Job's Dairy - A History of Job's

A History of Job's


H.A. Job - 'The Guv'nor'	Teddington Dairy

Part Two - The Guv'nor

Most successful businesses acknowledge one particularly dynamic figure in their history; and for Job's it was H.A. Roberts. He was born in 1883, the year after the move to Vicarage Road; but when he grew up he did not meekly follow in his mother's footsteps. While his elder brother went into the Navy, reaching the rank of Rear-Admiral, he joined the Army, went to Australia with the Queen's Own Regiment, married, produced a family, became a stockbroker, studied at the Royal Veterinary College, and then set up his own bakery business at Raynes Park.

In 1919, at the age of 36, he became 'The Guv'nor' of Job's Dairy; and it is no exaggeration to say that the company never looked back.

The firm became a limited company in the same year, and Louisa Job had a seat on the board; but the power to shape the future now lay with her son, and he tackled the task with energy and flair. Expansion in those days of innumerable small dairies, all fighting for the custom of one street, was not easy; but it could be done, with the necessary combination of effrontery and hard work; and by 1928 the Teddington Dairy had half-a-dozen retail branches and was selling 2000 gallons of milk a day, collected from 42 farms

In the same year a small laboratory was installed and placed under the supervision of a young bacteriologist, Barbara Fischer, from Dr Stenhouse William's National Institute for Research in Dairying. 'The lab' Miss Fischer wrote later, 'was draughty and not too light, but I thought it was wonderful and it was very well equipped.'

For a comparatively small dairy to have it's own laboratory in 1928 was as rare as for a small dairy to have a pasteurising plant in 1912; and it was not there for ornament. From it's work sprang directly the bonus scheme for farmers who produced the best and purest milk.

Barbara Fischer was no backroom boffin and much of her time was spent at the farms which supplied the dairy, remonstrating with farmers whose notions of hygiene was non-existent, and convincing them that their milk was, to put it bluntly, filthy. Her work laid the foundation for the claim that Job's sold better milk than their competitors.

Today the pioneering work is done, and the personal contact with the farmers has consequently lapsed; but the laboratory, under her successor, Jean Allin, continued to flourish for many years, keeping a daily check on every batch of milk that comes into the dairy, as well as on the equipment of the dairy itself.

In 1928 also, a 3-way batch pasteurising plant was installed at Teddington. To launch it, H.A. Roberts secured the presence of an emigree Russian princess; a publicity stunt which was characteristic of him. He has an equal, and equally modern grasp of what is now called 'communication', and in February 1929 he started a house magazine, waggishly entitled The Book of Job, designed to tell his 'family' what was going on. It was published regularly up until the company was sold in 1987.

It wasn't long before the premises at Teddington were becoming too cramped; and in the same year - 1929 - a site for a new dairy was bought at Hanworth. The new site was to be "on high gravel ground, situated in open country, not overlooked by other buildings, and where we shall always get the maximum amount of fresh air" as 'The Guv'nor' described it in the magazine.

So much for prophecy!

Douglas, his elder son, joined the company in time to help with the planning of the new building which his father referred to as his 'Palace of Health'. By autumn of 1930 it was complete - at a cost of £26,000 - and in production.

It was officially opened by Lord Iveagh on the 13th may 1931; and within three years it was handling 5000 gallons of milk a day. Louisa Job, then 82, was at the ceremony.


Louisa Job celebrates the opening of Hanworth	Milk was very much the order of the day!

It all must have seemed a long, long way from the cows behind the shop in Teddington, and a just fulfillment for all those years of driving hard work. Sadly Louisa died three years later, at the grand age of 85.

Much was added to Hanworth Plant over the next 30 years, and a separate office block was built just across the road in 1959, remembered fondly as 'Job's Hall'. But this was nothing on the scale of what was to come.

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