The "Gut Factory" - an update

After publishing our previous blog about the "Gut Factory" at Ingleburn, we were lucky enough to be contacted by a grandson of Wilhelm Klages, who was able to give us some more information about the family.
Wilhelm Klages was born in Elberfeld, Germany, on the 17th September 1885.  He studied Chemistry at the University of Kiel. He married his first wife Katarina Roeser at the age of 22 in Berlin in 1908. They had a son, Frederick, but after Katarina and Wilhelm divorced, Frederick lived with his Roeser grandparents for some of his early years.
Meanwhile, Wilhelm moved to Switzerland and married Dora Ziegler, gaining Swiss citizenship. He returned to Germany to reclaim his son Frederick and took him back to Switzerland.



Wilhelm Klages (Campbelltown City Library)

In 1921 the family moved to Japan. There, Wilhelm worked for the Tansan Kobe mineral water company. Whilst there, the family lived through the Great Japan Earthquake of 1923.
During 1927 and 1928 the family, Wilhelm, Dora, Frederick, and Frederick's three half-brothers Ulrich (later known as Eric), Arthur and Arnold moved to Australia.
It was from this time that the family settled in Ingleburn and Wilhelm started up the gut factory - (see previous blog).
The boys grew up during the years between the wars. Unfortunately, all but Frederick had Swiss citizenship, so when WWII broke out, Frederick was interned while his son James was still a baby, being sent to Alice Springs and Butlers Gorge in Tasmania.
Thanks so much to James, Frederick's son, who provided this great information to us!

"The Gut Factory"

William (Wilhelm) Klages and his family arrived in Ingleburn as immigrants from Switzerland in 1928. Ingleburn was a small village at the time with a few shops, poultry farms and dirt roads. William established a factory with a compatriot, Adolph Bolliger, which used sheep intestines for the manufacture of medical sutures. This was known as the Olympic Gut Manufacturing Company and was situated on the corner of Kings and Fields Roads, Ingleburn.


William (Wilhelm) Klages (Truth, 27.11.1932)

Two years on, the partnership between Bolliger and Klages was dissolved and a new one formed between William and Paul Witzig. The business must have proved successful as permission was obtained to build a new factory and offices in Kings Road. In 1939 the company was renamed the Australian Suture Company - trading as ASCO. Johnson and Johnson later took over the company.


ASCO - the "gut factory" (Campbelltown Library Local Studies collection)

Margaret Firth of Ingleburn remembers her time working at the factory -
"Oh well, he used to make the surgical gut it was, he used to get the special intestine things from the abbatoirs, and they used to prepare them, sterilise them and all that sort of business, cut them up, and then we girls used to have to roll them, when it was dry, roll them and smooth them down, and they'd get it fine enough to sew eyes with, you know, and then the coarser stuff".
William's son Eric learned the trade after attending the local school, Granville Technical College, and then studying chemistry at Sydney Tech. He worked for the family business before building his own factory, designing machines for treating, stretching, polishing and manufacturing what was commonly known then as "catgut" - nothing to do with cats! He also branched out into the manufacture of tennis racquet strings and violin strings.


A 1946 advertisement for Spiroflex tennis gut strings.

Eric's business was known as "Spiroflex, and was on the corner of Carlisle and Cambridge Streets, Ingleburn. At one stage the factory was turning out 3 million feet of gut a year for surgical sutures alone, with more than 90% of the product for export.
Eric died in 1982, and the factory ultimately closed in 1986.

Eric Klages checking the quality of the material under manufacture.
(Macarthur Leader, 5.12.1972)

Written by Claire Lynch
Sources:
Local Studies Pamphlet files
Grist Mills Vol.21 No.1
Trove
Margaret Firth oral history - Local Studies collection
"From many lands we come" by Hugo Bonomini et al.