A Brief History of Whatman PaperWilliam Balston purchased his first plot of land at the site in 1805, roughly where the main car park is now, though then it was a cherry orchard and meadow. Having fallen out with his Hollingworth partners at Turkey Mill, he had been making paper on his own at a little one vat mill at Eyhorne Street, then a little hamlet below Hollingbourne just before you start climbing the hill, and before you get to The Dirty Habit pub. It’s gone now, under the M20, but the mill-stream is still there crossing beneath the Hollingbourne road.
Through 1805 and 1806, William Balston bought several other adjoining pieces of land and started building. The official inauguration of Springfield Mill was on the 1st. of January, 1807. Your last reel of paper rolled off Cornwall machine just last week, so 208 years of continuous paper-making is quite an achievement these days, and you are all to be congratulated for keeping the place running for years longer than its anticipated life-spans, plural, as you will soon see. William Balston was nearly bankrupted by building Springfield Mill on such a vast scale, with its anticipated 10 working vats when really five would have done well enough for the size of the market back then, and three would have kept him profitable and have been fully sustainable. Balston though, was a man of high ambition, as have been all his descendants who worked the Mill, Mr Hugh Balston being the last of a long family line, but all ‘proper gents’ to the last. By1814 William Balston was crippled by debts and was forced to take-on Partners in his business to prevent bankruptcy, and both of them from outside the industry (they had both been destined to join the British East India Company, but it lost its monopoly in 1814 for the greatest part of its territory – everything except China – and they needed a new enterprise to try and make money in), so the cash side of things may have become a little easier, but his workload certainly did not. The Partnership (Balston & Co) was only supposed to last 21 years, and after five or six years of scraping by, it started to turn a profit, though sometimes that profit was pretty lean. By the time that the first Partnership Agreement was due to expire, William had been joined at the Mill by his two eldest sons, William junior, and Richard, and it is from the initials of these two sons that the firm later became known as W & R Balston. In 1835 the Partnership Agreement was renewed, but only for a fixed term of seven years, after which period the firm was to be broken-up and sold, with the proceeds going to the three founding partners. The terms of this second partnership agreement were just as draconian as the first, even to the extent of barring William Balston, the founder, from signing company cheques or making financial agreements of any sort. Finally, the new agreement made it clear that the other partners were having less and less to do with the company (which meant that William Jnr. and Richard had more and more to do with it), and that William Gaussen and Richard Bosanquet (the two partners) should slowly bow-out of business activities. William junior and his brother Richard were doing such a good job of running the business that after this second term ended, the partnership and business was allowed to run on, without being broken-up. In 1849 William Balston the founder died, and left his ‘share’ in the business and property to his wife for her lifetime. His widow, Catherine Balston, died in 1853 and left her one-third share in the company to be equally divided between her seven surviving children, including William junior and Richard, so at last they legally had a stake in the business, having worked so hard at for just wages since their respective fifteenth birthdays. In the meantime, with their mother’s, brothers’ and sister’s agreement, in 1849 William and Richard started the process of buying-out the original partners, by leasing the business from them for £600 each per year, on a fifteen year lease. They also bought the ‘goodwill’ of the business for a nominal £100, the low price reflecting the extent of the work that the brothers had put into the firm. However, someone ‘threw a spanner in the works’, so to speak, by questioning the validity of the transfer of ownership on the basis that because the company had run-on after the seven years allowed for in the second partnership agreement, legally, the business was not Gaussen and Bosanquet’s to sell, and should be broken-up as originally intended. It is not known (and I certainly have been unable to find out) who attempted to wreck the deal, but all the Balston ‘children’, their mother, and the two partners, joined forces and said that the deal should go ahead anyway, unless any of the parties should say no, within a twelve-month after the signing of the documents. Of course, that was just a legal nicety, and none of the parties stopped it all in its tracks. In 1853, after the death of their mother, the two brothers, William and Richard E. P. Balston bought-out the shares of their brothers and sister (and their own) with company funds, for £1000 each. All this goes to show just how successful the business had become, at hand-making drawing, printing, writing, and ledger papers. In 1859, William and Richard E.P. Balston bought the sole use of the J. Whatman ‘brand’ from two descendants of the original Hollingworth brothers at Turkey Mill. Until that time, both companies had used the watermark, with papers made at the Hollingworth’s Turkey Mill (and elsewhere) also carrying the words ‘Turkey Mill’ to distinguish their J.Whatman watermarked papers from those made at Springfield. As well as Balston’s at long last gaining the sole use of J. Whatman branding, the Hollingworth’s also agreed not to make hand-made paper anymore (which, having installed a paper-making machine – or two – was no big deal to them anyway), nor yet to make any (machine-made) Antiquarian size of paper for ten years. The cost for this agreement was £3000 cash on signing, plus five annually post-dated ‘cheques’ for £900 each, i.e. £7,500 in total. So now the two Balston brothers had the mill, the land, the business, and the branding all to themselves, and from this point the company became known as W & R Balston, no longer Balston and co. However, they nearly lost the whole lot in a disastrous fire in 1862 (thought to have been an act of arson by a disgruntled ex-employee), but it did allow the brothers to almost completely re-build the mill on a more ambitious scale. William died a bachelor at the grand age of seventy-five in 1882, leaving his half-share in everything equally divided between his brother Richard for his lifetime, and Richard’s son, also called Richard (known as R.J. Balston in order to distinguish him from his father, Richard E.P. Balston). When Richard (E.P.) Balston died just six years later, the whole lot was bequeathed to his son Richard J. Balston, with provision for Richard E.P.’s youngest son, William, to receive £4000 a year from the company, but to not have any part its affairs, now thought to be caused by a family disagreement between the two brothers that went on for a generation. Richard Balston the younger (R.J.) had already been working under his father at the mill for some years, but frankly, paper-making was no his ‘thing’, and he was more interested in buying land and property, foreign travel, and bird watching. R.J. had the old family house at Springfield pulled down (though you can still make-out some of the tennis court and some garden statuary through the chain-link fence and undergrowth), and had the eminent architect Alfred Waterhouse (Natural History Museum, London was one of his) design a sumptuous new residence, the Springfield House that still stands, though now converted to very high quality offices. He also bought an estate at Bilsington Priory, just ‘inland’ of Romney Marsh, Great Buckland Farm on the other side of the River Medway, farmland at Mersham near Ashford, and fields further down river, known to some now as ‘Pepper Alley’, part of which became W & R Balston’s sports fields. In 1899, R.J. Balston also purchased Medway Mill, and its associated land, from Walter Monckton and his associates. R.J. had won a case in the High Court to get Medway Mill closed down because of the awful stench that came from the mill, and if the wind was in the right direction (which it generally was) caused the terrible stink to enter his new Springfield House, to such an extent that guests would retreat from the gardens and all the windows of the great house had to be closed, even in high summer. The cause of the dreadful sulphurous smell occurred when Medway was boiling old ships ropes (hemp), ships sails (coarse cotton canvas), and sacking (jute) to break-down the cellulose fibres, in order to make their paper, called ‘rope browns’ on a paper-making machine, for the shipping trade. The first thing that R.J. did when he bought the defunct mill for £15,000, was to scrap the stock-boilers, then to rip-out the paper-making machine, and convert the mill to produce the finest white hand-made printing and writing papers, as at Springfield Mill, giving a combined capacity of twenty-two working vats, the biggest hand-made enterprise in the land, if not the world. An unrecognised (at the time) problem with R.J. Balston’s property ‘empire’ was that it was all in his name. Thus, when he died in 1916, the company was thrown into turmoil, having been hit with a massive bill for death duties and the realisation that much of R.J.’s money had actually been gained on various mortgages. R.J.’s eldest son Reginald, was supposed to be his principal executor, but R.J.’s Will had also made provision that should his professional soldier son be out of the country on active duty at the time of his father’s death, then the next son, Charles would have to carry-out the Executor’s duties. With R.J.’s death happening half way through the First World War, of course Reginald was away on active duty, and although Charles was fighting in the Middle East, he somehow gained leave to return home and try and sort the problems out. And problems they were, not least that the local Bank had seized all of the family furniture as security against R.J. Balston’s massive over-draft! Charles had already been working at the Mill under his increasingly absent father for a few years, and was destined to run the business, especially as the older brother was more interested in soldiery and law, at both of which he led distinguished and heroic careers. It took years for Charles to sort-out the financial mess, selling-off the Bilsington Priory Estate, various pieces of land, and part of Great Buckland Farm, though it was not until 1921 that Charles managed to sell Springfield house (to Kent County Council) for a mere £22,000 – a fraction of what it had cost – and so clear the final mortgage for £6,100 at that time still secured against it. As for the paper-making business, in 1909 R.J. Balston had had the sense to convert the business to a limited company, but because he was principal share-holder at the time of his death, the banks put a lien on the business activities and Mills as well (the land that the Mills stood on was bequeathed to Charles in R.J.’s Will and couldn’t be touched by his creditors, and it was not until 1931 that Charles sold the land to the Company, for £1,929 = 17s = 10d!) Part-way through WW1 Balston’s started to make filter papers, at first by hand at Medway Mill, for the more technically demanding grades, and the more prosaic qualities on ‘borrowed’ machine time at, of all places, the Hollingworth’s Turkey Mill, but by this time the two families were good friends, and Turkey had to stop its own production because most of its men had signed-up for the war. There is controversy still about whose idea it was to start producing Whatman Filter Paper. Aside of The Kaiser (because until the out-break of hostilities Germany had been the main supplier of filter papers to Britain and the U.S.), the Balston family tradition has it that it was Charles’ younger brother, Maurice, who had the idea; the firm’s consulting chemists, a company called Cross and Bevan said it was their idea; and others are of the opinion that it was at the request of His Majesty’s Government, Cross and Bevan say it was their idea, and a firm of consultant chemists called Sindall and Bacon say that the Government asked them to find a mill to make filter paper and they chose Balston’s. Whoever initiated it, the manufacture of filter and scientific papers would one day save the mill from extinction. Some years after the Great War, (now Colonel) Charles thought it was crazy to use other mills’ capacity to make their papers, and in 1928-9 the first paper-making machine at Springfield was installed, a machine exactly modelled on Turkey Mill’s machine, which later took on the name ‘York’. This Fourdrinier machine ran in tandem with the hand-making of filter paper production at Medway Mill. Colonel Charles, now joined in the business by his younger brothers Maurice, and Francis (Mr Frank), now looked at the possibility of York producing their world renowned drawing, writing, and ledger papers too, but it was a disaster, and as any artist would have told them, nothing could match the genuine Whatman hand-made papers. However, while Colonel Charles had been investigating paper-making machines prior to 1928, he had met with another means of mechanical paper-making, the cylinder mould machine (invented by the great John Dickenson – Basildon Bond, Croxley Script - in the early 1800’s), so it was not long before Springfield became home to its first mould machine, Connaught. Like York, it had no drying capabilities to start with, and both machines took wet-lap paper through a separate ‘Spooner’ dryer, which for a few years they shared, until York was given its own drying cylinders. Initially Connaught made some of the ‘higher’ grades of filter papers, but Col. Charles soon tried it out for drawing papers, with such success that within just a few more years, the first Kent machine was installed, closely followed by Gloucester, with its two different width vats, and mould-made Whatman drawing papers became a success. So close in quality were they to the hand-made sheets still being made, that Balston’s were forced to include the words ‘Mould Made’ in their papers to stop unscrupulous suppliers passing them off as ‘the real thing’. York was constantly being improved and rebuilt, until, rather like Trigger’s Broom, it had had so many replacement parts - though it was still in theory the same York machine - that in the mid-1950’s it was completely rebuilt and became the York machine that was finally ‘closed’ in 2014. In a separate development, the 1930’s saw a demand for acid-washed filter papers for certain applications, and Francis Balston (Mr Frank, a qualified engineer) was tasked with creating ‘50 Plant’, which at first was made out of borrowed tin bathtubs and bicycle chains. Bit by bit the process and equipment was perfected, and worked so well that it stayed-put in ’50 Plant’ and operated in its ex-army shed until quite recently. Connaught and the original short Kent machine were decommissioned to make way for Edinburgh machine in the early 1950’s. Towards the end of that decade a narrow width experimental/development machine was installed, which later became a fully functioning commercial machine better known as Cornwall, the last of the machines to produce paper at Springfield. Modified cellulose products were a major growth spurt for the company from the mid-50’s onwards, and PMC (Project Modified Cellulose as it was initially called) became a major revenue stream. Col. Charles retired from the firm in 1953, aged 80 years, and died just four years later. It was that same year, 1957, that the Company decided to stop making paper by hand. In 1963 an equally difficult decision was made to stop production of all non-scientific papers, which had after all, become the mainstay of Balston’s business (including ‘Thimble’ production, initially at Medway Mill). For some reason that I have yet been unable to sort out, the company hit major financial difficulties in the early 1960’s, and it was only a merger with their long-term sole sales agency, H Reeve Angel, that saved the day, and Whatman Reeve Angel was born and the mill given a new lease of life. After a few years it became Whatman International Limited, and then the company became a Plc and was floated on the Stock Exchanges of London and New York, and the last of the Balstons (Mr Hugh) left the company. Now as a forward looking modern technological company, driven by the need for dividends for its shareholders, Whatman Plc diversified beyond recognition, and at sometime in this period one of the C.E.O.’s (and it had a succession of them) decided that other than the Whatman brand name, the new company wanted nothing to do with its past, and that all traces of its heritage were to be thrown out. Mercifully, some brave souls who got wind of this decision were on hand the day of the big clear out, and were at the bottom of the chute before the archives and library fell into the waste skip. They salvaged much of what I have spent the last five years trying to put back together. It has been rather like buying a second-hand jig-saw puzzle at a boot fair (whatever happened to jumble and rummage sales in village halls?) and finding half of the pieces missing! The new Whatman Plc grew like topsy and eventually caved in on itself, whole divisions had to be sold-off, and it looked very much like Springfield Mill was facing closure, yet again. Things were so bad that it seemed unlikely that the company would be in existence to celebrate its 200 years anniversary, so a decision was made to celebrate two-hundred years since William Balston bought his first piece of land that was to become Springfield Mill, in 2005 instead. Then the multi-national General Electrics Corp. of America took a look at the products that Springfield was making (filter, scientific, modified cellulose, DNA – you can probably extend the list much further than I) and saw that the mill and its products dove-tailed really well into what its Healthcare division were already making/operating in, and purchased the whole lot which not only saved the mill (and its staff) from execution, but for a considerable time, breathed new life into the place. But for G.E.’s intercession, what we are all facing now, would have happened maybe eight years ago. It would be wholly inappropriate, especially as an outsider, for me to comment on the why’s and the wherefores’ of G.E.’s eventual decision to pull the plug on Springfield, but I am sure that they only did so for the best of reasons, delayed making that decision for as long as possible, and have made every provision available for those of you that are having to find ‘pastures new’. MOULDS AND WIRES, a description of Laid and Wove The papermakers mould is constructed of mahogany and made slightly larger than the finished sheet of paper it is destined to create. It is held together using a unique type of ‘dovetail’ joint. Into the back of the mould pear-shaped pieces of pine are inserted during construction, the narrowest point of the ‘ribs’ as they are called, almost touching the level where the wire ‘cover’ will be placed. Each ‘rib’ is pre-drilled with tiny equidistant holes for sewing. Guide wires are fixed to the front of the mould in both directions so that the ‘vertical’ wires are strung atop where the narrower edge of the ribs are. Copper wire (or more rarely brass) is laid across the horizontal, and held in position with further vertical wires, fixing them together with a double twist to the guide wires beneath. Then after a gap of as little as a millimetre or so, another laid wire is placed, and the vertical wire run down and fixed with a double twist as before, and so on until the ‘cover’ is finished, slightly larger than the inside edge of the mould. The wires travelling cross-ways are individually laid, from whence the mould takes its name. The vertical wires being double twisted and then moved on to the next laid wire takes-on a much thicker form where they hold the laid wire, giving them the overall impression of a very fine chain, thus these are referred to as the ‘chain wires’. When this mesh is completed, the chain wires are sewn with wire to the ‘ribs’ through the pre-drilled holes mention previously. These ribs have two purposes: one, to support the wire mesh or cover on which the paper will be formed; and secondly, because of their shape, they help to drain the water from the layer of pulp that adheres to the face of the mould during the paper-making operation. The level surface formed during the vat-man’s labour, has indented lines on the underside of the sheet from contact with both laid and chain wires, where it is consequently fractionally thinner than the paper formed between them, thus when the finished paper is held to the light, these thinner places appear as lines, usually with the finer ‘laid’ lines running parallel with the short edge of the sheet, while the thicker wires make the paper just fractionally even thinner yet, and so present as more prominent lines at right angles to the laid lines in consequence, generally running top to bottom of the finished sheet of paper. Further, where the water has drained slightly more slowly down the supporting ribs than the unsupported areas between them, a type of shadow is formed which can be seen on both sides of the chain wire marks. The second, and equally important, part of the paper-makers mould is another wooden frame that sits snuggly over the top and grips the edges of the mould itself. Again, generally made of mahogany which remains stable after continuous dippings in the wet ‘stuff’, it is joined together at the corners with another type of joint, again unique to mould-makers. This second part is called the ‘deckle’ and is narrower in the inside edges than it is at the outer edges which are in fact deeper, in order to hold the deckle in place over the mould. The thickness of the inside edge of the mould is helpful to the Vatman to keep the level of the paper to a desired thickness, while the size of the opening of the mould dictates the size of the sheet of paper since it is only within its opening that the fibres form on the wire surface. The Vatman paper-maker holds the mould by the middle of the two short sides, over the vat of pulp and dips the bottom edge of the mould in the milk-like consistency ‘stuff’, then evenly and gently lowers the top end of the mould toward the surface of the stuff as he brings the mould closer and closer toward him in one smooth continuous movement, ‘scooping’ up stuff from the lower edge immersed by three or four inches. He should avoid allowing the far end of the mould to be completely immersed into the ‘stuff’ for this would set-up tremendous suction as he then lifts the mould with it cargo of paper-fibres and water, though this is less important with smaller moulds. When the ‘loaded’ mould is lifted out and to about chest height, the Vatman sends a gentle pulse of his energy toward the far end of the mould in the form of a wave, which allows for what he considers excess pulp to wash over that far end of the deckle and back into the vat. Immediately thereafter he gently shakes the mould from left to right to help the fibres interlock and so ‘close’ the surface of the sheet, now formed atop of the mould within the confines of the inside edge of the deckle. To the layman, the almost balletic movements of the Vatman are so smoothly and skilfully performed that some actions are almost imperceptible. The apprenticeship to become a paper-maker is seven long years, and it is not before the third year that an apprentice is allowed to try his hand at forming a sheet, and at least a further year before he is considered well enough trained, largely by observation, that he is allowed to practice the ‘art’ properly. Most parts of the skill can only be learned by watching and imitating the Master Paper Maker, and to begin with possibly as much as three-quarters of the apprentice’s sheets are so improperly made that they have to be returned to the vat for another try. One skill of the Vatman that we must touch upon again before moving on, is the Vatman’s ‘shake’. This is so skilfully done and so critical to the formation of the sheet of paper, that as just mentioned it can take years to perfect, and must be almost continually practiced, for once ‘lost’, either through injury, illness, or foul mood, it cannot be renewed or re-learned, and the days of that Vatman are over, and he moves down the skills-ladder to become a ‘Coucher’, at a slightly lower wage than that commanded by the highly skilled Vatman. There are apocryphal stories of where the ‘spirit’ of the Vatman is so broken should he lose his ‘shake’, that demoralisation befalls him and in time he walks away from the trade completely, a broken man! If we return to the making of the sheet, we see a skilled craftsman holding a two-piece wooden frame horizontally in the air, while water drains back into the vat, carrying with it excess fibres. The Vatman now hands the mould to another man, whilst retaining the deckle, which he places over a second mould exactly matching the first. Mould- sets should always consist of two moulds with one deckle. The reason for this is simply so that while another member of the ‘team’ performs the next stage in the act with the ‘loaded’ mould just handed to him by the Vatman, he (the Vatman) is able to continue his work in forming another identical sheet, which in turn is swapped for the former mould, then devoid of its sheet, and so on, the team working in perfect unison so that no single part of the process need delay another. The Vatman passes the mould complete with the newly formed sheet adhering to its surface to another man or boy (usually an apprentice) who slides it from the Vatman’s side of the vat to his own at right angles, along a wooden board or plank, called the ‘bridge’ and places it in a near vertical position on a wooden strut called the ‘ass’ (in a ‘short-handed’ crew it is the second most important man in the chain, known as the ‘Coucher’ who performs this task, which lasts but a few seconds). The Coucher takes the mould and turns it upside-down, and with a firm rocking action, transfers the newly formed sheet onto an oversized sheet of woollen felt. Thus, now devoid of the paper, the ‘empty’ mould is passed back to the Vatman who has made ready with the twin mould, and another sheet of paper has been formed ready to be ‘couched’ (from the French couché = to lay down.) The Coucher or another man (or boy apprentice Coucher) has meantime laid another over-size felt on the sheet of paper just ‘couched’ to make ready for the next sheet. When a quantity of the papers, with their interleaving sheets of felt, is deemed sufficient, the stack now becomes known as a ‘post’, and is moved off, either by the crew themselves or others, to a press where water is squeezed out of the sheets and felts, which as with the Vatman’s ‘shake’ helps to consolidate the fibres and form a cohesive sheet, which has inherited the surface texture of the pressed felts above and below it. To return briefly, but importantly, to the paper-making mould, we need to place on record the work done by one James Whatman the Elder. He it is that is perceived as being the inventor of two separate phases of mould production which separately or together made for smoother papers that we are used to seeing today, and were much in demand by the printers of his day (mid 1700’s) for smaller type and finer engravings. The wire lines of the laid mould not only created a watermark that could be seen when held to the light, they also made for a degree of what can only be described as corrugation on the bottom side of the sheet. After pressing the wet papers as described above, much of this unevenness of surface was removed, but it was still prominent enough to break-up the lines of ink that created either a small printed character (often presenting as missing ‘feet’ on a serif typeface) or the line of engraving of an illustration. Further, the shadow marks from the drainage ribs were quite prominent in some papers, and there was a need to solve this too. Whatman’s answer was to have his mould-maker create a two-tiered wire cover, separated by maybe 3mm (quarter of an inch). The lower one could be more basic, with fewer wires, and this was sewn intermittently onto the ribs. Then the cover proper was affixed to the edges of the mould frame, and the paper formed on that surface. This did away with the shadow marks, and by good fortune also made the lower surface of the sheet almost as smooth as the upper one. Moulds of this new type with a double wire are these days referred to as ‘modern’ moulds, while those single-faced moulds (which continued in use for years to come) being termed ‘antique’ moulds. Whatman’s second innovation was to use a pre-made ‘woven’ wire mesh instead of the usual laid wires for his top mould cover. This could only be achieved through the advancement in the process of metallurgy and wire drawing, creating wires of such fineness (and strength) that they could be used on a converted cloth-weaving loom, and a criss-cross mesh formed from the woven wires. When this mesh was used for the mould covers, the laid and chain wires no longer existed, and the finished sheet had a uniform appearance when held to the light, and once pressed, the perfectly smooth surface for fine printing. It is from this woven surface that the term ‘wove’ derives, for papers that did not have ‘laid’ wire-marks. These two innovations were quickly adopted by paper-makers throughout the land, and although it is not known by this writer whether Whatman tried to patent these improvements, such a patent would have been unenforceable, because within a few short years virtually all papers were made on ‘modern’ moulds of two layer constructions, and although there was still a strong demand for laid paper, many mills adopted Whatman’s wove covers, regardless of the expense of this new process of making what was effectively fine-weave cloth out of wire, that expense translating into a higher price for wove papers. Whatman, and later his son (also called James, and an equally important figure in paper-making history), also continually improved the operation and performance of beating engines, or ‘Hollanders’ as they became known, which will be discussed shortly. Almost three hundred years later, J.N. Balston (op.cit.) referred to the three innovations collectively as ‘the new technologies’, as they together formed a ‘watershed’ moment in British paper-making, with a ‘before’ product, and a markedly different ‘after’ product. |
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