Valerie Hunter Gordon
Mother who channelled her frustration at doing laundry into inventing the first disposable nappies
VALERIE HUNTER GORDON, who has died aged 94, helped to deliver mothers from the daily drudgery of mangle, washing line and ironing board by inventing the first disposable nappy system. In 1947 Valerie, the wife of an Army officer, was living in Camberley, Surrey, and expecting her third child. She was not looking forward to the prospect of washing, ironing and drying the traditional towelling nappies which were all that were available at the time.
“I just didn’t want to wash them,” she told an interviewer last year. “You had to iron them as well. It was awful labour. I was amazed you couldn’t buy a disposable version. I enquired of the US and you couldn’t buy them there. It was extraordinary.”
So she decided she had better do something about it herself.
After a certain amount of trial and error (initially she used old nylon parachutes, of which there were many spare after the war), and drawing on her considerable needlework skills, she came up with a pair of adjustable PVC waterproof pants fastened with poppers, with a cord around the waist, which could be wiped clean, or washed and bleached. Into these she slipped a pad of cellulose wadding with a thin layer of cotton wool next to the baby’s skin to prevent soreness. The waterproof pants prevented leakage and were shaped to ensure that the pad remained in position without safety pins.
Unlike modern all-in-one disposable nappies, Valerie’s design meant that only the biodegradable dirty pads were disposed of, while the waterproof pants could be rinsed and used again. This system created very little permanent waste; it also significantly reduced the water and electricity consumption associated with washing cotton nappies.
The nappies were a huge success on her baby son Nigel and she soon began taking orders from the wives of other senior officers at Staff College in Camberley. “My husband used to cut out the pads on the floor of the attic when he came home from work and I used to run them up with my mother’s old sewing machine... I would go out for tea with the wives and babies, and they would say, ‘Oh Valerie, wouldn’t you make one for me?’ It became a full-time job. It was more hard work than washing the damn things.” The old Singer sewing machine remained in regular use in her children’s nursery until the final years of her life.
Of the pre-PVC prototypes, Valerie ended up making some 400 pairs of plastic pants in her kitchen from parachute nylon and other experimental materials and selling them for five shillings each. In 1948 she and her husband applied for a patent.
A breakthrough came when Valerie Hunter Gordon’s father, Sir Vincent de Ferranti, met Sir Robert Robinson, a director of Robinsons of Chesterfield, manufacturer of oldfashioned women’s sanitary belts, and told him about his daughter’s invention.
In 1949, when the family moved to Inverness-shire, Robinsons agreed to start manufacturing the nappies. The pants were patented as a “Paddi”, while the “Paddi Pad” throw-away inserts were made a registered design.
They were not an immediate success. In the frugal postwar years many women found the disposable element of the Paddi wasteful and extravagant, but the idea began to catch on and the product was featured in the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1952.
The BBC then featured the Paddi as one of the six most innovative items of the year and by the end of that year 750,000 packs had been sold. By 1960 sales had reached six million and the royalties contributed to the Hunter Gordons’ increasing household expenditure (they went on to have three more children).
Valerie Hunter Gordon travelled up and down the country to the Robinsons headquarters in Chesterfield, fine-tuning designs for Paddi and, later on, designing other products including a similar product for women, the Nikini (with “Nikini Pads”), based on the Paddi concept. Rather to her surprise the Nikini earned more royalties overall than the Paddi, though as she reflected, “there are probably more menstruating women in the world than incontinent babies.”
The Paddi brand went into decline in the 1960s with the arrival of Proctor and Gamble’s all-in-one disposable nappy, Pampers. Robinsons fought back with Paddi Cosifits, but were unable to unable to invest sufficiently in marketing to compete with the American product.
While the Paddi’s PVC pants could be reused, the Pads were disposable, so few examples of the product in their unused, pristine form still exist. The V&A possesses a pack “found in the donor’s mother’s attic”, observing that “due to their ephemeral nature [they] are quite rare.”
Valerie Ziani de Ferranti was born at Baslow, Derbyshire, on December 7 1921, the daughter of Sir Vincent de Ferranti and Dorothy Hettie Wilson. Her grandfather, the inventor Sebastian de Ferranti, was the founder of the eponymous family electrical engineering company.
She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Woldingham, and in 1940 married Patrick Hunter Gordon, then a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, who had won an MC earlier in the year after blowing up a bridge under heavy gunfire during the retreat to Dunkirk. He suffered post-traumatic illness and Valerie Hunter Gordon unflaggingly supported him over years of investigation and treatment, shielding her children from crises and developing her products all the while.
In 1959 she designed the family’s hi-tech house in Inverness-shire. It featured electric self-closing curtains and sophisticated heating systems. She constructed a magnificent garden and would do the weeding in an old raincoat she referred to as her “mink”.
Valerie Hunter Gordon was rarely satisfied with things as they were; she liked to make improvements. She did not believe, for example, that you could only have one Scottish tartan. She was lunching with Lord Lovat one day when he joked that her two daughters, dressed in identical Gordon tartan dresses, looked like sponge bags.
Determined to find an alternative pattern, she consulted the thread count registers collected by the Highland Society in the 19th century and reconstructed another tartan that was recorded as having been created by Gordon weavers. A lively pattern with shades of pink, red, green and black, it became one of the most popular Gordon tartans worldwide, marketed as Red Gordon.
Patrick Hunter Gordon died in a car accident in 1978. Valerie Hunter Gordon is survived by their six children.
Valerie Hunter Gordon, born December 7 1921, died October 16 2016