Who Do You Think You Are?

THE WORK OF GENERATION­S

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Cyril Osborne (left) shovels salt from an evaporatio­n pan into a storage bunker at the Maldon Salt Company works, Maldon, Essex, on 24 November 1948

Salt has been harvested in Essex for millennia. Sea water flows into estuaries and rivers, saturating marsh plants with salt that dissolves again and increases the salinity, helped by the relatively low rainfall. Our ancestors boiled the water away in clay pots and pans, leaving the salt crystals behind; the remains dot the county in mounds of burned earth and clay fragments known as the ‘Red Hills’. Maldon on the Blackwater Estuary has been a centre of production since at least the 11th century, and the Maldon Salt Company began trading in 1882. The Osborne family bought the firm 40 years later, and still own it today. You can see Cyril at work in 1968 on British Pathé’s site at tinyurl.com/bp-maldon-salt, and his grandson Steve featured in a 2020 episode of Inside Britain’s

Food Factories on the ITV Hub: tinyurl.com/itv-inside-salt.

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