THE village bakers at Garsington, near Oxford, were determined not to be beaten when supplies of flour threatened to dry up during a bread strike.

Millers refused to deliver to small bakers in an act of solidarity with employees of national bakery firms, who had walked out on strike in a pay dispute.

But John Clinkard, known as Herbie, and his wife Ciss, who ran the bakery at Garsington, refused to give in and hit on an ingenious idea to beat the strikers.

They hired a lorry from an Oxford scrap merchant and arranged for it to be driven to a mill in the Cotswolds, where the owner had agreed to supply them with flour.

The flour was loaded on to the lorry and covered with a sheet, and scrap metal was laid on top.

The pickets at the mill gates assumed it was a scrap lorry, let it through – and the villagers at Garsington got their daily bread!

The owner of the lorry refused to charge for the use of the lorry – all he asked for was one of the bakery’s wonderful lardy cakes.

The Clinkards’ son, Dave, who lives at Deddington, has fond memories of the bakery, which was run by his family for nearly 100 years.

He recalls how they were asked to make brown bread by hand for the Queen Mother when she flew by helicopter to stay at Garsington Manor, home of Sir John Wheeler-Bennett.

Sir John was writing a book on the life of her husband, King George VI, and wanted to include her memories of their life together.

He remembers one customer who refused to buy any more bread from the bakery when the price of a loaf went up by a halfpenny, claiming it was an extortionate rise.

Mr Clinkard recalls: “She rather changed her tune when the bread strike started. Of course, we supplied her.”

The bakery came to the rescue when the village suffered a two-week electricity blackout during the severe winter of 1963.

Mr Clinkard tells me: “We delivered bread on a sledge and cooked joints of meat for villagers on our coal-fired ovens. Our coal merchant was very good – he would always tip us off if supplies were going to be short.”

Interviewed by our sister paper, The Oxford Times, in 1960, Herbie Clinkard recalled many large families in the village.

He told the reporter: “One Christmas Eve, a woman kept me on the doorstep debating how many loaves she would need to last over the holidays. In the end, she said 20.

“Not long afterwards, two little tots came running after my horse and cart and said: ‘Mother said she had better have two more to make sure’.”