Ladies’ underwear is not, I hope you’ll agree, a regular component of this column. But an item I spotted in the new Shrewsbury Museum compels me to head in this unaccustomed direction.

Back in the fifties, one of Shrewsbury’s most successful companies was Silhouette, makers of swimwear (the biggest in the UK), bras, girdles and corsetry.

Silhouette is one of those perfect case studies of British industry: household name one minute, basket case the next. Yet at one time the firm had five factories and employed almost 2,000 workers.

Silhouette should never have been in England in the first place. It was founded in 1887 by two Jewish businessmen – Max Lobbenberg and Emil Blumenau – in Cologne. By the 1930s the business was in the hands of the sons of the original owners, and it was they who wisely took the decision to move their factory out of Germany, first to London, and then (when the bombs starting falling there) to Shropshire.

In 1937, shortly before the move to England, Otto Lobbenberg got hold of the manufacturing rights for a new and revolutionary piece of “foundationwear”, which turned into an overnight sales success. The London office called the garment “Silhouette Radiante”. It was a radioactive corset.

In case of doubters, Otto obtained a certificate from the Marie Curie Institute in Paris confirming that the item was, indeed, radiating.

Ah, those far-off days when nuclear energy was thought of as our friend. It would not be many years before people would run from anything radioactive but in these optimistic early days enthusiastic shoppers could hardly get closer to it.

“The corset has a stimulating and rejuvenating influence on the cells of the human body,” went the advertising blurb, “aiding fatigue, warming the body, and reducing rheumatic pain.”

It warms as it lifts and supports. Whatever else it might be doing was something for the scientists to find out. But when your beloved took to the dance-floor and said she was looking radiant, she really was.

* Dr Chris Upton is Reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham