A history of gingerbread in Market Drayton

Ginger is one of the oldest spices of all.  The ancient Chinese and Indians used it as a medicine – mainly to help digestion and stomach ailments, but also as a cure for rheumatism, burn blisters, heatstroke, colds and gout.  More recently, it was tested as a travel sickness cure, and outperformed the standard brand.  Generally it was also used to add flavour to food, to spice up ale, and to disguise tainted meat.

Rhodes, in the times of classical Greece, was renowned for producing “melitates”, perhaps the first specialist gingerbread.  Mediaeval knights used to present small gingerbread shields to their ladies before jousting matches as tokens of love, although they probably had other things in mind, since gingerbread is also an aphrodisiac!  ‘Gingerbread’ used to be slang for ‘money’ – only the ‘bread’ bit has survived.  We still ginger people up, though.

In 17^th Century Market Drayton John Cox and William Broadhurst felt they had to hold a large stock of ginger – 84lbs worth.  Since this is enough to make 4 tons of gingerbread, it must also have been used extensively for other medicinal purposes!  It was just as well that Robert Clive secured the trade routes from the East, and the supply of ginger from Cochin in southern India.  This marked the start of the gingerbread industry in town.

In 1793 Roland Lateward was our first recorded “maltster and gingerbread baker”.  He was granted a licence to build a bakery at the back of his cottages in Shropshire Street.  One of these, No 75, was later the site of another famous town gingerbread (Chesters).

But the four gingerbread dynasties really started with the turn into the 19^th Century.

In 1817 a Mr Thomas began baking in the house and shop at the corner of High Street and Church Street.  Generally known as St Mary’s Buildings, it was also called Clive’s Old Home – due to the story that the young Clive once threatened to flood a shop there.  The recipe famously contained rum.  The business was handed on to cousins and it became “Billington’s Gingerbread”.  Richard Billington, and son Stephen, won a world-wide reputation with it towards the end of the 19^th Century, and opened a second shop and café behind the Buttercross, where the farmers’ wives on Market Day began the practice of dunking gingerbread fingers in port (for extra warmth).  But it was Samuel who later insisted on tasting the rum before starting work…  to “make sure it hadn’t gone off during the night”!  Unfortunately there were hard times after World War I, and the business was sold out of the family to half a dozen subsequent bakers.  The latest of these recently emigrated to Yorkshire with the recipe.  From there “Billington’s Celebrated Gingerbread” is now somewhat controversially exported back to Market Drayton!

The second baker, William Chesters, began baking in 1850.  Although there were suspicions about where the recipe actually came from, it is said not to have had the alcohol of Billington’s.  It was a family affair again, and later managed to win an award and became “Chesters Prize Gingerbread.”  It was distributed to half of Who’s Who and all over the world.  But the Depression made things difficult, and in 1937 the business was sold out of the family.  It continued after the War, but gradually cut back and closed in 1964.  The recipe is still safe, though.

George Comer started the third dynasty.  He came to the town from South Wales in 1888 with his own secret recipe – this was much spicier and had a texture almost like toffee.  Walter Griffiths took over and developed the business, and his family became the town’s most successful bakers and confectioners, with a number of shops and a fleet of 24 vans.  Although the other two had peculiar gun-barrel machines for piping the fingers onto baking trays, the Griffiths bakers simply piped them manually out of large 56 lb forcing bags!  After World War II the business declined and finally closed in 1986, apart from a brief resurgence later on.  The recipe is still guarded by the present Griffiths family.

The fourth dynasty emerged in the late 1980s when Tim and Sarah Hopcroft began baking their own tasty brand of gingerbread in a shop and bakery just over the road from Roland Lateward, that first gingerbread baker.  However, they also made these into animal and people shapes, and a variety of other confections.  The business grew, and there is now have a factory on the far side of the bypass producing regiments of gingerbread men for Harrods, the UK, and the rest of the world.  So the tradition of gingerbread baking in Market Drayton continues, but on a much larger scale than before...  and has now reached the 21^st Century!