"BROCCOLI"

ST ERTH | 1920s - 1960s

Workers stood next to crates of packed produce on a trailer

Cornish broccoli ready to be loaded. Courtesy of STEAM Museum of the GWR

When is a cauliflower not a cauliflower? When it’s Cornish broccoli!

The coming of the railways allowed, for the first time, perishable items to reach major city markets quickly, so that they would be in good condition to sell.

Cornwall’s mild and temperate climate meant that fruit, vegetables and flowers would ripen early meaning they could be on sale well before the produce of other areas. It also meant they could command a higher price.

From West Cornwall, these included flowers, locally grown as well as brought over from the Scillies, new potatoes and what was called broccoli (and later Cornish broccoli) but was what we know as cauliflower.

Initially though, the broccoli (cauliflower) grown in west Cornwall was yellow whereas that grown in Brittany, France and imported (the Roscoff type) was white.

Kresen Kernow, Cornwall’s archives, records how strenuous efforts were made in the 1920s and 30s to improve broccoli and hence increase sales.

The GWR were supportive, in 1929 even offering to install sidings and erect packing sheds for growers next to Penzance Goods Depot at Ponsandene, near Long Rock. These efforts led to Cornish broccoli being the white cauliflower that we know today.

Business boomed and its success carried across the world. The Canberra Times in Australia reported in its 3 August 1934 issue that during April, 280 special trains had carried 18 million heads of broccoli from Cornwall to destinations across Britain.

It continued that as many as 13 special trains ran on just one day, carrying half a million head of broccoli. The special trains were known locally as “Broccolos”.

After the war, in house film unit British Transport Films made a film showing the efforts made by the railways to carry this and other special traffics. It’s called “Train Time” and was made in 1952. The British Film Institute (BFI) has more information about it. The film can be seen at the BFI in London and is also available on DVD.

St Erth station, Penzance Goods Depot and the now closed station at Marazion were all major starting points for broccoli heading off by train.

Broccoli was transported in big numbers from Cornwall to London and other cities by rail until the late 1960s. The peak year was 1946 when over 65,000 tons of broccoli were loaded.

With the cutbacks of the Beeching era and just after, the railways ceased to have the wagons, locomotives or staff to be able to run the special broccoli trains.

This together with the fact that the grower had to deliver their crop to a station which, on arrival at the destination, then had to be taken from the station to the market meant that, as lorries and roads improved, broccoli and other perishables transferred to the door-to-door service offered by the roads and no longer went by train.