William Burford starts dominant soap maker company from 1840 business in Adelaide

William Burford, founder in 1840 of what became one of Australia's biggest soap-making companies. 
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

William Burford in 1840 founded one of the Australia’s earliest soap makers and its oldest up to the 1960s when it closed, after being dominant soap maker in South Australia and Western Australia.

Burford, an apprenticed butcher with some experience as a tallow merchant, built up a large painting and glazing business after arriving in Adelaide in 1838. When the 1840 recession hit, Burford opened a soap and candle business on the Grenfell Street-East Terrace corner. The business failed several times, but revived with the cooper boom from the Burra (1848), Moonta and Wallaroo (1863) mines.

Carried on by Burford’s son, the business opened bigger factories in Sturt Street and later Adam Street, Hindmarsh (taking over Apollo Soap). Fire destroyed both factories. The fires – rather than £12,000 offered by the council in 1919 for Burfords to move their smelly factories out of the city altogether – prompted new premises at Dry Creek in 1922. In the late 1890s, Burfords had opened factories in Western Australia.

Burford products included Signal soap, Apollo laundry soap, Sayso carbolic family soap, White Dove soap, Dr Bayley’s medicated soap, Southern Sky washing blue, Exhibition candles and Brunswick stove blacking, Snow White starch and Magic egg preserver.

In the 1920s, W. H. Burford and Son was taken over by its eastern states rival J. Kitchen & Sons, who became Lever & Kitchen, part of the British Lever Brothers empire, which in 1930 merged with Dutch Margarine Unie to form the multinational Unilever.

The Burfords factory was still running profitably in the 1950s, and the factory at Dry Creek was still listed in 1962. The office at 83 Sturt Street still bore the Burford’s name, alongside that of its nominal owner J. Kitchen & Sons, Rexona Pty. Ltd. and Lever Brothers.