In May 1948 at the tender age of fifteen 1 found myself aboard the Cornish Riviera Express leaving Paddington station bound for the end of the world! Well that was how it seemed to me at the time, actually it was only to the end of Britain, Penzance, to be exact. I had left school at fourteen and started work in the Bee Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station, seven miles from my home in Luton. My father had read out the advertisement for the post to me and also arranged the interview, so, believe it or not I had no idea I would be working with bees -I thought it was "B" department!

My first day was a terrifying experience, helping to examine colonies, covered in bees. I was petrified, but I quickly overcame my fear, became fascinated then hooked and have been ever since. Twenty mon.ths later and, as far as I was concerned everything was fine, apart from a really terrible winter. One of the worst on record, I was enjoying my job and learning a great deal from a very able beekeeper, skilled carpenter and innovator, Norman Ellement the head apiarist. Then one Sunday morning my father and I were listening to the radio programme Down Your Way which, this particular week, was coming from somewhere called Gulval near Penzance. They were visiting a new company called Mead Makers, which was running one hundred colonies of bees and making mead in an old flour mill and had ambitious plans for expansion. My father got quite excited about this and suggested it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to extend my beekeeping experience if I could get a job there. I was persuaded to write and enquire about vacancies and in no time at all found myself sitting in the foyer of the Paddington Hotel in London being inter- viewed for the post of assistant apiarist by Mrs Mann, lady manager of Mead Makers Ltd. The formalities over I was offered the position at £2 a week and my rail fare home once a year, and with a little prodding from my father accepted the offer on the spot.

Procession on St Bartholomewtide before blessing the mead. (Author on the right, behind the Beadle).

I think I was too young to be either scared or excited at the prospect of leaving home to go and work three hundred miles away, but that journey to Penzance seemed to go on for ever. Digs had been arranged for me and I was met at the ,tation by my landlady's husband, a friendly Cornish cobbler who escorted me to the little terraced house which was to be my home for the next three and a half years.

Col. Gayre, the founder of the company, had grand ideas for Mead Makers with the formation of a liveried guild, The Worshipful Company of Mead Makers, with himself as master, various dignitaries as wardens and senior members of staff as freemen.. For the latter this meant an increase in pay of 10 shillings (50p) a week and, the privilege of dressing up and participating in various ceremonial functions like "Blessing the Mead" in which I also played apart as a fanfare trumpeter. In February 1949 it stated in the local press that £40,000 had been spent and it was planned to spend a further £60,000 over the following year, an enormous amount of money for those days. Of course one only had to look around to see where a lot of it was going. There was 'a workforce of over thirty people including masons, carpenters and a tinsmith, some very expensive distillation and fermentation equipment, and 150 purpose made oak vats increasing in size from 324 gallons at the top to 1,296 gallons at the bottom of the building. The largest were made with two inch thick timber and were, on their stands, twelve feet high; as a small lad I found them awesome. The reason for employing the various tradesmen I mention above was not just for routine maintenance but because concurrently with the actual mead making a huge programme of redevelopment of the mill was in progress. The old engine room at the back of the premises was being converted into a medieval mead hall with exposed beams, refectory tables, coats of arms and stained glass windows all made on the premises. Adjacent to the mead hall was an ornamental garden with fish pond, dovecote, bee bole, museum apiary, and shop. The main body of the building was a massive granite edifice seven storey's high and walls nearly two feet thick surmounted by a huge water tank which supported a flag pole proudly displaying the coat of arms of the company.

Honey extracting with Roots forty-four frame radial extractor.

When I first arrived there were two other people looking after the bees, the head beekeeper, a Mr Sparrow and a young Cornishman named Arthur Cutter who had no previous experience. A few months later, on the departure of Mr Sparrow, Arthur took over as head beekeeper and we were joined by another lad from Bedfordshire, John Porter, who had at least had some experience with colonies of his own.. So the three of us, novices basically, with occasional help, were to run the beekeeping enterprise at Mead Makers. It was not an easy task, for apart from our inexperience we had to contend with Col. Gayres eccentricities and the physical problems imposed by the layout of the Mead House. Because gravity was employed in the mead production and honey handling, the extracting room was located on the fifth floor! This meant hand winching boxes of honey up five at a time, and lowering cans of syrup down. It was a precarious procedure and not without the occasional mishap. Once, on pulling in the rope sling all five boxes slipped out and plummeted to the yard fifty feet below -what a mess. Another problem we had at first was a diversity of hive types. Col. Gayre's own hives were Wormits, B.S. size with interlocking parts, and to get the business started he had bought stocks of bees from various sources and of different types, W .B.C., National, Modified National and Modified Dadant. On my arrival most of these about one hundred, were on one site at Marazian (now the location of a Cheshire Home). During 1948 we opened up many new sites, increased the number of stocks to about one hundred and fifty, and removed about 600 pounds of honey. This was extracted in a two frame hand operated machine as our forty-four frame Roots radial had not yet been installed. 1949 was a wonderful summer with good weather from April until October. We extracted three tons of honey, increased, the number of stocks to over three hundred and transferred one hundred and forty-four colonies to the Gulval hive. To give it its correct name The Gulval Long Modified Dadant Labour Saving Hive! It was design- ed by Co. Gayre purchased in the flat and assembled by us during the winter of 1948-49. These long hives held twenty one M.D.frames with three separate inner covers, a single floor, the front entrance divided into three with individual three position entrance-blocks. There were two vertical queen excluders and division boards so they could be used as three separate units each with seven frames, which, of course is equal to one B.S. deep. For honey production the idea was the queen was confined in the centre section with the vertical excluders, the honey being stored on either side. When full these combs were removed in a separate honey carrier come nuc box which held seven frames. The hive was not a success when using the queen excluders as the bees attached them to the comb face and this formed a restrictive barrier to the colonies' development. After a time we discarded the excluders and found a big improvement in colony growth and honey production. Some colonies reached huge proportions with large areas of brood on as many as fourteen col11bs. It was not unusual for a number of these to contain sealed brood from side to side and top to bottom, a wonderful sight! The honey was automatically stored in the outside combs from where it was removed. These hives were not a good idea for commercial honey production, they were easy to examine but difficult to manage and very awkward to transport. We found the Modified Dadants the most satisfactory for our purpose at that time.

By the end of that glorious summer of 49 we had established apiaries from St. Just to St. Keverne and from Gulval to Zennor , covering the S. W .tip of Cornwall. It was hard work but undeniably one of the most enjoyable years of my life. By the way, the Cornish honey was not used for mead mak- ing, the product of each apiary was labelled according to origin and sold at the top price of 2s.9d (14p) per pound. The mead was made from Australian honey purchas- ed in 561b cans, 5 tons at a time at the in- credible price of 1/4 d (0.1 p) per pound.

Two, less memorable, years later and I left Cornwall to do my National service in the R.A.F., during this period I heard that Mead Makers had folded and Col. Gayre had emigrated to South Africa. I was not surprised by this news as there were already signs of things being cut back before I left. I think in retrospect the Colonel overstretched himself by diversifying his production over too wide a range, eleven different types of mead, for example. Maybe if he had settled for a couple of the more popular varieties, who knows, Mead Makers could still be in business. Personally I must say I have been forever grateful for the Cornish Experience.

Rosemary’s Cornwall Links

http://www.stevepearce.co.uk