Howard & Sons

GATEWAYS: THE STORY OF LAPORTE 1888 -1988 by H L Salter ARCS, BSc, DIC

The founder of the business was Luke Howard, born 1772 into the strong Quaker tradition of the family. Showing an early interest in chemistry, he was apprenticed at 15 to a pharmaceutical chemist (Olive Sims of Stockport), completed his indentures and set up as a retail chemist in Fleet Street in 1793. In 1797, Wm Allen of Plough Court and Plaistow took him into partnership. The company has always dated its inception from this point, as it was with Wm Alien that Luke began to manufacture chemicals on a commercial scale. The partnership lasted till 1807, when Alien continued at Plough Court the business, which developed into Alien & Danbury’s Ltd, while Luke carried on the commercial preparations as Luke Howard & Co. Just

before the partnership amicably dissolved, probably in 1805, Luke moved the small works from Plaistow to Stratford. His invaluable foreman, Joseph Jewell, formally became Luke’s partner in 1813, when the firm was renamed Howard, Jewell & Gibson. At that time, the work force under Jewell was 9 men, earning about four shillings for a 12-hour day, plus a liberal allowance of bread, cheese, beer and meat.

Before the end of the 18th century, the firm was producing commercial quantities of:

• Recrystallised borax from Tineal and from East Indian crude borax
• Succinic acid
• Silver nitrate
• Vitriolic Ether
• Pure aqueous ammonia
• Copper carbonate
• Potassium acetate Acetic acid
• Arsenic sulphide
• Oil of wine

Many of these products remained in the Howards range until well into the 20th century.

Ether was one of the most important products and when its use as an anaesthetic in surgery was demonstrated in 1846, the Howard product already had a high reputation for purity. In 1800, Luke Howard began to manufacture certain salts of bismuth, mercury and cobalt. In 1803, he first prepared citric acid and then potassium citrate, followed by tartaric acid, oxalic acid and oxalates.

In the early part of the 19th century, Luke Howard and Joseph Jewell concentrated much effort on the extraction of quinine from the cinchona alkaloids, developing methods, which had first been studied in France. Howard began production of quinine in 1823. By mid-century, it dominated all other manufacture, contributing more than half of the total sales. Howard went on to become one of the most important quinine makers in the world and framed a scientific contribution to the knowledge of cinchona, which was second to none. Quinine manufacture had been continuous for 105 years when, in 1942, Japanese occupation cut off crucial sources of cinchona bark. Although production was re-started 3 years later, natural quinine did not regain its pre-eminence and eventually gave way to synthetics. Other new products were not neglected.

By the 1830s, they included zinc and antimony salts, ethyl compounds, alkaloids and pharmaceutical iodides. For about I 5 years before this time, however, Luke Howard had begun to develop more actively his other interests outside chemical manufacture. He had long been fascinated by meteorology. His observations and writings on cloud formations originated terms such as ‘cumulus’, ‘cirrus’, ‘stratus’, which we still use and which earned him election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Goethe was keenly interested in this work and wrote two poems in Luke’s honour. In addition, Luke Howard, who had acquired familiarity with French and German by persistent evening study when he was an apprentice, became increasingly prominent in the activities of the Society of Friends and received accolades from the King of Prussia and the King of Saxony for his administration of Quaker relief in Germany. He died in 1864, aged 93, with a great reputation for unsparing effort, achievement and personal probity.

Luke Howard’s two sons, Robert Howard and John Eliot Howard, were apprenticed to the firm in 1816 and 1823 respectively. From about 1830, Luke progressively relinquished direct supervision of the factory to John Eliot, who became one of the world’s greatest quinologists. His publications on cinchona and its chemical constituents were standard works. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1874. Robert Howard was one of the first Fellows of the Chemical Society and was head of the company in 1871 when he died.

At John Eliot’s death in 1883, the partners were the three sons of Robert Howard – Col SH Howard, Theodore Howard and David Howard – and John Eliot’s own son, W Dillworth Howard – although, after Robert Howard’s death, Col SH Howard and John Eliot himself had retired from active participation in the management of the company. That role fell mainly to David and Dillworth, while Theodore was in charge of the office. David was responsible for factory management and chemical development. His work on the cinchona alkaloids was remarkable and consolidated Howards’ international reputation as producers of quinine. Moreover, he was a founder of both the Society of Chemical Industry and the Royal Institute of Chemistry. He died in 1916.

During the second half of the 19th century, the comp any had added to its range of products cocaine, caffeine, benzoic acid from gum, Epsom and Glauber’s salts and specially pure bicarbonate of soda. Later, benzoic acid was eliminated, in fact killed by competition from the synthetic product, and so was cocaine, as controlling regulations became ever more stringent. For a time, morphia was made on a small scale, but was dropped in the eighties. David Howard was assisted on the chemical side by three younger cousins, one of whom, Alfred G Howard (grandson of John Eliot Howard and son of Joseph Howard MP), entered the firm in 1880 and was made a partner in 1883. In 1888, David Lloyd Howard, eldest son of David Howard, joined the firm. He contributed a number of original papers to pharmaceutical journals; helped to establish the Association of British Chemical Manufacturers and was an original member of its council; helped to establish the Wholesale Drug Trade Association, of which he was a Trustee until his death; was one of the founders and first chairman of the Drug and Fine Chemical Manufacturers Association.

In 1903, the business was incorporated as a limited company. The changes in ownership and title to this point can be listed:
1797 – 1807 Alien & Howard
1807 – 1813 Luke Howard
1813- 1825 Luke Howard, Joseph Jewell & John Gibson*
1825 – 1831 Howard, Jewell, Gibson & Howard
1831 – 1841 Howard, Gibson & Co
1841 – 1858 Howards & Kent*
1858 – 1903 Howards & Sons
1903 – Howards & Sons Ltd
* Gibson and Kent were from the financing side.

Very soon after the firm’s centenary in 1897, it was decided to find a new site for the factory, as Stratford was unsuitable for expansion. A freehold area of 30 to 40 acres was bought at Ilford, convenient for railway and river communications. What became the site of the Howard works was, in the Iron Age, part of a hill fort or camp protected by earthworks and the marshy levels beside the River Roding. Covering at least 48 acres, Uphall Camp was the most southerly in Essex. After the Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD, the camp was occupied by Romanised Britons, relics of whose pottery, implements and coins appeared during excavations through the years. Little is known of the intervening history but one source has it that William the Conqueror garrisoned troops there when, at Christmas 1066, he visited Barking Abbey a mile to the south. When David Howard bought the site in 1898, most of the banking and ditches of the camp had been destroyed by ploughing and housebuilding. The only prominent part remaining was that shown in a 1926 photograph, the earthen mound called ‘Lavender Mount’ and about eighty yards of banking to the north of it.

Originally thought to have been part of the Iron Age earthworks, ‘Lavender Mount’ has been identified as dating from the 15th or 16th century and was probably named after a tenant of the farm then lying in the north-west corner of the site. During the winter of 1960-61, excavations were directed by Mr K Marshall of the Passmore Edwards Museum in Stratford with the West Essex Archaeological Group. These showed the mound to be superimposed on the banks of the original camp, in an area where double banks indicated a probable entrance to the fort. On top of the banks and just underneath the mound were also found the shaft and capital of a column, together with Tudor pottery. At the 16th century dissolution of the monasteries, the farm, the property of Barking Abbey, was, together with Stratford Langthorne Monastery in East London, sold for £398 6s 8d. Attached to the farm was a magnificent timber and thatch Tithe Barn, the largest of its type in Essex. The buildings were retained on the Howard site until, during the Second World War, they were irretrievably damaged during a VI rocket attack. The barn had to be demolished and, although the repair of the farmhouse was attempted, this too had to be taken down in 1953. Finally, as the Howard works expanded in the north-west quarter of the enclosure, the farm stables which the company had used until
then as a store, were removed in 1962 and, at about the same time, ‘Lavender Mount’ was levelled to make way for the cyclohexyl phthalate plant.

The transfer from Stratford, starting in 1898, was gradual and still incomplete at the outbreak of war in 1914, although by then the office, warehouses and some plant were installed at Ilford. A large part of the company’s resources, both financial and human, being pre-empted by the move, few developments in existing products and processes took place in this period, although a tableting department had been set up in 1903.

The war, although it led to absence and deaths in the Howard family and among key workers, stimulated the introduction of new lines, notably Aspirin, which had been a permanent monopoly until Howards began to manufacture it in 1916. By 1919, output of tables had risen to 10 mpa. Production of established products also sharply increased, especially of quinine.

In 1919, the company established a separate department devoted wholly to research. JW Blagden PhD, MSc, and FIC, whose work, particularly on catalytic hydrogenation, took the company into wholly new fields, headed it. Until that time, products had been pharmaceutical and quite largely inorganic. Dr Blagden led the Company into industrial organic chemicals, solvents, plasticisers and intermediates – used eventually in a variety of industries, including paint and varnish, textiles, plastics, rubber, leather, laundry and dry cleaning, soap, polishes etc.

Through the 20th century, the importance of the Howard traditional products fell away, as other specialised pharmaceutical companies grew and as synthetics supplanted materials of natural origin. Production swung toward the technical organics such as phthalic anhydride, cyclic alcohols, ketones, esters, amines and resins. This was broadly the position when Laporte acquired Howards in 1961.