50 years: let's celebrate!

Chris Gadsden looks back over our remarkable record of 50 years of pumping innovation - and forward to an even better tomorrow

1956 was a great year. Elvis appeared on television for the first time, and had four number 1 hits with Heartbreak Hotel, Don’t Be Cruel, Hound Dog, and Love Me Tender. The Platters had a hit with The Great Pretender.

In the UK, Anthony Eden was Prime Minister, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the USA. The New York Yankees won the World Series, and Yankees pitcher Don Larsen pitched the first and only perfect game in World Series history.

Rocky Marciano retired as the only undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World with a perfect record (49-0). Manchester City (not United) won the FA Cup, beating Birmingham City 3-1.

And in a beautiful town on the river Thames called Marlow, an inventor called Bernard Refson was working on a problem posed by a friend who wanted to transfer milk straight from the cow to the churn.

Working in his garden shed, he used a lathe, a curved wooden track and Bunsen burner tubing to make his first peristaltic pump. He refined his design, patented his adjustable track, made six pumps, and went into business. He planned to sell one pump a month. He sold all six in one month, and realised he had a success on his hands.

The pump was called the HR, although no-one knows why for sure, and Bernard Refson always refused to give his reasons. Some say it was for his last two initials in Bernard H. Refson, and some say the pump was in the Heath Robinson style.

The shed was hopelessly small, so the business moved to some old stables in a railway yard. Thus was born Refson-Marlow - except that Refson was a very unusual name, and people kept thinking he must have said Watson. Bernard grew fed up with having to keep spelling it out, and decided to roll with the punches, and changed the company’s name to Watson-Marlow.

Bernard built on his success with both bigger - the LHR - and smaller pumps - the MHR - in various fixed and mechanical and electronically variable versions.

The next years also saw the introduction of Neoprene and PVC tubing, greatly increasing the capability of the pumps and their sales potential. The one thing the pumps never did, though, was to pump milk straight from the cow to the churn!

These were heady years because the Watson-Marlow pumps proved to be ideal for use in the new field of renal dialysis, and the company supplied thousands of pumps to hospitals in the UK. At one point, Watson-Marlow even made complete dialysis machines, although it was always the laboratory and industrial sales that were the core of the business.

In 1969, having run out of space in Marlow, and with Bernard’s love of sailing, happy memories of childhood holidays, and attractive terms from Cornwall County Council, the move was made to a purpose-built and award-winning factory landscaped into the parkland in Falmouth the company still occupies today. And, people who joined the company then are still with Watson-Marlow today, leading our innovation.

At the time of moving to Falmouth, Bernard Refson set out his principles, which were extremely enlightened, and remain so today. Watson-Marlow abides by these principles, among which are:

Although all companies exist to earn a living, Watson-Marlow has another and no less important purpose. This is to establish a working community in which individual human dignity is preserved and work is both a pleasure and a social benefit. Watson-Marlow does not employ "labour" - only people.

And:

To its suppliers, Watson-Marlow pays it accounts promptly, to its customers it spares no effort to give satisfaction before and after sales, and to its employees it strives to provide security and steadily growing prosperity.

In 1978, Bernard Refson sold the business to the UK healthcare group Smith + Nephew who, although primarily interested in the company for its medical products, provided the investment funds for a completely new range of pumps and export sales development.

By this time, the MHRE (the electronically variable miniature HR) had reached its fourth generation. In a competition within the company, the chief draughtsman suggested that instead of calling it the MHRE Mark V, it become the 501, and that’s how the 500 series came into being, and from which all today’s pumps from the 100 series to the 800 series sprang.

By 1990, Watson-Marlow had become the leading peristaltic pump company in the world, and its exports accounted for over 75% of its sales volume, compared to around 10% 12 years before. However, the medical business was negligible and Watson-Marlow was put up for sale.

It had the good fortune to be bought by Spirax-Sarco Engineering plc, a UK public company specialising in partnering steam users and specifiers to improve the performance of their plant and processes.

Spirax-Sarco has around 4,000 employees and had sales in 2004 of £325 million.

The 501, left, was developed and improved over the years, becoming our best-seller

The biggest change that Spirax-Sarco brought to Watson-Marlow was encouragement to establish its own direct distribution in major world markets. The first step was the acquisition in June 1991 of our successful American distributor and the creation of Watson-Marlow Inc near Boston, Massachusetts. A measure of the success of this venture is that we started with a total of 3.5 people, and today in Wilmington there are more than 60, with representation from over 100 organisations and distributors.

America was followed by The Netherlands (1994), Germany, France, Belgium (1995), Italy (1997), Sweden (2002), South Africa (2003), Brazil (2004) and China and Korea (2005). Every one of these ventures has been a success. Outside those countries, Watson-Marlow, Bredel, and Alitea have the finest third-party distributor network in the world.

The other absolutely key events in the past 10 years have been the acquisitions of Bredel Hose Pumps in The Netherlands in 1997 and Alitea in Sweden in 2000, which hugely extended the capabilities of our group.

Watson-Marlow had long admired Bredel, which invented high-capacity, high-pressure hose pumping (at very much the same time that Watson-Marlow was taking its first steps), and was and is the undisputed world leader in its field. Alitea was a smaller company, but again is the world’s pre-eminent manufacturer of high-precision OEM peristaltic pumps.

Success requires every aspect of a company to improve constantly and as rapidly as possible. What makes us so successful is the strength of our people in every area of our business.

The 520, direct descendent of that very first pump of 1956

Our three factories in Falmouth, Delden and Stockholm are world-class, our 12 sales companies use their unparalleled knowledge to drive us to greater success year after year, and we have the most active new product development programme in the pump business—think of the SPX range, the 323, and the 520 and 620 pumps.

As we enter 2006 and our fiftieth year, we can be very proud of the position of trust our pumps have achieved with many of the world’s most famous companies. Watson-Marlow, Bredel and Alitea are all highly respected for their engineering skills, knowledge and integrity. We are by far the biggest in the world in our specialised field, and we are the innovators. From one man with an idea, we are now nearly 400 people on the same mission: to convert the world to peristaltic pumping.

The future is very bright for us. We make the perfect pump, so our job is to give better and better service to our customers, promote our benefits to all those poor customers suffering the misery of using other pump types, and add to our pressure, chemical compatibility, life and control capabilities as fast as we can.

Here’s to our next 50 years!