Play to the End by Robert Goddard

in composition and polymeric in structure and may be given a permanent shape by moulding, extrusion or other means during manufacture or use'.

    Most of us know what the word means without needing to understand the chemistry of polymerization. Acrylic. Alkathene. Araldite. Bakelite.
    Bandalasta. Beetleware. Celluloid. Cellophane. Ebonite. Ivoride.
    Jaxonite. Lycra. Melamine. Mouldensite. Nylon. Parkesine. Perspex.
    Plasticine. Polythene. Polystyrene. PVC. Rayon. Styron. Terylene.
    Tufnol. Tupperware. UPVC. Vinyl. Viscose. Vulcanite. Xylonite.
    We are all familiar with at least some of these.

    The first semi-synthetic plastic, based on cellulose nitrate, was invented by Alexander Parkes during the 1850s. He named the substance Parkesine and displayed it at the International Exhibition of 1862. In 1866 he launched the Parkesine Company to market products made using the material. Parkes was a brilliant inventor but a poor businessman.
    In 1869 he was forced to sell his patent rights to the Xylonite Company. He did not give up, however. When those patents expired, he set up in business again, launching the London Celluloid Company in partnership with his brother Henry in 1881. This venture also failed.

    The Parkes' works manager, Daniel Colborn, decided to carry on alone.
    He returned to his native Brighton and built a workshop in Dog Kennel Road (the original name for Hollingdean Road), where he began trading in 1883 as Colbonite Ltd.

    The Colbonite workforce was at first very small. It soon began to increase, however, as the company prospered. Labour was in plentiful local supply. A

    large area of artisans' dwellings (later categorized as slums) existed to the south. By the outbreak of the First World War, Colbonite's workforce stood close to a hundred. One of those hundred was my grandfather, George Oswin, who took a job working 55Vi hours per week in the Colbonite acid shop in 1910, at the age of fourteen, on a wage of three ha' pence per hour. His descriptions to me of his working life are one of the principal sources of information I have drawn on in the compilation of this history, especially where the early period is concerned.

    Before I enter into an account of working conditions at Colbonite during this period and the industrial processes applied there to plastics manufacture, I should try to set the scene.

    Colbonite's premises filled a roughly triangular plot bounded by the Brighton to Lewes railway line, the municipal slaughterhouse and the Jewish cemetery in Florence Place. The slaughterhouse opened in 1894, replacing the Union Hunt kennels which had given Hollingdean Road its original name.

    To the south lay the small and largely middle-class parish of St.
    Saviour's. The next parish to the south was St. Bartholomew's, where most of the Colbonite workforce lived in densely packed terraces.

    Most of these houses were demolished in the slum clearance programmes of 1955-66. Only photographs and memories can tell us what the area looked like before then. St. Bartholomew's Church, which has the highest nave of any parish church in England, was built in 1872-4 at the instigation of Father Arthur Wagner as an inspiration for its poverty-stricken parishioners. It soared to what must have been awesome effect above the narrow streets, just as it still soars above the car parks and vacant lots that have succeeded them.

    My grandparents began their married life literally in the shadow of the church, at a house in St. Peter's Street. My grandfather walked past St. Bart's every workday morning at about 6.30 en route to Colbonite, where he was due to clock on at 7.00. In London Road he could catch a tram that took him most of the way, but he only did this in severe weather. Usually, he crossed London Road, cut through via Oxford Street to Ditchling Road and walked north uphill to Hollingdean Lane, which led round to the Colbonite site.

    I imagine him as I want you to imagine him in the final stage of that walk, dawn