Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business

by Jessica Borge, Lesley Hall (Foreword)

From humble beginnings wholesaling at a small tobacconist-hairdresser shop in 1915, the London Rubber Company rapidly became the UK's biggest postwar producer and exporter of disposable rubber condoms. A first-mover and innovator, the company's continuous product development and strong brands (including Durex) allowed it to dominate supply to the retail trade and family planning clinics, leading it to intercede in the burgeoning women's market. When oral contraceptives came along, however, the company was caught in a bind between defending condoms against the pill and claiming a segment of the new birth control market for itself. In this first major study on the company, Jessica Borge shows how, despite the "unmentionable" status of condoms that inhibited advertising in the early twentieth century, aggressive business practices were successfully deployed to protect the monopoly and squash competition. Through close, evidence-based examination of LRC's first fifty years, encompassing its most challenging decades, the 1950s and 1960s, as well as an overview of later years including the AIDS crisis, Borge argues that the story of the modern disposable condom in Britain is really the story of the London Rubber Company, the circumstances that befell it, the struggles that beset it, the causes that opposed it, and the opportunities it created for itself. LRC's historic intervention in and contribution to female contraceptive practices sits uneasily with existing narratives centred on women's control of reproduction, but the time has come, Borge argues, for the condom to find its way back to the centre of these debates. Protective Practices thereby re-examines a key transitional moment in social and cultural history through the lens of this unusual case study.

306 pages, Hardcover

Published September 23, 2020

Reviews

[Sean Smart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very original and interesting academic study of the History and development of the London Condom business!

[Mark Farley · Rating 5 out of 5]

PROTECTIVE PRACTICES is the unsung story of a lost British manufacturing industry to time and the embarrassment of keeping records. And the London Rubber Company didn't. Because of the nature of its... ummm... y'know....CONDOMS. Ah yes, that wonderful British reservedness we are so famous for.

This book does what it says on the tin. Its a fascinating account of a company that goes... so far. And yet are in a bind between the changing social morals of the country, the message of the product and yannow… making bank and all that.

My only bugbear was that it feels like reading someone’s thesis in parts and not what you normally want from your fucked up history book. But otherwise, it’s a cracking read. The whole idea of how, where and why the protectives were introduced into the country is worth the entry fee in itself.

It’s about something important, after all. The effects of sexual health within our culture. The first hand accounts are great and the author does her best to bring these records to life. She approaches the subject (SEX) in the very most polite BRITISH way, but its very much a story about cock sizes, tensile strength and the national attitude over the last hundred years to the art of fucking. And factories.

Fucking and factories, the lost 70’s British sitcom. Hurrah!

[David Seidel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a thoroughly researched history of a subject that most people would not have been exposed to. Jessica Borge has very set out the history of the condom, the condom manufacturing industry, the contraceptive industries in the UK and the various tensions and drivers between them. It is an entertaining and scholarly introduction to something that is given little thought of today. Highly recommended.

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much a business history, with the cultural history as context rather than focus. Interesting for all that.

But it is a PhD thesis and it shows. Cutting the introductions and conclusions of each chapter would have improved this book immensely. By the end I was skipping them.


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I did vaguely wonder why the Jewishness of the firm (and it's German rivals) wasn't considered. I'm frankly amazed no one came up with a conspiracy theory about Jews undermining the Christian population.