As we celebrate our 100^th year, it’s the perfect opportunity to remember the man who started it all, Ernest Bader. It was 1921 in Finsbury Square, London when he became the sole agent for a Swiss manufacturer of Celluloid, marking the beginning of Scott Bader.

But what brought Ernest to this point?

Born in Switzerland in 1890, Ernest was the son of a farmer and the youngest of seven. By the time he was 14, family finances forced him to work and he found a job as a clerical apprentice in a silk factory. With his pacifist and deep Christian beliefs, Ernest had no wish to continue in the Swiss military service, a requirement then as it is now, for all male Swiss citizens.

Restless, ambitious and always enterprising, young Ernest Bader soon tired of the limited prospects before him and in 1912 decided to travel to the world’s centre of banking and commerce – London. Here he met and married an English girl, Dora Scott.

Coming from farming stock he had a love of the land and toyed with the idea of becoming an apple farmer, even a beekeeper, before finally deciding to set up on his own as an agent selling Celluloid. Ernest called the company E. Scott Bader, incorporating his wife’s name and his own (another sign of his modern thinking), and the rest, as they say, is history.