Gossage

When conditions returned to normal post war, the Gossage brand was not revived by Unilever though the company name is still registered for legal purposes.

The online 'Times Index' shows meetings of the Gossage company board until the early 1960s.

[citation needed] William Gossage (1799–1877) was the founder of the dynasty and the youngest of 13 children.

Around the same year of 1830, he set up partnership with Mr Farndon to form the British Alkali Works at Stoke Prior, Worcestershire.

The process involved the use of coal, limestone, salt and sulphuric acid, which produced copious quantities of hydrogen chloride.

Gossage left Stoke Prior for Birmingham in 1841, where he entered the white lead trade.

Examples are patents 826 and 908, for firming up the soap with the addition of 'wheat flour or other farinaceous substance', or 'finely divided china clay or flints'.

Patent 908 also extended protection to silicated soaps made by the cold process (saponification without the addition of external heat).

Gossage's response was to produce their own similar soap, also wrapped, branded and advertised.

By 1932, Lever Bros had joined with the Margarine Union of the Netherlands to form Unilever.

So, rationalisation meant the closure of the Widnes plant, and concentration of soap production at Port Sunlight.

The factory was demolished, save for the office buildings, which lay derelict for many years.

The waste ground near the Gossage Buildings formed the site of the Spike Island Festival of 1990.

The first successful user of the process, James Muspratt in Liverpool, was forced from Everton due to complaints by neighbours.

This was one reason why the early alkali makers set up in then remote spots such as Widnes, which they thought would be distant from litigious neighbours.

In experiments at Stoke Prior, Gossage discovered that surface area, not volume, was the key to absorption (it is likely that he collaborated with Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, who came to the same conclusion at about the same time in 1820s-1830s).

An early example of a packed bed, this made for a great surface area of water, able to absorb over 90% of the noxious gas.