A fair on St Anne’s Day
The 1472 charter that made Bewdley a borough also granted the town a fair, to be held on St Anne’s Day, 26 July. That is the documented starting point, and it is a firm one. The town’s chapel was dedicated to St Anne, so the fair fell on the town’s own feast day, which is exactly how these things usually worked.
Somewhere between then and now it became a cherry fair. When, and why, is not recorded. Brian Stephens, writing for Bewdley Civic Society, says plainly that it is not known, and he is the person who has looked hardest. There is one small clue worth holding on to: Wyre Forest District Council’s own description of the event says the town has been famous for its cherry fairs “for almost two centuries”, which would put the cherry association somewhere in the early nineteenth century rather than the medieval fair. That is a modern council press release rather than a document, so it settles nothing, but it points in a plausible direction, because the early nineteenth century is precisely when the cherry growing around Bewdley was expanding.
Why cherries, and why here
The answer is that North Worcestershire was genuinely good at them, and had been for a very long time. The county was noted for cherries by 1650, and in 1657 the Reverend Doctor John Beale, a Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote that “Worcestershire is more proper for pears and cherries and Herefordshire more proper for apples”. John Rea of Kinlet, just north of Bewdley and one of the leading plantsmen of his day, described sixteen sorts of cherry in his book Flora, Ceres and Pomona of 1665. He gave the world the term “Dukes” for the hybrids between acid and sweet cherries, a word still in use, and he named a variety Carnation which is still held in the National Collection.
Bewdley’s own contribution came a century later, and it is a bigger name than the town generally gets credit for. Thomas Andrew Knight, born in 1759, was a son of the Rector of Bewdley and became the first President of what is now the Royal Horticultural Society. Working at Elton Hall near Ludlow, he raised several new cherries which were the first results anywhere of controlled breeding with known parentage, which is to say he was doing scientific plant breeding before the phrase existed. Some of the varieties he produced still grow in orchards around here.
The industry itself flourished through the Industrial Revolution across the Teme Valley and around Rock, Bewdley and the Wyre Forest, and it grew fastest once the railway arrived and gave growers a way of getting a highly perishable crop to a city market before it spoiled.
How it ended
Cherries were always a difficult crop, and it is worth understanding why, because the reasons are structural rather than bad luck. A cherry cannot be grown from a cutting, so every tree has to be grafted onto a rootstock, and until about 1970 those rootstocks were wild Mazzards, which produce very large trees that take years to come into full bearing. The scions were not self-fertile, and with something like a dozen pollination groups every orchard needed suitable pollinators planted through it. Growers also had to plant early, mid-season and late varieties together, partly to spread the blossom so a single frost could not take the whole crop and partly to stretch the picking season. Even with all of that, the crop depended on the weather and was at the mercy of frost, rain, birds, pests and disease. Then it had to be picked from a tall tree by hand, and it would not keep.
Those facts eventually beat the local trade, which ended in the early 1960s.
The scale of what disappeared is worth stating, because it is easy to imagine a few cottage orchards. In 1957 Worcestershire had fifty-nine thousand cherry trees standing in fifteen hundred acres of plantation. Within a few years the trade was finished, and today only a handful of derelict orchards survive.
Getting them back
Since the 1990s there has been serious interest in saving what is left. The Wyre Forest Study Group’s survey of local orchards was published by English Nature as Research Report Number 707 in 2006, and reliable identification of old cherry varieties only became possible at all with DNA fingerprinting, because you cannot tell many of them apart by eye.
The Cherry Rescue Project, backed by the Wyre Forest Study Group and Bewdley Civic Society, samples local trees for DNA fingerprinting at East Malling. Funding from the Helen Rachel Mackaness Trust paid for the analysis and identification of a hundred local trees. The aim is to preserve the West Midlands land-race, the distinct local population of cherry types including the wild Mazzards of the Wyre Forest, adapted over generations to local soil and weather, as a gene pool for whatever gets bred next.
Commercial cherry growing came back too, though for reasons that had nothing to do with Worcestershire. Three things did it. Stella, the first self-fertile cultivar, was released in 1970 by K. O. Lapins at the Summerland Research Station in British Columbia. Then came rootstocks that produced a smaller tree, Colt from A. D. Webster at East Malling in Kent in 1980 and the Gisela series out of Giessen in Germany in 1985, which between them made dense planting and reliable cropping under polythene possible. Third was a 1996 review of cherry biology and production by Webster and N. E. Looney, the first substantial new work on the subject since 1949.
That is also exactly why the rescue project matters, and the numbers make the argument. Between 1991 and 2004 the world gained two hundred and thirty new sweet cherry cultivars, a hundred and sixteen of them European. But they were bred from a very narrow genetic base, particularly the self-fertile ones. Cherries are now grown commercially in more than forty countries, all leaning on the same small pool. The old Worcestershire varieties matter not for sentiment but because they are genetic material that no longer exists anywhere else, and after a gap of about forty years several local enterprises are producing cherries here again.
The fair today
Bewdley Civic Society and Bewdley Museum revived the fair in 2011, and it now runs as the Cherry Fayre and 1940s Weekend across a July weekend in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Gardens behind the museum, from ten until four on both days, free to attend.
There are cherries and cherry trees to buy, a chance to taste and compare different varieties, craft stalls including the museum’s own Made in the Museum makers, a Civic Society stall and raffle, and live music through both afternoons in the Green Theatre. The 1940s half brings re-enactors, classic cars, wartime artefacts, and the museum’s own air raid shelter open to visitors. Children can pay a small charge to do a cherry hunt round the museum and gardens. The Garden Kitchen café runs a cherry theme across its menu for the weekend.
It is worth knowing what you are standing in the middle of. A fair granted by a Yorkist king, attached to a saint’s day, that somehow turned into a celebration of a fruit industry which then vanished inside a decade, revived by a civic society that is now DNA-testing the surviving trees to work out what was lost.
