A History of Job's
- This lorry fleet dates from the early 1930's, when they were used to bring milk from the farms -
The First One Hundred Years
Job's Dairy, which celebrated it's 150th anniversary back in 1969, traces it's origins to a 'cowkeeper' by the name of William Porter who started in business in Teddington, Middlesex in 1819.
On his death, his business passed to his son, who in turn sold out to a man called Kirby, in whose hands it remained until 1874. At this time and for many years to come, the production and sale of milk, butter and cheese were two sides of the same coin, and the cows were stalled behind the shop at No 67, High Street, Teddington.
While Mr Kirby was busy supplying the inhabitants of this Thameside village with milk, the two daughters of a Gloucestershire farmer, Louisa and Sally Barber, were busy growing up not far from the River Severn. Both of them married farmers: Louisa, a Mr Edward Roberts and Sally, a Mr James Prewett. It is with them that the story of Job's Dairy really begins.
Louisa and Sally Barber
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In 1874 the young Roberts' left Thornbury, came to Teddington, and bought Kirby's Dairy. Quite soon after that they founded the family which, apart from one very brief interval, has run Job's ever since.
It seems as if the move was a success from the start, for they were soon having to fetch milk from Hampton. Within a few years Sally and James Prewett also left Gloucestershire and started a dairy of their own in Hampton Hill - a dairy which would, one day, become part of Job's.
Within eight years of starting in Teddington, Louisa Roberts, who is still remembered as a formidable businesswoman, and who now had a family to feed and clothe, bought some land on the corner of High Street and Vicarage Road and built a new shop - with space behind for the cows. She called it the Teddington Dairy, and although it no longer belongs to Job's it is still there, substantially the same as when she built it.
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But if the premises were new, the work was just as hard. In his English Social History. G.M. Trevelyan writes:
"In dairy farms the farmer's wife was herself the foreman labourer, getting the milkmaids up before sunrise and often working on at butter and cheese making until a late hour at night. Dairy farming . . . was the most arduous and the most profitable of the occupations of women"
Arduous it certainly was. The routine, which remained much the same up to the end of the First World War, started at 4am with the milking. By 5.30 or 6am the first of the three daily rounds was on it's way; and this meant pushing the heavy, three wheeled, iron-tyred 'pram' with it's quart, pint and half-pint measures jingling at the side.
The early round was followed at around 11am by the 'pudding' round, then in mid-afternoon by the tea round. And, at the end of it all, there were the churns to be scalded and polished, the evening milking, the stalls to be cleaned out, the cream to be separated and the butter to be churned.
It is interesting, in view of later developments in the firm, that those who remember Louisa Job - as she was to become - vividly recall her insistence on cleanliness. She had an eagle's eye for a churn that was not burnished like the sun, both inside and out.
In 1897 Edward Roberts died; and two years later his widow sold the business to a Mr McVicker and moved to Wembley. But not for long! Besides being her own 'foreman labourer', Louisa Roberts had employed a man by the name of Handel Alfred Job. Around the turn of the century she married him, bought back her old dairy, and rechristened it H.A. Job.
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Handel Job, who comes down to us as a friendly, simple soul with a healthy respect for his wife and a certain fondness for ale, ironically figures very little in the story of the dairy that bears his name. Job's Dairy, if it was the creation of any single person, was created by Louisa Roberts, and was built up by her Roberts son and grandsons. Handel Job acquired his immortality vicariously!
By 1908 the business had grown, and the cows were no longer kept behind the dairy, but at Udney Park Farm. Four years later Louisa Job installed the first, small pasteurisation plant, capable of treating 90 gallons of milk a day. In spite of the fact that Louis Pasteur had made his discoveries on the heat treatment of liquids nearly half a century earlier, the process, as applied to milk, was slow to be adopted. Indeed controversy continued right through the 1920s; so Louisa was well ahead of the field. The tradition of professional alertness, of being up with the times - or just ahead of them - which she established, has been maintained ever since.
Dairying had always been women's work: with the outbreak of the Great War and the men away on service, there was no one else to do it. Mrs Culver, mother of the company's financial director, remembered those dismal wartime dawns, meeting the milk train at Kingston station and having to enlist the help of casual "tommies" - the porters demanded a shilling - to lift the heavy churns on to the pram.
When at last the war ended, Louisa Job, now nearly 70, decided to sell up and retire once again. This time, however, she sold the business to her own second son by her first marriage, Henry Alfred Roberts.
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