Newton Chambers initially gave the toilet paper away to local authorities who placed bulk orders for their liquid disinfectant.

It meant the medicated toilet paper began appearing in public toilets, hospitals and schools.

Softer alternatives were viewed with suspicion – seen as unnecessary, even frivolous, or not strong enough to do the job.

But in the mid-20th Century new competitors approached the market differently, emphasising comfort rather than hygiene.

White says brands such as Andrex made the contrast clear, promoting the idea that toilet paper should be “soft not stiff, shiny or scratchy”.

Sales of the softer varieties began to take over.

Izal introduced its own soft toilet paper, but the brand’s old image was hard to shake.

Its hard toilet paper survived for years as a niche product.

Jayne Howe, a former marketing director at Jeyes which bought the Izal brand in 1986, recalls that people would write to the company asking where they could buy it.

“Most of the letters were coming from older people, 70-plus, that had grown up with it,” she says.

Falling demand led to lower production volumes, which pushed up costs and made it harder to keep the product widely available.

Attempts to reinvent it as a moist toilet tissue were ruled out.

“It was associated with this awful product that nobody really could understand why anybody had used it,” says Howe.

“So you just couldn’t see how you could modernise to a wet wipe and put that name on it.”

In the face of falling financial returns, Jeyes discontinued Izal toilet paper in 2010.

A product that had once dominated the market and been used on millions of suffering bottoms quietly disappeared.