John Caplin, Caplin & Co (Plastics), Bletchley.

Born in North London, John Caplin is the son of a chemist and businessman who started to pioneer the prospect of reprocessing plastics, after he returned from the RAF. (The family is believed to originate from Latvia, coming to the East End as immigrant Jewish tailors). Mr Caplin senior devised a very simple machine to strip the insulation from copper cables; at this time rubber insulation was being replaced with a new innovation from US – ‘polythene’. In 1953 he set up in a small warehouse in Lambeth and built machinery which enabled him to produce polythene, initially from waste material and later polymerised gases from refineries, which were extruded into usable moulding materials using heat and pressure. In the 1950s the LCC offered incentives for industries to move out of London and in 1959 Caplin senior was offered the opportunity to move the company to a two-acre site in Bletchley, where he built a modern factory for Caplin & Co (Plastics) processing and re-processing. John worked in his father’s Liverpool factory and studied the chemistry of polymers at John Dalton Polytechnic. He then took a post in a factory in Johannesberg, for three years before returning to Caplin & Co.