On 10th August 1860, Mary Elizabeth Bates was born at 23 Essex Street, Toxteth. Her father, Joseph, worked in a forge. When her mother Sarah registered the birth a month later she made her mark rather than signing the register, which implies that Sarah could not write even her own name.
Some 20 years later Mary was working as a servant in the house of Harold and Mary Brocklebank in Hailwood, and there she met and married Edward Mills. In the next fifteen years they had eight children. The second of these, a daughter named Miriam Gertrude Mills, was to be one of the founders of Satterthwaites.
It came about quite by chance. Mary died tragically in childbirth in 1897, when the family were living in Leeds. Sadly, her husband died a year or so later. The young family, as was the custom of the time, was shared among uncles and aunts. Miriam went to live with her aunt Sarah back in Liverpool. The time came to apprentice Miriam to a trade. Millinery (hat making) was selected, but on the way to the milliner's shop they passed a baker's shop and saw from a sign that apprentices were wanted there. They stood and decided on the spot, and by the turn of the 19th century young Miriam was learning the trade of a pastrycook and confectioner at Dewhurst's, bakery and shop at 101 Stanley Road, Bootle.
All did not go smoothly for the young apprentice, Over the next few years she found herself in some very difficult situations. In one post, the bakers were fed on stale custards and other unsold items, and in another the owner of the business drank excessively and kept mysteriously vanishing, finally turning up dead on Westminster Bridge in London. Eventually Miriam found a safe haven in Ambleside, at Mrs Walton's tea rooms, a well-run and high-class business. She later recalled that her first sight of the Lake District hills, from a steamer taking her up the lake from the station at Lake Side, was 'like a vision of heaven'.
Once established there, her striking red hair (and her hard-working nature) caught the eye of a Cumbrian carpenter's son, Walter Satterthwaite, and they were married at the parish church in Ambleside in November 1910. With the £50 which was all their combined savings, they immediately set up Satterthwaites at 3 King Street in Southport.
The early years were very hard. Coping with full-time work and starting a family (no maternity leave then), they had to take in lodgers to make ends meet. When Walter went to the First World War (where he was wounded twice), the firm was still struggling in its start-up phase. With two small daughters, Joan and Miriam, his wife was left to manage a nightmare situation in which supplies were scarce, money scarcer, and some ignorant people thought that a firm with an unusual name must definitely be run by a German family!
['Satterthwaite' is a Lake District name that derives from the language spoken by the Norsemen who came from the sea over a thousand years ago. A 'Saeter' was (and still is) an upland barn, usually occupied only in summer.
'Thwaite' means 'a place'. So 'Satterthwaite' might be loosely translated as 'the place with the barn, where we take the pigs in summer'. ]
Not many people know that.
Fortunately for Satterthwaites, Southport flourished during the war. Soldiers were billeted in the family home over the bakehouse and shop, and many people came to the town to escape the Zeppelin attacks on the cities. They all needed to eat. When Walter returned at the end of the War things were still difficult, but the worst was past.
Alas, just as Southport was starting to look promising the landlords decided that they required the lease to be surrendered to them. Casting about, the Satterthwaites discovered a business for sale in Coronation Road, Crosby, then run by a Mr Haliwell and his family. For a while both shops were run together, Walter baking in the morning and then driving the old Southport Road (no by-pass then) at 6am with the bread for the Southport shop. Later, his wife would travel over and open the shop. Once, tired after a long day, she left the day's takings on the train seat rolled up in her overall. Fortunately, they were handed-in to the lost property department and disaster was thus averted by honesty.
Over the inter-war years, although the country was suffering depression, the quality and service provided to the community ensured the growth of the little company. Small local baking businesses in College Road, South Road and Crosby Road North were purchased, and a lock-up shop at the corner of Allengate was rented from the builder, Mr Glenn. Walter played golf with other local bakers, including Fred Sayer who had a rather different view of the proper rate at which a family baking business should be expanded. By the time their daughters married just before the Second World War, Walter and Miriam could begin to feel that at last they had achieved their ambition.
Then war came for the second time. The shop in South Road was closed after the young manageress was killed in an air raid. After 1945, rationing was gradually eased and it slowly became possible to return to normality. In the decades that followed Joan Satterthwaite (now Joan Wilson) who had been widowed in 1944 when her husband Tom was killed on active service increasingly took responsibility for the running of a Company now employing over fifty people. Mr and Mrs Satterthwaite died during the 1970s, both aged over 90.
Literally dozens of small bakeries have closed in this area in the last generation. Satterthwaites represents a survival of a previous era, maintaining traditions that are increasingly under attack by large corporations. The Government consults the supermarkets when it is considering new legislation, and the new laws just 'happen' to favour practices used by the supermarkets. Legislation specified that a pie should be chilled after baking (as the mass manufacturers have to do), while not specifying a time limit for the pies to be sold. The craft bakers had to go cap in hand to ask the Government for permission to sell a pie hot from the oven, grudgingly granted. There is still no law that stops a supermarket selling a pie which is weeks old. Look at their 'sell by' dates, then come and buy one baked today. There is no way to keep that quality on a shelf, no matter how many additives they include in the recipe.
Fortunately, there are still good sensible folk who appreciate the difference between real freshness and 'freshness' added by the food-chemist. The undoubted convenience of the supermarket means that craft bakers are an endangered species, but there is no charity that supports craft bakers, no laws that protect us from becoming extinct. Quite the opposite: we exist in spite of the powers that be, and we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.
We are local while everything favours international corporations. We are small in an age that does not yet really understand that small is beautiful. We are human in a time that seems to misunderstand the nature and value of humanity.
But while we exist, there is still a choice. Your choice.
This website © Roger Wilson 2003-2007
Satterthwaites Ltd, Registered Office 51 Coronation Road, Crosby, Liverpool L23 5RE
Tel: (+44) (0) 151 286 9690 Fax: (+44) (0) 151 284 0096