Fourth PHS Plaque

On Wednesday October 8th about 15 members of the PHS, including Glen Beall and his wife from the US, gathered outside Banstead Court, Green Lanes, Hackney to celebrate the contribution that Thomas Hancock had made to the world we live in today,

We were particularly pleased to welcome two great great great nephews of the great man - Frank (back row) and Prof. Tom James (middle row); his great great great niece (their sister) Liz (front right) and their cousin, also a great great great niece of Thomas, Lorna Ferrari, (front left) who had travelled from Toronto especially to be with us on the day. Thomas never married so there is no more direct line than that leading from his nieces and nephews who moved in with him on the death of their own father in 1835

Our Chairman introduced John Loadman who described the problems in identifying the site of Thomas’ residence when the house no longer existed and how an e-mail by Lorna’s brother, David Eustace, to the Plastiquarian.com web site’s ‘visitors book’ had set him on a trail which included Frank and Tom James, documents held by the family and Hackney archives. Eventually the trail led to Banstead Court, a block of flats built by the LCC in 1945 after Hancock’s house had been demolished.

He described Hancock’s contribution to the world we live in today with particular reference to his invention of the ‘pickle’ or masticator in 1820. This machine gave him a homogeneous mass of rubber from an assortment of bits of rubber scrap which could then be shaped, mixed with other materials and much more easily dissolved than the virgin rubber then available. Rubber technology had arrived and Hancock, together with his subsequent partner, Charles Macintosh, took advantage of it.

Some 20 years later Hancock was to realize that rubber heated with sulphur would change its properties, no longer suffering from the two problems which had beset it for years (turning sticky in the heat and brittle in the cold) but remaining strong and elastic over a wide range of operating conditions. Vulcanization had been discovered. Hancock patented his discovery before Charles Goodyear, who had been carrying out parallel work in the States, got round to so doing and the world would never be the same again!

John then introduced Professor Tom James who frightened his audience by producing about 20 pages of A3 typescript which turned out to be a memoir written by his father describing his visits to the house in the last decade of the 19th century. He quoted (selectively) from the memoir to evoke a fascinating picture of the house and the lifestyle of those who lived there until it became empty in 1909 and was finally demolished after a V2 rocket landed close-by on January 10th 1945. He highlighted his tour of the house with a description of Hancock’s the steel-doored laboratory on the ground floor (not as Charles Slack wrote in “Noble Obsession” in the attic) with a private staircase to his bedroom so that he could get on with his work should an idea wake him in the night and Tom capped this by producing the actual lock from the door which Hancock used to guard his privacy (or was it an early attempt at H&S?).

Percy Reboul proposed a vote of thanks and we adjourned to a near-by café for light refreshments and further discussions. It was universally agreed that a most enjoyable and educational afternoon was had by all, both relatives and PHS members - and it didn’t even rain!