Our Daily Bread

Bill Curtis

There has been a baker recorded on Westerham Green since at least the first official census of 1841 when forty year-old George Norton ran his business on the site of what is today ‘Sir Winston’s Vintage Tearooms’. Two years ago, I received a call from a couple who had recently moved to number 17, The Green – still on the east side but five houses further up towards the church. Did I know anything about the ancient bread oven in their basement?

The story unfolds on the 1851 census when George’s unmarried sister Sarah was recorded running another bakery at that address.

On the 1871 census, forty year-old James Clark is resident where George Norton had been previously, recorded as ‘Baker, Master’ living with his wife and family and working with his eighteen year-old lodger Ellen Pett recorded as ‘Baker’s Assistant’, which may well have been an apprenticeship. By that census Clark was the only baker to be found around The Green so it would appear that, bread oven or not, there was no longer a bakery at number 17.

Twenty years later, James Clark had retired and sold his business to forty four year-old Charles Boreham whose family would continue to run a successful bakery business on that site for the next fifty years.

A hunt assembles on The Green in the 1930s. In the background can be seen Frank Boreham's bakery. In the foreground, a milk delivery cart from Force Green Dairy.

Local competition arrived around 1900 when Arthur William Mills opened a bakery at number 12, along the top of The Green. He was obviously successful as a baker, confectioner and pastry cook as five years later he had moved the business to what is today numbers 7 and 8 currently ‘Chocs on The Green’ and ‘Tudor Rose Tea Rooms’.   In 1905 the whole frontage was replaced with the distinctive ‘Faux Tudor’ style that still exists today, by local builders Edwin Martin & Sons, to include elaborate plaster scrollwork and a centre panel below the dormer bearing the builder’s name and the Latin words ‘Nisi Dominus Frustra’, which translates as ‘This House without God is nothing’.

This photograph taken around 1910 shows the Mills family outside the bakery at the top of The Green. From the left - an unknown friend, Arthur Charles Mills, Millie Elizabeth Mills, Emma Mills and Arthur William Mills.

This was to be the town’s first modern ‘Steam Bakery’, where a gas-fired boiler would pump super-heated steam through tube-work in the bread oven thus ensuring that the bread and cakes remained spotlessly clean, devoid of smuts or soot during the baking process.

1913 advertisement from Hooker's Almanack. By the 1930s Westerham had other bakery outlets alongside Mills and Boreham. In 1936 the Co-Op opened a new store on the site still occupied by them today. This had its own bakery at that time. Further down the High Street, opposite New Street was a popular bakers and confectioners owned and run by the Taylor family.

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