[BITList] My whey

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-04-26



Calvert,  Thomas Christopher  [Kit]  (1903-1984), businessman and philanthropist, was born on 26 April 1903 at Burtersett, Wensleydale, Yorkshire, the oldest of the three sons of John Edward Calvert (1877-1946), quarryman, and his wife, Rose, nee Fothergill (1878-1966). Both his parents were natives of the Yorkshire dales. He was educated at Hawes elementary school, but left at the age of twelve and began his working life in farm service at Colby Hall, Askrigg. A motorcycle accident prevented him from doing hard manual work. He then found a job at Hawes auction mart but left when a request for a wage increase from 18s. to £1 a week was refused. He was already showing a fighting spirit.

Calvert married Jenny Horn (d. 1976), a daleswoman, in 1931. Their early married life coincided with a period of trade depression. Kit and his brother Robert kept cattle and sheep on rented land. Milk was produced for a cheese factory inaugurated by Edward Chapman in 1897 which was now suffering from poor trading conditions. When the milk producers were no longer being paid and the dairy faced closure, the newly established Milk Marketing Board offered milk contracts. When the upper-dale farmers were told that milk would no longer be used for local cheesemaking, however, Calvert called a meeting in Hawes town hall, in 1935, and the dalesmen formed their own company with a capital of £1085. Calvert, who had put £200 into the scheme, was appointed managing director. Over the next years, he used his vast knowledge of Wensleydale cheese production successfully to promote dales cheese. In 1953 he built a new creamery in Hawes, on a spacious site beside the road to Gayle. To his regret, it had by now become commercially expedient to exchange the cheese's traditional linen bandage for a polythene wrapping. He introduced the 'baby Wensleydale', a 1 lb cheese which the average household might buy weekly. About 50,000 such cheeses were sold in the first year; production rose to 250,000 per year by the 1960s. The Milk Marketing Board purchased Wensleydale Creamery for £500,000 in 1966 but persuaded Calvert to continue to run it. In 1967 he retired.

Calvert had long collected second-hand books about the Yorkshire dales. In 1965 he gave the best of them, with an estimated value of almost £3000, to the Wensleydale county modern school. He then quietly set about restocking his empty shelves. For over twenty-five years, from 1951, Kit's single-room bookshop in the main street at Hawes was the talk of the town. It was a cal-oil (gossiping place) on market days. Some 5000 books, set haphazardly on floor-to-ceiling shelves, were available at 2s. for a hardback, 1s. for a less substantial work. If there was no one in attendance money was left in a box, in a chapel collecting plate, or, at one point, in a tin designed to hold Oxo cubes. For a time John Mason, a retired railwayman, looked after the bookshop, describing it on a framed card as 'The University of Hawes' and himself as 'bursar'. Mason died in 1975 at the age of ninety-two. Calvert said of his bookshop: 'If it makes my bacca [tobacco] money, and covers the cost of a drop or two of petrol, I'm satisfied.'

Calvert was an authentic dalesman and full of character. He often reverted to local dialect. His grizzle-grey hair did not frequently have a comb drawn through it. He wore comfortable rather than fashionable clothes. He smoked black twist using a clay pipe, as had the farmers and lead-miners of old. A devout Christian, he was deacon and secretary of Hawes Congregational Chapel, and a preacher in the homely yet forceful dales manner. His translation of passages from the Bible into the dialect of his native district included, from St John's gospel, chapter 21, the conversation between Jesus and his disciples, who had no luck when fishing: 'He called out: "Lads, hey ye caught owt?" They shouted back: "Nowt!" So he said: "Kest yer net over t'reet side ev t'booat an' ye'll git a catch"'  (T. C. CalvertThe Dalesman, May 1953, 89).

Calvert transformed a tract of land near his home into a well-equipped children's playground. When, in February 1977, his services to dales life and the cheese industry were acknowledged by his appointment as MBE, and he received the medal at Buckingham Palace, he was accompanied by his daughter Florence and granddaughter Pauline. He died in Hawes on 4 January 1984. Four days later, on a Sunday, he was interred at the roadside cemetery on the Burtersett side of Hawes, the coffin having been transported on a cart pulled by Dolly, his favourite pony. The Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes continued to flourish, and was the subject of a management buy-out in 1992. A portrait of Calvert, languidly applying a match to his clay pipe, adorned every 500 gram packet of 'real Wensleydale' cheese.

W. R. Mitchell 

Sources  personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004) [Florence Garnett] + The Dalesman
Likenesses  B. Drew, drawing, Wensleydale Museum, Hawes [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Dalesman (Dec 1976)
Wealth at death  £120,144: probate, 27 Feb 1984, CGPLA Eng. & Wales