THE RECENT SALE of Bourne Textile Services for £22 million is the success story of a small rural business of humble origins and the foresight and diligence of three generations from one family to turn it into a major international undertaking. 

The business was founded by Ernest Stroud (1886-1966) from Quorndon, Leicestershire, who in 1932, at the age of 46, moved to Bourne with his wife, Daisy, and their three children, Basil, Eunice and Stuart. In fact it was Daisy (nee Kettle) who brought them back to the town because she was born here and at one time worked at the former council school in Abbey Road [now Bourne Primary Academy] where she met her future husband after he went there to install a new central heating system. 

Ernest Stroud established a small laundry on a strip of land at the corner of Manning Road and Recreation Road that was once used as a timber yard, equipping it with new machinery although he also patented some of his own inventions. Business flourished and in 1938, Bourne Hygienic Laundry became a limited company with Ernest as the first managing director. 

The Second World War of 1939-45 intervened but as the country began to recover, the firm decided to expand into dry cleaning and shops were opened in nearby towns with agencies in many of the surrounding villages. Since then there has been continued growth, the company even sinking its own boreholes on site to ensure that there was always a continual supply of water.  

After Ernest Stroud died, the business was run by his two sons, both qualified engineers. Basil (1914-2006), specialised in the engineering side of the company's operations and introduced many new items of equipment associated with the laundry industry. Stuart (1925-2003) was responsible for the transition of the company from a small domestic laundry to a major supplier of clean textiles to hotels throughout the Midlands and East Anglia. His engineering skills were also acknowledged throughout the laundry industry where he was recognised as a pioneer, introducing many new processes which others have since copied. 

Over the past 80 years, the company has changed its name several times to reflect the evolutionary nature of the service sectors in which it operates but still concentrated on what it knew best, that is washing and cleaning. 

By 1960, the company was serving between 4,000 and 5,000 domestic laundry customers in Spalding, Oakham, Stamford, Bourne and Grantham, as well as the Royal Air Force stations at Wittering, Cottesmore and North Luffenham, employing 105 people, one twenty-fifth of the town's working population, and had made considerable extensions to plant and equipment. 

By 1965, the business was known as the Bourne Laundry and Cleaning Services Company Limited, employing 108 people with a variety of large and small vans. They had shops in Bourne, Sleaford, two in Peterborough (Broadway and Millfield), Oakham, Stamford, Market Deeping, Whittlesey, Holbeach and Spalding. Welfare of workers was high on the firm's agenda, running a social club with various attractions including an annual dinner dance and children's party, draughts, darts and table tennis competitions and annual outings such as a trip to the Blackpool illuminations. 

The introduction of the domestic washing machine and selective employment tax in the 1960s and 1970s forced the company to look elsewhere for business growth and it was then that a relationship was formed with a Bristol-based company, Brooks, to develop an emerging market in providing a linen hire service to hotels and restaurants.  

This part of the business traded as Bourne Textile Services and eventually had over 350 customers in an area from Brighton to Burton-on-Trent and all points eastwards. Over 650,000 pieces of linen owned by the company were processed each week and such was the demand that new laundry premises were planned to give additional capacity in a still expanding but competitive market.  

Eighty thousand garments were handled each week at the Manning Road site by Brooks Bourne Services, a company jointly owned by Brooks Service Group and Bourne Services Group. This processing unit specialised in servicing industry and later the food sector by providing their laundered garments on a rental basis. Bourne Contract Support Services also had their head office on the site and were established in 1991 with Mike Taylor, the managing director. The backbone of the company provided cleaning services to the Ministry of Defence and to other large industrial and office premises over a wide area.  

In the summer of 2007, Bourne Textile Services, as it had become known, needed more space and gradually re-located to a new four-acre site on the Cherryholt Road industrial estate at a cost of over £1 million which included major investment in new state of the art washing systems and tumble driers. The business was by then stand alone, having entirely separated from Brooks which went into administration in 2006, and employing more than 300 people, making it one of the town's biggest employers with the prospect of further jobs being created in the future.  

The company retained the office block at the Manning Road site but the bulldozers moved in to demolish the laundry buildings after planning permission was granted for residential development on the adjacent land with Larkfleet Homes building 43 houses which have since been completed and occupied. 

By now, the company's operations provided a laundry and washing service for Bourne and the surrounding areas, also supplying textile services to the East Midlands and East Anglia, while their hotel linen retail market supplied some 350 hotels with approximately 28,000 bedrooms in the Midlands, South Yorkshire, East Anglia, Central and North London and the Home Counties. 

This major relocation, the arrival of foreign workers and strict environmental regulations have been some of most recent developments. But while much may have changed since Ernest Stroud began 80 years ago, there is still a lot he would recognise at Bourne Textile Services today and a glance at the firm's pay role is likely to reveal a few names he would find familiar because generations of Bourne families have worked for the firm and many employees are approaching their 30th, 40th or even 50th anniversaries.  

Managing director David Johnson, now aged 69, is one of them, having been there for over 50 years and one of many in the past to have got a foot through the door via Bourne Cricket Club of which the Stroud family have always been associated. “There was an unwritten rule that if you played cricket for the town you got a job", explained David who has had various roles at the company, particularly supervising the move from Manning Road. 

When Ernest Stroud launched the business in 1932, the company was built on washing and cleaning for individual customers, such as locally based airmen with uniforms that needed attention. The basic process has not changed greatly since then and is similar to what anyone would use at home, washing, drying and ironing, only on a much vaster scale. 

The washing systems, each the size of a double-decker bus, handle 85 kilos of washing in three minutes, compared with the six kilo load of most domestic washers, and the firm's most recent washing system cost in excess of £750,000 while a second laundry added last year brings the total investment on site to over £12 million. Catering for almost 30,000 hotel rooms with a regular turnover of over 1,100,000 pieces of laundry requires top quality equipment as well as a reliable water source and, as at the Manning Road premises, this comes from a borehole sunk on site to a depth of 115 feet into the Lincolnshire limestone. 

But over the years the continuing focus has been on energy and water efficiency and all of its vehicles, many bearing laundry-themed names such as Bubbles and Fluffy, are low emission and routes are computer tracked for maximum efficiency. 

The new premises in Cherryholt Road doubled the laundry's capacity and allowed 24 hour, seven day a week processing which meant that more staff were required and for the first time in the history of the firm, a recruitment drive was launched which resulted in many people new to Bourne being taken on. But although a large number of Polish and Lithuanian nationality joined the staff, the traditional family ethos was passed on to the new workers so that as well as Bourne people encouraging members of their own family to join, the new wave of workers has done likewise. "Without people you do not have a business and I think as a company we tend to look after our employees”, said David Johnson. “The last ten years have become more difficult because of the competition for labour although the emphasis on local employment has been lost."  

But it is not all big business. Few people in the town have not availed themselves of the services offered by this company, whether it has been washing and ironing, garment alterations or dry cleaning, because no matter what progress was being made in the industrial sector the company has always kept a foot in the domestic market and has become affectionately known locally as Bourne Clean.  

The Stroud family retained control over the years, from that early beginning to becoming one of the largest and most efficient firms for processing high volumes of hotel linen in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Basil’s son Norman, who joined in the late 1960s, was company secretary when he retired in 2008 having been involved in many areas of the company’s operations. Stuart’s son, Hedley, joined in 1981, having qualified as a chartered accountant in London, and became chairman and managing director of Bourne Services Group after the death of his father in 2003. 

This family control ended in March 2014 when the business was sold in a deal worth £22 million. Hedley, now 58, resigned after 33 years with the company although senior management are staying on together with the workforce now numbering 350. Apart from David Johnson, Richard Clark (28 years with the company) and David Bower (21 years), also remain as directors. 

The new owners are the Johnson Service Group, a British company dating back to 1780 with a history of acquiring established family businesses, which rents and dry cleans uniforms and other textiles but no matter what changes they decide to implement, the company will always be known locally as Bourne Clean.

WRITTEN IN APRIL 2014