Briwax

No I hadn't heard of it either until I got the call to go work there a few years ago.

It's funny how something on the TV triggers a memory. I was watching a programme today that involved making reproduction antique furniture and the craftsman was painting then using a rag to apply some dark gunk to a pice of furniture. Something clicked and I thought "Briwax. He's using Briwax".

I honestly thought I'd written something about every job I'd ever done and here was another one. I did a couple of spells working for a firm that made a specialist wax polish for wooden furniture. I can't remember much about the first spell. It was in Kettering in their old factory which was sited in a residential area of the town, and had been there for years and years.
When Kettering expanded from the 1880s onwards it was because of the coming of the railway. They'd always made boots and shoes in Kettering. What held them back was the poor roads, making it time consuming and expensive to export. In Northampton it was just possible to use the river to get to the sea. That was before the canals linked everywhere to everywhere else, cutting the cost of transporting raw materials and finished product to the market place.
The coming of the railways and the huge stride in technology brought the price down even further. When the streets of terraced houses were built there was a brick built outhouse at the bottom of each garden and a lot of the shoe making was carried out there. Somewhere along every street there was a large building- a shoe factory where the locals would all work. Most people walked or cycled. Work was no more than a couple of hundred yards away and there was a shop on every corner. While Northampton became the centre for shoe making, Kettering was famous for boots, including army boots. Boots that were exported to every corner of the empire.

In the midst of all this Victorian street layout a chemical company set up to make this wax polish and carried on quietly for many years. Eventually the rise of the health and safety brigade, plus the inconvenience of bringing lorries into residential areas began to tell, and the firm moved to an industrial estate in Corby, which was where I was sent to work about a dozen or so years ago.

I was involved in the packing end of the production line, although I did work in other areas. The various ingredients were mixed and heated until they formed a liquid. I would then load the belt with empty tins and the liquid wax was poured into them. The tins then travelled along the belt, through a cooling tunnel and then to where I was standing ready to put the lids on and clean any splashes from the outside.
I was having some building work done at home and the firm kindly let me have a dented tin for free. My studio now has some nicely waxed dado rails and architraving.

I'm not sure what the complete list of ingredients were, I seem to remember one of them was toluene. My "O" level chemistry taught me that that was potentially very flammable, so it was no surprise to read in the paper a few years later that there had been a huge fire and explosion at this factory and that it had smashed every window across a huge area, leaving a nice hole in the ground where I once spent a happy week temping.