SHELFORD CORN AND COAL COMPANY

It all started with Richard Headley, who in the 1830s lived in High Green, Great Shelford. He owned a few strips of land in the, "old open fields" and in 1835 in exchange for these strips of land he was given about 11 acres of land at the corner of London Road and the road now called Station Road.

In 1845 the section of the London (Liverpool Street) to Cambridge Railway that passed through Great Shelford was constructed. The railway lines passed diagonally across Richard Headley's 11 acres with the new station and sidings adjacent to his land.

So Richard Headley built the Railway Tavern, plus a yard, malting and coal store next to the station and sidings. His idea being that the malt could go by train to breweries in London and coal would come by train to Great Shelford.

The next we know of the malting, yard and coal store is that they were lot number 2 in a sale by auction held by Messrs Grain Moyes and Wisbey at the Red Lion Hotel, Cambridge on Saturday the 26th April 1902, at 4.30pm.

By 1906 the yard and coal store was called The Shelford Corn and Coal Company, owned by a Mr. Martin Wright and a Mr. Kent and it was a young Mr. Clarence Edwin George who left the local School and went to work for the Shelford Corn and Coal Company.

The soil in the villages around Great Shelford is well suited to cereal growing, and in Kelly's Directory of 1922 there were four other corn merchants listed in Great Shelford.

Horses were stabled on the premises, which were used until the end of the Second World War to 'hawk' coal around the local villages. At the end of the second world war a grain silo and dryer were built, and malting barley was loaded in bulk straight into railway wagons in the Company's own railway siding.

In the 1950's the Shelford Corn and Coal Company was increasingly being asked by local companies to supply fuel oil, so with a lorry and a few tanks this side of the business was born. In fact, supplying fuel oil became so successful that the George family established a separate company in 1963, called Shelford Petroleum Oil Transport.