| Northampton County Magazine 1933
The first use of soap was in the washing of fabrics, chiefly clothing, which formerly was cleansed by simply pounding in Water, running water for preference. Until very recent times this was a frequent method.
Recent improvements in the manufacture of soaps have vastly altered the methods of washing linen and other clothing, and further have encouraged personal cleanliness. Concurrent with the increasing use of soaps for personal washing and the cleaning of clothes, special soaps for utensils and other objects of wood and metal have become extremely popular. Soaps and soap powders for kitchen use are in ever increasing popularity. Their very name is legion.
 |
|
Northampton County Magazine
|
It is because a Rushden firm, Andrew Austin, Ltd., knows that it can produce soaps of superior excellence at competitive prices, that it has entered the market, and it has done it to good purpose. It is making its mark. It may be that the future holds for Northamptonshire the name of a soap making county. We feel that such industrial fame will be deserved.
On the outskirts of Rushden, in a district where other industrial concerns have sprung up, the company we have mentioned have a very compact factory in which soap making is carried on. In the public mind soap making, or soap boiling as it is popularly named, is associated with disagreeable smells. This unpleasantness was inevitable when animal fats, generally the coarsest and never particularly fresh, were refined in the course of manufacture. At Rushden there is none of that. Only pure vegetable fats are used. The factory, on our visit on a hot September day, was redolent of nothing but the freshness of perfect cleanliness. As far as smell is concerned it might have been a textile factory; and for sight, a confectionery establishment could not show more spotless whiteness. The workmen, engaged in laborious tasks, boiling and mixing, were working in a deliriously pure and cool atmosphere, the work girls, stamping and packing, looked as though they must be lady clerks. All seemed imbued with healthy contentment.
Mr. A. W. Keeble, the works manager, who conducted the writer over the factory, explained to us the process of soap making, and showed it in operation. The mere mixing and boiling need no description: the technical details of material and formulae we confess we cannot hope to explain with intelligence. Besides, if we could, we are not sure it would be fair. Mr. Keeble has evolved a process, a secret process, which enables his company, it is claimed, to produce a superior article. Their household soap has a minimum fatty acid content of 64 to 66 per cent., which is said to be superior to that of any other soap in the same class. If we may put it so, the fatty acid content is the business part of a soap, the rest is, as the lawyers would say, embroidery and surplusage. So much for effective quality, which is obtained by a method requiring only about one-fourth of the usual time in the process.
|
|
|
Advert for Austin's Cleanser - 'Soaprise'
The Northampton County Magazine, November 1933
|
Andrew Austin, Ltd. make household and toilet soaps, the latter as attractive in appearance as any we have ever seen. It is when specimens of the various soaps were shown that we began to be bewildered at the variety. Then came something altogether different. A special soap, or paste, with the trade name of Soaprise, put up in noble looking round tins such as the good housewife loves to see.
Soaprise is a general cleaner, to cleanse nearly everything, but like another proprietary article, it won't wash clothes—everything else. It is a product occupying the happy medium between harsh soaps and gritty powders. Although only recently put on the market it has a large and daily increasing sale. Suitable for all homes and houses it has proved an attraction to large concerns, hotels, theatres, hospitals and other institutions. For large users it is sold in bulk; for household purposes it is put up in attractive tins of two sizes. It looks as if Soaprise will become a household word. We trust it may. It will, if the business ability of the managing director, Mr. C. H. Miller, and the technical skill of Mr. Keeble, count as they should.
|
