was available. There was an additional advantage to using palm oil. The region that produced the oil - the present day Ghana, Nigeria and Togo – was also the centre of the African slave trade. Slavery had been abolished in Britain and its colonies by 1833, but a huge and lucrative market for African slaves continued in the United States, Brazil and Arabia. Palm oil provided an economic alternative to that slave trade and was actively encouraged by the British government. Slavery had become immensely unpopular in Britain and 'politically correct' products like Price's palm oil candles and non-slave produced sugar were very popular. In 1847, when Edward Price and Co became Price's Patent Candle, the new joint stock company considered its ethical use of palm oil so significant that it became the basis for the company's seal which depicted Africans bringing calabashes of palm oil to a seated Britannia figure under a palm tree. Labour In 1840 the company employed 84 staff; by 1855, with two factories in London and one in Bromborough Pool, this figure had risen to 2,300 of whom 1,200 were boys. To any Victorian factory owner child labour was logical and attractive: it was cheap, flexible and in some cases carried out intricate tasks that adults were incapable of. At Price's Patent Candle nightlights and candle packaging were "turned out by the deft fingers" of its child employees. But if there was a single issue that enraged the British public as much as slavery did, it was factory child labour. Unusually for an employer Price’s shares these concerns. The Wilsons were a deeply religious family. William had worked for the London Missionary Society in his youth and his son James was an earnest and evangelical Christian. James was so concerned for the well-being of his child employees that in 1849 he had set up a Christian society at the factory. Each boy was given his "own drawer with lock and key in which to keep his own testament, prayer book, hymn book, arithmetic book, slate and copy book". Boys were encouraged to attend a religious service in the factory in the morning and to go to the factory school in the evening; they were rewarded with games of cricket and outings in the summer. James's religious and education programme was radical for its time - it was most unusual for a factory owner to be