A Criminal History

Our packs show how proud we are of our heritage, and how we’ve been “England’s Cheddar makers since 1861”. But it turns out we might have been underestimating just how far back our cheesemaking experience goes – by almost a century.

Likemany family businesses who have been rooted in the same place for a long while,we’re very interested in tracing our history so we’ve delved into the historybooks with the help of some experts. One of these is the genealogist AnthonyAdolph, as featured on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and many other TVshows about family history, and he uncovered a rather exciting story. Here searched the history of the Wyke cheesemaking tradition, tracing it back from daughter to mother since we knew that it was traditionally a craft run bywomen. Along the way, he uncovered a historian’s dream: a news item that provided names, dates and proof of occupation.

This was a newspaper story about a cheese theft that took place on 29 October 1789. It told how a truckle of farmhouse Cheddar had gone missing from a wagon in Kilver Street, Shepton Mallet, which is close to us here in Somerset. An enjoyable detail was that the suspected thief, one Edward Kingston, was caught rather quickly when he attempted to sell the cheese on to a local woman for “three pence farthing.” Kingston did not admit to stealing the cheese, instead claiming that it had fallen from the back of the cart and that he had simply picked it up.

Most exciting for us here at Wyke, however, was the identity of the crime’s victim: William, the fifth-great-grandfather of our current MD, Rich Clothier. Previous research told us that the recipe for Wyke Cheddar had been passed down throughthe family of Ivy Clothier (previously Thorne), Rich’s grandmother and the pioneer who set up the cheesemaking business as we know it, alongside herhusband Tom Clothier. “In the late 1800s,” explains Rich, “my grandfather’s family moved to Wyke Champflower where Grandfather Tom was born in the cheeseroom whilst my great-grandmother watched the curd. Later, Tom would marry my Grandmother Ivy and the couple would make cheese to her family recipe, which is still in our safe today.”

This tale places Wyke within a long line of famous cheese robberies. As recently as 2024, a major theft involving tonnes of Cheddar worth hundreds of thousands of pounds made headlines, but cheese has long been a prized target for thieves. Today, it’s the food item that’s most likely to be stolen across the world.

It also tells us that our history is much longer than we thought. We knew that our family cheesemaking heritage reached back to at least the middle of the 19th Century, but it’s now clear that Cheddar was our business much earlier than that. That makes Wyke one of the oldest Cheddar-makers in the world and evenone of the longest-running food brands. Before we change the date on our packs,though, we’ll continue digging into the genealogy. Watch this space...