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sue the company over an advertisement that presented “a new John Boyd Dunlop, a tall, handsome, stylishly dressed old man, with a shiny hat and boots with spats, who had all the airs of an old bean. A cane and an eye- glass added to the splendour of the figure who recommended Dunlop wares to the world” (Cooke 2000, p. 28). In her forward to her father’s autobiography, Jean McClintock writes, “It was unfortunate that he con- sidered it necessary to sever all connection with the Company, which bears his name” (McClintock in Dunlop 1925, p. 5) and in her appendix adds:
I should here like to state clearly that my father has never at any time received money or compensation in any form from the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co., either for the use of this name and bust or publication of the advertisement to which he objected … We all objected to the advertise- ment, not because it depicted a younger man than my father, but because it depicted a type, which is the antithesis of what my father really was.
(McClintock in Dunlop 1925, p. 95)
The story of the invention of Dunlop’s air tire is not, or not just, a story about a father and son and a set of cycling races. It is notable that Dunlop does not name his wife, Margaret Stevenson, or his daughter Jean in the text, while his son Johnnie is named and pictured as is Johnnie’s son, John Boyd. There is a story to be told about a daughter representing a father, and another about wives and mothers who are hard to catch sight of in the accounts the fathers and sons have written. And there is a story to be told about the millions of others who participated in collecting, transporting, and processing the rubber that went into these new pneumatic objects. The story of Dunlop is a story about carrying on, covering up, casting off, and handing over names.
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innocent invention clusters tales of sport and adventure, of fortune and misfortune, of bitter litigation, and high finance” (Du Cros 1938, p. 1).
Throughout the book, Du Cros returns repeatedly to the central role sport played in the building and sustaining of the business. About the production sites, he writes:
All forms of outdoor activity were encouraged, for we regarded sport in any form, with its community of feelings and friendships among all classes, an asset worthy even the attention of British statesmen. To-day ‘the playing fields of Eton’ and all they stand for are being out-rivalled by the playing fields of industry and the Nation, a valuable and significant feature of our modern commercial life. (Du Cros 1938, pp. 220–221)
The saying that Du Cros references is that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The remark is usually attributed to the Duke of Wellington although there is no evidence that the com- mander of that famous battle ever said these exact words. But the phrase has been picked up and passed down as a way of encapsulating the argu- ment that the games that boys play in Britain’s public schools train them to be good soldiers. In The Games Ethic and Imperialism, J. A. Mangan describes the “profound purpose” of game play: “the inculcation of man- liness” (Mangan 1986, p. 18). The “games ethic” taught the public schoolboy “the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control … it promoted not simply initiative and self-reliance but also loyalty and obedience. It was therefore a useful instrument of colonial purpose. At one and the same time it helped create the confidence to lead and the compulsion to follow” (Ibid.). Arthur Du Cros, who attended a national school rather than a more prestigious pub- lic school and entered the Civil Service at the lowest pay grade, turns the Duke of Wellington’s phrase to make a counterargument: it is not the
“playing fields of Eton” but “the playing fields of industry” that are train- ing British men to be the workers and soldiers and leaders and sharehold- ers that the empire requires (Du Cros 1938, p. 221) (Fig. 2).
Arthur learned the power of sport from his father. Almost every description of Harvey Du Cros highlights his athletic prowess. In his youth he was a champion in fencing, running, and boxing, “known to all
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Ireland mainly as the greatest athlete of his day” (T. P. O’Connor in Dunlop 1925, p. 99). Most accounts then go on to describe how he instilled a love of sport in his six sons and trained them into fearsome cyclists. As Dunlop grew into a giant multinational, Harvey Du Cros ran the company as its chairman and patriarch, carving out central roles for his sons and maintaining an emphasis on sport across the board. James McMillan describes how “the old man [Harvey] reveled in encouraging his work-force to take part in sports as once he had spurred his sons to the same endeavors. Rugby football remained a passion with the Du Cros’
and each factory had its own team” (McMillan 1989, p. 37). The com- pany also “sponsored cycle racing, arranged training facilities under a competent trainer, and organized a regiment of professional racing teams with multiple machines” (Bijker 1997, p. 84). Along with promoting sport within the company, there were also business relationships that were secured and solidified by the common ground shared by sporting men. Arthur Du Cros attributes the formation of a partnership with the Byrnes family’s rubber goods business which would become Dunlop’s first rubber mills, to a “kinship of sport and country” (Du Cros 1938, p. 208). The Du Cros used these “playing fields of industry” to promote the same game ethic that was fostered in the British public schools within the company as it expanded rapidly, creating and acquiring ever more subsidiaries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, becoming its own empire.
From the early twentieth century on, Dunlop was an “all-up” com- pany, “from raw rubber via cord to the finished tyre: manufactured worldwide and sold worldwide. Dunlop Rubber was now a multi- national, perhaps the first of its kind on the face of the globe” (McMillan
Fig. 2 “Play up, play up, and play the game,” the refrain from Sir Henry Newbolt’s 1892 poem “Vitaï Lampada,” carved on the relief at the entrance to Lord’s Cricket Ground, London (Photo by C. Wing, 2014)
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1989, p. 37). To achieve this, the company had begun by purchasing patents and producing tires exclusively and worked backward from there to rubber mills and rubber manufacturers and finally to rubber trees and rubber plantations. Arthur Du Cros was part of the group that surveyed Ceylon and the Straits Settlements (the British name for what was in 1955 called Malaya and is now known as Malaysia). He chose the latter as the spot for the company to purchase plantations. In 1910, the company established its first rubber plantations in Malaysia and formed the Virginia Rubber Company in the US, which became Dunlop Plantations in 1915 (Dunlop Tire & Rubber Goods Co. 1953). At its peak in 1920, Dunlop had plantations with attached factories around the world, with especially large holdings in India and Malaysia. The company would continue to be the single largest private landholder in Malaysia through the 1970s.
Given the central role of sport, it is not surprising that when the com- pany began to look beyond tires, they diversified by beginning to pro- duce other kinds of sports equipment. The company’s first sport product for ball games was the “Orange Spot” golf ball which arrived in 1910 followed by Dunlop tennis balls in 1922 (Dunlop Tire & Rubber Goods Co. 1953, p. 12). After the advent of vulcanized rubber, many balls began to be made with rubber bladders or rubber cores. Golf balls became inex- tricable from the rubber industry to such an extent that even today “half of the present market share in golf balls belongs to four manufacturers that emerged from the colonial rubber trade” (Brown 2015, p. 23), with Dunlop being one of these four. Dunlop’s long-standing investment in sports was formalized with the creation of the Dunlop Sports subsidiary in 1928. This was just one of the company’s many subsidiaries. The list of subsidiaries included in the Dunlop Rubber Company reports and bal- ance sheets for the years 1901–1965 names 159 separate corporate entities (National Archives of the UK 2018). By 1946, the company had 90,000 shareholders and 70,000 employees around the world (Ibid).
Each site and subsidiary had people with their own set of stories, people whose lives have been touched and torqued, made and unmade, by the making and moving and using of elastic things.
The company produced promotional materials for its customers and its workers. The media directed at its own workers included the publica- tion of a romanticized and sanitized version of The Story of Rubber (31)
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and a similar film called Dunlop in Malaya (Dunlop 1955), which pre- sented a picture of the first stop of the company’s supply chain, Dunlop’s rubber plantations in Malaysia. In The Story of Rubber (31), the transfor- mation of rubber into a plantation crop is presented as necessary to ensure quality and volume. Describing the sites of wild rubber production, the text declares: “Not only were these areas unable to supply the quantities required, but because of a lack of care for the trees, the quality of the rub- ber was bad. To ensure the greatest production of high quality rubber, the areas selected for plantation were carefully chosen” (Dunlop Rubber Company 1957, p. 11). The description is striking. The claim that a lack of care for the trees made the quality of the rubber bad figures the planta- tion as a structure of care, a place where trees will be properly looked after. The phrasing reads as a displacement that tells us more about what the company did and did not care about than it tells us about how the trees and vines and people were treated. The film Dunlop in Malaya high- lights the 20,000 person workforce made up of people of many different nationalities, religions and languages, the roads, hospitals, schools, reli- gious buildings, recreational activities, and playing fields, before turning to the industrial processes and “security measures for the personnel on the estate” (Rice 2010). The film was screened at Dunlop sites in England, France, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, and the US. Neither the book nor the film name the history of mass deaths tied to rubber production, nor do they mention the Malaysian workers’ strikes in 1940, which according to an exchange in the British Parliament in 1941 saw the arrests of two of the strike leaders, a march of 500 workers on the police station to protest these arrests, and police gunfire that killed 3 and injured many more (House of Commons and Lords Hansard 1941).
Three decades before The Story of Rubber and Dunlop in Malaya were produced, and a few years before Dunlop Sport was created, Arthur Du Cros and his brothers were pushed off the board largely because of Arthur’s failure to separate his family’s interests from the company’s inter- ests and his role in financial manipulation that left the company close to bankruptcy in 1921. Like the leaders of multinational companies then and now, Dunlop’s leaders and representatives wielded multiple forms of authority. They were executives, employers, sponsors, patrons, patriarchs,
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overseers, leaders, political representatives. They did not always maintain clear or clean boundaries between the different kinds of authority and power that they wielded. The company was saved by F. A. Szarvasy of the British Foreign and Colonial Service (Jones 1984, p. 44) and the Du Cros family was ushered out. The expansion that followed was pursued in relation to the parallel growth of the other major rubber manufacturers and the relationships that each of these giant multinationals had to the nations that they claimed as homes and as territories. In 1985 Dunlop Rubber was acquired by its longtime competitor British Tyre and Rubber (BTR). BTR proceeded to spin off—sell—most of the company’s subsid- iaries and then renamed itself Invensys, as part of a transformation into a conglomerate of companies that focus on software, industrial automa- tion, energy controls, and appliances. But the name Dunlop, which was first printed onto dirt roads in 1891, and the Flying D logo, which was launched in 1960, persist. Today, they are used by companies around the world that sell Dunlop tires, conveyor belts, golf balls, tennis rackets, mattresses, and footwear. In acquiring the right to use the Dunlop brand these disparate companies have acquired a common lineage while having no other necessary relation to each other. Their wielding of the brand can in turn render the lineages of the current companies (Goodyear, Sumitomo Rubber, the Ruia Group, Pacific Brands, Sports Direct) a little harder to see. We could think of this game of hide and seek as another kind of vulcanized play.