The Bath Soft Cheese Company

So there was my great grandparents and then my grandfather, who I think to be fair was possibly more focused or interested in his hobbies than the farm but then my father came back from agricultural college determined to invest in a new milking parlour, determined to invest in the farm. In terms of what I’ve achieved, none of it would have been possible without those investments my father made. When we were growing up there were four dairy farms in the village and apparently about 35 on this stretch of road between Bath and Bristol and today we’re the only dairy farm on this stretch of road and that is because my father made the investment in making this a modern dairy, and he put in the hours, he milked the cows, he borrowed the money. When I think things are risky and dodgy I think back to my father being massively in debt in the 1980s with really high interest rates and very little in terms of actual assets.

I never actually thought I was going to take over the farm business, mainly because my older brother was passionate about farming, he was four years older than me and before I was even on the scene he was going around in tractors. But, he died of cancer at 34, which kind of threw the whole thing open, initially I still didn’t think that I would get involved but it’s funny how I kind of needed to see what it was like to have another occupation to see what I had on the farm. Also for me having children really changed things, farm life is so about that kind of children enjoyment of freedom, space, building dens. I was working in London, we had three children at that stage, we now have four, and the more I kind of thought about where I wanted to be, about where I wanted my children and my family to be, the more I thought I should go back to the farm. So I came back, in 2010, primarily with the thought that I would focus on the cheese side of the business and we’ve grown quite rapidly since. Back then the cheese was pretty much a hobby on the side of the farming. So if you look at the cheese business, my grandfather, like many many other farmers, had stopped making cheese in the 1940s, or late 1930s. 

The thing about farming, is farmings all lovely and beautiful but there’s only so much you can do, you get really successful and you’ve got that much land, so once you’ve done it well, it’s difficult as you can only produce so much milk, or if you want to do something differently you have to reduce the number of cows you’ve got to make room. You’re confined. Whereas when you start something manufacturing wise, it’s different. Initially when I came back to run the farm we were using about 20% of our milk for cheese back in November last year I don’t think any milk left the farm, so we used 100% of our milk for cheese. Generally, I like to be slightly less than that, to give some flexibility. So I came back in 2010 and I built a house and then there was a time where we were making cheese in the same building as my great grandmother which was a fairly old and dilapidated building.  Initially when I came back, I went to Oxford and did PPE, I went into strategy and consulting for four years and then telecoms for seven years.

When I first came back to the farm I felt like I was on holiday. My summer holiday growing up on the farm we’d either throw on overalls or a pair of cut off denim shorts and you’d work on the farm.. That’s what we did, we earnt money in the day and we went out during the evenings and we had more money than our friends because we were earning like £1 an hour and doing a 90 hour week. So yeah, coming back and working on the farm, it just felt like I was back on my summer holiday, doing things that were fun, that I’d chosen to do. But when you have those down moments, God, I remember towards the end of my first year, we’d started doing all these farmers markets in London, and I’d got up to doing about 6 on a Saturday. Which involved me driving rapidly around West London, setting up trestle tables, setting up the cheese and blasting on to the next one trying to get them all set up by 10 o’clock and then blasting around at 2 o’clock to pack them up. Doing all of this in the family car, so I decided I needed a van, so this dodgy van dealer sold me a second hand van, it was delayed and delayed and I really needed it for the weekend when we had loads of markets on. He turned up late on the Friday night and I spotted it wasn’t the registration plate he’d promised me so the whole thing seemed bloody dodgy, we had a row about it. I’d hired a van to cover the week before and the guy who had driven that arrived back with it and said I’ve filled up the tank with diesel, I said “don’t fill up the tank with diesel!” so I’d laid on the pavement to suck the diesel, which resulted in nothing but a mouth full of diesel, then I had a row with this chap, I then realised I’d let the front door slam, with my two baby sons in the house, so I ran round the back of the house, twisted my ankle climbing into the window, sat on the sofa with breath stinking of diesel, with a twisted ankle, having just bought a dodgy van and thought ‘I’m not making any money and when my wife gets back she’s going to laugh at me’.

My father started with the Bath Soft Cheese, his intention was to make a cheddar as his grandmother had, and in keeping with the Somerset tradition of cheddar, my father being very much a Somerset man.  A friend at a party said “why don’t you make Bath Cheese” my father said he’d never heard of it and he said “well I’m the president of the Admiral Nelson Society and I happen to know there’s a letter from Admiral Nelson’s father to Nelson where he says I know you and Lady Hamilton love the Bath soft cheese” so my father went and looked it up, found the letter, went to the reference library in Bath, looked up the recipe. It’s funny because a lot of the cheesemakers in the late 80s early 90s were learning from 2 or 3 cheese makers who were around at the time, but my father just took a recipe from Bath reference library and just decided to teach himself in the kitchen with the argar and the milk. As a result quite a lot of cheese was thrown away but the end result is a delicious soft cheese. Very much like a camembert, and I always thought camembert had been being made for centuries and centuries but in fact it dates from the 1790s which is exactly when Bath soft cheese originates. So a real British contemporary of camembert and very like camembert. It makes sense as there are so many similarities between the North of France and The South West of England in terms of cows, cider, milk and so that was doing well and I think if my father had been more focused on that instead of farming the business would have done well. He then brought out the Wyfe of Bath cheese, he wanted to make a cheese that was like the kind of cheese that farmers would have made before cheese making was codified. My grandfather would take the milk to the dairy as a boy on a pony trap on the way to school. So he would literally put milk churns on the back of a pony trap and drop them off at the Chelsea Road where it is now, and they would smell the churns when he arrived and in heatwives it was highly likely the milk would go sour before you got there and if it did, this guy would just smell it and he’d have to take it back. The only thing you can do with the milk at that stage is make a cheese. 19th Century they codified how to make cheddar, stilton, cheshire but back before then, what they would have called cheddar is anything from the Cheddar region and what they would have done is just made a very simple curd and then put it into a cloth or a basket and allow it to drain and eat it pretty young.