Melford; Ballingdon; Chelmsford and Halstead plus dozens
more a few miles away.

ground, he was seriously injured  and was carried home  in a
horse and wagon [sic], he is so badly swollen that Dr Waring

cannot know the injuries. The facts are that the man's father in
law is also lying dangerously ill at his son in law's house.

He would have to outdistance them not just in quantity
of production but in quality of taste. What set David apart
was how deeply Victorian values had left their mark on
him. He was motivated by the age’s progressive philosophy
and was committed to the pursuit of excellence; his position
in the village did not blunt his appetite for hard work.

 Alas, nothing is known of William Gowers fate. Barring
the occasional accident, the brewery was the favoured place
for  local  people  to  work.  It  paid  generous  wages
supplemented by a beer allowance and ran a bonus system,
giving employees a small share in the brewery’s profits, and
sometimes other allowances in kind, such as fuel.

A paternalistic but progressive employer, Ward provided
the best working conditions he could finance and his
concern for the welfare of his workers ran deep. However,
one of his eccentricities was his insistance that his
workforce had to be Anglicans who went assiduously to
church on Sundays. Dissenters, such as the religiously
emotional Baptists and Methodists, whose yearnings of the
soul  were  unfettered  by  rigid  forms  were  avoided.
Methodism especially, had sprung from the very class it
served and made Christianity a living force within the
community rather than a power over it with hymns
stressing eternal salvation rather than temporal justice,
their rousing words and tunes encouraged a spirit of self-
confidence, self-reliance and self-respect and perhaps this
may have marked some worshippers out as potential
trouble-makers. Every form of dissent, notably of religion,
was banished as one strain of churchmanship soared above
all others, even then it was not always possible to protect
the brewery’s largely Church of England workforce from
unseen dangers, as this story from a copy of the 1903
Haverhill Echo makes out:

In a few years, almost all the cottages in the village
would be bought to house the brewery’s employees, and
soon others would be built; rents were offered to tenants at
much lower rates than in nearby villages and a real effort
was made to make the village a healthy place in which to

It has to be remembered that it was a rare place that
was free from disease. Most villages in the local area were
still unsanitary and the lack of a convenient or reliable
water supply was a crucial health risk. Many cottages
relied on dipping places or stagnant water which usually
contained water-borne diseases such as cholera and dip-
theria.24 In the wet months most of the cottages grounds
would have been full of stagnant water and the whole
village would have badly stank; open sewers running
through the place frequently trickling down from the
cottages into the small brook at the far end of Rectory
garden next to The Street leading to Cavendish.

Damp houses brought on pleurisy and rheumatism,
smallpox, scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough were
common, consumption was rife.

There  was  an  accident  at  Foxearth  brewery,  a  man  named
William Gowers of Glemsford was engaged in what is known
as turning the beer, whilst doing so his apron got caught in a

revolving  shaft  which  runs  through  the  room  where  he  was
working, he was drawn in to the moving machinery and spun
round  two  or  three  times,  fortunately  his  shirt  and  other

 A tragic outbreak of diptheria claimed the lives of five
children (four from the same family) at Western Hall Farm,
Western End. Their memorial stands in Foxearth churchyard.

clothes  gave  way  and  released  the  poor  man  who  then  fell
several feet and was  caught by  a workmate before he  hit  the