Croydon 15th August 1940: the Bourjois factory and the rest of the factory estate

What happened at Bourjois?

Bourjois made soaps and scents, including the famous “Evening in Paris”.  This webpage:

http://theglamourologist.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/cosmetics-and-world-war-two.html

gives more details of the impact of the war on the cosmetics industry.

Bill Whitehead was an apprentice at Bourjois.  As he left work on that Thursday evening,  he spoke to the commissionaire and they could see the German planes.  Bill remembered saying, “I don’t like the look of those” and the other man replied “Neither do I, you’d better get off home, son.”  Within minutes the commissionaire had been killed by machine gun bullets. (quoted in Cluett et al, pages 73-74)

Cluett et al suggest the first bomb hit Bourjois, instantly killing three of the four soap millers, including Georgie Beard who was the night foreman of the soap department.  The only survivor among the millers was Johnny Potts “who suffered a broken neck when a milling machine fell on him, and permanent deafness from the blast” (page 73).

Harvey Bennette was a messenger boy, seemingly working at the hospital (he says he saw the clouds of smoke and then heard the explosions, so he must have been some way away) and went with the first ambulances to arrive.  They went to Bourjois.  “[T]he tanks that held the cosmetic substances had burst – and the smell was quite, quite appalling.  Some people, thinking it was gas, put on their gas masks.  I saw some legs under a machine.  I thought, ‘Oh, must get that fellow out ...’ and he was pulled out from under the machine, covered in dust and debris. There was no blood. He hadn’t been cut at all. But he was dead.”  (quoted in Levine "For gotten Voices of the Blitz and the battle of Britain"). 

The most likely match for Johnny Potts is John Putt (b 12.7.10) whose occupation in the 1939 Register was “Miller, soap works (heavy work)”.  He lived at 6 Morslea Road, Penge with his wife of just over a year.  Lilian (nee Claydon) gave her occupation as “Stamper, soap works (heavy work)”.

In general the wounded outnumbered the dead by about three times and many workers would have left the scene either physically injured or struggling to come to terms with what had happened.  Some of them left eyewitness accounts, but by chance we have a photo of one survivor of Bourjois, Ivy Gatland and a glimpse of her life can be obtained from this webpage:

https://www.kenleyrevival.org/content/new-contributions/flight-sergeant-d-h-leason-letters-home-1940

A now-defunct webpage suggests Florence May Goodman (b 25.12.21, soon to become Poulton) and her future sister-in law Beatrice Vera Horder (b 18.3.21) were also present at Bourjois:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/vademecum/tree/info/h01.htm

Using the facility on the Find My Past website to search the 1939 Register on keywords, there were several hundred people living in the Croydon area in 1939 who gave their occupation as working in the soap or perfume industry – many of these would have been at Bourjois and the other survivors could be identified through that source.

 

Elsewhere on the factory estate

Bill Whitehead remembered a bomb falling outside the Hatcham Rubber Company and blowing him flat on his face.  Another bomb fell near the Day and Night Café where Bill had taken refuge, causing the counter to fall on him (Cluett page 74).

The Central Electricity Generating Board stores were damaged when a bomb fell outside Bourjois, just across the road (Cluett page 74).

The only exception was the Government Training Centre where CWGC says that one man was killed; this was on Stafford Road (Cluett page 77).  This mysteriously named location was difficult to find but Hansard, the account of proceedings in Parliament, for Thursday 2^nd May 1935 says, “Training Centres … at which selected men from the scheduled depressed and certain other areas are given a six months' intensive course in a trade.”  This reminds us the 1930s were times of large-scale unemployment, hence government run re-training centres.