Our milk vending story finds its roots back to the early 1900s
Whilst we’ve only just launched Woodhorn Farm milk vending in 2023, our history of selling milk from our farms dates back over a century to when current owner, John Pitts’ great grandfather, Fred, sold milk to the public under the Belgravia Dairy Company brand. Here, John shares some more of Fred’s story along with some pictures from the archive.
The Pitts family were once long established dairy famers in south Devon. In the late 1800s, farming in England was in dire straits due to a flood of cheap imports from throughout the British Empire. Many farms were abandoned, land values declined and the big landowners could not find tenants for their farms. So it was for one of the country’s biggest landlords, The Church of England, who had many vacant farms in Sussex where the soil quality was considerably better than that down in Devon.
My Great Grandfather, Fred Pitts, saw an opportunity and put his cows, horses, carts, ploughs, wife and children on a train and headed east in 1882. The Church gratefully offered him tenancies on Broyle farm outside Chichester (now a housing estate), Houghton Farm near Amberley and Woodhorn Farm in Oving. I am now the 4th generation of the Pitts family to farm at Woodhorn.
In 1889 Fred move his family to ‘Sunnyside’ in Chichester and his eldest son, William, moved in to Woodhorn. Sunnyside was a rather beautiful Georgian townhouse situated next to the equally imposing Chichester Police Station. Both were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the existing Chichester bus station.
Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines) tells of a visit to West Broyle Farm in his 1901 book ‘Rural England of 1901’. The farm was ‘mainly dairy with 90 pure and cross bred Guernseys’ and the staff consisted of ’15 men, 2 boys and 3 milkmen along with 12 horses’. He also described how Fred was ‘a good horseman and rode regularly around the 3 farms upon a high and strong horse inspecting with a critical eye and a strong arm’.
Fred was a businessman as well as a farmer (a relatively rare combination in the 1800s) and was owner and managing Director of The Belgravia Dairy Company in West Kensington with 26 branches in the west end, including 7 in the Mall. When my Father celebrated the centenary of the move from Devon to Sussex in 1982 , the Chichester Observer ran the story. My Father subsequently received a letter from an aged gentleman who had read the piece and described how his first job ‘as a very young boy’ was helping out on one of the horse and cart milk floats around London.
The Belgravia Dairy Company was sold after Fred’s death in 1924 to United dairies (later to become Unigate and Dairy Crest). Nearly 100 years later we will be selling milk from Woodhorn farm direct to the public, but this time via our vending machine in Oving rather than on the streets of London!