On This Day in Wembury – 18 November 1940
WMN reports milk adulteration case at West Wembury Farm
On this day the Western Morning News reported the prosecution of John Henry Smallridge, farmer-dairyman of West Wembury Farm. He was fined 10 shillings and ordered to pay £1 1s. costs at Plympton for selling milk that fell below the legal standard. The public analyst found it contained only 2.52% milk fat, whereas regulations required at least 3%.
Source: Western Morning News, 19 November 1940.
This case sits alongside other glimpses of wartime rural Wembury, where even as the parish dealt with the presence of military defences and tragedies like the 1940 Wilfred Barrack shooting of a sunbather and the RSPCA’s prosecution for a lame horse at West Wembury Dairy, local farmers still faced scrutiny over the quality of basic food supplies.
Milk was a vital rationed commodity in 1940, and prosecutions for adulteration or sub-standard fat content reflected the pressure to maintain fair distribution in a time of scarcity. West Wembury, like Langdon and other historic farms in the parish, had long produced dairy for local communities, and cases like Smallridge’s underline how the everyday agricultural economy of Wembury was drawn into wartime regulation just as surely as its coastline was drawn into national defence.
