Lord Wade of Chorlton
Entrepreneurial farmer and cheesemaker who helped keep Tory Party finances healthy in the 1980s
LORD WADE OF CHORLTON, who has died aged 85, was a Cheshire farmer and farmhouse cheesemaker who, during the 1980s as joint treasurer of the Conservative Party, was one of the corps of “friendly persuaders” who kept party finances on an even keel during Mrs Thatcher’s years at Number 10.
A third-generation cheesemaker, as chairman of the Mollington Farmhouse Cheese Company, Oulton Wade was credited with being a leader of the revival of interest in fine British cheeses, helping to develop a thriving export market.
His entrepreneurial spirit was stimulated by a visit to a San Francisco wine and cheese shop in 1979, when he found himself appalled by the dismal selection of British produce on offer.
He went on to set up an export business which by 1981 was selling £100,000 of the best farmhouse cheese to the Americas, including Blue Cheshire, which he was one of only two farmers to produce.
In November 1983 Wade took his company out of the Milk Marketing Board, worried by the tendency amongst British cheesemakers under the MMB umbrella to concentrate on “developing cheaper methods of production rather than improving quality”.
Under Wade’s leadership, Mollington became one of the largest makers of traditional farmhouse cheese in Britain, at its height making more than 6,000 gallons of milk a day into cheese. It was exported to America, Japan, Australia and Europe, and as well as cloth-bound hard cheeses like Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, Wensleydale, Derby, Caerphilly and a revived version of Oxford, the company expanded into soft cheese, including fromage frais, steadily building up sales through specialist distributors in Britain.
In 1986 in preparation for the EEC’S single market in 1992, Wade and the ex-food from Britain marketing director Bill Marlow founded a consultancy, developing a network of offices throughout the Community to provide clients, mainly in the food manufacturing and retail sectors, with marketing and communications services. “I firmly believe that the Single Market will provide profit, so I shall be taking whatever initiatives I can to make sure that Mollington products will be among the first to be truly European,” Wade told The Grocer magazine in 1989.
The following year however, the Mollington Farmhouse Cheese Company was sold to Northern Foods, and in later years Wade, who was first and foremost a believer in free trade, became a convert to Brexit.
For many years after selling the cheesemaking operation, however, Lord Wade would send large quantities of cheese from his son Chris’s cheesemaking business to the Lords bar to sustain their lordships over the festive season.
William Oulton Wade was born on Christmas Eve 1932 to Samuel Wade and his wife Joan, née Wild. The family company, William Wild and Son, had been established by his grandfather in the 1920s to provide horses to pull the buses in Liverpool and Manchester. By the 1950s it had moved into dairy farming, cheesemaking and pig breeding.
Wade was educated at Birkenhead School and at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied Veterinary Science. He developed a keen interest in pig genetics and was one of the farmers who, in the 1970s, developed the “Q-lean” pig breed with a low ratio of fat to lean.
Wade was a Conservative member of Cheshire County Council from 1973 to 1977, and during his business career served on many industry bodies, including as chairman of the English Cheese Export Council (1982–84).
He was treasurer and chairman of the North West Area for the Conservatives until April 1982 when he was appointed to succeed Lord Boardman as joint treasurer (with Alistair, later Lord, Mcalpine) of the party. While Alistair Mcalpine raised money from business, Wade toured the country raising funds from the constituencies.
Knighted in the Birthday Honours in 1982, Wade was created a life peer on his retirement in 1990.
In the Lords, he served on the Science and Technology Select Committee, and in 2002 chaired a report by the committee on the microchip industry, “Chips for Everything”, which recommended the creation of a national centre which would bring academics and engineers into contact with the legal and financial resources needed to develop their business ideas into commercial products.
Lord Wade, who listed his interests in Who’s Who as “politics, reading, shooting, food, travel”, was Chairman of the Historic Churches in Cheshire Trust and raised some £25 million with the Duchess of Kent for the Christie Hospital in Withington, Manchester.
He retired from the Lords in 2016. He married, in 1959, Gillian Leete, who survives him with their son and daughter.
Lord Wade of Chorlton, born December 24 1932, died June 7 2018