Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  Child Bereavement UK supports families through the trauma of losing a loved one – and educates professionals in how to help the bereaved. Practically, the charity says they hope to ensure the accessibility of high-quality child bereavement support and information to all families. But it’s not just families they want to help. They hope to help train professionals, by improving training across the country and maintaining the high standards needed to care for struggling families. Mary was familiar with the charity before they approached her. The organisation is based in Saunderton, Buckinghamshire, near Mary’s family home, and she became aware of the charity partly because of their annual Snowdrop Walk, which is held to raise funds for families every year in West Wycombe Park, and is a big event in the county’s calendar. Mary was certainly aware of the lack of access to good-quality support when William died, with there being little or no support other than from her immediate friends and family. Child Bereavement UK say they believe all families should have the support they need to rebuild their lives when a child dies.

  Today the charity delivers training across a breadth of issues to around 5,000 professionals at the front line of bereavement support. The charity – which relies mostly on public donations – counts Prince William, the broadcasters Sir Michael Parkinson and Alan Titchmarsh, chef Antony Worrall Thompson and theatre, TV and film actor Daniel Casey among its patrons. The Prince’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, backed the charity during her lifetime. Prince William understood the value of the charity and the good work it did. He pledged his own support, saying: ‘What my mother recognised then – and what I understand now – is that losing a close family member is one of the hardest experiences that anyone can ever endure.’ Mary was herself asked to join Prince William, Sir Michael Parkinson and others to become a patron of the charity in 2009. Recognising the good work the charity does to help families that are in exactly the same situation as she had so sadly been in, Mary enthusiastically accepted. As part of her work with the charity she has met and worked with families being helped by the charity through hard times, just as she has gone through. It has been, Mary says, a heartwarming experience to know there is support out there for families going through what she did back in 1989. She has also been a vocal supporter of her local newspaper the Bucks Free Press’s Christmas Appeals, which aimed to raise vital funds for the charity. She told the paper: ‘When my son died, people would cross the road to avoid me … The charity helps you meet others in the same boat.’ Speaking more generally about her work with the charity, Mary said: ‘When William died, there was little support available for bereaved families. Through my links with Child Bereavement UK, I have met families who have received and benefited from their services. I think it’s a wonderful charity and I am delighted to be a patron.’

  Child Bereavement UK wasn’t the only charity that Mary got involved with, as she later lent her support to the National Osteoporosis Society, becoming a patron of that organisation as well. Osteoporosis is a disease of the bones that leads to an increased risk of fracture. It literally means ‘porous bones’ and is often referred to as ‘fragile bone disease’. Broken wrists, hips and spinal bones are the most common fractures in people with osteoporosis and it is most widespread in the elderly, although younger people can sometimes be affected. This crippling disease affects tens of thousands of people in the UK, with the charity estimating that one in two women and one in five men over the age of 50 in the UK will fracture a bone, mainly due to poor bone health. The charity was established in 1986 when doctors at a Bath hospital realised that people were worryingly unaware of osteoporosis. Back in 1986 few people had even heard of osteoporosis, and there were no national campaigns to raise awareness of the disease and the steps that can be taken to prevent it. Life for those affected by osteoporosis back then was tough, especially in terms of diagnosis. Patients were only identified as having osteoporosis if they were fortunate enough to have a doctor with a specific interest in the disease. The charity has since grown into a well-respected national concern with approximately 25,000 members and over 50 members of staff. The charity runs public health campaigns, support groups and events as well as a helpline manned by nurses with specialist knowledge of osteoporosis and bone health. Landmarks in the charity’s history include receiving support from the Queen in 1990, and launching the first National Osteoporosis Week in 1994. The charity’s public profile was raised further in 2001 with the appointment of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, as president, and in 2005 the government announced £20 million extra funding for DXA bone density scanners in England after tireless campaigning by the organisation.

  The charity’s core aims resonated with Mary, who has always passionately believed in the value of good cooking in helping to achieve and maintain good health. And as someone in her seventies, Mary also understood that it was a disease that particularly affects the older generations. Not only has Mary supported the charity generally, meeting workers from the organisation and seeing first-hand the work they do, but she has also put her culinary expertise to good use in order to raise funds. She helped run the charity’s Bone Appétit campaign – a drive by the organisation to get people around the country to start cooking food that helps prevent bone disease and build healthier bones. Specifically, the aim of the campaign was to encourage people to host dinner parties using recipes for meals that are high in calcium, a mineral that helps maintain bone health. The aim was to get each guest to pay the equivalent of the price for a meal in a restaurant, to generate funds to support vital services, including the charity’s helpline, research programme and 100-plus UK-wide support groups. Mary didn’t just front the campaign, she very much led from the front – even holding one such event herself. She organised and cooked at a four-hour lunch at Ston Easton Park, near her birthplace, Bath, where she prepared a series of delicious bone-healthy recipes from her own cookbooks. Guests were treated to a two-course lunch with wine included for just £50, and all the profits went to the charity.

  Another good cause wholeheartedly supported by Mary is Meningitis UK. She has opted to use the high profile her writing and presenting career has afforded her to shine a light on this charity, which funds research into preventing the devastating disease. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, Mary wrote: ‘As a Great British Bake Off judge and cookery writer, I am appealing to your readers during National Cupcake Week to get creative in the kitchen for Meningitis UK. From a Mad Hatter’s tea party to a bake-off with your friends, there is so much fun you can have with the charity’s Time 4 Tea fundraising initiative this autumn. Meningitis is the disease which parents fear most. To find a vaccine which would protect future generations would be a wonderful achievement. I’m offering one of my favourite cake recipes, Ginger and Treacle Spiced Traybake, to everyone who signs up.’

  As far as Mary was concerned, a little charity work has been the least she can do. Despite the tragic loss of William, she feels truly blessed. Not only did she have a loving family to support her through the hard times, but she also felt she had a calling in life in the form of baking. While William is never far from her heart, no matter what life throws at her, Mary knows she will be able to survive.

  CHAPTER 6

  QUEEN OF THE AGA

  Mary’s love affair with the Aga started years before it would become part of her working life. She and her husband Paul first bought one of the state-of-the-art heat-storage cookers in the 1960s, when they moved from London to Buckinghamshire to settle and start a family. It was the pride and joy of Mary’s kitchen, sitting right in the middle, and would come to be a huge part of her life and career in the coming years. She later said that the Aga could do ‘amazing things’. And by that, she didn’t just mean cooking. At first it wasn’t even something she used to bake her world-famous cakes and other recipes. In fact, she used it for anything but cooking to begin with. She simply liked the ambient warmth it created at home. ‘I got one just to keep warm when we moved out of London,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘And it has other us
es: I dry my cashmere on it, and I hatched a duck in the warm drawer by the side of it.’ And she also told The Times: ‘Whenever I empty the washing machine I automatically pick out things like that jumper I want to wear tonight, and carefully fold it on the simmering plate, and it is soon cosy and ready.’ Those anecdotes perhaps take Mary back to her own childhood, when she was growing up in Bath and remembered bringing up little chicks at home with her parents. ‘Paul found a duck egg on the village green and brought it home for breakfast,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘But I decided to try to hatch it. It was a very ordinary mallard but William adored it. He called it Bloody Lucky.’

  But of course, the Aga became an integral part of Mary’s cooking life, too. It is a one-of-a-kind item. It runs on gas, oil or solid fuel. It is always turned on, and even heats all the water for the household. It comprises either two or four ovens, with half very hot and the other half warm. Two large hot plates sit on the top. The heat isn’t adjustable – instead you have the equivalent of either gas mark nine or gas mark two to cook everything. The lightest of the two-oven models weighs 406kg, while the heaviest four-oven variety is a whopping 842kg, and they are currently priced between £3,775 and £10,000. When it comes to the Aga’s popularity, the numbers speak for themselves. It is estimated that there are more than 800,000 in homes across the globe. The fact that the Aga was always turned on meant that Mary was always inclined to be testing out a recipe or trying to come up with something new in the oven. She says it enticed her to cook even more than usual. ‘The dog and grandchildren love it, and it tempts me to cook,’ said Mary in an interview with the Daily Mail. ‘I have four ovens – for roasting, simmering, baking and warming. The roasting oven has bottom heat, so you can put things like flans in it without baking blind,’ she told the paper.

  The Aga company website gives a comprehensive decade-by-decade rundown of the cooker’s lively and interesting history. The Aga range was invented in 1922, when the Swedish physicist Dr Gustaf Dalén came up with the idea for the world’s first heat-storage cooker. He had already won the Nobel Prize for developing automatic lighthouses, which quickly became used across the globe, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and transforming the shipping and sailing industries. But Dalén had recently lost his sight after an experiment went wrong and exploded in his face. As a result he was confined to his bedroom. His wife Elma, who looked after him around the clock, was always having to fix their standard, old-fashioned cooker as it became increasingly unreliable. And, desperate for a project to keep him occupied, Dalén decided he wanted to create a cooker that was generally more efficient, to help his Elma in the kitchen. He created a cast-iron cooker capable of doing every kind of cooking simultaneously, by means of its two large hot plates and two ovens. And so the now-famous Aga was born, and by 1929 manufacturing had moved from Sweden to England, at the Aga Heat Ltd factory in Smethwick in the West Midlands. Agas became really popular during the 1930s and sales continued to grow steadily during that time. In 1931 a total of 322 Aga cookers were bought, with sales soaring to 1,705 just 12 months later. One of the keys to its success was talented salesman David Ogilvy, who went on to form the worldwide advertising giant Ogilvy Mather. He was one of the company’s first salesmen and his ‘The Theory and Practice of Selling an Aga Cooker’ has been described by Fortune magazine as ‘the finest instruction manual ever written’. In 1934 the Aga Cookbook was published by Sheila Hibben, who explained that Dalén had ‘tackled the problem with a view to creating a stove that would provide all the conveniences and economy that modern engineering demands’. The book was published in the USA, proof of the Aga cooker’s growing popularity outside Britain. Years later Mary would write her own Aga cookbook, which became the bible for using the iconic stove.

  In 1934, 16 members of the Graham Land Expedition Team took an Aga cooker to the Antarctic. For the next three years their Aga cooker ensured they ate well and lived in warmth and comfort, despite the temperature dropping to -40°C outside – proving that an Aga isn’t just for cooking, as Mary would later discover. In the 1940s, the demand for the Aga cooker continued to grow. As the Second World War loomed, the Aga in a way helped to hold families together, as crisis gripped Europe. It started to become more than just a cooker – it was a focal point for family activities; the heart of the home. The kitchen equivalent of a roaring log fire in the living room, it was something people could congregate around even when food wasn’t being prepared.

  The British government placed orders for Aga cookers for canteens in munitions works, communal feeding centres and hospitals. Demand increased so dramatically that the waiting period rose to a staggering 27 weeks. A second manufacturing plant was opened in Shropshire. In 1947, the majority of manufacturing moved to the landmark Coalbrookdale foundry in Shropshire, a foundry that has been running for more than 300 years. All Aga cookers continue to be handmade here today by a team of engineers. This little village in the Ironbridge Gorge was a very fitting home for the Aga. It was here, in 1709, that Abraham Darby first smelted iron with coke, a move that kick-started the Industrial Revolution. To make an Aga, molten iron is poured into casting moulds, before every cooker is given multiple coats of vitreous enamel. The process, which takes place over a period of three days, is a world away from the process used by most modern cooker manufacturers – a quick spray-paint. Finally, every Aga component is individually inspected and colour-checked. It is such craftsmanship that helps ensure the life of an Aga cooker is measured in decades, not years. When war broke out in 1939, much of Aga Heat Ltd’s production-line workers were given indefinite leave from work to help the war effort.

  By the 1950s, the cooker had established itself as an essential accessory to fine living, and sales reached more than 50,000 units per year. But its history was about to become even more colourful – literally – when the Aga was rolled out in a range of different finishes. Buyers could, for the first time, have their favourite cooker in their favourite colour. For 34 years the classic Aga had been available only in cream, but in 1956 that all changed. The introduction of the new Aga De Luxe models in pale blue, pale green, grey and white proved hugely popular with Aga enthusiasts. All production had moved to Coalbrookdale by 1957, where further new models were being introduced. These included Agas that had chrome-plated domed lids. Perhaps the biggest stamp of approval came when the long-running BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers featured an Aga in Doris and Dan Archer’s kitchen. Because of the difficulty of re-creating the authentic sound of an Aga door, a real Aga door had to be built in to the studio.

  The 1960s saw a decline in the use of solid fuel and the move to more convenient energy sources, such as gas and electricity. The first oil-fired cooker was introduced in 1964, followed by the launch of the first gas model in 1968. These products were the first to make use of the iconic black lozenge logo – which is still used to this day. In 1968, reflecting fashions of the time, the Aga colour palette was further extended to include dark blue, red, yellow and black. The 1970s was a decade of transition for the Aga company, as the focus shifted to innovation and the challenge of developing a new wave of Aga cookers to meet the demands of the next generation of families. Only one new model appeared during this decade, the EL2 Aga cooker in 1975. Its design moved away from any previous Aga heat-storage cooker and it looked more like a conventional cooker, built in sheet metal and available in a wide range of colours. The 1980s started in style with Aga’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. A lavish birthday party was thrown at the Royal Garden Hotel in London, attended by advertising guru and lifetime Aga supporter David Ogilvy. The company continued to flourish, and its status as something of a national institution was recognised when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited the Coalbrookdale foundry in 1981. Then, in 1985, Aga launched a landmark model – the first electric Aga range cooker, with the two-oven EC2, followed two years later by the four-oven EC4. These new models retained all the traditional features for which Aga cookers were renowned, but for the first time no flu
e was required, as the cookers vented through a small pipe fanned to the outside. By the end of the decade, more than 8,000 new owners were joining the Aga family each year. In the 1980s the Aga cooker began to feature in romance novels by authors such as Jilly Cooper. This phenomenon gave rise to the expression ‘Aga sagas’, used to describe this genre of fiction. ‘Although we’ve got a large house, we’re always in the kitchen – and we wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the Aga,’ the novelist once said. Mary herself admitted that she was partial to the occasional Aga saga. ‘I love Joanna Trollope. I especially liked The Choir,’ she said in an interview with the Independent. ‘I like the older ones rather than the more recent ones. I’ve got them all in a row upstairs. Joanna Trollope does have an Aga herself, of course.’

  By the 1990s, the Aga was the oven that anyone who was anyone just had to have. Jan Boxshall’s nostalgic Good Housekeeping book of the 1990s, Every Home Should Have One, described the Aga heat-storage cooker as being the ‘epitome of country-kitchen style’. The module was unveiled in 1996 – a conventional electric cooker with traditional Aga styling designed to fit on the left-hand side of the range. Later the same year the companion was introduced – similar to the module, but freestanding. By 1998, both were available with gas hob options.

  While the simplicity of the design was what made the Aga so impressive to begin with, over time that simplicity would also prove to be iconic. In 2000, the BBC published a report looking back over the twentieth century. It hand-picked what it considered to be the top three design icons from those 100 years. In first place was the Coca-Cola bottle – with its curvaceous contours, the bottle was instantly recognisable as containing the world’s most popular soft drink. In second place was the VW Beetle car, thanks to its bubble-like design that was like no other. And third was the Aga cooker. But as the Aga Cooking website noted: ‘Some say you can cook on the engine of a VW Beetle but we leave our roast chicken to the Aga.’