Peter Gott: founder of the Westmorland County Show Food Hall

This year marks 25 years of the Food Hall at the Westmorland County Show, but its founder Peter Gott’s support for local produce and its makers and suppliers goes back much further

Sporting moleskin breeches, a wool waistcoat and felt hat, Peter Gott is instantly recognisable to visitors at the Westmorland County Show. As host of the Cumbria Life Food Theatre his voice is equally memorable as he maintains two days of banter and witty asides and shares his stories and deep knowledge of food with audiences.

For Peter is not there just to entertain, he also sees his job as being able to inform and educate, whether it is the ingredients critical for traditional Cumberland sausage, the impact of increased animal feed costs on food production or the importance of bringing on the next generation of chefs..

Many assume that he is from farming stock. For almost 40 years he did have his own farm and has spent a lifetime in the company of farmers. But, as evidenced by his gift of the gab, his background is in markets, in particular Barrow Market, the location of his first job and where he still spends his working days. He turns 70 in 2025 and more than 50 of those years have been spent in Barrow Market.

It came after a private school education, which saw him doing drama and getting up to mischief with comedian and actor Rowan Atkinson.

Peter (centre front) with Rowan Atkinson (back right) in their house shooting team at St Bees School Born in Morecambe, Peter went to Charney Hall Prep School, at Grange-over-Sands, then boarded at St Bees School from the age of 12. “It gave me a bit of discipline,” he says. “I was in the same house as Rowan Atkinson, Foundation North, and we joined the rifle shooting team together. We were in our house shooting team of four and in the school eight and we shot at different competitions. He was a farmer’s son and a damn good shot.”

They also did drama together. “In the first year I was a stagehand and Rowan was in lighting. In our last year we did Waiting for Godot; he was the leading actor and I was the slave who was whipped and dragged off, but I was also stage manager by that point.

“We used to do drama in Memorial Hall and it was quite an opportunity to have a fag in the toilets. There were double doors so you could hear someone coming in before you saw them. One day Rowan and I were having a fag – he was in a cubicle and I was by the sink when the doors opened. It was the bursar.

“I put my fag down the sink but Rowan’s kept recirculating when he flushed the toilet. The bursar told us to report ourselves to our housemaster. The fine for smoking was £5 but Rowan had been caught before, so he was looking at a £10 fine.

Peter at the Sillfield Farm stall in Barrow Market [Sheenah Alcock] “I was quite entrepreneurial so I suggested that I took the blame and the fine would only be £5. We were interrogated by the housemaster, but it worked and I was fined and confined to house for the term and stripped of my prefectship. I still maintain that Rowan Atkinson still owes me £2.50, plus interest.”

Meanwhile, Peter’s mother was running and growing a successful business under the name of ME Slater Ltd selling poultry, dairy produce and fruit and vegetables from three shops in Morecambe, two in Lancaster and one in Kendal, and a stall on Barrow Market since 1956.

At the time, the family lived on a small farm at Halton with a few pigs and ducks. Peter’s grandad ran the Red Well Inn, in the Lune Valley, and used to show poultry in London, a publican-cum-farmer-cum-market trader. He had the first permanent stall on Morecambe market as well, the licence for which Peter’s mum took aged 18.

“It was the war years and she used to tell me all sorts of tales about the black market including my grandmother being in bed with the carcass of a pig to hide it when the inspectors came. Every Tuesday mother would meet the Heysham-Belfast boat to pick up two bags of ‘washing’ that was actually fresh chickens. She was a rogue, there’s no doubt about it.”

Peter left school at 18. “I’d wanted to be a vet and enjoyed metalwork, but because I didn’t have the right O-Levels I couldn’t do the right A-Levels.

Peter with food consultant Lorraine Stanton at the auction at the end of the Westmorland County Show [Sheenah Alcock] “My father took ill before I left school and I was looking after him that summer. I started at Preston Poly doing business studies, law and accountancy but after my father died my mother and brother were struggling so after three months I came into the business.”

Peter, who had helped in the business since he was seven, was put straight onto the stall at Barrow with “an old Yorkshire trader, an amazing character” called Don Robson. “I had a plum in my mouth and I’d had a good education, brought up to be straight and honest. Don sold ‘Shap cheese’ that was branded as local but I knew there were no cheesemakers at Shap.

“The market was really busy then with about 80 traders. At 12 o’clock the buzzer would go and 5,000 Vickers workers would storm in for their pies and cooked chicken legs. It was manic.”

Eventually his mother wanted to focus on The Cherry Tree restaurant she ran in Kendal (now Bangkok Seven) and closed the shops, which she owned so was able to generate rental income.

Peter’s brother Walter took on the wholesale side of the business, calling it Gott Foods and selling cooked chicken portions. “He took it from a very small business to a multimillion turnover. At one point he was selling half a million chickens a week to pubs. We were in it together really but he took it on and developed it which left me with Kendal Market on a Saturday and Barrow on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

“It was really my destiny because I had to keep mother going. Then another stall came empty in the butchers’ hall in Barrow when I was about 24. I bought a bacon machine and fridges and that was the beginning of the meat side.

“We would go to the old Smithfield Market in Manchester to buy and bring the stuff back and sell it. I supplied Tebay Services with sliced bacon from 1975-1980, half a tonne a week, as well as frozen chips, peas and vegetables. I also had a McCain chip agency with 150 accounts in the Lake District.

Peter with the Queen “I used to go to London to buy cheese. I had over 200 different British cheeses and was supplying restaurants from the market. In 1987 I met the Queen at the East of England Show and told her that we could supply her with a different British cheese for every day of the year. I was promoting cheese for the Farmhouse Cheese Bureau and really got into it.

“The supermarkets didn't have the ability to offer them then, but if you’re a trader you need something that's different and unique so you don’t get stuck on price.

“The supermarkets are all about price, they all want to be the cheapest and that has a detrimental effect on our understanding of food. Food is totally essential, but we are treating it like it's a commodity, a basic fuel.

“When we finally got into Europe we started to see the French and Italians had more respect, pride and passion for good food.”

Traditional Cumberland Sausage [Sheenah Alcock] It was from Europe that Peter and others learned about Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), a recognition that emphasises the relationship between a product whose name, reputation or other characteristic is fundamentally attributable to its place of origin. It seemed made for Cumberland sausage.

Peter explains: “We could see that we were being undermined on price and quality and the PGI was something that was European-wide that would allow us to stamp our regional identity on the product.”

First, they needed a benchmark recipe. The late John Anderson, from Made in Cumbria, supported the concept with research, identifying 180 possible farmers and butchers in Cumbria who could be part of a PGI application, although the actual number ended up being much lower.

“We were all busy but there were some outstanding contributions made by the likes of Phillip Cranston, Stuart Higginson, Border County Foods, Woodall’s of Waberthwaite and Nick Bellas, at Shap. “A lot of people gave their time and energy to try and create the standard, but then Foot and Mouth came along and some businesses never came back from that.

Peter and butcher [Sheenah Alcock] “Inevitably there was reluctance to divulge recipes too and there were some lies and mistruths. There was an element of ‘this is my recipe and I'm not sharing it’.”

The Cumberland Sausage Association did find agreement, however.

“First, we had to agree meat content. Some were doing 90 per cent at the time, some were doing 70 per cent so we settled on a minimum of 80 per cent. We agreed on an inch diameter and that it must be sold in a coil.

“Then there were variations on seasoning: salt and pepper, Whitehaven port spices like nutmeg and mace, then some recipes had geographical variations like sage in the south but not in the north. You couldn’t include things like coriander, ginger, marjoram, chives and cayenne pepper.”

It took more than a decade but eventually confirmation of PGI status for Traditional Cumberland Sausage came in 2011, the 44th protected food in the UK, sadly a year after John had died.

At the time, Peter said: "This is a great milestone for the county and a well-deserved place in England's food history for a truly sensational, diverse food product."

The PGI protects Traditional Cumberland Sausage as a product that must be produced, processed and prepared in Cumbria with meat content of at least 80 per cent, sold in a long coil and seasoning which can be individual to the maker.

Peter had his own farm, Sillfield, by then, the brand under which he still operates today. He was still farming wild boar until three years ago.

Peter shares a joke with the then Prince of Wales

“My brother bought me four females in a pub as a birthday present. I'd bought the farm in 1980 it didn't have a lot of land, it was more about having a few sheep and pigs and processing there.”

At the same time as he was working to protect Cumberland sausage, Peter was invited by food writer and event organiser Henrietta Green to attend one of her Food Lovers’ Fairs with the Two Fat Ladies at the then nearly derelict Borough Market, in London.

“Because we had always done shows and events we were light on our feet and could pick up sticks and go to a day market anywhere. It became the start of the retail farmers and producers in Borough. We did the third Saturday in November in 1998 and the same in December that year. There was amazing demand for our produce.

“In the build up to Christmas we did an offer to collect a free slice of ham which was a great success. Because we were from the north and we were prepared to chat and talk, that market banter, people really liked us.”

In January 1999, he returned to continue the retail market with another trader, Wild Beef, from Devon. “By March we had 12 traders, in April 16 and by the August we had 40. It became London’s best kept secret. The food journalists and writers started to come: Prue Leith, Rose Prince, Sue Lawrence and Sheila Dillon.

“When we got to 99 in October someone suggested we should go weekly so I went to the trustees and asked to rent a permanent site. We used to get there on a Friday and realised there was a different audience, the pinstripe suit brigade, who wanted something nice to cook over the weekend. So then we started going down on a Thursday.”

Peter Gott [Sheenah Alcock] By then Peter had quite a posse heading to the capital from Cumbria including Farmer Sharp with his Herdwick lamb from Barrow and Furness Fish and Game. His wife Christine looked after the farm while he was away.

“We had a back room behind our stall and we all slept in there, it was very compact and bijou. We used to shower at a gym at London Bridge and we never did find out where our electric supply was coming from. I did it every week for 19 years. Eventually we established a cold room which meant we could leave stuff down there.

“Often smaller traders struggle with logistics and getting to market. There was a triangle of space and I offered to put in seven traders who wouldn't normally be able to get to a market like that. We researched what was in the regions and got them to bring their part of the country to London. It lasted two years and it made me the only person there who was a tenant and a landlord.”

Having enjoyed success at Borough Market, and at markets all over Europe, in 1999 he started talking to Roger Reed, the then CEO of the Westmorland County Show. “I asked him, ‘why can't we have a food hall like they have at the Suffolk Show and the Royal Highland?’. He said, ‘you can, here's a tent, get on with it’.”

Peter arranged for fridges for the 12 stallholders and recalls it taking two days to get them, and his Land Rover, back out of the field when the show was over after heavy rain.

“With having done Borough Market and shows I was well placed to try and do something. The emphasis of the first show was trying to show farmers how it was done, how to add value, so you might get £25 for your sheep at auction but you could get £75 for it at a show. There were logistics and hygiene issues to think about, but it's not that difficult.

“The Food Hall got bigger and it did showcase local food. Initially there was a bit of hot food cooking and then we had the idea for the Food Theatre and Christine Knipe, to her credit, took it on board.

Peter with a young Jamie Oliver “Phil Vickery was one of our first celebrity chefs 12 or 15 years ago. By then we had invested in the kitchen, which the Agricultural Society paid for because we were a growing asset to the show. It was also somewhere people could take shelter when it rained.

“It became like a little food festival, now it's a big food festival people. It's also an opportunity for farmers and producers. Some of them have gone on to supply people like Booths, others have done wholesale, it's been a stepping stone for them.”

He has worked with many celebrity chefs over the years on programmes including ITV’s This Morning with Phil, Rick Stein's Food Heroes, Jimmy’s Farm, Jamie’s Kitchen and Saturday Kitchen and even presented a programme for BBC Open University called Bringing Home the Bacon.

“I still believe in local food and food production, local abattoirs, different breeds and high quality,” he says. “There is so much highly processed food out there and we are all seeking clarification what it's all about. Behind the scenes there is a lot of commercial gain.

“Our sausages are gluten free with no MSG, nutmeg instead of antioxidants, no flavour enhancers other than spices, no colouring and a high meat content. They have a five-day shelf life because anything longer would need extra preserving ingredients and if you aren't going to use them straightaway you can freeze them.

“A lot of standard sausages contain rusk from bread that is highly processed by industrialised corporations. I think a lot of the intolerances we are seeing now are because of the cocktail of ingredients in processed foods. We used to have a big variety of microbiology and now we don't.”

Heading back to his stall in Barrow Market, he adds: “I strongly believe in the Slow Food movement, which encourages and promotes local food and artisan food production. Markets, farmers’ markets and shows are the only places where people can buy food from the producers and talk to people with the knowledge about how it's been produced.”

sillfield.co.uk

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