Bacon curer who gained a cult following dies aged 87

Mr Davies, from Halfway House, near Shrewsbury, spent a lifetime in the food industry and wrote a book – the Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer – to pass on traditional skills from the meat industry to a new audience and to inspire a new generation of meat workers.

“I didn’t want to die and let the information die with me, I just had to pass it on,” he said when it was published in 2009.

“The old curers were magic men,” he was to recall.

“They were simple people who just loved what they were doing. But now that tradition is dying because the current producers cut so many corners and stick so much water into it.

“It’s all to save time. In my day it took a month or two months to cure a ham. These days they can do it in 48 hours, but it just isn’t the same.”

A master curer – curing is a process of preservation and flavouring of meat – in retirement he was a consultant to major supermarkets and even did work for a Shropshire company which produced ham for the Queen.

He had served an apprenticeship to Theo Mountford – owner of the famous Theo’s Bacon Curers in Stafford.

Karen McCall of Ludlow-based publisher Merlin Unwin Books said his memoirs had gained a cult following.

"He was probably the UK’s most famous bacon curer in his day, renowned in the UK and with a following in America."

The son of a steel worker in Hanley, after leaving school at the age of 15 unable to read and write – he had dyslexia – he found work as an apprentice at an old curing house in a cobbled street in Stoke on Trent.

It was the start of a successful career, and opportunity came knocking when an American offered him a job in his Philadelphia ham factory.

Karen said: "He cured and learned more recipes in the US where his work also involved training the inmates at the State Penitentiary how to cure bacon and make sausages.

"On returning to England after several years, he climbed the ladder in a new company but found the world of curing had been changed by cheaper supermarket products so he branched out on his own, buying a run-down remote smallholding in the Derbyshire Peak District."

Later moving to Shropshire, his bacon and sausages became nationally acclaimed.

He died on February 24 in Shrewsbury.