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Dewhurst Butchers . By Donald Jay.

I started Butchering at the age of 12. at a local butcher on Colne road in Burnley called Harrison Brothers. ( Jim and Robert Harrison). When I left school at 14 I went to work at J H Dewhursts in Scotland Road Nelson. I left school on Friday and started work on Monday in Easter 19 65. my wage was 4 pound 2 and 6 pence a week we worked every day with Tuesday afternoon off and Sunday off. The policy of Dewhursts was the window had to look nice and full at all times and everything had to be spotlessly clean. 7.30am the shop had to have a big clean and polish. you started by sweeping the flags at the front of the shop. and washing the tiles down at the shop front. then you cleaned the inside if the window till it shone. and then you cleaned all the silver bars that the meat hung from. so you could see you face in the silver. The other butchers would be filling the shop up with fresh meat and filling the shelves with tinned stuff. ( Donald Cooks tinned foods). I then had to get my orders ready I had to take these every day 6 days a week on an old butchers bike with a basket on the front in the sun and rain snow and frost. 1. Barkerhouse Road Day Nursery. 2. Andrew Smiths Old Peoples Home. 3. Ecroyd Centre Colne. 4. Marles Hill Wheatley lane Road. 5. Any other orders. 6. Go to Burnley. Colne and Barnoldswick. with stuff on my Butchers bike. I had to serve on in the shop. In between all this I had to cut up and bone out meat gutting chickens. make dog food. and beef burgers. and cook meats. cut bacon. make dripping. keep the shelves filled with what ever. At 5pm it was the big clean-up. put all the stuff away scrub all the blocks clean. the mincer and bacon slicer. then there was all the trays to clean up and by 6 30pm it as time to go home. And for fun on a Saturday I had to clean all the fridges. and defrost them. that was a big job and when the area manager called I had to clean his car too. And when it was my half day off they had a trick of sending me to a shop for the afternoon that did not close. and you could not say no. so I only got Sunday off if I was lucky sometimes. they had use working on Sundays no pay. just my 4 pound 2 and 6 pence a week. and a joint of meat at weekends. But even after one had severed ones time. the wage was very poor even the managers wage was poor. you could get much more working in other places. and most people would leave for more money. But I loved it but left for more money.

Some of the men I worked with starting with me. Mr Donald Jay.

Mr Harry Hunt. Mr Ernest Boardman. Mr Les Nelson. Mr Roy Windle. Mr Tom Brenan. Mr Alfred Gilberts. Mr Stephen Astin. Mr Peter Bird.

William & Robert Fletcher was a Australian company. importing mutton & lamb to the British isles. In 1912 they had 417 shops. mainly in the north & south of England. They also bought control of The New Zealand Mutton Co. & The Direct Supply Co. The company was started in 1888. by the two brothers & in 1910. they sold controlling interest to the Vestey bros Union Cold storage co ltd. This was the start of a decade of aquasitions for Vestey bros.With the Argenta meat. British & Argentine. Eastmans. & JH Dewhurst .Giving them 2,356 shops by 1923. B & A were a previous merger of James Nelson & the River Plate fresh meat co. In 1893 N Z F M Co. traded from 84 Fore St Exeter Devon, Author N Finnimore.

Dewhurst butchers shuts 60 stores .

Dewhurst, the UK's biggest chain of butchers, has closed 60 outlets and called in administrators to help it sell its 35 remaining stores. Administrators BDO Stoy Hayward said it had to close 60 unprofitable stores in order to try to secure a sale of the rest of the group. The Tunbridge Wells-based company employs 600 staff nationwide. Back in 1977 Dewhurst had 1,400 UK outlets, but it has since struggled to compete with supermarket meat counters. Poor trading conditions. West Country butchers firm Lloyd Maunder bought control of Dewhurst from its private equity owners early in 2005 and spent money refurbishing a number of stores and reorganising the chain's supply systems. The company said it had been hit by increases in rent and energy prices, and then had seen a "substantial" decline in trading conditions over the last six months. In a statement, the company said: "Despite our best efforts and the application of experience gained in running our own chain of butcher's shops, the recent trading conditions have proved to be much worse than those we had anticipated. "We can no longer justify the much heavier investment being demanded by Dewhurst's bankers to support this operation. We ourselves are the principal creditor involved." Independent butchers now hold just 13.8% of the a 5.4bn pound retail market, according to the Meat and Livestock Commission.

Vestey Group.

The Vestey Group (Vestey Group Ltd) (formerly Vestey Brothers) is a privately owned UK group of companies, comprising an international food product business (that includes meats, dairy products, frozen vegetables, bakery products, food services and trading) and significant cattle ranching and sugar cane farming interests in Brazil and elsewhere. Union International, the former core of the Vestey family business, went into receivership in 1995. •	Business origins

William Vestey (later Lord Vestey) and his younger brother Edmund (later Sir Edmund) established the Vestey empire in 1897 from a family butchery business in Liverpool. They were a pioneer of refrigeration, opening a cold store in London in 1895. The Vestey brothers were initially sent to South America in an attempt to make their fortune because the economy there was booming. They started by buying game birds and storing them in the cold stores of American companies before shipping them to Liverpool. International expansion These early activities soon developed into importing beef and beef products into the UK, which in turn led to them owning cattle ranches in Brazil, Venezuela and Australia and their own meat processing factories in Argentina, Uruguay (Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay), New Zealand and Australia (in 1914 Vestey Brothers built a meat processing works at Bullocky Point, Darwin, Australia, but closed its operations in 1920 after the Darwin Rebellion). In 1915 the brothers, after being refused a request for income tax exemption made to David Lloyd George, moved to Buenos Aires to avoid paying income tax in the UK. The family later administered the business through a Paris trust that enabled it to legally avoid an estimated total of £88m in UK tax until the loophole was closed in 1991.[1] Vestey Brothers also developed a business importing eggs from China, and during World War II they were a major importer of powdered eggs. It is said that by 1930 Vesteys had 30,000 employees world wide and a net value of 300,000 pounds.

Shipping

To ship the meat back to the UK the Vesteys created their own shipping company, the Blue Star Line. Their first two ships (Pakeha renamed Broderick, and Rangatira renamed Brodmore) were bought in 1909, and the company registered on July 28, 1911 in London and Liverpool with a capital of 100,000 pounds. The line owned a number of refrigerated ships (Reefers), and business later expanded to countries as far apart as Egypt and China, carrying passengers in addition to various foodstuffs. Blue Star was finally sold to P&O Nedlloyd for 60,000,000 GBP in 1998, although most of the refrigerated ships were retained by Vestey's Albion Reefers subsidiary, which later merged with Hamburg Sud to form Star Reefers, finally sold off in July 2001.

UK developments

In the course of their expansion, Vestey bought a number of other companies, acquiring Oxo and London's Oxo Tower through the purchase of the Liebig Extract of Meat Company. In the middle of the 20th century, Vestey companies dominated the UK wholesale and retail meat trade, selling refrigerated and canned meats, as well as leather and other by-products. Having saved cash reserves for the purpose, they entered into a price war with the US owned importers to largely drive them from the UK market. Vestey developed the country-wide Dewhurst chain of butchers shops, which was eventually disbanded in 1995 in the face of increasing competition from the supermarket chains. Dewhurst were the first to introduce the innovation of glass windows on butcher's shops - previously meat had been exposed to the elements and pollution.

Involvement overseas

The Vestey Group had acquired a large amount of land in Australia, and using the Australian Aboriginal people as cheap labour. This sparked the Gurindji strike in 1966, where the Group was forced seven years later by Gough Whitlam's government to return part of the land they owned to its indigenous owners. In Venezuela in 2005, state troops occupied a cattle ranch owned by the Vestey Group, under a 2001 land use reform programme instituted by the Hugo Chávez government. In March 2006, the Group reached an agreement with the Venezuelan government, ceding two ranches to the state while retaining ownership of eight.[2] Current situation After a period of major restructuring in the late 1990s, Vestey Group today consists of Angliss International and significant cattle ranching and sugar cane farming interests in Brazil and Venezuela. Sam, Lord Vestey, born 19 March 1941, is the great grandson of the 1st Lord Vestey, and the current head of the family and Chairman of the Group. He owns the 6,000 acre (24 km²) Stowell Park Estate at Stowell Park, Gloucestershire, valued at £15,000,000 as well as a villa in Nice and a Townhouse in Belgravia. The Vesteys endowed the Vestey Professorship of Food Safety and Veterinary Public Health at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London.

2012

Dewhurst, once Britain’s biggest chain of butchers, is set for a to return to the high street – as a brand of fresh meat. The chain once boasted 1,400 shops on the high street but closed in 2006. It has now been acquired by Brands Cellar, a new company that aims to restore old brands to their former glories, for a “nominal sum”. However, the Dewhurst name is likely to be revived as a meat, in partnership with a retailer or wholesaler, rather than returning as a standalone chain. "We are looking at a number of options, but there is a huge resonance with people for this brand,” said Brands Cellar’s Andrew Harrison. “Apart from New Zealand lamb and Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire puddings, there just aren't that many meat brands.” The entrepreneurs who have taken on the Dewhurst butcher brand are in final talks with suppliers about launching a Dewhurst-branded meat range.

2012

Dewhurst the Master Butcher which had more than 1,000 UK shops in its heyday was unlikely to reappear as a chain of stores, despite being recognised by more people than modern high street names such as Millie's Cookies [YouGov], admitted start-up business The Brand Cellar. "Trying to develop a chain of high street butchers would be very brave," said director Andrew Harrison.

However, the dominance of own-label products in the fresh meat category presented an obvious opportunity for Dewhurst-branded meat, he said, adding that it might also stretch to other uses such as branded deli counters. "We will be asking retailers and suppliers how we can work to ¬recreate it," he said.

The Brand Cellar helmed by former Kwik Save chief executive David Birchall was set up in 2009 to acquire lost or under-performing brands and redevelop them with a licensee. Among those already taken on are four former First Quench Retailing drinks brands.

"Brands that used to be strong have something fad brands don't a place in the heart of consumers," said Don Williams, CEO of branding agency Pi Global.