15 Facts About Henry Pochin

Henry Davis Pochin was a British industrial chemist.

Henry Pochin invented a process that enabled white soap to be made and a means of using china clay to create better quality paper.

Henry Pochin owned several china clay pits in Cornwall, and a mine at Tredegar in South Wales, and was briefly a Liberal Member of Parliament.

Henry Pochin's wife was Agnes Pochin who was a leading suffragist.

Henry Pochin was the son of a yeoman farmer of Leicestershire who served an apprenticeship to James Woolley, a manufacturing chemist in Manchester.

Woolley died in 1858 and Pochin kept a manuscript diary of the illness, treatment and death of his partner.

Henry Pochin sold the rights to this process to raise money to exploit his second invention, which was a process using ammonium sulfate and alumina as a low cost alternative to alumstone in the production of alum cake used in the manufacture of paper.

The process required china clay, and Henry Pochin bought several china clay mines in Cornwall for this purpose.

The tramway was operated by a small fleet of steam locomotives known as "Henry Pochin's Puffing Billies", carrying clay to the wharf in crude three plank wagons.

Between 1863 and 1867, Alderman Henry Pochin led a consortium of Manchester business men in the formation of a number of companies in the iron, steel and coal industries.

Henry Pochin was elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1868 as one of two members of parliament for Stafford.

Henry Pochin was a director of the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company, that sunk two shafts at Pochin Colliery, Tredegar, in 1876 to a depth of 340 yards ; the first coal was brought to the surface in 1881.

Between 1871 and 1876 Henry Pochin had a residence in Llandudno, North Wales at Haulfre, on the south facing landward side of the Great Orme where he was able to pursue his passion for gardening in an extensive and steeply terraced garden that since 1929 has been under the care of the local authority and is freely open to the public.

In 1874 Henry Pochin bought the Bodnant estate at Tal-y-Cafn in the Conwy Valley comprising 25 farms with the Bodnant House and over 80 acres of garden where he lived in active retirement.

At Bodnant, Henry Pochin realised the superb qualities of the Dell through which the estate river ran and after first strengthening the banks to deter erosion he set about planting with great American and Oriental conifers.