Brian Goodall is a fourth generation strawberry grower in the New Forest.
His family’s strawberry farm near Lymington is still a popular pick-your-own attraction.
“We have always been a good place to grow English early strawberries because of the proximity to the sea and our hopefully lack of late frost that will kill flowers.
“So it’s always been a good spot with high light intensity as well.”
With old varieties of strawberries – Royal Sovereign and Cambridge Favourite and Vigour – the south coast would have the first crops of strawberries each summer.
But with a short picking season of only about three weeks, he recalled the need to get strawberries onto the train as quickly as possible.
“So they would start picking very early in the morning and start packing them as soon as they were picked.
“They put covers on top of the trays and then run them down to Lymington Pier where there was a steam train waiting with a goods carriage.
“It would then take the fruit straight from there at eight, nine o’clock in the morning up to Swanwick on the other side of Southampton.”
In Swanwick, a train would be waiting to take an “immense” load of strawberries from growers across the country, bound for retailers and wholesalers as far as Cardiff, London, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.