The Grand Onion Canal

An extract from the history of the grand onion canal, reproduced by kind permission of Mike Stevens, editor of "The Grand Onion Bargee" newsletter, of the NWF at Milton Keynes

2. Branches

Readers will recall that it was Hepzibah Milton's attempt to create a new ale called Gooeyness which accidentally created the pickling vinegar on whose success the Braunston Pickle company was founded. Her descendent John Maynard Milton-Keynes, Founder of the Grand Onion Canal Company, came across recipes in her diary for Blackberry Ale and Elderberry Ale. These sounded good and he reproduced them and decided to exploit them commercially. But neither the neighbourhood of Braunston nor those of its onion beds in Beds, nor his Milton-Keynes estate produced sufficient fruit for commercial production, so he found a suitable source in Buckinghamshire and built the first branch of the Grand Onion Canal to carry the fruit to his works. It was called the Ale Berry Branch.

The new ale sold so well that he went back to the diary and founded an un-named drink based on oranges and sparkling wine. His spice-importing business made it easy to get the oranges. He was keen to make the sparkling wine himself, but where could he find grapes? After a long search, he found one of the few vineyards active in the Midlands in the nineteenth century. It had originally been set up by a monastery founded by Ratt, one of the lesser known Celtic Saints, by a ford over the Great Ooze near Buckingham and was owned by a Mr Olds. JMM-K went into partnership with Olds and built a branch of the canal to bring the grapes to the factory. This was the Old St Ratt Ford & Buckingham Branch. Looking for a name for the sparkling drink he decided to immortalise the home county of the grapes he was using so called it "Bucks Fizz".