Mr. John Eastwood
1909 – 1995
John Eastwood, better known as Jack, was born in 1909, the son of William and Elizabeth Townroe Eastwood. He left Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Mansfield, at the age of 16 on the understanding that his grandfather had bought a small farm and that he would be able to work on it.
But the deal fell through and instead he joined the family’s civil engineering business, Adam Eastwood & Sons. By the time he was 21, Jack was put in charge of the company’s biggest contract, installing sewerage works at Romford, Essex.
When it was finished and he had married his childhood sweetheart, Constance Tilley, Jack announced plans to take a farm in Essex. His father responded by buying the substantial Belle Eau Park Farm, in Bilsthorpe, Nottinghamshire to attract him back home.
Jack then became a farmer, as well as helping with the civil engineering business, and his wife developed poultry units at Bilsthorpe which included thousands of turkeys for Christmas and, eventually, 3,000 laying hens in homemade cages.
By 1956, his attention had turned to broiler chickens as a means of turning home-grown cereals into a higher value product to sell. His first broiler houses were fitted with his own design of automatic feeder, and he was delighted with the margins left by the chickens.
He multiplied the houses, increased their size, and developed a 3,000t/week feed mill at Belle Eau Park, thought to be the largest in Britain at the time. A chicken packing plant was also incorporated, becoming the first fully integrated unit. The chicken business went public in 1959, with Jack advising his many friends to buy shares.
Egg units were added to the existing broiler units from 1963 and Jack’s company Eastwoods came close to supplying 10% of the national market for both chickens and eggs. He sold the poultry business for £40m to Imperial Tobacco in 1978.
Jack had begun supporting charitable works in west Nottinghamshire from early in the days of the expanded poultry business. He had a particular sympathy with the coal miners.
He was three times president of the Newark and Nottinghamshire Agricultural Show and provided the society with a number of large buildings, as well as funds to encourage other aspects of the show. He was knighted in 1975 and appointed a deputy lieutenant of Nottinghamshire in 1981.
He was also an important benefactor to the Farmers’ Club in London, the Royal Agricultural Society in Warwickshire and the Glyndebourne Opera, in Sussex. He became virtually blind in his early sixties, which extended his charitable works into new fields.