RS Clare started in business as a chemist, druggist and dry-salter in 1748, during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution which began in the North West of England. For the first time, wealth was generated from commerce,  a part of the economy from which most land owners were absent unless they had minerals under their land.

From small beginnings provisioning ships in the growing port of Liverpool, Clare began to distil raw turpentine imported from the Carolinas in North America. 50 years later, tar distillation began along with rosin manufacture. Apart from trading tallow as a lubricant, the company focused on tar derivatives – phenols for disinfectant, creosote for wood preservation, naphthalene and road tar.

At the start of the twentieth century, Clare’s ‘Tarco’ became renowned as the most effective dust laying compound and was manufactured for local authorities under licence throughout the country. However, in 1947, nationalisation of the gas works made the production of tar uneconomic so that it was superseded by bitumen. By this time, first ‘Tarcoline’ road paint and then ‘Plastaline’ the world’s first thermoplastic road marking material became the major product lines of the business. Despite being invented in 1933, thermoplastic road marking is still the predominant form of road marking today in UK and beyond.