F W Hampshires: Sugar dust, fish glue and grease

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Ivy Ryall's sister, Iris Dean, in the Zube room at Hampshires in the 1940s

BOTH my sister, Iris, and I worked at F W Hampshires in the 1940s. The photograph shows Iris standing at the back of the vat where the man is peering inside.

The other lady is the forewoman. I believe her name was May. There was another forewoman, named Annie or Alice, in the Zube room.

In those days, everyone smelled of the product that they were working on – and very often their clothes were covered in some of the ingredients.

Looking at Iris, you can see that her overall is covered in sugar dust. Even her high-heeled court shoes are wearing a coating of it.

The girls in the custard powder room smelled of vanilla and their khaki overalls were covered in a pale yellow dust. The Snowfire tablet-makers’ overalls were covered in grease and smelled of menthol and the poor makers of the fish glue fly papers were definitely to be avoided. They always got a seat to themselves on the bus going home.

In those days, Hampshires made almost everything from cardboard and tin boxes, nerve tonics, cosmetics, pain relief tablets, ointments to ice-cream wafers, shampoos, orange and lemon jelly sweets, fly papers and so on.

But they were most famous for their... Zubes.

When the Second World War started, they produced medication for the Forces and, with scientific advances and changes in fashions, the range of products changed and so did the name.

In the May 15 edition of Bygones, Licia Toplis gave an account of her work experiences at Hampshires, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Yes, I, too, remember Mr Mosely, Mr Best, Miss Mullins, the personnel officer, Myra and Jean Longbottom, Mr Lander, the chief chemist when I was there, and so many others.

I joined the company straight from school in 1937. I was 14 and was paid 2½d (1p) an hour for a 48-hour week. I left in 1942 to work at International Combustion on the opposite side of the road.

I went straight into the training school for six weeks and came out as a fitter, helping to produce torpedoes for our Navy’s submarines.

I believe my sister was still at Hampshires when she married Bill Wheatley, who was a regular in the Royal Navy. Afterwards, she travelled with him to Singapore where their first daughter was born.

Another destination was Malta. When Bill had finished his service, their first home was in an Army hut, where Ascot Drive is now, until a house became vacant in Underhill Avenue.

Eventually they moved to live in Mackworth. Bill died in the l980s and my dear sister died in March 2000. I guess that she would have been about 16 years old in the photograph. She was beautiful.

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