May & Baker

May & Baker

May & Baker Ltd, a major manufacturer of herbicidal compounds, (later to become Rhône Poulenc Ltd), was for a century until 1934 in Church Rd, Battersea. For all but seven of those years their premises were in what was known as Garden Wharf. Other premises in Battersea from which they undertook business during that period were offices at 39-41 Battersea High Street and a warehouse at Vicarage Wharf.

John May, one of the founding partners, was born in Harwich on 3 February 1809, son of the captain of a ship which plied regularly between Harwich and Gothenburg. Soon after John’s birth his father retired to Ipswich where John was educated at a local private school and then served an apprenticeship with a chemist and druggist, F J Hooker, whose business was in Ipswich

In 1830 John May went to London where he attended lectures at the Aldersgate Dispensary. He also found employment in Battersea with a manufacturing chemist, Charles John Price, whose firm was then ‘the chief manufacturing house in sulphate of magnesia [health salts], mercury preparations in the South of England’. The factory was located in Soap House Lane, on the river front beside the dock on the eastern side of Battersea Bridge (viz. the eastern end of Hester Ro

The experience May gained must have stood him in good stead when, in 1834, he started up in business himself as a manufacturing chemist with two partners. Tradition says that his first partners, Joseph L Pickett and Thomas Shipp Grimwade, had been fellow-apprentices with May at Hooker’s in Ipswich. Grimwade had further useful connections in that he was related to the head of the export drug house, Grimwade, Ridley & Co and had worked for Jacob Bell in the latter’s family business in Oxford Street (it subsequently became John Bell & Croydon of Wigmore Street).

The partners rented premises in Bolingbroke Place, Battersea which are described in the Rate Book for 1834 as a “house and manufactory” in part of the street then known as Bolingbroke Place. The whole area had formerly been Lord Bolingbroke’s estate, to the west of Battersea Bridge. Battersea, with a population of some 5,000 in 1831, was the home of a number of chemical plants including a sulphuric acid plant and a dyestuffs factory as well as a large malt mill, a brewery, a distillery, saw-mills and a pottery. Despite this industry, Battersea was still semi-rural in character. The land which in later years was to be laid out as Battersea Park was still fields and William Baker recalled that when he joined the business in 1839 (see below) the firm grew its own fodder for the horses it owned and used for transport.

For the Grimwade, May & Pickett partnership in its very early days, trading was probably restricted to London, which with its high concentration of population and large number of chemists and druggists was market enough. But it was not an auspicious period in which to establish a business. There were financial crises in 1837 and 1839, and between 1836 and 1842 there were poor harvests necessitating heavy imports of grain, and industry was effected by depression. They were also years of political difficulty and social unrest as the reform agitation was followed by the upsurge of the Chartist movement which began a four-year period of agitation in 1838.

For the new business there were immediate difficulties when Joseph Pickett died within a year of its establishment. Grimwade and May carried on, but in 1839 Grimwade, who ‘did not care for cooking chemicals’, retired to Harrow to take up farming, and later, the production of evaporated milk. In Grimwade’s place, John May was joined by William Garrad Baker, eldest son of William Baker, a chemist and druggist in Chelmsford. William Garrad Baker was then 24. He had served his apprenticeship in his father’s business and, according to his own recollections:

‘I managed a business in London for my father, waiting for something to turn up. My chance came in 1839 when a partnership fell open in the firm of …Grimwade and May.’

The partnership agreement between John May and William Baker was drawn up and signed in 1840. It was to last for ’14 years and subsequently unless ended by 6 months’ notice.’ In fact it survived until 1877. (The simple partnership was the predominant form of industrial organisation in Britain until legislation in the 1840’s and 1850’s, consolidated in the Limited Liability Act of 1862, made incorporation as a joint stock company not only possible but positively easy.

In December 1841, land in Battersea which had formerly belonged to Timothy Cobb, a banker in Banbury, was put up for auction. For £200 the newly formed partnership of May & baker bought the plot known as Garden Wharf (“Chemical Works” on the map (above), which was immediately to the rear of their existing premises in Bolingbroke Place. It was this location from which first the partnership and the company was to operate until 1934.

Here the two partners set about building up their business, against what Baker was to describe, some sixty years later, as bitter competition of Howards, White & Co, Huskissons, Whiffens (whose factory was in Lombard Road, Battersea) and Atkinson & Biggar – the five firms which, with May & Baker, formed ‘the backbone of the London chemical trade.’

William Baker looked after the manufacturing and dispatch side, while John May did the travelling consisting mainly of weekly visits to London wholesale drug houses.

Manufacture of many of the products on which May & Baker’s reputation rested in the later decades of the nineteenth century appears to have started in the 1830’s and 1840’s; particularly camphor, bismuth, ether, calomel and ammonia preparations. From the mid-1830’s, until it was superseded by creosote, there was an extensive trade in corrosive sublimate, used as a preservative to ‘kyanize’ timber (the inventor of the process – patented in 1832 - was a Dr J H Kyan, a fellow Battersea resident).

When the Pharmaceutical Society was formed in 1841, John May and William Garrad Baker were amongst its earliest members.

At the Great Exhibition of 1851, sponsored by Prince Albert, May & Baker exhibited a number of products which shown the extent of their range. They were also awarded a Prize Medal for their acids, metallic salts and other preparations used in pharmacy, Similarly they won First Class Medals at the Paris Exhibition of 1855.

In 1856, another world renowned company was to purchase the small factory which stood between the May & Baker Garden Wharf complex and Battersea Bridge: the new neighbouring company at that time called itself the Patent Plumbago Crucible Company but would subsequently simplify its name to the Morgan Crucible Company. (The view, right, of these two premises,seen from the Thames was sketched by one of the local boatmen who was also a talented artist.)

By this time the business was providing the partners with a comfortable living. John May lived at Hyde House, Hyde Terrace, Battersea with his unmarried sister Sarah and a housemaid. The house was at the opposite end of the then Bolingbroke Road from the business at Garden Wharf. William Baker lived at The Cedars, a little further south, in Battersea High Street with his wife, son and four daughters.

The firm continued to expand its trade as opportunities arose. A growing concern with public health and sanitation was given a fresh impetus by the outbreaks of cholera in London in 1831-2, 1848-9, and in 1854. Victorian philanthropy established new hospitals in London so that by 1861 there were 66 special hospitals compared with twelve in 1800. There were also 39 dispensaries, 29 of them established since 1800. The first public hospital was not opened until 1870. Other institutions, such as boarding schools, required supplies of drugs and chemicals; new industries were developing and there were opportunities to export, particularly to the British colonies.

The 1860s and early 1870s were perhaps the golden age for the old-established manufacturing chemists like May & Baker, secure in their products and processes, based on a mature technology, with an expanding range of manufacture and growing markets. Thus, the firm continued to develop.

In 1876 the partnership between May and Baker had been existence for thirty-six years. May was 67 and had been manufacturing chemicals in Battersea for more than forty years. May had never married and seems to have been a man of frugal habits, so it is not surprising that he was contemplating retirement. Baker was 61 but apparently wished to continue in business and therefore someone had to be found who not only wanted to enter the business, but who was acceptable to Baker as a partner and who had sufficient resources to replace May’s share of the partnership capital. The man they found was Richard Child Heath, a 43-year-old solicitor from Warwick and a new partnership agreement was signed and dated December 1876.’

At the end of 1889, Heath suggested that when the partnership agreement of 1876 expired, a year later, the firm should be converted into a limited liability company. His reasons, it seems, were two-fold. It was widely expected that the government would introduce more stringent regulation of company formations and flotations and that it would be wise therefore to take advantage of existing permissive legislation. More importantly, the fluctuations of trade and the economy, particularly during the Great Depressions of the 1880s, had made the weaknesses of unlimited liability very clear. When a partnership failed, the partners were personally liable for its debts – the painful consequence of failure for many over the previous twenty years had been not only loss of capital but also personal bankruptcy. Heath would also have known that May & Baker could attract investors who would be able to provide further capital for the business. However, a condition of this arrangement was to be that William Baker, now 74 years of age, should retire from the day-to-day running of the business. A notion with which Baker was not happy.

After a somewhat protracted and acrimonious series of negatotiations agreement was reached and the new company was registered in December 1890. Both William Baker and John May received shares in the new company and the business name, May & Baker, could, thus, continue. In January 1891 May became a director of the new company and remained on the board until his death, at the age of 84, in November 1893.

Baker was also a director of the new company until his death in May 1902. However, in the last five years of his life, his visits to Battersea from his retirement home in Brighton had been few, mainly for board meetings. He travelled in the train from Brighton (with his invalid chair) to Clapham Junction where two May & baker employees met him, lifted him into a brougham and afterwards carried him into his office at Garden Wharf.

An interesting side note from this period was a new and rather unlikely venture in mosaic flooring. In November 1891 May & Baker agreed to provide the Vitreous Mosaic Company (owned by the inventor Jesse Rust of Battersea) with furnaces, buildings and all the material necessary for the manufacture of Rust’s patented mosaic flooring. The nature of the relationship was that the Mosaic Company became, in effect, a partnership between Rust and May & Baker. It seems that Rust was not a businessman when May & Baker started to invest, for the Vitreous Mosaic Company did not start to show a profit until the end of the decade. It was a concern which continued until the fashion for mosaic flooring began to wane.

The Mosaic Company was closed down by May & Baker during the First World War. One of the last examples of their work is, in fact, a mosaic mural for St Aidan’s Church in Leeds. Designed by Frank Brangwyn and the work was carried out by Rust’s Vitreous Mosaic Company, under the direction of Silvester Sparrow. The apse mural shows the life of St Aidan after landing in Northumbria, feeding the poor, his teaching and his death.

As the business expanded, the restrictions of the inadequate premises became obvious. In 1907 plans for news offices and a new warehouse at Gardens Wharf were approved. Manufacturing accommodation was also cramped and in 1908 a suggestion was made that the company should move to Silvertown, in East London. Neither the rebuilding nor the relocation came to pass and the question of moving the company was put into cold storage for a few more years. Later in 1908, however May & Baker was able to rent additional premises in Battersea High Street – numbers 39 & 41 – which gave some extra office space.

In 1914, mindful of the fact that the lease on the Garden Wharf premises was due to expire at the end of 1917 the board began considering the removal of the business to “more suitable and cheaper premises”. By January 1918, however, a lease was granted on the Garden Wharf premises for a further seven years and an option to purchase the freehold, to be exercised by 31 December 1922.

Also during this period May & Baker branched into chemotherapy as a consequence of which they opened a factory specifically for this purpose in Bell Lane, Wandsworth. Certainly by 1927 there were four qualified chemists and two pharmacists in the research laboratory at Wandsworth. This was a large research establishment for a company the size of May & Baker at that time.

In 1930 additional warehouse space was purchased at Vicarage Wharf to provide additional warehousing space. One of the directors who had been strongly opposed to this proposed, at a board meeting in October 1931 (as he had in 1930) the abandonment of the existing factories at Battersea and Wandsworth and the building elsewhere of a new factory combined with a warehouse. Following the production of estimates of the cost of building a factory, warehouse and offices on land already owned by May & Baker at Dagenham the board, in March 1933, approved the scheme. During the construction stages useful material from the two South London factories, such as the water tower from Battersea, was transferred.

During the weekend of 14-16 April 1934 the transfer of the general offices, warehouse and specialties department from Battersea and Wandsworth to Dagenham was carried out with military precision so that work could be resumed as normally as possible on the Monday morning.

The connection with the past was preserved, however, by naming roads inside the Dagenham factory as Battersea Road, Bell Lane and Wandsworth Road.

In October 1934, Garden Wharf was sold to the Morgan Crucible Company, May & Baker’s former Battersea next door neighbours for almost 80 years. The disposal of the lease of the Wandsworth factory was a more lengthy business, made especially difficult by a fire there after the company’s removal. It was not settled until after the Second World War. Similarly it was not until 1936 that the offices in Battersea High Street were finally disposed of by May & Baker thereby severing their 100 year connection with Battersea.

References
Slinn, Judy A History of May & Bakers 1834-1984 Hobson for May & Baker Limited (1984)
Shaw, Tony Notes on May & Baker Wandsworth Borough Library (1977)

Tom Champagne (23 Feb 2005)

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