Henry Davis Pochin (25 May 1824 – 28 August 1895) was a British industrial chemist. He invented a process that enabled white soap to be made and a means of using china clay to create better quality paper. He owned several china clay pits in Cornwall, and a mine at Tredegar in South Wales, and was briefly a Liberal Member of Parliament. His wife was Agnes Pochin who was a leading suffragist. Life Pochin was born on 25 May 1824 in Wigston. He was the son of a yeoman farmer of Leicestershire who served an apprenticeship to James Woolley (1811–1858), a manufacturing chemist in Manchester. In 1852 he married Agnes Heap (the sister of Woolley's wife) at the Unitarian Church in Manchester. In time Pochin became James Woolley's partner. Woolley died in 1858 and Pochin kept a manuscript diary of the illness, treatment and death of his partner. On Woolley's death Pochin became the sole proprietor. Pochin is noted for two important inventions. Firstly, he developed a process for the clarification of rosin, a brown substance used to make soap, by passing steam through it so that after distillation it came out white, thus enabling the production of white soap. He sold the rights to this process to raise money to exploit his second invention, which was a process using ammonium sulfate and alumina as a low cost alternative to alumstone in the production of alum cake used in the manufacture of paper. The process required china clay, and Pochin bought several china clay mines in Cornwall for this purpose. In time H. D. Pochin & Co. became one of the three largest British producers of china clay until they were acquired in 1932 by the English China Clays along with the second largest producer, Lovering, to form English China Clays Lovering Pochin & Co. Ltd (ECLP), with both Lovering and Pochin remaining shareholders. Pochin's principal china clay works was the Gothers drying complex, near Roche, Cornwall. This consisted of a number of kilns, each served by a narrow gauge tramway, and was considered to be an extensive works in its day. The tramway was known simply as Pochin's Tramway, and ran from the Gothers works, across the Goss Moor to a loading wharf on the St Dennis Branch. The tramway was operated by a small fleet of steam locomotives known as "Pochin's Puffing Billies", carrying clay to the wharf