HER NAPPY MADE NEW MUMS HAPPY
CHANCES are you have never heard of her but chances also are that if you are a mother – and these days, a father – she will have changed your life. A 94-year-old Scottish mother of six, grandmother of 19 and great-grandmother of 17 called Valerie Hunter-Gordon has just died and that would be unremarked by the wider world were it not for this.
After giving birth to her third child Nigel in 1947 Valerie, like many a mother before her, became fed up with washing traditional nappies. And so she took to her sewing machine and, using old parachutes, tissue wadding and cotton wool, put together a two-part garment for her new baby. It was to undergo many modifications but the disposable diaper was born.
“I thought you must be able to buy them – but you couldn’t, not anywhere,” she said in an interview with the BBC last year. “It seemed extraordinary that it hadn’t been done before. I thought, it’s easy, I’ll make them. But it wasn’t easy. It was quite tricky. Everybody who saw them said Valerie, please would you make one for me? And so I ended up making about 600 of them. I spent my time sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, making these wretched things.” They went for five shillings each.
But perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that a so-called “humble housewife” could have come up with the contraption that was to change women’s lives: Valerie’s grandfather was the inventor Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti who founded the engineering firm Ferranti. The genes were clearly passed down.
VALERIE Ziani de Ferranti was born on December 7, 1921, and in 1940 married Patrick Hunter-Gordon, a Scottish soldier and engineer, who was five years older than his wife. The couple set about having a family and it was the arrival of their third child Nigel that gave Valerie the idea for her breakthrough.
Her friends loved them and wanted some for themselves so when Patrick, a major in the Royal Engineers, returned from Borneo he found himself pressed into a very different kind of service: helping his wife create the diapers and the numerous modifications they went through in their early stages.
Now that their potential was becoming clear the new nappies needed a name: Valette, Snappy, Napkins, Lavnets and Drypad were all contenders until Major Hunter-Gordon consulted a group of officers at the Army Staff College in Surrey and the name Paddi was born.
In 1948 the couple patented the Paddi garment, although not the inserts, and the following year they signed a contract with Robinsons of Chesterfield to manufacture and market them on a much wider scale. The business was slow to take off: rationing was still in force and households were reluctant to throw anything away, even a used nappy. There were also concerns raised by doctors that they could harm a baby’s skin. But matters began to change when one doctor used Paddis on his own child and went on to write an article in the Lancet praising them. From 1950 onwards they were sold through Boots.
Appropriately, given that it was his arrival that prompted his mother to come up with her idea, Nigel was used as an early model in the advertising: “Until I was 30 I used to see myself on the side of trucks as I went up and down the M6,” he said in an interview last year. Meanwhile much was made of the fact that their inventor really knew what she was talking about: “A really attractive garment, skilfully designed by a mother,” said an early advertising line, “to make the whole-time use of disposable nappies a practical possibility.”
Valerie made some money from her invention, enough to send all six children to fee-paying schools, but not as much as one might think. Crucially she was unable to patent the throwaway pad part of the nappy, which meant earnings were limited. Even so, in the early years she did well. The Paddi patent was granted worldwide and was shown at the Mothercraft Exhibition and the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1952.
Sales hit 750,000 that year and the Paddi featured on the BBC, prompting various companies to try to buy out Robinsons, with sales rising to six million by 1960. Three more children followed and the family moved to Beauly in Scotland where Patrick (who died in a car crash in 1978), now retired from the Army, joined the family engineering business Al Welders, in Inverness. Valerie then invented the Nikini sanitary towel, the first of its kind.
Valerie Hunter-Gordon, who has just died, transformed the lives of millions of parents with her disposable diaper
BUT the glory days were coming to an end. In the 1960s Pampers came on the scene with another innovative product, an all-in-one nappy, that went on to dominate the global market.
These days most mothers of newborns wouldn’t know that Valerie was really the one to change their lives. But by sitting at her sewing machine and coming up with a novel concept, freeing them from constant washing and ironing, Valerie made her mark on history. She was one of the very first mumtrepreneurs.