[6][7] Manchester-born William Vansittart Bowater trained as a manager with James Wrigley and Sons, a paper making business based in Manchester.

It expanded into large-scale dealing in waste paper, including the export of surplus newspapers to the Far East to enable their protection during shipping of tea plants.

But after Thomas became Lord Mayor of London in 1913, the company was left to be run by his younger brothers, who expanded the business internationally.

After the need to redesign the plant proposed by Armstrong Whitworth, eldest grandson Eric Bowater was put in charge of the project to select new secondary contractors.

[8] At the outbreak of the Second World War, the British government restricted the import and consumption of wood and other products used to create pulp, resulting in an 80% reducing in the companies pre-War UK output.

From 1940, Eric Bowater himself was seconded by William Morris to join his team at Ministry of Aircraft Production, for which he was knighted in 1944.

After buying Acme Corrugated Cases Ltd in 1944, Bowater began to organise the companies interests into a series of wholly owned subsidiaries.

[13] Consuming huge amounts of capital, the company had failed to invest in its newsprint production, leaving it with a high cost base which was added to by the opening of Bowater House, a new head office in Knightsbridge.

UK and North American newsprint was unwound, with the loss of 300,000 tons of annual production and the closure of the Northfleet mill.

[14] However three years later, in 1987, the company acquired Rexham Corporation, a manufacturer of plastic, paper and foil, based in North Carolina.

[16] In 1995, the name was changed to Rexam,[17] an abbreviation of the name of one of the Company's subsidiaries, Riegel Paper America, and the business was refocused again – this time into consumer packaging.