Henry Harry Pickup was born in Scarborough on 16thNovember 1888 he was the son of Henry Pickup (1859 – 1940) founder of Pickup’s Engineering Ltd, and Florence Emily Allison (1864 – 1946) of Norwood in London. Harry was educated at a private school in Boston Spa, after leaving school he spent some time at his father’s business learning the engineering trade before emigrating to Canada in 1911.
In 1913 a Scarborough woman, Gertrude Mary Newlove (1889 – 1976) arrived in Canada, and they married, they probably intended to live in Canada, but for whatever reason, they returned to Scarborough the same year (1913) and started their family of four children, three boys and a girl. In the early 1920’s they moved home from Scarborough to Teddington in London where Henry Harry and Gertrude had their fifth child, another boy. It was about this time that Henry Harry discovered that the waste product, nitre cake, from post war, London’s munitions factories when mixed with water, made a powerful toilet cleaner and limescale remover, he named the product Harpic from his own name Har(ry)Pic(kup). The cleaning solution could be made using a domestic coffee grinder and it was at first developed by the Pickup company before they sold the rights to Reckitt’s in 1932, who turned it into a world-wide cleaning product, now available in many different forms, initially marketing it with the slogan ‘clean round the bend’ which led to it becoming a slang term for crazy.
Another product created by Henry Harry was Oxypic which was and still is used as a boiler sealing compound. Towards the end of the 1930’s Henry Harry and Gertrude split up, with Gertrude keeping the Teddington family home where she died in 1976. At the start of WW2 Henry Harry was in Marseilles, France when Germany occupied the region, he personally chartered a collier which ferried all the British citizens in the area to the safety of Gibraltar. It was at this time Henry (sen) died and Henry Harry took over the firm, he remarried Marjorie Maude Day from Woodgreen in 1942. It would seem Henry Harry had no affection for either Scarborough or the Pickup’s company as in 1948 he sold the company to the then Lord Downe and never returned to Scarborough. He died on 9th June 1975 at Slaugham, Sussex, his second wife Marjory died in 2002 at Warminster, Wiltshire.
