Price's Candles

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Price's Candles, founded in 1830, is an importer and retailer of candles headquartered in Bedford, England. The company holds the royal warrant of appointment for the supply of candles and is one of the largest candle suppliers in the United Kingdom.

In 1840, Price's stearin 'composite' candles, produced from a mixture of refined tallow and coconut oil, gained prominence around the time of Queen Victoria's wedding. Traditionally, households would burn a candle in their front room windows on the evening of a monarch's wedding.

Price's Patent Candle has maintained a longstanding association with the Royal Family. The launch of their composite candle coincided with the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, initiating an ongoing royal connection. Price's Patent Candle has held the royal warrant—either in its name or through its subsidiaries Francis Tucker and Charles Farris—since the 1850s. Currently, it holds the royal warrant^[1] in its name for Her Majesty the Queen. The status as a warrant holder means that it supplies candles for all royal state occasions—coronations, weddings, lyings-in-state, and funerals.

There was a potential market in England for a mid-priced candle that gave a brighter, cleaner light than tallow, but was not as expensive as beeswax. William Wilson and his partner discovered a new raw material and a scientific process in 1830 that allowed them to manufacture such a candle. The firm they set up, Edward Price and Co., would make candles from coconut. Wilson took out a license on an 1829 patent for the hydraulic separation of coconut fats. The partners built a candle factory at Vauxhall on the Thames in South West London, a crushing mill just upriver at Battersea, and invested in 1,000 acres of coconut plantation in Sri Lanka. The initial results were not very successful, but the infant company had a couple of good breaks: in 1831 the candle tax was abolished and by 1835 it had developed better chemical processes to obtain solid fats.

In the 1820s a French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, published his research on fatty acids. By mixing a strong alkali with vegetable or animal fats he discovered that the solution separated into liquid and solid components. This technique, known as saponification, was already used by soap makers, but nobody had employed it for candle manufacture. William Wilson's son, George, experimented with this process by adding a further distillation using a vacuum or high-pressure steam he improved Chevreuil's chemistry. Price's were now able to refine tallow and vegetable oils to produce a harder, pure white fat called stearin. Candles made from this burned brightly without smoke or smell. The same method could also be applied to a range of raw materials that had previously been unusable—skin fat, bone fat, fish oil, and industrial waste greases were all rendered into hard white candles.

Another of George Wilson's innovations allowed Price's to use a second overlooked tropical product—Palm oil, extracted from the palm nut, harvested and processed in West Africa. Soap makers were already using the oil but its dark orange-brown colour made it unattractive for candle-making. Wilson invented a process for cleaning palm oil with sulfuric acid and a new cheap source of fat was available. There was an additional advantage to using palm oil. The region that produced the oil—present-day Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo—was also the centre of the African slave trade. Slavery had been abolished in Britain and its colonies by 1833,^[2] but a huge and lucrative market for African slaves continued in the United States, Brazil, and Arabia. Palm oil provided an economic alternative to the slave trade and was actively encouraged by the British government. Slavery had become immensely unpopular in Britain and 'politically correct' products like Price's palm oil candles and non-slave-produced sugar were very popular. In 1847, when Edward Price and Co became Price's Patent Candle, the new joint stock company considered its ethical use of palm oil so significant that it became the basis for the company's seal which depicted Africans bringing calabashes of palm oil to a seated Britannia figure under a palm tree.

In 1840, the company employed 84 staff. By 1855, with two factories in London and one in Bromborough Pool, this figure had risen to 2,300 of whom 1,200 were boys. To a Victorian factory owner, child labour was logical and attractive: it was cheap, flexible, and in some cases carried out intricate tasks that adults were incapable of. At Price's Patent Candle nightlights and candle packaging were "turned out by the deft fingers" of its child employees. William had worked for the London Missionary Society in his youth and his son James was an earnest and evangelical Christian, so James was so concerned for the well-being of his child employees that in 1849 he had set up a Christian society at the factory. Each boy was given his "own drawer with lock and key in which to keep his own testament, prayer book, hymn book, arithmetic book, slate and copy book". Boys were encouraged to attend a religious service in the factory in the morning and to go to the factory school in the evening; they were rewarded with games of cricket and outings in the summer. James's religious and education programme was radical for its time - it was most unusual for a factory owner to be treating his workers in such a way. Other examples of this attitude were the free breakfasts and suppers for night shift workers and warm baths for the boys.

Price's attitude was an enduring one that continued beyond the Wilson family. The company sought to build good quality housing for its workers in London but could not buy any land. However, the Wirral factory at Bromborough Pool—"our colony on the Mersey"—was a green field site. Here Price's eventually built a village of 147 houses with church, institute, shop and library for its workforce of "come downs" (the Battersea families who migrated to the new factory). This model village was an inspiration to other employers, and the idea was used at Lever's Port Sunlight factory adjacent to Bromborough in the 1880s and by Cadbury's Bournville village in the 1890s. Other examples of the company's approach to its employees included the introduction of a profit-sharing scheme for all staff in 1869 and a contributory employees' pension in 1893—the first scheme in the country to include floor workers.

William Wilson's other son, George, had become a company chemist and with his assistant George Gwynne, was responsible for many of these new chemical processes. The company acquired a reputation for innovation and it generally had first refusal to work on any newly patented inventions. As well as industrial chemistry there was the development of mass production processes. In 1849, they installed a system that moved candle moulds around the factory on a railway. By 1864 a new method of ejecting candles from moulds using compressed air pushed candle production to 14 tons a day. A decade later increased mechanisation allowed Price's Patent Candle to produce 32 million nightlights a year.

Price's Patent Candle processes for producing stearin gave them a commercial edge over those competitors who were still making ordinary tallow candles. However, the saponification and distillation processes that Price's Patent Candle used required two and a half times the quantity of raw material.

One of the products separated out by saponification was a liquid fat called oleine, which was separated from the stearin by compression. Wilson discovered that it could be used as a light lubricating oil and marketed it to English woollen and cotton manufacturers as a cloth oil for mechanical looms where it quickly replaced olive oil. This was the first of a range of lubricating oils that Price's Patent Candle would go on to develop. By experimenting with the heavy waste oil and by blending these mineral oils with animal and vegetable oleines, Price's Patent Candle developed a range of specific lubricants for rifles, sewing machines, bicycles, steam engines and gas engines.

For the first 30 years of the 20th century Price's Patent Candle dominated this market; their Huile de Luxe and 'Motorine' were major products. As early as 1902 an attempt to drive to the South Pole was made using a car lubricated by Price's Oils as were, more successfully, the Norton motorbikes that won at Le Mans in the 1920s. From 1906 and for 30 years after all Rolls-Royce's new cars were sold supplied with Motorine oil—the Rolls-Royce of lubricants for the Rolls-Royce of cars. In 1928, Price's Patent Candle received the Royal Warrant from The Prince of Wales for their motor oils.

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By 1900, Price's Patent Candle was producing 130 differently named and specified sizes of candle, any one of which could, in theory, be manufactured in 60 different permutations of material, colour, and hardness; the company regularly held 2,000 different standard candle products in stock. Candles were created for many needs: carriages, pianos, dining rooms, bedrooms, servants' bedrooms (that only lasted 30 minutes), and photographic darkrooms. They also made "The Burglar's Horror!" nightlight (to be lit in every front and back window and designed to scare off criminals) and candles for coal miners, the navy, engineers, and emigration ships. To compete with other sources of light, the design of the candles were changed. Tapered Venetians, spirals, flutes, and candles with self-fitting ends in many colours replaced the utilitarian white, cylindrical products of the mid-century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Price's Patent Candle designed 'Art-Deco' candles and coordinated candlesticks as a luxury range and appealed to the growing children's market with Noah's Ark nightlight holders, birthday cake candles, and a range of Walt Disney candle merchandise.

In 1910, Price's Patent Candle acquired its first overseas factories in Johannesburg and by 1915 the company owned six factories in South Africa, Shanghai and Chile. Price's Patent Candle went on to construct factories in Rhodesia, Morocco, Pakistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

After its interlude as a public company, Price's Patent Candles became a privately owned business. Turnover increased five-fold between 1991 and 1998, and the company is once again the largest British-owned candlemaker with over 300 employees. In 2001 Price’s Patent Candles^[3] relocated their headquarters to Bedford, Bedfordshire, incorporating a warehouse where they remain today. 2003 saw the acquisition of Price’s Patent Candle by the Italian-owned company Sgarbi which in turn sold on to another Italian company SER^[4] in 2004. The majority of Price’s Patent Candle candle manufacturing is now done at SER’s headquarters in Turin with the sales and distribution both nationally and internationally still coordinated from Bedford.

In a consumer-led market where 80% of candle sales are now purely decorative, the company has focused on new ranges of perfumed and essential oil candles and aromatherapy products.

Price’s Candles won best display stand at a 2019 Home Hardware trade show.^[5]

• Price's Candles website