holes appeared in the bed but that all of the coal was burned just as it reached the end of the grate and fell into the sealed ash hopper. Some secondary air was introduced over the grate to ensure full combustion of the gases and small particles blown off the grate. CO2 readings would decide whether, or not, the right amount of air was being used and the stack temperature would determine, amongst other things, the state of the economiser. Scale was always a problem and we used a Neckar lime/soda water softener, a very temperamental beast where scale would repeatedly stop the tippler bucket, thus meaning, no treatment applied and more rapid scaling-up of the boilers. I was deeply involved in all of this activity and, combined with night school at Newark & District County Technical College, I eventually gained my City & Guilds Certificate in Boiler Operation & Management.
We had two ancient high-sided lorries for carrying raw materials from the heap in the field to the degreasing plant. This 'heap' was quite disgusting and stank to high heaven. Some of it, such as 'fallen' beasts, was fairly rotten when it arrived on site. There were swarms of flies, rats without number and the place was crawling with maggots, particularly in the warm weather. These were a source of income—they were gathered up, placed in sawdust to clean them up and sold to local fishermen as well as to local shops who supplied these same fishermen as well as establishments much further afield. Local dogs were also a nuisance, especially after the local authority built houses near to the works. This caused, shortly after the war, the transfer of degreasing from Newark to Gallow Hill works at Market Harborough. Of the afore-mentioned lorries, one would be in use until it broke down and went into the garage for repair, then the other would meet a similar fate. Sometimes the material arrived directly in the plant by rail. Bones would be crushed to about 2”-3” in a swing beater mill and the flesh cut up by hand into manageable lumps, the fed into the top of the IWEL (Industrial Waste Eliminators Ltd). This was a large, horizontal steam-jacketed cylinder similar in appearance to a Lancashire boiler. Inside was a horizontal shaft with paddles. The flesh (and bones) was fed in at one end and the paddles worked it to the outlet at the other end whilst it was being cooked. The fat would run away through a filter and be pumped to the grease plant some distance away. This fat was put into 40 gallon drums and sold to Price’s of Bromborough for use as lubricant. The fully cooked matter came out as a fairly dry, fibrous mass, and was collected, after removal of the bones, until there was sufficient to, fill a degreasing extractor. The bones were fed through the mill.
After crushing, both streams of bones were elevated to fill an extractor holding about five tons. When full, this was sealed and benzene vapour was introduced (a petroleum fraction, boiling point 40 to 60 degrees centigrade, not benzene). This would remove the fat from the bones, condense and run away, with the fat, be re-vaporised and circulated for several hours leaving the fat behind to be pumped to the grease plant. This plant was run by Billy Rawson known variously as 'Wick' or 'Tet' but nobody seemed to know why (It must be remembered that many of these workers were survivors of the horrors of the Great War). He was a scruffy, thoroughly disreputable character with his clothes lathered in grease. It was rumoured that they were so well preserved that he never needed to change them and even slept in them. When a grease vat was full he would sample it and come across the yard to the lab shouting at the top of his voice (so that we would be fore-warned of his arrival) 'fatty acid' and singing 'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam and a bloody fine sunbeam I’d be' A less likely sunbeam could never be imagined. FFA, free fatty (aliphatic) acid was a test which had to be done immediately and was a titration against sodium hydroxide. The indicator we used was known as methyl blue but it was probably methyl violet. If the result was above a certain figure the fat would go, as lubricant, but if below, it was less degraded and was mixed with Fuller’s Earth, passed through a leaf filter and sold as refined (or bleached ) grease at a much higher price for soap manufacture. Speed in sampling and testing was essential because whilst the fat was still hot it was degrading. When there was sufficient IWEL material it also was degreased with benzene, ground because there was always a small amount of bone present, and sold as Feeding Meat & Bone Meal.

And now I digress. Scrapie had always been present in sheep flocks and was always so-called because it was extremely irritating and caused the sheep to scrape themselves against anything they could find. It wasn’t known, at the time, that it was a prion disease. In about 1980, petrol prices (and benzene) soared and solvent degreasing of this residue was discontinued but it was still sold as animal feed. This turned out to be a disaster because hot solvents are about the only way to neutralise prions. This was only discovered much later. So, active prions in animal feed - mad cow disease - variant CJD in humans. Was it a purely commercial decision not to use solvents or did somebody, somewhere relax the regulations? It was rumoured that the EU did so but I can find no evidence to support this. Could we now, with solvent degreasing, return to using this valuable by-product instead of burning it?

When the bones had been degreased they were discharged into small four wheeled trucks, holding several hundred weights, and pushed along rails between the boiler platform and the water softener to the 'polisher'. This was a rotating drum dresser which removed the fine particles which were barrowed over the yard to an elevator into the first-floor fertiliser department where they were ground, dressed to size and bagged to await laboratory testing before being sold as fertiliser. There were various grades depending on nitrogen and phosphate content. Potash was so low as to be irrelevant. The polisher discharged on to a belt manned by one or two operators who removed hoofs, horns, 'paddywhack' (sinew) and hair because extracts from these would degrade the glue we are about to make. The hoofs and horns were ground to be sold as an expensive, slow acting, high nitrogen fertiliser and the sinew and hair went to the 'raw dissolved' den. This was an opening on the first floor into a large, sealed room and everything and anything went through that hole - sweepings from everywhere, dead rats and anything vaguely organic went through that hole. When full, concentrated commercial sulphuric acid was introduced and left to stew for several days, even weeks. When judged to be ready, the den was opened, emptied, ground, dressed and sold as an expensive fertiliser. The acid had transformed the 'rubbish' into a homogeneous product with readily available nitrogen and phosphates but the garden would need to be well limed afterwards.
The polished bone was elevated to one of a series of six large wooden bunkers each holding sufficient to fill a digester, about five tons. These bunkers, besides holding bone, were home to numerous large crickets which would chirrup away, especially on the night shift. As a digester became empty it would be re-filled, via a chute from the bunker and a man would enter the bunker to empty it down the chute. When full the digester would be sealed ready for processing.
Each cycle consisted of five pressurisations followed by a series of three to five hot washes. The washes after the first pressure were all hot water and were blown off by steam pressure to vats for evaporation as XMS (extra medal standard). The first wash after other pressures was hot water but was passed over to several earlier digesters, in sequence, gradually become less dilute but losing quality and eventually being blown to the vats for evaporation as Medal standard. As soon as these liquors arrived in the vats they were treated with sulphur dioxide and sodium pentachlorphenate, known as Lotna. Each digester was fitted with a recorder (charts changed by the shift operator if he remembered) and the lab checked the charts to see that the correct pressure (37psi) had been applied at the right time, held for the correct period and each wash circulated at the right temperature for the correct period before being transferred. Any anomalies were marked and shown to the process controller or, sometimes, the works manager. The weak liquor vats were four, about 6 ft square and 10 ft deep. They were not stainless steel but had to be acid resistant. Were they wood or cast-iron? Immediately the liquors arrived they were treated with Ranti and/or Lotna.
BGC used a system of five letter words to identify the chemicals we used and they were very secretive. Was it to help non technical operators or to deceive possible rivals? Even myself, as Works Chemist, was not allowed a list but here are the few I can remember -
ALLOX - calcined magnesite, used to extract glue from chrome-tanned leather
ELZEM - cresylic acid, used by Croid as a liquefier
LOTNA - sodium pentachlorphenate, fungicide
NANTI - sulphur
NORSI - sugar
RANTI - sulphur dioxide
VANOC - turkey red oil, anti-foaming agent.
As soon as possible the liquors were evaporated and there were four evaporators. No1 was an old Scott, just a single chamber which heated the liquor, under vacuum, until it had about 50% solids content. Very inefficient and a serious degrader of the product. No2 was a Blair quadruple effect and Nos 3&4 were similar but larger and of later date. The concentrated liquor was fed into three cylindrical vats, iron lined with acid-resistant tiles, from which the glue was run into large 3 wheeled tubs and taken next door to the casting house, where the girls took over. They were young and boisterous and it was well known that the supervisor would sometimes disappear with one of them into the drying tunnels - to check that the glue was being correctly dried??
The casting house was lined with racks containing glass bottomed, wood edged trays about 4ft long, 2ft wide and 1inch deep. Using a grid, this was divided into squares and a small brass plaque placed in the centre of each square (I don’t remember how they were secured). These plaques were supplied by the merchant who had placed the order. They varied in size from about 1in to about 4in and carried the merchant’s mark, maybe a flag an, emblem or even animal. There were more than fifty types and hundreds of each. When cake glue manufacture ceased, some time after WW2, all of these plaques were sold to the local scrap-iron dealer, Terry Price. He had a scrap yard behind the stadium at the beginning of Muskham Road, later transferred to Muskham. I wonder if anyone ever salvaged enough of them to make a collection. Some of them were really quite decorative.
Once the glue had cooled and set to a jelly, usually the next day, the metal grid was placed over the glue, the squares cut with a very sharp pointed knife and placed on a wire grille tray. Minor accidents with these knives were frequent and I remember one occasion when a feisty young girl, Betty Baker, stabbed herself in the groin. She came to the first aid station in the lab hotly pursued by the afore-mentioned supervisor who would not allow the first-aider (yours truly) to dress the wound. He insisted on doing it himself. Being one of the BGC 'anointed' (he started his working life at Meggitt’s) I had to obey. His name was Robert (Bob) Pyke, he lived in a semi-detached company house at the end of the lane and was selected to run BGC’s new enterprise in Toronto. These wire grille trays were stacked about 6ft high on a trolley with spacers to allow free circulation of air and taken by the lift to the drying tunnels. There were two tunnels, each with two tracks with large extractor fans at one end and steam heated coils at the other. The trolleys were introduced at the fan end and pushed forward each day as new trolleys were introduced. It took two to three weeks for trolleys to reach the heater end by which time the cakes of glue were dry to about 15% moisture content. The trolleys were then taken down and the cakes packed neatly in hessian sacks. Those with brands went to their merchants, unbranded to hardware dealers, joiners or cabinet makers and the surplus went along the veranda to the mill where they were ground, dressed to size and bagged in hessian or paper sacks to await testing. After testing they were blended in a rotating drum holding about 1ton then bagged for sale or packaged into small paper bags (not on the works site) for sale as Gryps powder glue.
Croid (Improved Liquid Glues) had, for many years, been wanderers but settled down on the Newark site during the early years of the war. Their manager (probably a director) was Mr Palfreeman and the chemist Mr Jack Stocking, a strange fellow exempt from military service with a disability. They used a small part of the building opposite the railway tunnel and produced small quantities of liquid glue. They had few operatives and when a batch was ready they would call on staff members from our side to work overtime on the packaging machine, filling and labeling small bottles, tins and tubes. They later had a new factory built over on the office side of the railway.
It was never admitted but there was obvious rivalry between Mr Palfreeman and our manager Mr Eric John Gardiner JP. Mr Gardiner had a nice, large company house at the end of the lane (he also had two daughters at Lilley & Stone). Mr Palfreeman lived in the select Newark suburb of Beacon Hill. He also had the latest Rover but our manager had a Hillman Minx.

I had an Assistant Chemist named Tony Goodwin who went on to become a Croid Sales Rep. Sales were better paid and had an expenses account plus a company car..

In the 1950’s production of cake glue ceased and a pearl plant was installed. This consisted of a tower two storeys high through which refrigerated white spirit was circulated. At the top was a perforated plate into which the warm liquid glue was pumped. As it dripped through the plate it formed pearls which were chilled as they fell through the white spirit. At the bottom they were sieved out and spread over perforated dryer plates about 15ft x 10ft. They were turned frequently whilst ambient air was blown through the bed. The air was gradually warmed by steam heated coils, still working the bed, until the pearls were dry. This was a tricky operation, and an acknowledged difficulty of the process particularly in summer time with a low grade glue on the point of melting, unless turned constantly. A necessary but unwelcome task was the emptying of the compartment under the plates. Some smaller pearls would always fall through and there could be half a ton or more under each plate. Heat from the heater coils could cause the pearls under the plates to coalesce into one large mass and a pneumatic drill, with compressor, would have to be hired to break it up. Despite the expert and dedicated efforts of George Wakeham, the Works Engineer, and his team to maintain smooth production of the system, it was evident that it was unfit for purpose.

  Later, after the Croda take-over and the appointment of Mr Harry Thompson as Works director, a mechanical system of reciprocating and lifting plastic blades was installed in order to cut the labour. It was supposed to 'walk' the pearls along an extended plate with gradually increasing air temperatures in each section. It was sheer hell to operate but, mercifully, the plant closed after a few years. Harry Thompson lived in Southport, was Works Director at Appley Bridge and Newark under Croda Polymers, having recently joined Croda from posts in Nigeria in the oil industry?

The number employed at Newark was about 100, all in, plus 20/30 in Croid.

I closed the Newark Factory down in 1976. Newark a unique BG&C factory in that, besides making glue from bones we also made it from tanned, dyed leather scrap but only chrome tanned. Any other tanning agent produced unusable rubbish. There had been other bone glue plants at Newcastle and Plymouth which closed earlier but we closed Newark in 1976 and Wigan was the last to close about a year later having received all my precious lab equipment only to then scrap it! I wish I had retained some of that lab equipment ... anemometers, microscopes and pocket refractometers ...

Impulse rendering never reached the Newark works where it was known as a 'secret' development - CCD (Chayen Cold Degreasing). Dr Alan Jobling, BGC Chief Chemist, left the company after the Croda take-over with a colleague Mr John S Olds to develop the idea that if the abattoir treated bones as they treated meat, then all by-products would be suitable for human consumption. They formed a company, Lensfield Products, under the umbrella of fmc (Fatstock Marketing Corporation) of Calne, Wiltshire and I joined them after closing down Newark. The start of the concept was to degrease bones without solvents so, after crushing, they were fed into a steam jacketed worm against counter-current liquor, then into a similar worm placed at right-angles. Hot water was used in this second worm and it formed the input to the first worm which then fed an Alfa-Laval centrifugal separator.

((1978 - Lensfield Products Ltd have two processes devised by Dr A Jobling and Mr J S Olds for the extraction of edible proteins from fresh bone which are now being operated on a full scale demonstration and prototype plant.

1980 - Lensfield Products £1.3 million bone processing plant starts operation in September ... the result of an agreement with the National Research Development Corporation who are providing £550,000 towards the costs.

1984 - Lensfield Products, until last April a subsidiary of FMC, has been purchased and relaunched by a management group ... Lensfield Products has developed processes to extract food quality protein and calcium phosphate from fresh bones. At present they are producing only 500 t/annum. The proteins can be used in hams and burgers.

1984 - A Lensfield patent was filed in 1984 but Institution of Chemical Engineers reported 'The batch pressure hydrolysis route developed by Lensfield Products for soluble protein proved to be economically successful, but the acid route was not considered suitable for scale up as a batch process.' ))

PS Calfos never used degreased bone due to tainting from solvents - it was always Argentinian Knuckles and Toes which had a very low fat content. When production was increased we had to use Indian sun-dried bone chips but ran into trouble with 'black specks'. I spent many hours developing a test for microscopic 'black speck' assessment and experimented with a machine which passed a stream of bone between two electrodes which imparted a charge to the black particles and then a puff of air diverted them from the stream.

 According to some, when Croid came to Newark they came to a site in Tolney Lane. This was not true. Yes, there was a dump in Tolney Lane (off Muskham Road ) operated by a scavenging Rag & Bone man; Tommy Crowden. Croid - Improved Liquid Glues came to Newark in early 1940 when it was bombed out of Bermondsey. Our site was off Winthorpe Road down the lane leading to the municipal sewage works ...

More news of Newark and Croids comes from the Newark Advertiser ...

The Times on October 29, 2010: Dr Alan Jobling. Alan, BSc, PhD London, PhD Cantab, Founder of Lensfield Products Ltd, died peacefully in hospital on 23rd October 2010. His wife, Yvonne and younger son were at his side. He will be greatly missed by all family and friends.

Any corrections and additional information gratefully received contact john p birchall

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