THE NEWTON GROUP: Survivors of fire and commercial hazards of 108 years' trading, the Newton family company marches on towards its fifth generation

This story of the 108‐year‐old Birmingham Newton Company, manufacturers of industrial and automotive lubricants and chemical products, might well have come to an abrupt end twenty years ago — on 20 March 1968 in fact — when a disastrous fire gutted the company's Holt Street works, blending plant and laboratory, leaving a pile of smoking rubble where Ernest Newton founded his family business in 1880.