Brasso, the thin, burnished yellow liquid metal polish became a global household name and made door knockers, tableware and brass buttons and cap badges of First World War soldiers shine. It was developed in 1905 by Reckitt & Sons in Hull, and its familiar canister of red, white and blue, capped with red, holds many forgotten or untold stories. One begins as a droplet and, as I rub away layers of stubborn surface history, glints of the wartime women in my family and our city emerge beneath.

Already I have connected with my late-grandmother, Olive May Bertholini, through traces left behind (see blog posts Unfolding Hankies and Where Were You?). Now, a canister of Brasso and inky scrawls on a Census, help me uncover more of her wartime life. I follow 15-year-old Olive May as she wraps a woollen shawl around her ankle-length cotton apron. She pulls on worn black boots over long stockings and walks through the terrace streets of East Hull to the Reckitt’s factory.

She is one of many ‘Canister Girls’ who, from as young as 14, made up the majority of the factory’s workforce, turning flat sheet metal into canisters for Brasso and other cleaning products. There was Reckitt’s Blue which, on wash days, whitened tablecloths, sheets and tea towels, and gluey, slippery Robin Starch which freshened shirt collars, nightdresses and knickers.

But when war comes in 1914 the company’s Quaker owners, who did not make combative goods and munitions, began supplying petrol tins for the Armed Forces and canisters for gas masks. For its soldiers returning from the front, the Canister Works also made wristlet watches, although not every fellow worker returned. More than a thousand young men left the factory floors to fight and 153 were killed. Each November, a private Remembrance service gathers around the war memorial fountain, a stone sculpture of a woman with dead youth at her feet, symbolising ‘Sacrifice’ . 

The history of the Reckitt’s male factory workers in wartime is well-documented. As is the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) hospital for sick soldiers established in the work’s social hall. At sewing and knitting centres volunteers made scarves, belts, mittens and sandbags for the soldiers at the front. A few homes, at a new village the firm had created for its workers and to ease overcrowding in the surrounding slums, were furnished for fleeing Belgian refugees. 

Yet lesser known are the stories of survival of the factory’s army of women and girls, like the Canister Girls, who kept the production lines rolling as well as the home fires burning. Their indispensable labour, especially in a time of crisis, was the backbone of the home front in Hull. Their increased daily toil and overtime at machines contributed to households where many breadwinners were away fighting, and proved a huge contribution to the city’s economy. By 1917 the factory employed 5,000 workers and in spite of the war, the firm expanded globally.

For even during wartime the nation needed to clean and for most women there was no rest from wash days by hand, enamel tubs and wooden pincers. Always, there were aprons, bedding and linen to steam, stir, whiten, starch and iron. Wartime advertising posters designed by male artists (not until 1964 did the factory employ a female artist) continued to entice households to buy Brasso. It was the stuff to make metal ware shine ‘as brightly as the little lady herself’ and was there during wartime ‘for England, home and beauty’.

Then war came to the factory itself and surrounding streets. The first Zeppelin air raid to hit Hull on June 6, 1915 wiped out civilians in nearby terrace houses, and a bomb damaged the Brasso building of the Canister Works. In Bright Street, where Olive May’s parents lived at Number 7, a bomb set ablaze the timber yard and knocked out the grocer’s at number 30. I’m not sure whether my great grandparents were physically hurt, but neither would live to see war’s end in 1918. On the anniversary of war in August 1916, and for the next two years, the production lines of the Canister Works fell silent for prayers of peace. 

Today, the Canister Works is gone and Brasso is made at a factory elsewhere. Yet within the Reckitt Heritage Archive, only now being painstakingly catalogued, I find faces of the Canister Girls staring out from century-old photographs. Many photos appeared in the firm’s monthly magazine ‘Ours’, a fascinating means to engage workers and an insight into the company’s extensive social welfare programme. In a photo from a 1919 fancy dress party, one ‘Canisterian’ has turned up as a living Brasso tin. The girl dressed as an aviator, I discover is my great aunt, Mary Jordan, who became Olive May’s sister-in-law.

By June 1921 Olive May has clocked off her shift one last time, and leaves to marry a twice wounded Hull soldier. Her younger sister Cora Alice is employed at the Canister Works. Olive May receives a leaving gift of a pair of pictures and probably, as was the firm’s tradition, a Mrs Beeton cookery book. This is the last trace I find of Olive May Bertholini before she becomes Mrs Alfred Jordan, wife and mother to four.

Maybe a red, white and blue canister of Brasso stands upright on a shelf beneath the sink in her kitchen. It will soon be needed, to polish again the brass buttons on the uniform of her husband and, this time, maybe the buttons on the uniforms of their son and daughter, Leslie and Kathleen. For a Second World War is knocking at the doors of Hull that will add more young names to the Reckitt’s war memorial. The German Luftwaffe will bomb the Canister Works. Life for many is being tarnished again, and little will shine for a very long time.

With special thanks to Reckitt Heritage Archive Hull. No Reckitt Heritage Archive images to be reproduced beyond this article without further permissions. 

Dr Lee Karen Stow is a photographer and visual researcher. This is the third photo essay in Visual Traces, a visual narrative exploring the wartime experiences of civilian, working-class women in her family and birthplace of Hull through the traces they left behind.