BAKELITE AT BRACKLEY

Patricia Kingsbury 

When in 1939 Bakelite Limited evacuated their London Office, Brackley Lodge became its wartime base and Brackley, the small Northamptonshire market town, became the home of many of the staff and their families. 

HV Potter, the Managing Director, with his wife Amy lived in The Lodge stables, refurbished and renamed by him ‘The Dobbins’. Very near, up and down the High Street and its adjacent roads was a cluster of family names well-known in the earlier days of the plastics industry and its organizations: Sherwoods, Lassens, Lustys, Lowes, Coopers, and Markhams.  

Miss Winsten, HVP’s secretary and other women staff were in a ‘hostel’ in aneighbouring village. We (the Kingsbury family) lived next to the High School, our family extended by girls for whom the school dormitories had no more space. My grandfather J.E. Kingsbury, who was vice-chairman of the Company from 1928 to

1945 (and vice-chairman of the Damard Lacquer Company for the previous 18 years) stayed from time to time.

Company wives took a full part in local activities. The Women’s Institute numbers rose and volunteering benefited the Cottage Hospital and Mother and Baby Clinics. But one of Bakelite’s so-far unrecorded wartime efforts was the Wives Knitting Party, ably organised by Mrs Markham. They produced piles upon piles of grey and khaki gloves, balaclavas, socks, more socks and Merchant Navy socks of oiled wool, which you could smell a mile off. I can still smell it now as I write! 

The adjustments needed by Bakelite staff unaccustomed to living and working so closely together should not be underestimated, nor should the effect on a small town of the arrival of an established business into its own existing community, quite different from the community already there. 

Brackley today supports a number of small businesses, the population grows and Brackley Lodqe is now called Brackley Mews, billed in the developer’s brochure as ‘a sympathetic restoration and conversion of a Grade II listed buildings by the Living Heritage Group to provide for fourteen luxury dwellings’. I wonder if anyone ever told them about “The Dobbins”?  

Brackley Lodge, the wartime home of the Bakelite London office

 H V Potter, at the end of the war, unveiling the company’s Roll of Honour