Hughes, William

by Terry Clavin

Hughes, William (1920–2006), businessman, was born in Dublin on 16 November 1920, the first child of James Hughes (see below), of Hazelbrook farm, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, and his wife Estelle (née Porter). He represented the third generation of his Church of Ireland family's involvement in Ireland's leading private dairy business. His grandfather William Hughes (c.1841–1906) was originally a youngest son from Summerhill, Co. Meath, and settled in Rathfarnham in the 1870s to work as a farm steward before taking up the tenancy of Hazelbrook farm in Rathfarnham in 1884. He completed a large farmhouse, Hazelbrook House, in Rathfarnham, in 1898, and developed his dairy herd, gaining a merited reputation for producing quality milk. In 1900 he founded a dairy business, distributing milk in Dublin's southern suburbs. After William's death in 1906, his sons William, George and James took over the running of Hazelbrook Dairy; as a result, the business became known as Hughes Brothers.

James Hughes (1877–1944), businessman and farmer, was born 28 December 1877 in Whitechurch, Co. Dublin, the third son of three sons and three daughters of William and his wife Margaret (née Bennett). Over time, James emerged as the guiding spirit behind the family enterprise, further evolving his father's progressive approach to dairying. The Hughes brothers continued to farm at Rathfarnham (where James lived and took over the management of Hazelbrook farm) and at Tallaght, Co. Dublin. By the 1920s they had two herds of 170 shorthorn cattle, and James had become a recognised authority on dairy cattle and stock breeding. The brothers also bought milk from local farmers and were particular in choosing suppliers, insisting on high standards of quality and hygiene. In 1912 James began selling milk in bottles, but there was little public appreciation of the hygienic benefits thus conferred and the venture was aborted. Nonetheless, the business expanded steadily, acquiring lucrative bulk contracts with public and religious institutions, and became one of the largest milk distributors in south Dublin. By virtue of its suburban location, the Hughes Bros dairy could maintain cows more economically than city-centre dairies while still being close enough to provide milk fresh to Dubliners.

James served as chairman of the Dublin Cowkeepers' and Dairymen's Association (1919–21) at a time when milk vendors were being heavily criticised by newspapers and politicians for operating a cartel that failed to provide a steady, cheap and safe supply of milk to Dublin city. Moreover, milk distribution was characterised by extreme disorganisation and by a profusion of small participants. While he defended association members, Hughes realised that cattle-keeping within the city was unsustainable, and that he was in a position to initiate a safer and more efficient system of supply based on economies of scale and the development of milk processing functions.

In late 1923 the Hughes brothers committed themselves to establishing a pasteurising plant and a bottling factory at Hazelbrook, acquiring a pasteurising machine second-hand for £4,000. The timing was propitious: during the early 1920s, scientific studies and the vigorous publicisation of their findings by medical practitioners had raised awareness of the contribution made by 'loose' or unpasteurised milk towards the city's high rate of infant mortality and tuberculosis. In advertising, Hughes Bros stressed both the purity of their milk and the hygienic conditions in which it was processed.

The new plant opened in autumn 1924, and the demand for its pasteurised, bottled, and more expensive milk from schools, hospitals, religious institutions, and the suburban middle classes soon outstripped supply. From early 1925, the firm bottled all its milk. Hughes Bros' success prompted a number of other large dairies to pasteurise and bottle their milk. Hughes's bold initiative had rapidly brought about a great advance in public health conditions in Dublin, though lingering distrust of pasteurisation, which was held to be unnatural, and the poorer classes' inability to afford the more expensive pasteurised product, meant that large quantities of untreated milk continued to be sold in the city.

During the mid 1920s, Hughes Bros began focusing mainly on processing and distribution; the dairy farm was wound down, and milk parlours and sheds were converted into stalls for horses and into garages for petrol trucks and vans. In 1926 Hughes Bros registered as a limited company and had a workforce of seventy. The pasteurising plant was upgraded in 1933, increasing its output six-fold to 600 gallons per hour. Meanwhile, the commercialisation of the internal combustion engine enabled the use of delivery trucks to collect milk from farmers in Dublin's rural hinterland, mainly in Wicklow and Kildare. Hughes Bros claimed some 75 per cent of milk supplies sent to Dublin from Co. Wicklow, and James is credited with pushing largely unwilling farmers in that county into improving their dairying methods.

A major headache was the farmers' insistence that dairies take all the surplus milk produced during the summer. James's inspired solution was in 1926 to absorb the additional milk by making ice cream, investing in a manufacturing unit and extra refrigeration, and marketing the finished product as HB Ice Cream. While ice cream had been introduced into Ireland by Italian street vendors in the late nineteenth century, the market remained small. Where Hughes Bros led, the other dairies soon followed, and within a decade Hughes could claim to have driven Irish levels of ice cream consumption to among the highest in Europe, perhaps second only to that of Italy.

The biggest retailer of ice cream in the country was the Woolworth's chain, which, however, found the importation of ice cream from its supplier, Walkers in Liverpool, to be increasingly problematic following Irish independence. Walkers searched for an Irish supplier, and, soon after Hughes Bros started producing ice cream in 1926, signed a deal whereby the Irish company agreed to make and supply to Woolworth's in Dublin ice cream made to Walkers' recipe. Woolworth's remained HB Ice Cream's biggest customer for the next forty years.

In 1932 Hughes Bros won the contract to supply milk and ice cream to many of the religious institutions and houses hosting some tens of thousands of visiting clergy and laity from abroad during the eucharistic congress, held in Dublin. During the event, Hughes Bros also supplied ice cream to mobile vendors, who achieved bumper sales in the warm weather. Encouraged, Hughes invested in more modern freezers in 1933, enabling the production of ice cream in a continuous flow rather than batch-by-batch. The same year, retailers began using the newly developed Rose Carton machine, which wrapped ice cream in a brick shape: as a result it could be sliced into flat portions and served with a wafer biscuit on each side. The two-penny wafer, a popular child's treat, and the pint brick, served as a desert with tinned fruit after Sunday dinner, became staples. HB's advertising slogan urged: 'Bring home a brick after Mass.'

While the other dairies continued to regard ice cream purely as means of disposing of surplus summer milk, Hughes Bros identified this sector's greater potential: profits from ice cream sales were much greater than those from milk, and the product could potentially be sold on a national scale rather than confined to Dublin. For long, this potential remained merely that, because distribution outside the Dublin area was a serious challenge given the poor state of the roads and the absence of electricity facilities across most of the country. Hughes gradually built up a network of retail customers in areas with mains electricity. This slow process was expedited by supplying retailers with free fridges (and, if need be, also with private power grids) on condition that they only stocked them with HB products.

During the 1920s and 1930s Hughes Bros was one of four large milk processing concerns that sprang up on the outskirts of Dublin, the others being Merville Dairies, Sutton Dairies and Lucan Dairies. Ostensibly rivals, the four dairies (all protestant-owned) carved up the Dublin market, with Hughes Bros being apportioned the south – excepting the coastal area – and south-west of the city. Hughes and his brothers were particularly friendly with the Craigie family who owned Merville Dairies. This cartel's efforts to exploit its market muscle inevitably brought it into conflict with the smaller distributors, who continued to undercut it by selling unpasteurised milk, and also with the Leinster dairy farmers, who were vulnerable to the emergence of powerful middlemen because they had failed to organise themselves around dairy co-operatives.

During the 1930s, the dairy farmers grew increasingly militant. A collapse in milk prices caused by overproduction brought their discontent to a pitch and resulted in the milk strike of summer 1936. While the small Dublin distributors were sympathetic, their larger counterparts generally took a hard line. However, Hughes Bros, though hardly a soft touch, was noted for its willingness to accommodate farmers, being focused as much on improving the quality of its milk supplies as on driving down the price it paid. In response to this crisis, the government passed the Milk (Regulation of Supply and Price) Act of 1936, which established the Dublin District Milk Board as a mechanism for collective, government-supervised negotiations between producers and processors-distributors, with the goal of guaranteeing a constant supply of milk for the consumer during the winter and a minimum price for producers during the summer.

Hughes was forward-thinking and pragmatic enough to welcome this development as a means of stabilising the market for the benefit of larger, entrenched participants. Closer cooperation among the state, the large dairy processors and the farmers' union promised to rationalise the dairy sector by imposing minimum standards of safety and quality. Thus, in 1937 James's brother William criticised the government's unwillingness to enforce the milk act. Despite an uncertain start, occasioned by further wrangling between milk distributors and producers, and also between the larger and smaller distributors, the milk act provided a framework in which the subsequent regulation of the dairy sector was conducted. The large dairies succeeded in dominating the Dublin District Milk Board and used it to squeeze their smaller competitors out of business. Sales of unpasteurised milk in Dublin ceased in the late 1950s.

In 1938 Hughes Bros had a turnover of £58,000 from milk and £22,000 from ice cream, and seemed to be prospering as the expansion southwards of Dublin's suburbs created a captive market of young, middle-class families on its doorstep. However, the company's growth had required heavy borrowing on an inadequate capital base and, although a capable businessman in other respects, James was not an assured handler of financial matters. Moreover, the death of his wife Estelle in 1933 at the age of 34 had an adverse impact on his health and morale. His threat to close the company, when faced with the prospect of a workers' strike in 1935, may have been a crude bluff, but could also have reflected his despairing state of mind. By 1937 his worsening diabetes was undermining the company, and other family members failed to fill this leadership vacuum.

Hughes Bros' main creditor was the Royal Bank, which, after repeated warnings, was prompted in autumn 1939 to call in its loans by the certainty of economic hardship attendant upon the outbreak of the second world war. The bank forced the three brothers to resign as company directors and relinquish their shareholdings, and gave them two years to vacate their homes. James left Hazelbrook House in 1940, being permitted to move into Holylands House just across from the dairy as a caretaker at the bank's discretion. He died at Holylands on 12 March 1944. With his wife Estelle (née Porter), he had one son and three daughters.

His son William was educated first at home in Hazelbrook House and then at Sandford Park School. Upon finishing school in 1938, he joined the family business, working as a trainee dairy manager. When the Royal Bank took over Hughes Bros in 1939, the new management decided to retain him as an employee on the advice of the company engineer, Paddy Moran, who had been impressed by his dedication. The only family member who continued to hold company shares, he retained a 2 per cent stake. He was promoted to dairy manager in 1940, and pursued a night course in bacteriology at Kevin Street technical school.

Like most private companies, Hughes Bros suffered from a sterile market and production difficulties during the Emergency, and as a result William struggled to maintain the company's previously high standard of milk quality and hygiene. In 1942, after suffering a bad bout of rheumatic fever and seeing no future for the business, he applied to join the RAF, but was ruled out by his illness. Encouraged by the Hughes Bros' management, he decided to remain, and his career progressed steadily thereafter. He was appointed to the board in 1950 before becoming assistant general manager in 1958. Although he did not succeed W. L. Freeman as managing director until 1967, he effectively ran the company from the late 1950s. As with his father, employees respected him as fair-minded and courteous.

Under the leadership of the new management, who had bought out the Royal Bank in 1944, Hughes Bros had grown strongly following the end of the war, benefiting in terms of ice cream sales from the further progress of rural electrification, and in terms of milk sales from the elimination of the smaller vendors and the continued growth of Dublin's southern suburbs. In 1961 the company employed 550 people (rising to about 800 by the end of the decade), produced 2 million gallons and 1.5 million gallons of ice cream and milk respectively per year, and had a fleet of seventeen lorries collecting 21,000 gallons of milk daily from 750 farmer-suppliers. The finished product was distributed by sixty-four horse-drawn carts and forty-seven electric vans in Dublin, and by seventy-one trucks serving shops, institutions and rural depots. As executive, Hughes was preoccupied with maintaining the company's hard-pressed production and distribution facilities, and with Hughes Bros' fierce rivalry with Dublin Dairies, a catholic-owned dairy that had emerged in the late 1940s and had, thanks to the support of the archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (qv), monopolised the custom of catholic institutions.

Although Hughes was more engaged with the milk arm of the business, this sector was increasingly subject to state control, which guaranteed market security but also limited profits. In contrast, the ice cream market, where Hughes Bros was particularly strong in terms of market share, was profitable, not susceptible to political interference, and fast-growing as the product rapidly shed its luxury tag. The opening of a new ice cream factory in 1961 facilitated the overdue addition of ice pops to the company's product line, and with that an additional surge in sales. Further to this a determined effort was made to develop a still patchy ice cream distribution network. But it was apparent that Hughes Bros would struggle by itself to raise the funds needed for its ongoing expansion.

In 1963 the company agreed in principle to be taken over by US conglomerate W. R. Grace, but rejected the offer of a share swap, wanting instead to be paid in cash, and eventually secured this concession in 1964. Hughes formed a rapport with the new American owners and was friendly with J. Peter Grace of the company's founding Irish-American family. Finding Hughes Bros to be, by American standards, an old-fashioned and rather paternalistic company lacking in bureaucratic sophistication, the new owners introduced an avalanche of paperwork and formal procedures, as well as strict financial checks and a longer working day. For Hughes, this represented a challenging experience, and he undertook an advanced management course at Harvard University in 1968.

In 1966, having obtained sanction from W. R. Grace, Hughes announced the construction of a new, ultra-modern, £800,000 ice cream factory. A week later, Hughes Bros underlined its intent by acquiring Lucan Dairies, leaving it with some 50 per cent of the Irish ice cream market. Meanwhile, the construction of the new factory quickly ran over budget, much to the alarm of the American parent company; it ended up costing £1.3 million. Hughes spent much time in London seeking to reassure Abel Smith, W. R. Grace's managing director in the UK. From 1967, he worked closely with Smith in splitting Hughes Bros into two discrete components, a dairy division and an ice cream and frozen foods division.

During 1967–8, Grace's installed younger managers within Hughes Bros, most notably the new marketing manager, Gerry Kilcoyne, a Harvard graduate who had spent two years in Grace's New York headquarters. In 1968, Kilcoyne was made general manager of HB Ice Cream (Hughes continued as general manager of Hughes Bros), and his aggressive sales tactics further disconcerted Hughes Bros' already alarmed competitors. In response to Grace's takeover of Hughes Bros, the other Dublin dairy businesses (Dublin Dairies, Merville Dairy and Sutton Dairy) had sought to repel the foreign invader by merging to form Premier Dairies in 1966.

The opening of HB's new ice cream factory in 1968 – the most modern of its type in Europe – paved the way for a major consolidation within the Irish dairy/ice cream sector. W. R. Grace had never been interested in the milk trade and sought to exploit Premier Dairies' obvious anxiety by offering to swap Hughes Bros' milk business for Premier Dairies' ice cream business. In summer 1968, Hughes sounded out his friend Victor Craigie, who was the dominant figure within Premier Dairies, and played an important role in the ensuing negotiations, which were successfully concluded in January 1969.

He continued as general manager of the Hughes Bros milk line within the Premier Dairies group, in which he held a 2 per cent shareholding, and also became non-executive director of HB Ice Cream. In 1971 Hughes Bros changed its name to Hughes Dairy Ltd in order to avoid confusion with HB Ice Cream Ltd. The remainder of Hughes's career was uneventful, as might be expected given Premier Dairies' status as a cumbersome, highly unionised monopoly, subject to price controls and operating within an increasingly saturated milk market. During the 1970s, Premier Dairies controlled 90 per cent of the Dublin market, with Hughes Dairy accounting for 35 per cent. When serious competition emerged in the early 1980s, Premier Dairies was unable to respond due to its unwieldy ownership structure and inability to rationalise its five city dairies in the face of union resistance. This crisis culminated in a major management reshuffle in 1982, the year in which Hughes retired, citing ill health.

In 1946 William married Georgina Hemmingway. They lived at Holywell, Dundrum, Co. Dublin, and had two sons and a daughter. His hobbies included golf and yachting. In retirement he lived at Annestown, Co. Waterford, and latterly at Druids Glen, Co. Wicklow. He also lived to see his childhood home of Hazelbrook House dismantled and then in 2001 reconstructed brick-by-brick in Bunratty Folk Park, Co. Clare. William Hughes died on 15 September 2006 at the Kinvara nursing home in Bray, Co. Wicklow.