W. H. Burford & Son

W. H. Burford and Son was a soap and candle-making business founded in Adelaide in 1840 by William Henville Burford (1807–1895), an English butcher who arrived in the new colony in 1838. It was one of the earliest soapmakers in Australia, and up to the 1960s when it closed, the oldest. Its expansion, (in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, at the hands of son William Burford) accompanied by a number of takeovers, made it the dominant soap manufacturer in South Australia and Western Australia. Its founders were noted public figures in the young city of Adelaide.

W. H. Burford and Son was in turn taken over by J. Kitchen & Sons, who became Lever & Kitchen, part of the British Lever Brothers empire, which in 1930 merged with Dutch Margarine Unie to form the multi-national Unilever.

W. H. Burford's first factory was on the corner of Grenfell Street and East Terrace, later the site of an Adelaide Electric Supply Company's building, (AESC became the Electricity Trust of S.A. – ETSA – in 1946) and in 1989, the Tandanya aboriginal cultural centre. Initially it was little more than a tin shed staffed by half-a-dozen workers. During one of the recessions that faced the colony, Burford was forced to sell the land then lease it back to keep the business running.

The second factory, opened in 1900 at Sturt Street, previously owned by competitor Tidmarsh & Co, occupied 4 acres of floor space ( 19,000 sq yards / 16,000m² / 1.6 hectares ) and employing over 200 men. Its most salient feature was the brick chimney – 152 ft 4in (46.5m) in height and a flue diameter of 4 ft (1.2m), and still standing (though no longer used). The boiler room housed four boilers, one of which was 27 ft long and 7 ft 6in in diameter (8.2m x 2.3m) and the largest to have been built in South Australia. The still-room had six large stills: four for distillation of stearine and two for glycerine. The building was organised so that manufacture started on the top floor and progressed by chutes or conveyors to the second floor for wrapping and packaging, thence to the ground floor, all with a minimum of handling. The smell emanating from the Sturt Street factory, despite installation of deep drainage, was the source of much complaint from neighbours.

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