Woman credited with inventing the disposable nappy

Born: December 7, 1921.

Died: October 16, 2016.

VALERIE Hunter Gordon, who has died aged 94 in her home in the Highlands, was widely acclaimed as the inventor of the first commercially-marketed baby’s nappies, which later begat the now world-famous American-produced Pampers diapers.

Many a woman, many a million, would say, without knowing her, that Mrs Hunter Gordon changed their lives. But all she was trying to do was keep her own third baby clean and smiling, while she avoided the scrubbing, wrangling and ironing she had gone through for her first two children.

Married to a Highlander and a Scottish resident for two-thirds of her long life, she could also lay claim to commercialising sanitary towels, which she branded “Nikini pads”. Not that she ever profited from the success of either product, or ever needed to, since her maiden name was de Ferranti and her grandfather was Sebastian de Ferranti, founder of the Ferranti company famous for its electronic products. Valerie Hunter Gordon did what she did to keep babies clean, not to make money.

Since women throughout the ages have been dealing with their babies in their own way, “inventor” is perhaps the wrong word to use but Mrs Hunter Gordon, half-Italian, half-English but proud to call herself a Scot for the latter 67 years of her life, was certainly the first to market the nappies she made on her mum’s Singer sewing machine in the post-war years. She called them Paddi nappies and Boots were the first major store to sell them – for five shillings each.

She even got her Scottish husband to help her make, market and sell them. He was Patrick Hunter Gordon, an officer in the Royal Engineers who had won a Military Cross for blowing up a bridge amid intense Nazi gunfire to help allied troops retreat to Dunkirk for evacuation. An Inverness lad, he came home with what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, jumpy at the sound of a door slamming, and his new wife Valerie - they married in 1940 shortly after Dunkirk - helped get him through it for the rest of his life.

Valerie Ziani de Ferranti was born in Baslow – within Derbyshire but close to Sheffield in Yorkshire – to (the future Sir) Vincent de Ferranti and Dorothy Hettie Wilson, both of them English. Valerie’s grandfather Sebastian de Ferranti, who founded the famous electronics company, was the son of a leading Italian classical guitarist, Marco Aurelio de Ferranti. One of Valerie’s brothers was Basil de Ferranti, who went on to become a well-known UK Conservative MP.

She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the village of Woldingham, just south-east of London. After marrying Patrick 1940, she lived with him in Camberley, Surrey, where she first got the idea of a disposable nappy after the birth of her third child Nigel. She didn’t have much to hand in the post-war years of rationing but one thing not lacking was parachutes - unused RAF ones, or the odd one captured from a shot-down Luftwaffe flier. She was one of the first conscious recyclers, using parachute nylon, tissue wadding and cotton wool to create the “Paddi” nappy and later the “Nikini” sanitary towel.

When her wee baby Nigel looked so happy, her neighbours asked her to make one for them. Demand grew. Her street, the next street, much of Inverness. Patrick found it calming to feed materials to her sewing machine on their kitchen table. A family friend, Sir Robert Robinson of Robinson & Sons, saw the potential and asked Valerie to produce them as fast as she could. With her own child Nigel as a model, newspaper ads started to appear. Boots picked them up.

In a BBC interview last year, Mrs Hunter Gordon said: “I found washing nappies much too laborious and so began searching for disposables. I thought you must be able to buy them – but you couldn’t, not anywhere. It seemed extraordinary that it hadn’t been done before. I thought, it’s easy, I’ll make them. But it wasn’t easy. It was quite tricky. Everybody who saw them said, Valerie, please would you make one for me? And so I ended up by making about over 600 of them. I spent my time sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, making these wretched things. Everybody wanted to stop washing nappies. Nowadays they seem to want to wash them again – good luck to them.”

Valerie Hunter Gordon never complained when the US company Procter & Gamble took over her idea and made billions of profits with Pampers. She’d become a Highland lassie, loved Scotland and cared about money only to take care of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom adored her.

Valerie Hunter Gordon’s husband Patrick died in a car accident in 1978. She is survived by six children, 19 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.

PHIL DAVISON