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One of the most successful enterprises in the history
of Bourne was that of T W Mays and Sons Limited, fellmongers, wool
staplers, skin dealers and fertilizer manufacturers, which supplied
hundreds of customers at home and abroad.
The company was a family business founded in the early 19th century by
William Mays, grandfather of Raymond Mays who developed the world
championship BRM, processing fallen stock such as horses, cattle and
sheep, and it was the firm's proud boast in a tradesmen's catalogue of
1909 that "every atom of the carcasses reaching us will be turned to some
commercial account".
The fertiliser company was based in corrugated iron sheds that had been
converted from disused First World War hangars at an airfield in Norfolk
which were dismantled and transported section by section by road and
re-erected on a site in Cherryholt Road where by 1965 forty people were
employed on processing and bagging the fertiliser for delivery to farms in
the area by a small fleet of lorries such as those seen here in 1930.
But the firm's prosperity was not to last. Economic conditions and
changing patterns of trade coupled with out-dated plant and equipment and
stiff competition from more modern factories, dictated the demise of their
operations which ended in 1980 although the warehouses continue in useful
service as the Britannia Industrial Estate with various commercial
occupants. |
