Balson the Butcher Hidden Histories: Britain's Oldest Family Businesses

This is a series about the hidden histories of Britain's oldest

family businesses.

Few businesses last beyond two generations.

Against the odds, these families have

survived in their trades for more than three centuries.

This is the 188,933rd day of Balson's at work.

They've come through 50 recessions, the Industrial Revolution,

two world wars and the rise of Internet shopping.

-Yeah.

-Really, things were very sad after the War. There was no money.

There was no money anywhere.

We'll meet the present-day head of each family as they face

a crossroads in their working life.

And we'll follow them

as they go on a journey into the past of their business.

Jonah Toye. Fantastic! I was very worried about Jonah.

This time, we tell a tale from the high street.

The Balsons have been butchers for nearly 500 years...

..since Henry VIII was on the throne!

-Hello, Balson's?

-Behind the counter today is Richard Balson.

Vicar, doctor! You sort out people's problems.

Usually, if they've got a problem,

it's cos they're not eating enough meat.

Once a mainstay of every neighbourhood,

butchers' shops are increasingly rare.

Richard is about to see how his family have kept going.

"Throat badly cut." Oh, blimey! He cut his throat with a knife!

This is the history of the local butcher and of the British

market town, told through the story of a single family business.

It's a lovely morning, anyway.

Six days a week in Bridport, Dorset, something extraordinary happens.

Richard Balson gets ready to butcher again,

as his family has done for almost 500 years.

Anything else?

I know a lot about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn

cos she got beheaded a year after we opened.

We opened in 1535, and she was beheaded in 1536,

the same year as Francesco Pizarro founded Peru,

the same year as Thomas More was executed for treason,

-the same year as William Tynsdale translated the first...

-Tyndale.

Tyndale. See? You know I'm not lying, don't you?

He translated the first English edition of the Bible.

-There you are. All in 1535.

-It's a hard thing to believe, isn't it?

The oldest family butcher in England. Is it England or Britain?

The world!

Entering Richard Balson's shop is like going back in time.

Butchering traditions, that have died out elsewhere in Britain,

are kept alive by the Balson family.

Grandmother's recipe, handed down, generation to generation.

Thank you very much indeed. Have a good weekend.

£4. Thank you. Lovely.

We've got unusual stuff, like ox cheeks and Bath chaps

and sweetbreads. This is a Bath chap.

And this is an old... It's an old-fashioned delicacy.

This is the cheek of the pig.

BELL RINGS

Yes? What would you like, sir?

-Can I have some...

-Diced rabbit?

-Yeah. And some...

-9.20.

This is my father and his mother.

That's taken in the office in the shop. This was on her 80th birthday.

Alongside the pictures from the past, there's also

a photo of the Balson Richard hopes will be the future of his shop.

This is my son, Billy. At the moment, he's in London.

He's not exactly hands-on, but hopefully, one day, he will be.

-Are you and your son still close, then?

-Oh, yeah.

I go up there and, you know,

we speak at least a couple of times a week on the phone.

Richard assumes his butchery business has been

passed down from father to son for over 20 generations since 1535.

But he knows very few details about the past of his family.

This is our present shop that we're in now.

And this would have been taken at Christmas time.

A lot of the shops had pictures taken at Christmas with all the family

and they made a big display.

We get loads of people coming in the shop and they're saying,

"Who's this chap? Who's this chap?" And unfortunately,

we don't know who any of the people are.

Ho, ho, ho!

Richard is about to learn all about his family's past.

Names will be put on the faces in his own photos

and he'll discover what it has been like

to be a butcher during the last 500 years.

I'm going to find out where they were in the town

and what they got up to,

and I expect that there'll be one or two black sheeps along the way,

cos they can't all be top-notch citizens, like myself! But, yeah.

I'm looking forward to it.

The Balsons have been lucky in their location.

Nestling in the hills of the Dorset countryside,

Bridport is a market town of 13,000 people.

Market days have been Wednesdays and Saturdays

longer than anyone can remember -

at least since 1278,

when Edward I gave royal consent for Bridport to hold its markets.

But even in Bridport, people find it hard to believe that

the local butcher dates back almost 500 years.

Richard has never seen authenticated proof to back up

his claim that the Balsons were butchering in 1535,

so he's retracing the steps of the local historian, who told him

the Balsons are Britain's oldest butcher.

It was in about 1982 when we found out that we were England's

oldest family butcher's, when a chap called Basil Short did a...

..did a lot of history and delved into the archives

so we could call ourselves England's oldest family butcher's.

Basil Short died 10 years ago, but Richard recalls being told

the evidence could be found in the Dorset County archives.

That's it there, isn't it? That's what we want, isn't it?

Dorset History Centre.

Archivist Cassandra Johnson has a document to show Richard.

It's a rental agreement for what used to be called a shamble,

which was a stall in the meat market.

-So it's in Latin.

-Yeah.

And it's quite heavily abbreviated, so obviously

it won't be easy to read.

John Balston is renting a market stall in Bridport,

and it's between the shambles of Andrew Stone on the north side...

-Yeah.

-..and John Gore on the south side.

-That's quite a good name for a butcher!

-Yeah, yeah!

-Spelling was very inconsistent.

-Yeah.

And obviously, Balston's got the T in it.

Has it got the actual date there, did you say, in the year?

-It says in the 26th year of the reign of Henry VIII.

-Oh, right.

Henry was crowned in 1509, so the 26th year of his reign

was 1535, the year Richard believes his business was founded.

But, before he can heave a sigh of relief,

Cassandra has a surprise for him.

-This one is actually from the year 1515.

-1515?

-Yup.

-Bit older.

It's a good 20 years earlier.

William Chard and John Orchard, in 1515, indenture,

and they're the officials of the town.

They're licensing Robert Balson two market stalls.

And this is definitely related?

I think it is very plausible because you're in the same location,

-and the Roberts do appear quite a lot in the Balson line.

-Yeah.

-That's right.

-So all those things together make it very plausible

-that they are related.

-Yeah.

-And this year was 15...

-1515.

-1515. Goodness me!

Yeah. That's amazing.

It's a long time, isn't it? 1515.

1515 is going right back to the early years of Henry VIII,

when the King was still with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

-Thanks, Cassandra.

-Pleasure.

I'd have been less happy if you said that we weren't quite

so old as we made out we were, but as it's that way, it's fantastic!

And it's all been authenticated, hasn't it?

The first recorded butcher in the Balson family,

Robert of 1515, was a tradesman, like Richard is today.

The social status of the butcher has changed little over the centuries.

But Robert Balson worked in a Bridport that was

very different from today's shop-lined high street.

500 years ago, British market towns only traded on market days,

when they became a patchwork of separate marketplaces,

each exclusively dedicated to anything from haberdashery

to cooper barrels.

One of the most important marketplaces sold only meat.

This was known as the shambles.

It was in Bridport's shambles that Robert Balson rented

a stall in 1515.

How does it feel to learn your business is 20 years older

-than you thought?

-It's good. I phoned my son and he couldn't...

Well, he thought it was really good, actually.

It's still in King Henry VIII's reign and it's...

You know, from all our bags and stuff we got printed,

it's only just one number to change - 1535 to 1515.

So that's a bit of luck!

Now Richard wants to find out where Robert Balson did his butchery.

Should be quite interesting, to see where we used to be.

He's arranged to meet someone who can point out

where Bridport's shambles once stood -

local archaeologist Peter Bellamy.

-Hello, Peter.

-Hello, Richard.

-How are you?

-How are you? Fine, fine.

So you want to be about here.

So the actual shambles, probably the end of them would be about here,

-roughly on that white line, I think.

-Yeah.

And then they'd be going this way.

So one stall after another along the streets.

-Yeah.

-Somewhere about there would be the other end of the...

of the thing.

So they were really right, right in the middle of the street.

And can you imagine the chaos with this building stuck in the middle?

It must have been quite a hustle-bustle, busy place, manic,

-you know.

-Yeah.

A year ago, maintenance on the gas main beneath Bridport's high street

accidentally exposed the remains of the shambles.

We came across two walls, although one of them...

Only one of them we've managed to expose properly.

And you can see it in this photograph here,

-right at the bottom.

-Yeah.

-Is this the remains of a stone wall?

That's the wall running along through here.

And it probably had a series of arches, arcades,

running along it, where the stalls would be.

So one of the walls really ran just along here,

-and the other one was about here.

-Yeah.

Richard's shop, on the outskirts of Bridport, is only a five-minute walk

from where Robert Balson did his butchering,

right at the centre of town.

And this map shows that when Bridport was a town of just

1,000 people, there was room in the shambles for 10 butchers.

That's about one butcher stall for every 20 households.

There are no working shambles left anywhere in Britain.

But Richard is determined to get as close as he can to

the bloody reality of the working life of Robert Balson,

the founder of his business.

So he's left Dorset and is heading north.

His destination is York.

It is one of Britain's most ancient townscapes,

at the heart of which still stands the remains of York's shambles.

Richard's guide to the working life of Robert Balson is

historian of butchery John Chartres.

-Good morning.

-Good morning, John. How are you? Nice to meet you.

-The oldest butcher in Britain!

-The oldest, yeah. Do I look it?

-Not particularly.

-No! Thank goodness for that! You said the right thing.

John begins by explaining that the word shamble just means

a kind of butcher's block.

Imagine a sort of six- or eight-foot-long bench

in which you'd throw the animal.

You put it onto the bench to cut.

But if you imagine it, in them days, I mean,

there would have been just meat hung everywhere, wouldn't it?

You probably had a job to walk down through

without sort of bumping into a carcass, I should think!

A lot of noise as well.

You will have people presumably shouting abuse at each other

and saying, "I don't think much of that, Jim!"

Do you think they have any special rules and regulations?

There's virtually no health regulations.

But on the whole, you know, you're not going to have, you know,

-I suppose, cold stores full of meat that might go off.

-No.

It's in, bang, eat, out!

500 years ago, there was no way to chill meat to prevent it rotting,

so meat couldn't be transported or stored.

Instead, on market days, butchers herded live animals

into the shambles and killed them on the spot, almost to order.

It was so messy, the word shambles has since come to mean chaos

and disorder.

The shambles, historically, would have been where you actually

did the killing, hence, the advantages of a sloping site.

-Yeah, yeah. To wash all the muck away?

-Wash it down.

I'm not quite sure how quickly the cattle pick up

-the sense of what's happening.

-Yeah.

-But they'll smell blood fairly early, won't they?

-Yeah, yeah.

And that spooks them.

So the shambles is manure, it's animal noises,

it's screams and squeaks.

-Really, it must have been one hell of a smell!

-Yeah.

I don't mind a bit of mess, never have done.

You've got to be able to get your hands dirty.

It's a life which I, personally, would have loved

because it was a busy, hectic lifestyle,

lots of interaction with people and animals coming to and fro,

customers coming to and fro and live ones in, dead ones out.

It was amazing.

For centuries after 1515, the Balson name appears

consistently in the records of those who rented a shamble in Bridport.

It was a period in which the craft of butchery barely changed.

In the mid-1600s, the Balsons survived the Civil War.

A Thomas Balston fought with Bridport's Parliamentarians.

They survived the Plague, which visited Bridport repeatedly

until the late 1600s.

The Balsons kept their place in the shambles for 250 years.

They probably weren't the only butchers with an ancient lineage,

but somehow they passed on their craft for over 10 generations.

These days, it's rare to find a family where the children

follow their parents for more than a couple of generations.

I always knew I was going to be a butcher

and it's what Dad wanted, I guess, you know.

He never said to me,

"Oh, you've got to be a butcher and you've got to follow me."

Not at all, but, I mean, it was just an opportunity of a lifestyle

that I wanted, I guess, you know.

That's lovely.

Looks like you've been doing this almost without thinking, Richard.

I learnt all of my trade through watching my father, really,

and just copying him

and with his guidance sort of overlooking you at first.

When did you cut up your first lamb?

-Oh, I don't know. 16, 17, I suppose.

-Was he a stern teacher, your father?

Yeah, he was a tough teacher, but it's better to be like that

than having someone who doesn't really care.

You know, there's only one way, and that's the right way.

Richard's father, Don, died aged 88 in 2011.

Jane, his sister, now looks after their widowed mum, Joan.

There we are.

A former Miss Bridport, Joan met Don at a dance in 1945,

just after he'd come home from the Second World War.

Oh, he was very handsome!

Very handsome and, of course, I realised they had the butcher shop.

My dad used to go out every weekend and buy the joint from there.

We got married and I went to live up over the shop.

When Joan moved into Don's shop,

Britain was on its knees after five years of conflict.

Meat was still rationed.

Each adult was allowed just over a pound a week,

about a third of what we consume today.

He had a hard time, like I said, with all the rationing and that.

You'd get some lady come in and said, "Oh, Mr Balson,

"can't you let me have a bit more?" He said, "Well, I know what.

"I can get you some tripe," cos that weren't rationed.

They had to clean it, which wasn't very pleasant.

That wasn't very pleasant but, I mean... But it was lovely.

Beautiful.

Having got through the War and rationing,

Don is now held up as an example in the Balson family.

He showed what it takes to keep the business going.

It's hard work, dedication, and you've got to do it.

If you don't do it, then it's gone, because so many butchers have gone.

-That's the trouble now.

-Richard's doing really... You know, really...

Really, really well. I think he really enjoys working in the shop.

He's very passionate about keeping it, you know, going.

Richard is trying to secure the future of the Balson legacy

by passing on what his father taught him to his only child, Billy.

He knows how to do all this... sort of cutting up.

This is just basic butchery, really.

But, having completed basic butchery,

Billy also trained as an accountant.

He's got a very good job in London, but hopefully

he will come back, he wants to come back.

He doesn't want to stay there all his life,

but at the moment he's got a very nice lifestyle and a very good job.

-And how old is he?

-He is 33.

I don't know how...

Whether Billy will ever... you know, Richard's son,

will come and learn the trade.

There's nothing to say he won't later on. He may well do later on.

-What will it feel like to you if Balson's didn't carry on?

-Devastated!

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean...

It would be awful.

For the moment, Richard is putting aside any concerns about the future.

He's returning to his exploration of the Balson's past.

And there's a crucial question on his mind.

How did the Balsons get from a shamble

into the shop which Richard has today?

He's in the nearby city of Bath to find out what happened to

Bridport's shambles.

He's meeting historian Peter Borsay,

an expert on town life in 18th-century Britain.

Hello, Peter.

-The big word in 18th-century towns is improvement.

-Yeah.

Improve the environment of the town.

Towns saw themselves as civilised places.

And there's a sort of revolution going on in the later 17th

and 18th century, by which towns are remodelling themselves

and trying to become more civilised, and particularly they're adopting

a building revolution which is going on, which is classicism.

Peter has asked Richard to meet him in Bath because here you can

still see how the classical revolution affected

the working lives of butchers.

But you've got to remember,

Bath is one of the most elegant towns of the 18th century.

And what was happening, Bath was dramatic.

Virtually where we're standing, there'd been markets there.

And the butchers had operated from this open streetside.

Now, you, as a butcher, would have been in the worst trade

because you're slaughtering animals, you had the meat on show.

So they move the butchers from here,

they take them out of the street and they build a brand-new guildhall

and sort of extend the market area behind it.

The butchers were just the first to be moved off the street.

By the 1770s, all of Bath's market traders

were hidden away in the guildhall.

In the following decades,

the classical revolution spread towards Bridport.

Towns like to compete with each other.

And there were other towns in Dorset which were also getting rid

-of their shambles.

-Yeah.

-And they'd all been demolished.

And the butchers were moved behind the line of the street.

The Bridport shambles were demolished in 1786

and a new town hall was built at the side of the high street.

Upstairs was an elegant room where the town council met.

On the ground floor was a closed market,

given over exclusively to butchery.

The town hall's market was smaller than the shambles,

but some of the butchers from the shambles were able to carry on

their trade here, hidden behind the elegant classical facade.

So Bridport's just doing what your other towns...

What everyone else was doing.

In Bridport, you know, they were right in the middle of the town,

bang in the middle of the road, and they were...

Like you say, they were in the way and they wanted to tidy up a bit.

-And, in a way, it didn't really matter what the butchers felt.

-No.

You know, they were expendable. They simply had to be moved.

Whether any butchers protested this drastic change

to their working lives isn't known.

But by the mid 19th century

there were no traditional shambles left anywhere in Britain.

It is something that had to be done, obviously.

You can't have people bringing animals in, leading them in on a rope

to be slaughtered in the middle of town for all to see, you know.

It's all for the best, really, and there was no...

They couldn't argue about it. They just had to be moved, really.

These days, the business is based on the outskirts of Bridport,

just beyond the River Brit.

Richard is heading back into the centre of town.

He wants to find out if his ancestors were among those butchers

who carried on in the town hall after the shambles were demolished.

It's a bit of a grey area, where they sort of moved to.

That's the in-between times, which I don't know a lot about.

Even today, there is still a butcher in Bridport's town hall,

Richard's friend, Phil Frampton.

-Morning, Richard.

-Morning, Phil. How are you?

-Very well, thank you, sir.

-Nice to see you.

-Nice to see you.

-We're not rivals, are we?

-No!

We help each other out if we can. That's what it's all about.

We're in a different thing.

-Obviously, Richard, being over the bridge...

-Yeah, over the bridge.

Yeah. Sounds like a troll, doesn't he?

We've got, um...we've got, you know,

our footfall is a lot more here because we're in the centre of town.

But if somebody comes in here and Phil hasn't got it,

I might have it, he'll send them down to me and vice versa.

I mean, you've got to work together in business.

Phil Frampton is the first in his family to be a butcher.

But he knows about the history of the Balsons.

I know they started up here in 1515.

Which is 500 years ago, in the old shambles.

-And you know that they were in here?

-They were in here at some time, yeah.

Yeah. You've seen this?

That's the town hall...

-That's the layout.

-When they moved in here was 1780s or summat, was it?

-Er...yeah, it was 1780 something.

-17-summat, wasn't it?

I'll get this down for you.

Let's have a look at that. Let's get me goggles on.

So that gives out all the individual stores.

This is the front of the shop here, one, two, three,

-hence these three windows.

-Right, right.

This 200-year-old plan reveals that where Frampton's butchers now stands

there used to be over 30 little butchers' stalls.

An undated document found in the archives lists the butchers

who rented these stalls.

At Number 11, there is A Balson.

On Richard's family tree, the only A Balson is Arthur.

He was born in 1820,

just a generation after the town hall was built.

-This one here...

-Right.

-..which is that...wooden block there.

-Yeah.

The bookcase, that's where his stall was.

-It's amazing, isn't it?

-Yeah. Yeah.

So if we turn the clock back, we'd better start work. Yeah.

-LAUGHTER

-Now.

-Now!

Here, Arthur Balson slaughtered animals, carved up carcasses

and sold his meat.

It was cramped, but the Balsons were still at the centre of Bridport.

In the mid 19th century, when Arthur took on his stall in the town hall,

the Balsons had been in business for over 300 years.

It was now the Victorian age.

A society built on the two pillars of trade and respectability.

And the Balsons' story was about to take a dramatic turn.

The family tree reveals that since way back,

in the era of the Shambles,

the Balsons had passed on their business from father to son.

Arthur broke that ancient tradition

and very nearly ended the Balson family business.

Arthur is buried somewhere in the graveyard opposite Richard's shop.

Although many graves are neglected and forgotten, the local vicar,

Reverend Peter Edwards,

has some information about the Balsons buried here.

He's even read a newspaper report about Arthur.

So these two graves here are both members of the family.

Sadly, this stone has fallen over at some stage...

-Yes, that's the back of it, I guess.

-..in the last decade or two,

but there is some writing we've deciphered

from records from the underside.

-We're here to talk about Arthur Balson.

-Arthur, yeah.

-Who was a distant uncle of sorts.

-Yeah, that's right.

-Who died in July of 1859.

-Right.

And the funeral service was held in early August of that year.

-The burial was done on a Sunday morning here.

-On a Sunday morning?

-That's quite interesting, yeah.

-Yeah.

Well, that's probably because they were working on all the other days.

Quite possibly. About 100 fellow tradespeople of the town

came to support the family

and to be in attendance at the funeral.

The huge crowd of mourners suggests Arthur was a popular figure.

But some may have come to gawp at the climax of a scandal.

Arthur, um...was living with...

And it must have caused something of a scandal at the time,

a woman who was actually married to somebody else.

-Right.

-So in the standards of the Victorian age...

-That's not good, is it?

-It must have caused something of a local scandal.

Her name was Charlotte Worsdell.

And her husband was away

and Charlotte was living with Arthur, together with her son, Tom.

And obviously, Arthur took to Tom,

as well as being in a relationship with Charlotte.

The paper reports that Arthur treated Tom like his own son,

digging deep into his pockets so Tom could have a good education.

Very likely, Arthur was thinking of handing the family business on

to the child of his lover, so ending the Balson tradition.

Then something terrible happened.

Arthur used to play sort of fights and what have you,

including which, he used to pretend that Tom had got a gun

and he would play dead when Tom fired this gun at him.

Sadly, one day at the end of July in 1859,

Tom came back from school one day,

found a gun which had been loaded,

not known to him,

and pretended to shoot Arthur.

And sadly, it went off and he was killed instantly,

there and then, on the spot,

which caused obviously a great consternation

and upset to the people of the town and all those who knew him...

-So, how old was Arthur?

-He was...39, I think, if I recall.

-Something of that sort of... 38, 39, that sort of age.

-Right.

Obviously, Tom might have inherited the business.

-You don't know, do you?

-Then it would've been a different story.

Well, perhaps it was an act of God.

LAUGHTER

Whether young Tom Worsdell attended the funeral

of the man he'd killed is not recorded.

And his name disappears from the local records after that.

It's known that he died in London, aged 26.

His lover's son was out of the picture,

but Arthur's sudden death meant that in 1859

the Balson business couldn't carry on father to son.

Luckily, someone else in the family came forward

to keep the Balson tradition going.

Arthur's younger brother, Richard.

This Victorian Richard Balson is the great-great-grandfather

of Richard, who runs the shop today.

Oh!

Whoo!

Do you reckon we can turn that around and lay it the other way?

There, there. Now you can see it. There's Arthur.

Died 1859, aged 39. Poor man.

What a shock that must have been.

Afternoon.

In 1859, when Arthur Balson died and the business was carried on

by his brother Richard, Britain was the richest country in the world.

Meat consumption was rising dramatically.

Those who could afford to ate meat at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

There was also a population boom.

In two generations, Bridport had grown from 3,000 to 4,500 people.

But the butchers renting stalls in the town hall

complained that the limited space here prevented expansion.

And that they were still only allowed to open on market days,

which were Wednesday and Saturday.

The Victorian Richard Balson, who'd taken over from scandalous Arthur,

found a way to carry on butchering

despite the restrictions in the town hall.

The 1871 census reveals that 12 years after Arthur's death

his brother Richard was increasing his income,

doubling up as a pub landlord at the Boot Inn.

Now a house, the Boot Inn was in a residential area of Bridport,

near where Richard's shop is today.

Many of Victorian Bridport's publicans already had second trades.

There were pubs which sold leather goods, others that baked bread.

At some pubs, you could buy meat alongside the beer,

prepared in a slaughterhouse behind the bar.

But what a publican butcher like the Victorian Richard Balson

really needed was to have his own shop.

A technological breakthrough

paved the way for the late-Victorian butcher's shop.

Come down and see the big fridge.

It's a good-sized fridge, where you can come in and...

It's nice to have plenty of racks for hanging all your sausages

and bodies of beef, lamb and pork.

Along with steam power,

refrigeration was one of the earth-shattering inventions

of the 19th century's Industrial Revolution.

It made it possible to store perishable foods.

Sweet chilli, merguez, smoky pork.

That's a rump of beef, there.

That's the darkness of that. That's been hung for three weeks.

In the shambles and even in the town hall,

butchers had killed animals almost to order.

Refrigeration made it possible to keep plentiful stocks

of all the cuts the customers might want.

This broke the link between selling meat and killing animals.

Soon, the slaughtering and preparation took place

a healthy distance away from the high street.

While in the centre of town

the butchers could sell their meat like any other shopkeeper.

A couple of loins of pork.

In the late 19th century, as a direct result of refrigeration,

butchers reappeared on the British high street.

This is when the Balsons moved into their shop.

Most likely, thanks to their first fridge.

Moving into a shop was a crucial moment in the story of the Balsons.

PHONE RINGS

Good morning. Balson's.

But which member of the family founded his shop

at 9 West Allington is a mystery to Richard.

It was initially called RJ & W Balson.

There's a photo showing the shop

trading under this name in about 1890.

But the people in the photo are unidentified.

And a second photo adds to the mystery.

It suggests there was another business called Balson & Sons,

which was once based next door at Number 7.

To help him work out which Balson was the father of his shop,

Richard is meeting local historian Richard Sims.

-Hello, Richard.

-Nice to see you.

-Nice to see you again.

I believe this to be when they came into this shop, this is this shop,

and this is just prior to that, when they were next door, or...

What's your source of information?

The Book of Balson Facts, handed down from my father,

which may not be exactly right, but pretty near right.

We don't know who any of the people are. I don't know. Maybe you, er...

I...I've, um...spent some time in the Record Office

-in Dorchester looking through the rates records of Bridport.

-Yeah.

Over the period of 1880 through to 1895.

-I've got a bit of paper here to help you.

-Oh, right, right, right.

I've just got the rumps to cut, all right?

From Bridport's rates records, Richard Sims has tried to work out

which member of the family started the shop.

The story begins next door at Number 7 with Balson & Sons.

To reveal the order of events,

Richard Sims has transcribed some of his research.

1st April, 1887.

Balson & Sons rented Number 7 from John Hoare,

who had the whole of the alleyway going backwards.

And we see here, in 1892,

they vacated Number 7 before moving to next door

to form what was to become RJ & W Balson.

-Yeah. So it was 1892.

-Yeah.

So this shop will date probably from 1892, within six months of that.

-Yeah.

-Whereas the other shop was almost certainly early 1887.

-Yeah.

Comparing the dates from the rates records

against the Balson family tree

makes it possible to deduce which family members

were behind each shop.

In 1887, when Balson & Sons was founded,

the Victorian Richard Balson,

who had doubled up as a landlord of the Boot, was still alive.

If we look at this photograph, this is the earlier one...

-That's right.

-..there's Balson & Sons at the top here.

We can now say that that has to be the Richard Balson from the Boot.

Richard of the Boot died in 1890, survived by three sons.

It was the eldest, Robert John,

in partnership with the youngest brother, William,

who carried on their father's butchery business.

Because the family had only rented at Number 7, the brothers

Robert John and William, moved next door.

They owned Number 9.

The Balsons were on the up.

So the other photograph is now RJ & W Balson,

so we must be looking at, I imagine, maybe Robert John

and William as the two main characters here.

Fascinating. Thank you.

But the family tree leads to a deeper mystery.

Richard, who runs the shop today,

is descended from neither Robert John nor William.

His great-grandfather is the middle brother, Richard John.

Richard John, who actually lived here, was a stonemason.

He was here until about the 1890s, before moving to Neath.

Are you disappointed to discover you're not

-descended from the two brothers who founded your shop?

-No, not at all.

I mean, it's...it's, er...it's still in the family, that's the main thing.

I mean, um...er...you know, people go off and do other things.

Um...yeah, that's just how it is.

Richard John Balson, seen here in this photo,

spent most of the rest of his life in Neath, Wales.

He enjoyed a profitable career there as a stonemason

and never joined the family business.

But somehow the Balson butcher's shop has ended up

in the hands of the descendant of Richard John the stonemason.

Richard's great-great-uncles Robert John and William

moved into a shop at just the right moment.

The start of the 20th century is now seen as

the golden age of the British high street.

Where the Balsons are, on the outskirts of Bridport,

was then a parade of shops, where people could buy everything

they wanted without leaving their immediate neighbourhood.

Almost nothing is known about the working life of Richard's

great-great-uncles Robert John and William.

All that's been turned up is a local newspaper cutting

from about 100 years ago.

"Guessing Competition. On Wednesday week,

"Messrs Balson Brothers Butchers of West Allington

"exhibited in their shop the carcass of a bullock,

"which they supplied at Messrs W Morey & Sons'

"Christmas fat stock show and sale

"for a weight-guessing competition.

"On a card, the actual weight of the animal

"was given at 39 stone 1l pounds.

"The winners were,

"first prize, two pound, two shillings

"to Miss C Balson of West Allington."

Sounds like a fix to me!

Discovering that the Balson shop was founded by his great-great-uncles

leads Richard to a further question.

How did the shop end up in his hands?

-All right?

-All right?

-Yeah. How you doing?

He knows the answer must lie in the story of the Balson

who came after his great-great-uncles, his grandfather,

known in the family as Pop.

This is my grandfather in 1920

delivering the meat on the horse and cart.

I can just about remember my grandfather sat in a chair.

I was only about four when he died.

But we get old customers come in

and they remember, um...remember him in the shop

and there used to be a pub just along the road called the Old Inn,

about 60 yards.

And he'd go out to the Old Inn and have a pint.

Pop was the son of the Balson who became a stonemason

and went to live in Wales.

As a boy, Pop didn't go to Wales with his father,

but stayed in Bridport.

The 1901 census reveals that Pop, then aged 10,

was living above the Balson shop with his uncle Robert John,

who was unmarried and had no children of his own.

This would have been seen as normal in those days.

Being brought up by his uncle Robert John,

Pop had the opportunity to learn the craft of butchery.

Then, in 1927, Pop's other uncle, William Balson, died.

He was survived by just one daughter.

And women butchers were almost unheard of in the 1920s.

Robert John was still unmarried and childless and aged almost 70.

To keep the shop in the Balson family,

Robert John decided that Pop,

the nephew he'd brought up, should take it on.

But Robert John didn't deal with Pop as if he were his son.

As Richard has just found out.

This is some old documents that have come out of the safe,

-which relate to...

-Under the stairs.

-Under the stairs, yeah.

Which relate to when Robert John, in about 1928,

decided to sell the business to, um...to Pop.

Um...for a sum of £1,000.

Pop didn't have any money.

So he borrowed it off of his...

wife's brother, who was a Bill Spencer.

The £1,000 was for the property and fixtures,

fittings and good will of the business.

£1,000 in 1928 is £50,000 in today's money.

He must have been very grateful to Bill Spencer

for lending him that £1,000.

Because obviously, without that, he couldn't have...

You know, if he hadn't have lent him that money,

who knows what would've happened to the business?

The deal between Pop and Robert John wasn't unusual

and there's no evidence of any awkwardness

between nephew and uncle.

It took Pop just four years to pay off the loan,

presumably using the profits of the shop.

And Robert John wouldn't be dependent on his nephew,

because he now had money to fund the care he'd need in his retirement.

Then Robert John seems to have been written out of the Balson story.

Until a few days ago,

Richard had never even heard of the family member who founded his shop.

To find out more about his great-great-uncle,

he's going to look through some old newspapers.

He wants to see if he can find any reference to Robert John Balson.

Right, here we go.

"An inquest held at Bridport on Wednesday evening

"on Mr Robert John Balson, aged 70.

"He retired only a year or two ago and was unmarried.

"Who was discovered in the washhouse,

"lying across a heap of coal with his throat badly cut."

Throat badly cut? Oh, blimey!

"Mr Balson was alive when the doctor arrived hurriedly on the scene,

"but died about half an hour later.

"A verdict of 'suicide whilst of unsound mind'

"was recorded by the deputy coroner for West Dorset."

He cut his throat with a knife.

Well, it said he was retired. I wonder if, being retired, he just...

Some people, they just can't cope with being retired.

Sometimes there's a void there which was taken up by work previously,

and when you retire, if you completely shut yourself off,

then you can become, um...

you know, a bit lonely, a bit reclusive, a bit, um...

You know, you'd think with the Balsons being, you know,

all this family-orientated,

where they hand it on from one generation to the next,

that he could've carried on there as long as he wanted to.

Just gone in maybe one day a week, two days a week.

My father, he was still doing the books at 88, 87.

You know, um... And he always kept his hand in.

I didn't just work with my father.

We went to football matches together, we played skittles together,

we went to the pub and had a pint together. I go out with my son now.

You know, it's nice. I don't see as much of him as I'd like to,

but, er...yeah, it's lovely,

I think, the father and son relationship,

it doesn't matter how old they are, they're your son all your life.

And you still sort of worry about them and care for them

and love them and that's what being a father is, really.

But unfortunately, he didn't have any children, did he? So...

He might've missed out there, but...

I don't know.

According to the local newspaper, the townsfolk of Bridport

paid their respects at the funeral of Robert John Balson.

Among the mourners was his nephew, Pop,

who left a floral tribute which read, "In loving memory."

A few days after finding out all about Robert John

and his nephew, Pop, Richard welcomes his own nephew.

This is our new 1515 shirts that we've just had done

since we found out we were established 20 years earlier.

So that's for you. And a nice RJ Balson & Son hat.

-Put them on and I'm going to put you to work for five minutes.

-Right.

Oliver Balson is the only son of Richard's only brother, Michael.

Instead of joining the family business,

Michael became a professional footballer.

His career took him to America and he settled there.

I've worked it out, this is the 188,933rd day

of Balson's at work since 1515.

Straight down the middle, kidney each side. Nice and straight.

There it is.

The last time that happened was, um...15 years ago.

-15 years ago?

-Yep. By this man right here.

-Yeah.

And I was seven, eight years old.

I have kind of memories of being in the shop.

-Hello!

-They're trying to put me to work.

LAUGHTER

Oliver is in Bridport to visit his English family.

He's also here on business.

It's hard to get butchery out of the Balson blood.

And Oliver sells sausages online in America.

Oliver's business is completely separate from Richard's shop,

which does no online trading.

But Richard advises Oliver with sausage recipes

and encourages him to trade on the Balson heritage.

It's almost unbelievable, you know,

when you say 1500s and America is only half that old.

I think most people are fairly sceptical. They're like, "Hm."

You know, it's almost like it's such a grandiose claim

that there's instant scepticism to how could it possibly be that old?

Filling out paperwork for the USDA

and they ask, like, "How old is your business?"

And sometimes I'm just cheeky and I say, "498 years."

And then every single time I do that, they say,

"There's some kind of typo. There's some mistake."

Oliver used to have a career as an academic,

running the online sausage business in his spare time.

He's now given up his university post

to concentrate on selling meat fulltime.

So for Oliver it's important to keep faith that there will

always be a Balson butcher in Bridport.

None of us know what the future holds,

but...I think it's a pretty good chance you'll find

a butcher's shop at this location with the Balson name on it.

I'd bet the farm on it.

The Balson shop has done well to survive as long as it has.

Because the late 20th century was difficult for butchers.

Pop, Richard's grandfather, died in 1961

and the business was passed on to his son, Don.

In the '60s, Don, Richard's father,

enjoyed the final great age of the neighbourhood butcher.

Towards the end of the 20th century, shopping habits changed.

The number of butchers' shops in Britain

fell from about 50,000 to less than 10,000.

Many high streets and market towns completely lost their butchers.

But the Balsons were still going strong when Don died in 2011.

Richard has come to Bridport's beach at 6:00am

to share some memories of his father.

Don Balson used to come here every day for a quick dip

before he opened the shop.

I'm very lucky to have spent 40 years sort of working with him

and he's taught me all I know and, er...

When he died, obviously, it was really difficult to go into work

and him not be there, sort of thing.

And, er...a chap came in one day and he said,

"What's the matter with you, Richard? You don't look yourself."

And I said, "Oh, Father has just died,"

and he said, "Sorry to hear that."

I said, "It's very difficult after, you know,

"spending every day of your life working with him

"and then all of a sudden he's gone."

And the chap, he put it into perspective, really.

He said, "Well, you think of all the good times you've had," he said.

"Because my father died when I was only sort of 14, 15.

"And I never even had the experience or the memory

"to even have a pint in a pub with him."

And, I mean, that put it into perspective, really.

And you think, yeah, I have been lucky.

And, you know, you think of the good times

and the happy memories you've got and, um...

and after he said that little sentence, you know,

it made me feel a bit better, really.

-11 slices of ham.

-11 of ham. Right. Let's kick off with that, then.

Right. OK.

-How's the missus?

-Very well, thank you, Richard.

All right, thanks very much.

-Have a good weekend.

-Thanks.

-Bye.

God save the Queen.

There we are, another day done.

Richard has now completed his journey into the past of his family.

He's learnt that staying in business for 500 years

has been a constant struggle for the Balsons.

They've kept going despite revolutionary social change

and personal tragedy.

How has learning about previous generations

who've faced crises and survived them

altered the way he sees the future of his family business?

My father went on until he was 88,

so I've got another 30...33 years, sort of thing.

So, I mean, a lot can happen in 33 years.

We can miss a generation and maybe the next generation will take hold.

You know, who knows?

We've survived suicides and being blown off with a shotgun, you know.

The main thing is that we're still here

and we're still making a living and we're still enjoying what we do.

And, um...you know, and long may it continue.

-PHONE:

-'And two packets of chipolatas. Thank you. Bye.'

That's the first order of the day.

Next time, we meet the Toyes,

who've been making regalia since the 1700s.

This is an OBE, which is something

I think we're very well known for doing.

Toyes is a traditional firm in a modern world.

Can its rich history help it flourish?

Absolutely magical.

Discover the secrets of successful, resilient enterprises

and the latest insights from business history.

Go to bbc.co.uk/hiddenhistories

and follow the links to the Open University.