Blythe Colours and Johnson Matthey Employee ReunionIn 2015 Johnson Matthey closed their Colour Manufacturing operations in the UK and donated their Company archive to the Discovery Center in Cheadle, Staffordshire.
In order to identify much of the archive material, some of which is over 80 years old, the center placed an advert in the Cheadle and Tean Times appealing for help from anyone who may have worked at Blythe Colours or Johnson Matthey at the Cresswell site. A short exploratory meeting was arranged on Friday 13th November 2015 at the Discovery Center in Cheadle to start the process of reviewing the donated archive material. The meeting proved to be very popular, with over 40 previous employees attending. The attendees were able to make a very positive start to the project, by identifying many of the people shown in the archive photographs that were on display, but it soon became clear that there was too much archive material to review during the meeting, with much of it not even being on display. Due to the success of this exploratory meeting, from both a historical and social perspective, it is proposed that a further meeting be arranged in January or February 2016 at the venue shown below, where a further review can be made of the remaining material and results of the initial meeting can be presented. If possible, the meeting will run for a longer period, to allow people who work the opportunity to attend, to review the archive and meet old friends. If you are interested in attending this event, it would be very useful if you were to register below to give some idea of numbers expected. Thank you. Location |
The reason for using this site
Whilst this site may eventually become a permanent home for the part of the Blythe Colours and Johnson Matthey archive that can be electronically stored, its purpose at this moment (Nov 2015 to Summer 2016) is to store and present archive material to selected individuals for the purpose of identification and verification of the content.
The people that attended the initial meeting and left email details will be the first to be contacted and invited to review the material displayed on this site. This will allow many people to see and review the online material at the same time, in their own time and without physical access restrictions. Generally, if you are reading this you are one of the individuals that have been invited to perform the review. This site cannot be found from an Internet search and can only be accessed if the specific address has been provided to you. Please do not distribute the address to people other than the review team. If you would like someone else to join this team, please provide their name and email address to [email protected] so they can be formally invited to join the team. This is not an exclusive group and anyone can join to perform the reviews, but as it is not initially intended as a public display site, we should just be careful to keep it to review team members only. Thanks. The material shown on this site is a small amount of the whole archive and the review process for this is a pilot to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. If it is successful, then further material will be added for review and when all material has been processed this site may be changed to provide a public access to the finished information. There is a menu option above to provide a guide to reviewing material on the site. If anyone has any queries about the review process or if help is required, please use the email address [email protected] and you will be contacted. |