Lionel Jackson

Origins and early life

Lionel Alfred Jackson was born Lionel Jacoby in 1894, the son of Daniel Jacoby, a hairdresser and tobacconist, and the grandson of Siegmund and Henrietta Jacoby, Jewish emigrants who had come to England from Russia in the 1860s.

Work and career

The historian Jessica Borge describes him as a third-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant, and that Jewish family is the route by which he appears here. In 1915 he founded the London Rubber Company, which at first sold condoms and other barbers' sundries imported from Germany and the United States, working from his father's hairdressing and tobacco shop. By 1920 the company had a shop at 3 Mincing Lane, in the City of London, and a wholesale surgical rubber business in Aldersgate Street.

In 1929 Jackson registered the Durex trademark, a name formed from the first letters of the words durability, reliability and excellence. From 1932, with the young Polish rubber technology student Lucian Landau, the company made its own latex condoms in Hackney, by dipping moulds into liquid latex, the first in Europe to do so. Jackson died of cancer of the spine in 1934, aged forty, and his brother Elkan, born Maurice Elkan Jacoby, became managing director.

Under the Durex name the company went on to supply the condoms issued to British servicemen in the Second World War and to introduce the electronic testing of its products in 1953, and the brand has belonged to Reckitt Benckiser since 2010.