Bourne Services Group

Bourne Services Group owes its origins to Ernest Stroud, an engineer, who moved to the town from Quorn in Leicestershire in the early 1930s and set up the Bourne Hygienic Laundry on a small site at the corner of Manning Road and Recreation Road. Over the past 70 years, the company has changed its name several times to reflect the evolutionary nature of the service sectors in which it operates but still concentrates on what it knows best: washing and cleaning.

The introduction of the domestic washing machine and selective employment tax in the 1960s and 1970s forced the company to look elsewhere for business growth and it was then that a relationship was formed with a Bristol-based company, Brooks, to develop an emerging market in providing a linen hire service to hotels and restaurants. This part of the business trades as Bourne Textile Services and now serves over 350 customers in an area from Brighton to Burton-on-Trent and all points eastwards. Over 650,000 pieces of linen are processed each week and such is the demand that a new laundry is being built off Cherryholt Road to give additional capacity in a still expanding but competitive market.

Eighty thousand garments are handled each week on the Manning Road site by Brooks Bourne Services, a company jointly owned by Brooks Service Group and Bourne Services Group. This processing unit specialises in servicing industry and, especially more recently, the food sector by providing their laundered garments on a rental basis.

Bourne Contract Support Services also have their head office on the site and were established in 1991 with Mike Taylor, the managing director. The backbone of the company provides cleaning services to the Ministry of Defence and to other large industrial and office premises in East Anglia and the East Midlands employing over 400 staff in the process.

The Group is still owned and managed by the Stroud family with Ernest Stroud's sons, Basil (now retired) and Stuart (now semi-retired) and his grandsons, Hedley and Norman, all involved in managing and developing the business at some stage over seven decades.