David Lidgate
Butcher favoured by celebrity chefs who sold Highgrove beef and founded the Q (for quality) Guild
DAVID LIDGATE, who has died aged 83, was one of Britain’s most celebrated butchers, his shop, C Lidgate in Holland Park Avenue, patronised by Notting Hill matrons, connoisseurs and top chefs, including Gordon Ramsay, Fergus Henderson and Nigella Lawson.
The shop had been founded by his great grandfather Charles Lidgate in 1850. David inherited the business in 1959 at the age of 19 when his father died.
Despite having a high reputation, based on its close relationship with farmers, the business, which operated out of two rented premises in Chiswick and Holland Park, was struggling. David Lidgate went on not only to restore its finances, but to raise its reputation to new heights, winning a slew of awards.
He was passionate about the flavours of different breeds of beef cattle and lamb, paying minute attention to details of farming and feed, quality of husbandry and how the animals were slaughtered. He sourced his beef exclusively from prime steer herds, raised on grass. These included herds owned by his brother Bill and the organic beef herds at Highgrove, the estate owned by King Charles. His shop was also the only retail outlet to be supplied with the award-winning beef from the Glenbervie herd of 100 per cent pure-bred Aberdeen Angus cattle.
Lidgate’s clientele were prepared to pay a premium for meat that had been hung properly and expertly trimmed of the fat so vital to its flavour, and he was excoriating about the impact of supermarkets on meat quality.
“Unfortunately, many people have got the wrong idea. They want lovely bright red meat that sparkles in the [supermarket] cabinet,” he told the Independent on Sunday in 1992. “It may be tender, though it’s often tough, but it usually tastes of nothing. I know the people who have put it there, bright, bushy-tailed graduates, full of technology, taking short cuts, getting everything right except the taste. Then they wonder why people are going off meat.”
He was highly critical of EU grading regulations which reward farmers for “producing a lean continental animal with cheap feed. It may be what suits the supermarkets, but the customers are losing out because they are not getting the taste and flavour which comes from slow, considered rearing.”
In 1987, at a time when independent butchers’ shops were closing at the rate of 20 a month, Lidgate was instrumental in establishing the Q Guild of butchers (Q for quality), membership of which demands high standards of hygiene and professional practice, policed with rigorous inspections by independent experts from the Meat and Livestock Commission.
To Lidgate, who served as Q Guild’s founding chairman, a key benefit of the guild was mutual assistance and the encouragement of innovation: “I have never yet visited a Q Guild shop without coming away with some good new idea. The way I look at it is that just one product could change my business.”
The vital importance of high standards and reputation was illustrated during the BSE scare and the salmonella epidemic among chickens, which took a huge toll on the butchery trade. For Lidgate, they had the opposite effect: “They were a tremendous boost for our business, which is based on a close relationship with farmers. The crisis brought it home to people that they didn’t know anything about the meat they were getting.”
David James Lidgate was born in west London on May 7 1940, the second of four children of William Lidgate and Phyllis, née Bracknell. He recalled, as a toddler, being fascinated by the business’s sausage machine and relishing eating raw bacon rind and beef dripping on toast: “When I was growing up, I’d work in the shop on Saturdays and holidays.”
Sport was his passion and by the age of 17, while attending City of London School, he had made his way up through the ranks of the Wasps Rugby Club. He was just about to make his debut in the first team when his father died aged 50 and his mother wanted him to take over the butchery business.
“I left the team and gave myself 18 months to learn as much about the industry as I could, so I went straight from school to Smithfield Market.”
There he learnt how to tell quality meat from look and touch, but it was during a holiday in Austria that he had what he called his “eureka moment”: “I got talking to a young man who… offered to introduce me to his cousin, a butcher. His shop turned out to be unlike anything I’d ever seen. Back in England, it was all crash-bash in those days, but this place was immaculate: small cuts of meat laid out on steel trays, salamis hanging around the walls, and in the back, they must have had £10,000 worth of machinery… they were manufacturing sausages and absolutely no meat was wasted. I thought then, this is the future.”
Back home, he closed the shop in Chiswick and in 1974 bought the freehold of the Holland Park premises. As well as sourcing his meat from the best suppliers, he expanded the range of sausages, pies, pâtés, and other prepared products: “A Michelin-starred chef extended our variety of sausages from two to about 15 in a week.”
In 1992 a journalist visiting his small office above the shop found it scattered with awards and certificates: “There’s one for bratwurst, another for coaching an under-10 rugby team, and the most recent, a gold medal from the Netherlands for the world’s best steak and kidney pie.”
Lidgate was always alert to trends in meat consumption. In 2005, after publicity about the Iq-boosting powers of red meat, he detected “a definite increase in sales around exam time, as parents try to give their children a head start”. Three years later, duing the economic downturn, he noticed an “increase in sales of beef brisket and pork belly – and our pies are selling very well”.
In 1971 he married Josephine Simpson, with whom he had two sons, Danny, now the company chairman, and Ben, now the finance director and chief sausage chef.