Plasticine

My earliest school days were spent in a tiny village school in rural Hampshire. This was in 1955. I have a strong recollection of a big Victorian classroom with windows that were too high for us to see out of, which was a disappointment for many of us, especially the boys. There was a railway line behind the school where steam trains of all colours and types chugged past and we tried to get a look at every one of them.

I suspect that all of the infant schools in the country had the same frieze showing the letters of the alphabet with colour pictures; A is for apple, B is for ball; and on to the inevitable zebra. Those high-walled Victorian classrooms seemed to have been designed with such a frieze in mind. We used to copy each letter with chalk onto a wood-framed slate and then hold it up for the teacher to inspect. She wore a dusty apron and carried a big cloth that she used to wipe the slate clean. If your work was satisfactory (mine seldom was) you could do the next letter, otherwise you had a to do the first one again. I suspect there was a group of us who were still practicing “a” at the end of the year. The only other educational aid that I remember was Plasticine, which I loved.

School Plasticine came in bulk-packs of a suspicious brown colour (at least, I hope it was Plasticine). I later found that, if you bought the colour packs, you could mix them all together to get a grey-brown colour that seemed about right to me. We were usually served potato sized lumps from an old biscuit tin and we had wooden boards to roll it on and wooden tools to work it with. Plastics hardly existed in our world at that time.

I was reminded of all this on a recent visit to Bath. We stayed in a cottage by the Kennet and Avon Canal at Bathampton. It is a beautiful spot where the canal, road and river all funnel through a tight valley, surrounded by wooded hills and meadows. All the buildings around us were old, including an ancient pub, a mill, warehouses, workers’ cottages and some posh houses. The only exception was a block of modern retirement apartments just downstream of us on the canal bank. This turned out to be the site of the Plasticine factory that burned down in 1963. I wanted to know more.

The man who invented Plasticine was William Harbutt who lived in Bath but later moved to the Grange (or “Ye Grange”) in Bathampton High Street. Today you can rent a part of the house as a holiday cottage. The factory was built in 1900 between the house and the canal and Bathampton was the only place in the world where Plasticine was made until they moved the business to Thailand in 1983.

The fire of 1963 was a disaster and led to a very well documented legal dispute that the Harbutt Company eventually won, but it took seven years. It seems that the fire was the fault of a contractor from the Wayne Tank and Pump Company who made an unsafe installation of a poorly insulated plastic pipeline that was connected to a faulty thermostat. Lord Denning awarded the full costs of building the new factory and recompense for the company’s lost profits due to the closure while a new factory was built nearby.

But what of the man himself? William did not start out as a businessman. He was an art teacher  from North Shields who had moved to Bath for his work where he became head of the local art school. He eventually had his own school which he ran with his wife Bessie, who was quite a famous artist herself. When he taught sculpture he needed a substitute for clay that was easy to work an did not dry out between workings. After experimenting with all kinds of ingredients, he came up with a secret formula of salts and oils that did the trick and was not toxic or particularly smelly. In my experience, the only issue with it was that it became very soft when warm and very hard when cold, but this could be an advantage too. The factory fire sadly demonstrated the fact that, if you heat it up enough, Plasticine becomes flammable.



Apart from a material for teaching sculpture, William soon found that his product could be used for educational play, for moulding, casting and lots of other things, but he could have had no idea just how well it would sell and how many applications it would have. One of my favourite uses was to press toys into it to make a mould and then cast them with Plaster of Paris, but the BBC found an even more creative way to use it. I think that the loveable character “Morph” who appeared on TV in the 1977 was the first stop-animation use of Plasticine and it led to many more characters, such as “Wallace and Gromit”, made at the Ardman Studio’s in Bristol, just down the road.

William Harbutt travelled widely, not just to promote Plasticine but also his theories about the teaching of art by allowing children free expression. That is the thing that I am really grateful for and it heartens me to find that my favourite product (until the invention of there Airfix kit) was made by a proper artist and educator and not just some Victorian industrial toff. He became a local councillor, but was not rewarded with any title, which I am sure would have happened today. He and Bessie had seven children, six of whom survived infancy and worked in the family business. He died of pneumonia while on a trip to New York in 1921.