Robert and William Colgate
It was a father and son from Filston Farm, Shoreham, who laid the foundations of one of the most famous brands in the world – the Colgate company, best known for its toothpastes. Robert Colgate was a tenant farmer at Filston in March 1795 when, in a moment of high drama, he fled at dawn for the docks at Gravesend, fearing his imminent arrest. With him were his son, William, and 15 other members of his family. It’s thought Robert had been tipped off that the authorities were after him for his radical views: he was a Baptist, a socially excluded sect back then, and a man who backed the ideals of the French Revolution two years into a British war with France. In a further cinematic twist, it’s believed it was a local aristocrat – radical sympathiser Lord Stanhope of Chevening – who told Robert he should go at once.
The Colgate family had farmed in Halstead until about 1500, and a former farmhouse there still bears the name “Colgates”. Later they farmed at Timberden before Robert came to Filston. After their dawn flit, Robert plus his wife, six children, two sisters, their husbands and five in-laws settled in eastern America. By 1800, Robert and the 17-year-old William were part of a soap-making venture in Baltimore, but Robert never found a steady occupation and eventually became a small farmer in upstate New York. It was William who carried on the soap business, co-founding the firm Smith and Colgate in New York City and taking full control in 1813.
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The company pioneered mass-produced bars of soap in an era when most households still made their own. It was wholly owned by the family until 1928 when Colgate merged with the Palmolive Corporation. William never forgot his family’s non-conformist ethos. He gave a large chunk of his income to charity, supporting the Baptist Church and helping to set up the New York Fire Department. It was William’s son Samuel who launched the firm’s toothpastes in 1873, creating the first collapsible toothpaste tube in 1896. Colgate-Palmolive had global sales of £14 billion by 2021 and the Colgates are surely the most successful industrialists in Shoreham’s history. |
Read more in History Society Publication No. 10, “Treason to Toothpaste: The Story of the Colgates of Shoreham”