It all began with an explosion and a stunned and shocked man staggering from a backroom of a small chemist's shop. It was in Windsor - not in England, but in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia during the first few months of World War 1.

The man was George Nicholas and, despite the setbacks, including being gassed and temporarily blinded, he pioneered an enhanced painkiller which he called Aspro. He used this invention to build-up a pharmaceutical company of the same name.

In 1927 George Garcia became Chairman and Managing Director of Aspro in the UK. He had 2 important policy decisions to make: a) to find and rent a factory, and b) to end Australian made Aspro imports and start production in the UK. He chose a factory site on Buckingham Avenue, Slough Trading Estate.

On 11th August 1927 the first UK Aspro tablets came off the production line and on 22nd November UK sales were ahead of Australia. That winter an epidemic attacked the population, a viral Asian flu. Slough factory stocks were drained and an extra 12 million tablets a week were needed with much overtime for the employees.

Just before the Second World War, George Garcia acquired a piece of land on the Bath Road. Plans and models were drawn up for a new and innovative factory, however whilst the war was raging all development came to a halt.

In summer 1958, the Bath Road factory was completed. It had modern, up-to-date concepts and became one of the first British examples of a 'windowless' factory, relying to a large extent on artificial light and ventilation.

The production lines were U-shaped and proved to be highly efficient. This allowed orderly, one-level flow from the raw materials to the finished products, with a single warehouse and single production area.

Thank you to Renate Hales who has taken this information from her article on Aspro's. To read the full article, please select the pdf icon on the right.