Chewing the Cud: Documenting the Dairy Farmers - Ruyton Co operative Dairies

As Chewing the Cud regulars may recall, Peter Roper runs a website and Facebook Group dedicated to the history of Express Dairy, which started in 1864 and continued until the early 2000s. Peter was recently loaned a steel trunk full of largely unsorted documents from the Gittins family who still live and farm in Ruyton-XI-Towns, a grouping of small Shropshire villages, and these have been carefully sorted, scanned, documented and archived. Through these, he has discovered how dairy farmers in a rural part of Shropshire got together during the 1920s and 1930s to try to sell and utilise their milk in the most efficient way. ‘Ruyton Co-operative Dairies’ became an important local employer in a very difficult national economic period. Later, Kraft Foods purchased the creamery, followed by Express Dairy in the mid-1950s, with much investment in new plant and equipment over the years. Some of the challenges of rural agricultural industries in the mid-twentieth century are uncovered, and the pride of those involved in the enterprise shines out.