ONE hundred years ago, Arthur Fawcett signed a deed with Lord de L’Isle and moved into his new butcher’s shop in Ingleby Greenhow, near Stokesley.

Three generations and a centenary later, the shop is still thriving – his grandsons have just been named North-East finalist in the national British Sausage Week.

Arthur opened his first butcher’s shop in Great Broughton when he was a very young man. It was next door to The Jet Miners inn, which was run by the parents of the girl he married, Violet Dunning.

In March 1916, he took the lease on an established butcher’s shop in Ingleby Greenhow.

“It was a bit of a strange move, going to a smaller village, but I think it was because this place had a slaughterhouse next to it,” says his grandson, Arthur.

Lord de L’Isle was the lord of Ingleby Greenhow manor – the family seat is in Kent, but his father had acquired the North Yorkshire estate, including the Elizabethan Ingleby Manor, when he’d married the heiress of the Foulis family.

Like many families, the Fawcetts were not especially imaginative with names, so Arthur acquired the nickname “Tinner” (a mining reference?) and his eldest son Arthur, born in 1917, was known as “Vin” from his middle name, Vincent.

Sadly, Tinner died aged only 39 in 1924, so Violet carried on the business with her new husband, William Smith, until Vin was ready to succeed. He added more farmland to it with his wife, Eleanor, whom he’d met at the village school, and they became known as “the midnight butchers” as they took their produce around the villages and up into the moors in their mobile shop.

The third Arthur now runs Fawcetts with his brother, John, and his sons, David and Michael. Having been to London to collect the award for producing the Best Pork Sausage in the North-East, Arthur is considering renaming it the “Centenary Sausage” to commemorate the anniversary.