Veritas Gas Mantle Works

Mantle packet.

of Wandsworth, London

The German Veritas trademark was made available to Falk, Stadelmann and Co of London, initially for gas lamp mantles.

The brand was to became a major name in the interwar years in the UK, when Falk, Stadelmann marketed all kinds of wick and candle lamps.

1919 Falks Veritas established to manufacture mantles.

c1970s Veritas Incandescent Gas Mantle Company

• Production Director : Stan King
• Production Supervisor : Bridie Lewis
• Chemist (from 1972) : Balbir Datta
• Printer : Tom Jones

Located at Farringdon Road, Wandsworth until c.1970 then moved to the Thames – side factory at Corney Road, Chiswick. This factory made a range of gas mantles, hard mantles with a ceramic ring for use in caravans and for street lighting, and soft mantles, ironed into a rosette form for kerosene or gas lanterns (eg. Camping Gaz). In 1972 the company was making 20 million gas mantles per year. Athough all hard mantles were made in Chiswick and involved machinery, the basic raw material for all mantles,( a knitted hose impregnated with chemicals), was sent to Brighton where homeworkers sewed the mantles to be returned to Chiswick for packing and despatch. Reels of the same material were despatched to a modern factory unit in Malta for finishing into soft mantles for despatch to the far – east markets. The factory was a modern unit on the Bulabel Trading Estate quite close to Luqa airport. It had been opened, I think in the sixties by Lord 'Alfred' Robens, who was chairman of the National Coal Board around that time. The General Manager was David Aylett, with a Maltese, Louis Buttegieg as his second in command, with a labour force of mainly teenage Maltese workers. I understand that this factory only stopped making mantles a couple of years ago.

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