Here’s the trick of this address: the name on the jar was Frank Cooper, but the work began with Sarah Jane Gill. She was born in Beoley, near Redditch, in eighteen forty-eight, married Frank in eighteen seventy-two, and two years later, at just twenty-four, she made seventy-six pounds of marmalade in the kitchen above this shop. She used leftover Seville oranges from her husband’s grocery business... and Frank took the credit. Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade was born.
That feels familiar, doesn’t it? The woman does the work, the brand grows a moustache.
This place was not a marmalade factory. It was a grocer and wine merchant, part of the Cooper family business, serving the High Street and the colleges, and it stayed here until nineteen nineteen. But the marmalade side-line grew so fast that the cramped back-of-shop kitchen could no longer meet the Factory and Workshop Act of nineteen oh one - a law about safe, legal working conditions. So in nineteen oh three, architect Herbert Quinton designed new works in Park End Street.
By the nineteen thirties, around a hundred people worked there, though the company still sold the stuff as a wholesome little cottage industry. Industrial scale with homemade manners. It won a Royal Warrant in nineteen thirteen, apparently because King George the Fifth liked it, and jars even went to Antarctica with Scott’s Terra Nova expedition.
The business left Oxford in nineteen sixty-seven after Brown and Polson bought it. Sarah died in nineteen thirty-two. Her name finally reached the wall in two thousand and one, on the blue plaque here... named on the plaque, but not on the brand.
When you’re ready, head for six Turl Street, about three minutes away.
