Worcestershire Farmers Limited

The Second World War brought new challenges for WFL as thousands of acres of pasture were ploughed up for grain and every cottage garden became the home of pigs and poultry. The staff of WFL, like the rest of the country, struggled with shortages and rationing, eking out the little that was available among the many members who needed it. Nonetheless, after the war the renewed emphasis on domestic food production was to provide the base for a major expansion in the cooperatives' business. First, in 1946, came the purchase of the St John's Egg Packing Station in Worcester. Here, 370,700 eggs were graded every week before being sent out to shops in Worcester, Malvern, Kidderminster and the Midlands generally. Two years later, in order to supply the northern half of the county and parts of Birmingham, a second egg packing plant with some of the most advanced grading machinery in the country was established on the Stourport Road in Kidderminster. By 1958 this was dealing with 16.5 million eggs per annum and had total sales of £591,000.

Concurrent with this expansion in the egg trade, the corn department built its first central depot at 23 The Butts in Worcester. In 1946 the Clockhouse in Tenbury Wells was also acquired and developed into a corn and fertiliser store with a general farm supplies shop, dealing in feeding stuffs for anything from cattle to canaries. This was followed in 1950 by the opening of a depot in Kidderminster where, in addition to the normal agricultural products, there was also a large seed cleaning plant. A garage and workshop was also established on Henshall Road in Worcester and by 1958 the society had 34 distinctly liveried lorries on the road. During this period, WFL also took over the role of fuel distributor for the Regent Oil Company in the county, running four tankers supplying diesel and other fuels direct to farms from riverside depots.

The leadership of WFL also changed as the Second World War came to an end. Frank Smith was succeeded as chairman by A.B. Quinney of Frankley in 1945 and then by J.H. Wythes. At the same time there were also significant changes in the administration of the society. E. H. Davies, who had been manager of WFL since its inception, retired at the beginning of 1947 and in March 1948 J.B. Alexander was appointed, first as the manager of the corn department and then as E.H. Davies’ successor as secretary and general manager of the business as a whole. In 1952 Thomas Bernard Davies of Chadwich Manor Farm, near Rubery, Bromsgrove took over the reins of the chairmanship. He had served on the board of WFL since 1944 and was to remain as chairman until WFL amalgamated with Warwickshire Farmers Limited in 1964. Always a strong believer in cooperation in farming, in a newspaper interview in 1958 he recalled how he had only become a member of WFL when he found a book of forgotten shares in an old roll-top desk which had been left at Chadwich when he took over the farm in 1924: 'I was going through the drawers with the previous tenant when I came across the book. It was dusty and dog-eared and he advised me to throw it away. Those were the bad days for farmers and he told me the society had never paid any interest on its shares. In spite of that I decided to have them transferred to my name and to keep them.’^[9] Under the chairmanship of T.B. Davies the post war expansion of WFL continued apace. In 1954 a new depot, Bridge House, was established beside the river at Upton-on-Severn to serve members in the southern part of the county, and on 1 January 1957, a corn and seed depot was opened at the Smithfield fruit and vegetable market in Evesham to perform a similar service for farmers in that area. The market in Evesham had been purchased by WFL from a private company in 1951 and it rapidly expanded, so that by 1964 it had more than tripled its pre-takeover turnover to over £300,000 per annum.^[10] On 30 July 1956 a permanent premises for the Worcester fruit and vegetable market also opened at a specially built facility on Hylton Road in Worcester,

However, by far the most ambitious project at this time was the construction of a new headquarters for the society in Worcester on the site of its previous depot at 23 The Butts. Indeed, its opening on 4 September 1958, by Sir James Turner, the President of the National Farmers' Union, even warranted the production of a special four-page supplement in local newspapers. The new premises, which have taken two and a half years to build at a cost of over £250,000, was a distinctive three-storey red brick building. It was constructed on concrete piles sunk 30 feet into the ground and had a ground floor raised four feet above road level to protect it from flooding by the nearby River Severn. Inside, as well as an office block for the cooperatives’ administrative staff and a retail store, there was a mill for the manufacture of cattle, poultry and pig foods. The idea of building a mill to produce animal feedstuffs had first been proposed in 1953 and it seems to have been driven by a desire to both create a more assured market for grain produced by the cooperative's members and to have greater control over the quality of the feedstuffs it supplied to them. Ambitions which were to lead Turner to remark at the opening of the building that 'here we have integration in the fullest sense; that is integration of farming operations, business enterprise, and direct service.'^[11]

The expansion in services was matched by a growth in the membership of the society which expanded rapidly from 846 in 1948 to 2,571 in 1957. During this decade, sales also increased sharply from £391,642 to £2,478,100, while the total of bonuses and interest paid back to members amounted to well over £300,000. This rapid growth led Sir Frederick Brundrett to state at the time of the opening of the new Worcester premises that ‘There is no other society in England, or to my knowledge in Europe, which provides such a wide service. providing, as it does, on the one hand the needs of production such as feeding stuffs, fertilisers, seeds, fuel oils, etc….. and on the other markets for grain, eggs, fruit and vegetables.’^[12]

The building of the new premises in Worcester did not stop the society's expansion. After a protracted debate within the borough council about the conditions to be applied to the lease, on 1 January 1963 WFL took over the loss-making Worcester cattle market. This was quickly sublet to Worcester Livestock Auctions, a collective of three local auctioneers who had previously operated separately. Within a year, alterations had been made to the animal pens in the market and a new canteen built for its clients at a cost of £2,500. In 1963 a large new egg packing station opened in Kidderminister, replacing the two previously operating in the same town and Worcester. Serving 800 egg producers across the county it was fully automated and capable of packing 750,000 eggs a week. In the same year a second £95,000 mill for animal feeds also opened in a converted hangar at a former RAF airfield at Defford in Worcestershire. Capable of producing twenty tons an hour it was judged to be one of the most modern in Europe with a main control panel which ‘looks like a device for launching space rockets’.^[13] The exhibition at its opening, however, was marred by such stormy weather that the tent erected for the directors was hurled 30 feet from its wooden base and they had to be 're-housed' in the mill office.^[14]

At the time of the opening of the new Worcester premises in 1958, Sir Frederick Brundrett had written that 'an outstanding feature of this successful organisation is the manner in which the society's strong committee of management has diligently sought to serve the interests of the farmers’ of Worcestershire rather than extend the activities of the society into neighbouring counties.'^[15] The continued expansion at the beginning of the 1960s, however, was to bring a change of heart. In May 1964 WFL had opened its first branch outside Worcestershire at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire but already the directors were making more ambitious plans. A proposal was made that WFL should merge with the neighbouring Warwickshire Farmers Limited to create one of the six largest agricultural cooperatives in England, with a total membership of 5,800 and a turnover approaching £6,000,000. This seems to have received widespread backing from the Worcestershire farmers but was openly questioned in Warwickshire where a director of the county NFU tried to reassure his colleagues that it was not just a case of the smaller Warwickshire Farmers Limited being ‘swallowed up’ by the much bigger WFL but rather ‘a happy marriage of equal partners’.^[16] Eventually, a joint meeting of WFL and Warwickshire Farmers Limited members, held at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on 28 October 1964, unanimously confirmed the merger of the two cooperatives. The new combined society, which was to be called Midland Shire Farmers, was scheduled to operate from January 1, 1965, under the chairmanship of T.B. Davies of WFL.

Between 1919 and 1964 WFL grew to be one of the main agricultural cooperative societies in England. Its successor Midland Shire Farmers eventually became part of the even larger Countrywide Farmers, which remained headquartered in Worcestershire at Evesham. Demutualised in 1999 when it became Countrywide Farmers plc, this new company went into administration in 2018, bringing to an end a century-old tradition of successful agricultural cooperation.