Although there are almost no advertisements, Henry is still a fixture for millions of homes, including No. 10 Downing Street. Meet the man behind a strange British success story
In March of this year, photos of the government’s luxurious new briefing room were leaked to the media, where Boris Johnson’s head of new media will host the daily press conference. As the core of the “presidential” communication method, it has already aroused controversy over its taxpayer’s cost of £2.6 million. With a gorgeous blue background, a huge union flag and a majestic podium, it looks like the stage of an American political or legal television program: West Wing’s contact with Judge Judy.
What the briefing room needs is something to eliminate its exaggeration. It turns out that what it needs is a cameo appearance from a 620-watt anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner. The sturdy red and black piece of equipment is barely visible on the wing on the left side of the stage, but it can be recognized at a glance. Leaving the podium, his chrome wand casually leaned against the painted wall skirting railing, and Henry’s vacuum cleaner looked almost rolling his eyes.
The photo quickly became popular; there are some gimmicks about the “leadership vacuum”. “Can we hold Henry in charge?” the TV host Lorraine Kelly asked. Numatic International is located in a huge complex of giant sheds in the small town of Chad, Somerset, and its executives are very happy about it. “It’s surprising that Henry is very few in that photo. How many people came up to us and asked us,’Have you seen it? Have you seen it?” Chris Duncan said, he is the company The founder and sole owner of, a Henry is taken off the production line every 30 seconds.
Duncan invented Henry 40 years ago this summer. He is now 82 years old and is worth an estimated £150 million. He is called “Mr. D” among the 1,000 employees of the factory, but he still works full-time on a standing desk he built. After months of persuasion, he spoke to me in the first official interview.
Henry unexpectedly became an icon of British design and manufacturing. In the hands of the prince and plumber (Charles and Diana received one of the first models as wedding gifts in 1981), he is also the backbone of millions of ordinary families. In addition to the Downing Street guest appearance, Henry was also photographed hanging on a rope because the rope zippers were cleaning Westminster Abbey. A week after my visit to Henry’s headquarters, Kathy Burke discovered one while visiting a magnificent mansion on Channel 4’s series Money Talks on wealth. “No matter how rich, everyone needs a Henry,” she said.
Henry is the villain of Dyson. He subverted the social norms of the home appliance market in a modest and humorous manner, discouraging this larger and more expensive brand and its billionaire creator. James Dyson received the knighthood and gained more land than the queen. He was criticized for outsourcing production and offices to Asia, while also supporting Brexit. His latest memoir will be published in September this year, and his early vacuum cleaners are highly regarded in the Design Museum. Henry? Not so much. But if Dyson brings ambition, innovation, and a unique atmosphere to Big Vacuum, then Henry, the only mass-produced consumer vacuum cleaner still made in the UK, brings simplicity, reliability — and a pleasant lack. A sense of air. “Nonsense!” This was Duncan’s reaction when I suggested that he should also write a memoir.
As the son of the London policeman, Duncan wore an open-necked short-sleeved shirt; his eyes gleamed behind gold-rimmed glasses. He lives 10 minutes away from Chard’s headquarters. His Porsche has a “Henry” license plate, but he has no other houses, no yachts and other gadgets. Instead, he likes to work 40 hours a week with his 35-year-old wife Ann (he has three sons from his ex-wife) ). Modesty penetrates Numatic. The campus is more like Wenham Hogg than Silicon Valley; the company never advertises for Henry, nor does it retain a public relations agency. However, due to the surge in demand for home appliances related to the pandemic, its turnover is close to 160 million pounds and it has now manufactured more than 14 million Henry vacuum cleaners, including a record 32,000 in the week before my visit.
When Duncan received the MBE at Buckingham Palace in 2013, Ann was taken to the auditorium to witness the honor. “A man in uniform said,’What does your husband do?’” he recalled. “She said,’He made Henry’s vacuum cleaner.’ He almost shit himself! He said: “When I get home and tell my wife that I have met Mr. Henry, she will be very angry, and she will not be there. “It’s stupid, but these stories are as valuable as gold. We don’t need a propaganda machine because it is automatically generated. Every Henry goes out with a face.”
At this stage, I admit to being a little obsessed with Henry. When I moved in with her 10 years ago, or when he moved to a new home with us after we got married, I didn’t think too much about Henry of my girlfriend Jess. It was not until the arrival of our son in 2017 that he began to occupy a larger position in our family.
Jack, who is almost four years old, was alone when he first met Henry. One morning, before dawn, Henry was left in the cabinet the night before. Jack was wearing a striped baby suit, placed his baby bottle on the wooden floor, and squatted down to examine a strange object the same size as him. This is the beginning of a great romance. Jack insisted on freeing Henry from his dark cabinet; for months, he was the first place Jack went in the morning and the last thing he thought of at night. “I love you,” Jesse said from his crib one night before the lights were turned off. “I love Henry,” replied.
When Jake found out that my mother had a Henry upstairs and a Henry downstairs, he was absent-minded in order to save lifting heavy objects. For several days, the fictional stories he asked to read before going to bed were all about Grandma Henry. They will call each other at night to meet for domestic adventures. In order to get Henry back in the cabinet, I bought a toy Henry for Jack. He can now hug little Henry while he is asleep, his “trunk” wrapped around his fingers.
This incident reached its peak with the outbreak of the pandemic. In the first blockade, Big Henry became Jack’s closest friend to his friend. When he accidentally hit the vacuum with his mini stroller, he reached into his wooden stethoscope toy doctor toolbox. He started watching Henry’s content on YouTube, including serious comments by vacuum influencers. His obsession is not surprising; Henry looks like a giant toy. But the strength of this bond, only Jack’s love for his plush puppies can rival him, which makes me curious about Henry’s background story. I realized that I didn’t know anything about him. I started sending emails to Numatic, and I didn’t even know it was a British company.
Back in Somerset, Henry’s creator told me his origin story. Duncan was born in 1939 and spent most of his childhood in Vienna, where his father was sent to help establish a police force after the war. He moved back to Somerset at the age of 16, earned some O-level degrees and joined the merchant marine. A naval friend then asked him to find a job at Powrmatic, a company that produces fuel heaters in east London. Duncan was a born salesman, and he ran the company until he left and founded Numatic in 1969. He found a gap in the market and needed a strong and reliable cleaning agent that could suck out smoke and sludge from coal-fired and gas-fired boilers.
The vacuum industry has been developing since the early 1900s, when British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth (Hubert Cecil Booth) designed a horse-drawn machine whose long hose could pass through the doors and windows of luxury houses. In an advertisement in 1906, a hose is coiled around a thick carpet like a benevolent snake, with imaginary eyes hanging from its steel mouth, gazing at the maid. “Friends” is the slogan.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, an asthma department store cleaner named James Murray Spangler used a fan motor to make a hand-held vacuum cleaner in 1908. When he made one for his cousin Susan, her husband, a leather goods manufacturer named William Hoover, decided to purchase the patent. Hoover was the first successful household vacuum cleaner. In the UK, the trademark became synonymous with the product category (“hoover” now appears as a verb in the dictionary). But it was not until the 1950s that cleaners began to enter the homes of the masses. Dyson is a privately educated art student who started developing his first bagless cleaner in the late 1970s, which eventually shook the entire industry.
Duncan has no interest in the consumer market and has no money to make parts. He started with a small oil drum. A cover is needed to house the motor, and he wants to know whether an upturned sink can solve this problem. “I walked around all the shops with drums until I found a suitable bowl,” he recalled. “Then I called the company and ordered 5,000 black sinks. They said, “No, no, you can’t wear it black-it will show signs of tide and look bad. “I told them I don’t want them to wash the dishes.” This Henry’s ancestor is now collecting dust in the corridor used as the Numatic Museum. The oil drum is red and the black bowl is sandwiched on it. It has furniture casters on wheels. “Today, the line in front of you where you put the hose is still a two-inch drum line,” Duncan said.
By the mid-1970s, after Numatic had some success, Duncan was at the British booth at the Lisbon trade show. “It’s as boring as sin,” he recalled. One night, Duncan and one of his salesmen lazily began to dress up their latest vacuum cleaner, first by tying a ribbon, and then putting the union flag badge on what began to look a bit like a hat. They found some chalk and drew a rude smile under the hose outlet. It suddenly looked like a nose and then some eyes. In order to find a nickname suitable for the British, they chose Henry. “We put it and all the other equipment in the corner, and people smiled and pointed the next day,” Duncan said. Back at Numatic, which had dozens of employees at the time, Duncan asked his advertising staff to design a suitable face for the cleaner. “Henry” is still an internal nickname; the product is still printed with Numatic above the eyes.
At the next trade show in Bahrain, a nurse at the nearby Aramco Petroleum Company Hospital asked to buy one for the children’s ward to encourage recovering children to help with cleaning (I might try this strategy at home at some point). “We received all these small reports, and we thought, there was something in it,” Duncan said. He increased production, and in 1981 Numatic added Henry’s name to the black lid, which began to resemble a bowler hat. Duncan is still focused on the commercial market, but Henry is taking off; they heard that the office cleaner is talking to Henry to eliminate the ordeal of the night shift. “They took him to heart,” Duncan said.
Soon, large retailers began to contact Numatic: customers saw Henry in schools and construction sites, and his reputation as a tenacious friend in the industry created a reputation that was passed down by word of mouth. Some people also smelled a deal (Henry’s price today is £100 cheaper than the cheapest Dyson). Henry took to the street in 1985. Although Numatic tried to prevent the use of the term “Hoover” which was banned by the company’s headquarters, Henry was soon informally called “Henry Hoover” by the public, and he married the brand through alliteration. The annual growth rate is about 1 million, and now includes Hettys and Georges and other brothers and sisters, in different colors. “We turned an inanimate object into a animate object,” Duncan said.
Andrew Stephen, a marketing professor at Oxford University’s Said Business School, was initially confused when I asked him to assess Henry’s popularity. “I think the product and the brand attract people to use it, rather than make them fall into the normal, that is, use price as a proxy signal of quality,” Stephen said.
“Time may be part of it,” said Luke Harmer, an industrial designer and lecturer at Loughborough University. Henry arrived a few years after the first Star Wars movie was released, with hapless robots, including R2-D2. “I want to know if the product is related to a product that provides services and is somewhat mechanized. You can forgive its weakness because it is doing a useful job.” When Henry fell over, it was difficult to get angry with him. “It’s almost like walking a dog,” Harmer said.
The collapse is not the only frustration for Henry’s car owners. He was caught around the corner and occasionally fell off the stairs. Throwing his clumsy hose and wand into a full cabinet, it felt like dropping a snake into a bag. Among the generally positive evaluations, there is also an average evaluation of performance (although he has completed the work in my home).
At the same time, Jake’s obsession is not alone. He provided Numatic with passive marketing opportunities suitable for his modesty-and saved millions in advertising costs. In 2018, when 37,000 people signed up to bring vacuum cleaners, a Cardiff University student was forced by the council to cancel Henry’s picnic. Henry’s appeal has gone global; Numatic is increasingly exporting its products. Duncan handed me a copy of “Henry in London”, which was a professionally produced photo book in which Henry visited famous places. Three young Japanese women brought Henry to fly from Tokyo to shoot.
In 2019, 5-year-old Illinois fan Erik Matich, who is being treated for leukemia, flew 4,000 miles to Somerset with the Make-A-Wish charity. It has always been his dream to see Henry’s home [Eric is now in good condition and will complete his treatment this year]. Duncan said dozens of children with autism have also taken the same trip. “They seem to be related to Henry because he never tells them what to do,” he said. He tried to work with autism charities, and recently found an illustrator to help create Henry & Hetty books that charities can sell (they are not for general sales). In Henry & Hetty’s Dragon Adventure, the dust-sweeping duo found a dragon fence while cleaning the zoo. They flew with a dragon to a castle, where a wizard lost his crystal ball-until more vacuum cleaners found it. It won’t win awards, but when I read the book to Jack that night, he was very happy.
Henry’s attraction to children also poses challenges, as I discovered when I visited the factory with Paul Stevenson, 55-year-old production manager, who has worked at Numatic for more than 30 years. Paul’s wife Suzanne and their two adult children also work at Numatic, which is still producing other commercial products, including cleaning trolleys and rotary scrubbers. Despite the pandemic and delays in parts related to Brexit, the factory is still functioning well; Duncan, who silently supports Brexit, is ready to overcome what he believes is the initial problems.
In a series of huge sheds exuding the smell of hot plastic, 800 workers in high-gloss jackets fed plastic pellets into 47 injection molding machines to make hundreds of parts, including Henry’s red bucket and black hat. A coiling team added Henry’s coiled power cord. The cord reel is located on the top of the “cap”, and the power is transmitted to the motor below through two lightly raised metal prongs, which rotate on the greased receiver ring. The motor drives the fan in reverse, sucking in air through the hose and red bucket, and another team adds a filter and dust bag to it. In the metal part, the steel pipe is fed into a pneumatic pipe bender to create the iconic kink in Henry’s wand. This is fascinating.
There are far more humans than robots, and one of them will be hired every 30 seconds to carry the assembled Henry into a box for scheduling. “We are doing different jobs every hour,” said Stevenson, who started producing Henry around 1990. The Henry production line is the busiest production line in the factory. Elsewhere, I met Paul King, 69, who is about to retire after 50 years of working at Numatic. Today, he is making accessories for riding scrubbers. “I worked at Henry a few years ago, but now they are too fast for me on this line,” he said after turning off the radio.
Henry’s face was once printed directly on the red barrel. But the health and safety laws of some international markets force people to make changes. Although no incidents have been recorded for 40 years, this face is considered a danger because it may encourage children to play with household appliances. New Henry now has a separate panel. In the UK, it is installed in the factory. In a more frightening market, consumers may attach it at their own risk.
Regulations are not the only headache. As I continued to develop the habit of Jack Henry through the Internet, the less healthy side of his dust worship emerged. There are Henry who breathes fire, Henry who fights, an X-rated fan novel and a music video in which a man takes an abandoned Henry, just to strangle him while he sleeps. Some people go further. In 2008, after a fan was arrested on the spot with Henry in the factory canteen, his job as a construction worker was dismissed. He claimed that he had been sucking his underwear.
“Russell Howard’s video will not disappear,” said Andrew Ernill, Numatic’s marketing director. He was referring to the 2010 episode of Russell Howard’s Good News. After the comedian tells the story of a policeman who was arrested for stealing Henry during a drug fight, he cuts into a video in which Henry takes a big sip of “cocaine” from the coffee table.
Ernil is more keen to talk about Henry’s future, and so is Duncan. This year, he added Numatic’s first chief technology officer, Emma McDonagh, to the board of directors as part of a broader plan to prepare the company for “in case I get hit by a truck.” As a veteran hired from IBM, she will help the company grow and make more Henrys in a more sustainable way. There are more plans to automate and increase local employment. Henry and his siblings are now available in various sizes and colors; there is even a cordless model.
However, Duncan is determined to keep his vacuum as it is: it is still a very simple machine. Duncan proudly told me that almost all of the 75 parts that make up the latest model can be used to repair the “first”, which he called the original in 1981; in the era of rapid waste landfills, Henry is durable and easy to repair. When my own Henry’s hose popped out of his nose a few years ago, I cut it off by an inch and then screwed it back into place with a little glue.
In the end, Downing Street Henry exceeded the requirements. After a guest appearance for a month, the idea of the daily press conference was cancelled on the 10th: the briefing room was mainly used for the Prime Minister’s pandemic announcement. Henry never appeared again. Should the U-turn of the communication be attributed to his accidental appearance? “Henry’s work behind the scenes has been greatly appreciated,” a government spokesperson would say.
My own Henry spends more time under the stairs these days, but his connection with Jack remains strong. Jack can now speak for England, if not always coherently. When I tried to interview him, it was obvious that he thought there was nothing unusual about liking vacuum cleaners. “I like Henry Hoover and Heidi Hoover because they are both Hoover,” he told me. “Because you can mix with them.
“I just like Hoover,” he continued, a little annoyed. “But, Dad, I only like the named Khufu.”
Post time: Sep-02-2021