8 minute read
Neta
George Alexander (centre) with Lou Murray (left) and Percy Green (right) at Lennon's Hotel in Brisbane in 1957. The occasion was a meeting of the hardware trade to farewell Percy Green and welcome Lou Murray as Neta's Queensland agent. Murray represented Neta for 25 years and George recalled that it was a very happy relationship.
With the end of the Second World War insight, the munitions’ annexe began to diversify into civilian production. Nuts and bolts were in short supply, so they began producing them, as well as other repetitive engineering work. There was plenty of work, George was a director of the company and on a good salary so he might well have stayed at the firm indefinitely, but for a bright idea.
Soon after the end of the war, Flexible Plastics Pty Ltd (a subsidiary of Moulded Products Ltd, later known as Nylex) released a plastic garden hose. Since the 1920s Pope’s had had a virtual monopoly in Australia on rubber garden hoses, and they believed that plastic garden hoses would never be a commercial success, largely because there were no suitable fittings for them. George had the perception to see the need, the inventiveness to imagine the solution and the technical skill to design and make the new product. Essentially, George Alexander designed a complete system of brass hose fittings suitable for plastic hoses, from the fitting to connect the hose to the tap to the nozzle to control the spray. He took out numerous patents to protect the key elements of the system.14
George regarded the nozzle he invented as a major step forward. Previously nozzles were cross-drilled and made in three pieces or more pieces, but George’s nozzle was much simpler, being made in two pieces and not cross-drilled. The nozzle allowed a more powerful and more uniform water flow than earlier nozzles and was also more readily adjustable.
By 1960 George had taken out 16 patents covering not only hose fittings, but also fittings for flexible and rigid plastic tubes, flexible conduits and other things. Many of these products were manufactured by Neta.
George Alexander was both inventive and entrepreneurial. He believed that his inventions had great commercial possibilities, so in 1947 he left his secure job with Glover’s and set up a factory in Burwood Road, Hawthorn, to manufacture his hose fittings. He had savings of £3000 and he sold some shares in the business to friends to raise the balance of the money he needed (although he bought back these shares as soon as he could because he wanted to plough profits back into the business rather than pay dividends). George called the business ‘Neta’, because everyone he showed the fittings to told him, ‘Those are the neatest hose fittings I’ve ever seen’.
As with most new businesses, Neta Industries Pty Ltd faced many challenges in its early years. Perhaps the most serious was due to the poor quality machinery initially installed. The machines had come to Australia as part of Germany’s reparations after the First World War and then had been used by Colonial Spark Plugs for 25 years. As well as being worn out, they were designed for working with steel, not brass. George blamed this mistake on naivety, although the extreme shortage of machine tools in Australia in the post-war years must have been a major factor. After trying for six months to make these machines functional, he was forced to take out a loan to buy replacements. This time he was careful to get the best available machines.
After the initial difficulties, the business prospered. Neta’s products were in great demand as new suburban homes were built in the post-war boom years. Further, there was no real competition, both because of the patent protection (which lasted for fifteen years) and because Neta had sophisticated equipment and could manufacture components far more cheaply than rival firms such as Pope and Ogden. George met Mr Pope soon after Neta was set up and Pope said he would, ‘send George broke within two years’, but Pope failed while Neta prospered.
George engaged a small advertising agency to promote Neta products and they thought up several slogans that are still remembered today such as ‘You need Neta’ and ‘the Neta man’, but George himself came up with the most memorable slogan, the ‘Happy Pappy’. In the early years of television, he recalled paying £3000 for a 30 second advertisement and thinking it was bizarre that advertising can be a bigger cost than manufacturing for many products.
As Neta’s business grew, George bought several more factories near the original premises as well as some surrounding houses. While hose fittings continued to be made in the original factory in Burwood Road, one new building became a general engineering workshop and another was a plastics factory. The business expanded into new areas, generally successfully, although occasionally George found his thinking ahead of the market. He recalled trying to sell flow control valves to the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works, but he was told that the board’s job was to sell water, not to conserve it. George was well ahead of his time in foreseeing that Australian cities would face serious water shortages in the future and water conservation would become a critical issue.
Even as the business expanded, the management remained lean, and George stayed closely in touch with every aspect of the firm’s business. There was no sales manager, only sales representatives around the country who were paid a percentage of sales.
Most of the workers at Neta were local people. George always made the union organizer very welcome, but few of his workers joined. He paid just a little more than the union wanted and gave wage rises ahead of the Arbitration Commission judgements, so he never had any staff problems.
Although George sought no public recognition or advancement, his engineering and business skills and the success of Neta inevitably led to numerous approaches for his services. He was invited to stand for the Hawthorn City Council with the promise that he would become mayor, but he was not interested in municipal politics. At the time that industry was preparing for the introduction of the metric system, he accepted an invitation to contribute to the Standards Association. George recalled that when polythene pipe was introduced, he insisted that they should measure the pipe by the size of the hole not the size of the outside of the pipe. He and others who shared this view ‘had a hell of a job’ convincing them but eventually succeeded and the standard was introduced as advised.
In the early 1960s, the owners of Harris Brothers, a large supplier of butchers’ shop equipment, whose premises were near the Neta factory, talked George into becoming a foundation member and number one ticket holder for the Hawthorn Football Club Social Club – the club’s Glenferrie Oval was just over the railway line from the factory. He did not go to many games, but he remembers that on one Saturday he offered to give the club ten dollars for every goal that Peter Hudson kicked that day – and George sat in the stands with the committee watching Hudson kick ten goals and thinking that he would rather be over the railway line at his factory.
After moving to Melbourne, George became a member of Yarra Yarra and later Huntingdale Golf Clubs and played bowls at the Auburn Bowls Club, where he became a committee member. He enjoyed playing bowls for many years, but he also spent many hours fixing the drains. His work was vindicated many years later when the Auburn Bowls Club escaped serious damage when flash floods hit the area in January 2004.
In 1972, when George turned 62, he felt it was time to sell Neta and retire. The purchaser was one of Neta’s long-standing competitors, Ogden Industries, which had developed into a diversified conglomerate. George recalled that he sold the business for ‘something over $1 million’, which was ‘exactly what I thought it was worth’. For a short time, George was a director of Ogden, but he resigned when he and his wife decided to move to Queensland.
Neta has had an erratic history since 1972. Ogden Industries eventually collapsed, and Neta was among its subsidiaries to be acquired by the Email-Lockwood division of Email Limited.(16) In the late 1990s Email sold many of its subsidiaries (before itself being taken over and dismantled) and Neta was bought by the Queensland-based PPI Corporation. Although its products are manufactured overseas, Neta is still widely recognized as one of Australia’s leading garden watering system and irrigation suppliers, and still distributes the brass hose fittings that George Alexander invented.
14 The patent application was lodged on 24 August 1948 and the complete specification was accepted on 1 June 1951, being patent no. 141,400. My thanks to Samantha Hoy for locating the patent documents.
15 The patent for the nozzle was lodged on 12 March 1954, patent no. P 25735.
16 Ian Potter's first capital raising on the stock exchange was for Email in 1935 and he was a director of the company for many years.
