Minora Stainless 
ShaveX
View attachment 1941770
Very many apologies for the length of this post.
Violet Ann Dodge was born into poverty in West London in 1882, her father a labourer and her mother a washerwoman. After entering service as a scullery maid, at 21 she married Harry Nathan, a civil engineer 13 years her senior and began making cosmetics in her kitchen. Her invention of the first "brushless shave cream", ShaveX, led to the founding of ShaveX Zee-Kol in Holloway, London, which she ran with noted ruthlessness and attention to detail. It made Violet Nathan one of the wealthiest female entrepreneurs in Britain, and she took a particular interest in the publicity and marketing of her highly successful product.
After her husband's death in 1927, she remarried a Belgian, Jean Van der Elst, who as well as being employed as a manager at ShaveX, was also an artist and composer. It was after her second husband's untimely early death in 1934 that Violet Van der Elst dedicated herself to one of her late husband's social interests, the abolition of the death penalty. She ran a notable campaign of direct action, using her advertising experience to create highly visible stunts and protests to raise publicity, as well as spending considerable amounts of her own fortune. She unsuccessfully stood for parliament a number of times on a platform of abolition.
In the late 1930s, after seeing a newspaper advertisement, she bought, saved and restored Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, a Victorian country house built in the Elizabethan and Jacobean styles, from where as well as directing her campaign she also pursued an interest in the occult, writing several collections of horror stories. When the manor was requisitioned by the RAF in WWII she moved to her flat in Knightsbridge, where she stayed throughout the blitz, reportedly patrolling the neighbourhood and helping to put out incendiaries.
She continued her remarkable efforts for the abolition of capital punishment after the war, and was prominent in the campaign against the hanging of Ruth Ellis, who proved to be the last woman to be hanged in Britain. These efforts throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, together with a notable predilection for litigation, diminished much of her fortune and she was far from wealthy when she finally died in 1966 in a private mental asylum in East Sussex at the age of 84. The death penalty had been abolished in Britain just one year earlier.
And so I suppose I should mention the actual razor! They were sold as 'complete outfits' together with ShaveX shave cream and ShaveX own-brand blades from around the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. It's an impressively solid, well made, plated all-brass razor weighing 61g that feels especially good in the hand. Despite looking like it shouldn't really work at all, it actually provides a remarkably good shave. As long as you ride the cap - and it will provide good audible feedback to let you know you have the right angle - the shave will at once be both mild, and yet impressively effective. Amazingly one of the best razors I own.
| Date | 11.11.2024 |
| 366 daily shaves | 316/366 |
| Razor (Daily Double) | Blade | Brush |
| Gillette Rocket HD | Lord Cool (3) | Abe’s Brush Works Blutt STF |
| Preshave | Soap | Postshave |
| Cold splash Mastro Miche preshave | Hampshire Wool Fat (34) | Cold splash Proraso Green A/S Balm |
| Effectiveness | Facial Impact Score FIS™ |
| 9/10 (BBS-) | 10/10 (Butterysmooth) |
| Notes: |
