Hello, you're listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me,

Rachel Naylor.

I'm going to take you back 75 years to the invention of the disposable nappy.

I've been speaking to the man who was the first baby to wear one.

It's September 1947 and we're in Canberley, in the south of England.

Halloween hunter Gordon has just had a third baby and she's had enough of cloth nappies.

I think my arrival was possibly the final straw.

I'm not putting up with this any longer.

You have these big towering nappies which you wrap around the baby, which got duly soiled

and then you had to wash them and didn't have washing machines in those days.

Then they had to be armed and hung up on a line to be dried.

And babies were just as prolific in those days as they are now.

So there'd be quite a lot of these to deal with every day.

And so most of your time was taken up as I understand it on dealing with these binite items.

That's Nigel hunter Gordon, Baluise third child.

And the reason she was keen to take action.

She just couldn't face the drudgery a third time round.

She believed it was ridiculous in that day and age with all the white heat of technology

and all that sort of stuff that something quite so fashion should be going on.

And so she really felt that something should be done about it.

First, she researched whether there was anything out there already.

Here's Baluise, speaking to the BBC in 2015.

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