Henry Pochin

Henry Davis Pochin
Etching by P. A. Rajon after W. W. Ouless
Born	1824
Died	1895
Nationality	United Kingdom
Occupation	Chemist and industrialist
Political party	Liberal
Spouse(s)	Agnes Heap
Children	two

Henry Davis Pochin (1824–28 August, 1895) was an English industrial chemist. He invented a process that enabled white soap to be made and a means of using china clay to create better quality paper. He owned several china clay mines and a mine at Tredegar in South Wales, and was briefly a Liberal Member of Parliament. His wife was Agnes Pochin who was a leading suffragist.

Pochin was born on 25th May 1824 in Wigston. He attended the United Reform church in Wigston. He was the son of a yeoman farmer of Leicestershire who served an apprenticeship to James Woolley (1811–1858), a manufacturing chemist in Manchester. In 1852 he married Agnes Heap at the Unitarian Church in Manchester. In time Pochin became James Woolley's partner. Woolley died in 1858 and Pochin kept a manuscript diary of the illness, treatment and death of his partner. On Woolley's death Pochin became the sole proprietor.

Pochin is noted for two important inventions. Firstly, he developed a process for the clarification of rosin, a brown substance used to make soap, by passing steam through it so that after distillation it came out white, thus enabling the production of white soap. He sold the rights to this process to raise money to exploit his second invention, which was a process using ammonium sulfate and alumina as a low cost alternative to alumstone in the production of alum cake used in the manufacture of paper.

The process required china clay, and Pochin bought several china clay mines in Cornwall for this purpose. In time H. D. Pochin & Co. became one of the three largest British producers of china clay until they were acquired in 1932 by the English China Clays along with the second largest producer, Lovering, to form English China Clays Lovering Pochin & Co. Ltd (ECLP), with both Lovering and Pochin remaining shareholders. ECLP kept this name until it was able to buy the shares from the Lovering family and Pochin family. ECLP was restructured, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the newly formed English China Clays group. ECLP was split up into four divisions; ECC construction materials, ECC quarries, and ECC transportation, and ECC international. ECC transportation was later merged into ECC international. Later the company divested all but two of its divisions, ECC International and ECC quarries. In 2000, the English China Clays group and its subsidiaries was bought by Imetal SA, which changed its name to Imerys. Imerys has kept ECC International subsidiary as its speciality china clay producing division under that name, even though it does not use that name or division logo, which have been replaced by the Imerys name and logo. Imerys is now the world's largest china clay producer.