The English Glass Company Little Things in Glass
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Introduction
Little things in glass! -and metal and plastics too. A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH GLASS CO LTD OF LEICESTER From incorporation in 1934 until the Management Buy Out in 1990 The English Glass Co. Ltd. originally manufactured and sold a range of small pressed technical glassware to industry, and glass consumer products during the 1940s. The company extended its existing technical glass from the 1950s and developed and added several new product ranges in the 1960s. The dispenser range was the most successful. Here you can discover more about the products and history of the company. Five years after its incorporation, The English Glass Co. Ltd. was technically bankrupt, with a debt equivalent to almost ¼ million pounds in today’s values. The company was founded by the managing director of The John Bull Rubber Co. Ltd., with his own capital plus, it is believed, loans from the John Bull Company which was virtually its only customer for safety reflectors for vehicles. By good fortune Josef Oplatek, a refugee from the glass producing area of Czechoslovakia, was allowed to rent, in late 1939, a part of the English Glass premises for producing glass jewellery for the UK market. Together with his wife they built up this fancy jewellery business which was so successful that by the end of WWII Josef Oplatek, who had soon become Managing Director of The English Glass had eliminated the original English Glass debt, expanded the technical glass side of the business (with some Ministry of Defence work) and had laid the foundations of a thriving business. The company was voted by Jordans Ltd of Bristol, among the top hundred private companies in Britain in the early 1980s. This book will captivate anyone interested in industrial history and in how a small company using an age old production process and managed by several directors (none of whom owned the company), became so consistently successful by exploiting unusual niche products, with relatively low share capital and investment or loan needs, in a variety of goods and markets. In the early 1960s, The English Glass Co. Ltd. pioneered the road ‘bonded system’, whereby road reflectors and markers were glued to the road surface rather than embedded in the road (such as Cats Eyes™) requiring more labour and damaging the surface. This system is still used widely today. The company also introduced what was to become Europe’s largest and most innovative range of small dispensing pumps. |
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The author, Tom Lawson, first learnt about the company through hearing his parents, Josef and Norma Oplatek, discussing the business over meal times and, eventually, through his employment with the firm from 1958 to 1993. The period includes difficult economical times and provides a record of how one small firm was able to survive and prosper.
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