Australian Dictionary of Biography

Joe Ford, c.1970

Courtesy of the Ford family

Joseph (Joe) Arthur Ford (1915-1998), air force officer, dairy technologist, and business manager, was born on 2 June 1915 at Shepparton, Victoria, twelfth of thirteen children of William Frederick Ford, farmer, and his wife Susanna, née Hillier, both Victorian born. Until 1912 his father and grandfather had been proprietors of W. F. Ford & Son flour mills at Shepparton and Dookie. With irrigation transforming the region, the family then developed a mixed dairy farm and orchard at nearby Grahamvale, where Joe attended the local State school. His father died in 1924, after which his maternal uncle, the South African War veteran Joe Hillier, was an important influence.

Having completed his education at Shepparton High School, Ford commenced employment in 1932 at the Shepparton Butter Factory, of which his uncle was a director. After five years the frugal Ford had saved £660, which allowed him to undertake a diploma of dairy technology at Hawkesbury Agricultural College near Sydney, from which he graduated with honours in 1940. He then worked briefly for the Port Curtis Co-operative Dairy Association Ltd at Wowan, Queensland, before becoming assistant dairy bacteriologist at Maffra Co-operative Milk Products Co. Ltd in Gippsland, Victoria.

On 24 April 1942 Ford enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force for service in World War II. After preliminary aircrew training in South Australia at Victor Harbor and Mount Gambier and back in Victoria at Sale and Nhill, he embarked for Britain in March 1943. Further training as a navigator-observer followed until 29 December, when he was posted to No. 576 Squadron, Royal Air Force, based at Elsham Wolds, Lincolnshire. As a bomb aimer in a Lancaster crew, he flew missions over Berlin, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Leipzig.

On 7 May 1944, near Le Mans, France, Ford’s Lancaster was shot down, and six of the crew died. Only Ford and Air Commodore (later Air Chief Marshall Sir) Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman, who had joined the mission as an observer, successfully parachuted out. With assistance from the French Resistance, they survived various precarious ordeals until the Gestapo raided their refuge on 8 June. Ford evaded capture and aided by the Underground, French families, and Ivelaw-Chapman’s fortitude under violent interrogation, he remained undiscovered, hiding and working on farms, until Allied troops overran the area on 17 August. Debrief interrogations with American and British intelligence officers followed, during which he provided information on German V-1 and V-2 rocket installations he had seen in occupied territory during his time as a fugitive.

Returning to Britain on 20 August, Ford became an instructor at No. 27 Operational Training Unit, Litchfield, and was commissioned on 29 October. On 9 December at Elvet Methodist Church, Durham, he married English-born Joan Gargate, a leading aircraftwoman in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They were to have three children. Early the next year he was posted to the Directorate of Military Intelligence (MI-9) in Paris to help identify French citizens who had assisted downed airmen. He was promoted to flying officer on 29 April.

Back in Australia in January 1946 and demobilised the next month, Ford resumed his employment at Maffra as chief dairy chemist. In 1948 he moved to a similar role at the Trufood of Australia Pty Ltd factory at Glenormiston South, where he became manager in 1953. In this capacity he travelled to the United States of America in 1957 to study the latest innovations in dairy processing. It was to be the first of many overseas study trips, during which he also represented Australia at World Dairy Conferences. On three of these trips (1965, 1969, and 1973) he visited French families that had sheltered him in 1944. He was also reunited with Ivelaw-Chapman in Melbourne in 1953 and they kept in contact.

After Trufood was taken over by local cooperatives, in 1960 Ford was appointed chief executive of Tatura Milk Products Ltd, a small Victorian processor near Shepparton, with an annual output of around 650 tonnes of butter from farm-separated cream and only eleven bulk milk suppliers. He encouraged local Italian families to switch from tomato growing to bulk milk production with the factory providing expertise and assistance. By the early 1970s the number of bulk milk suppliers had risen to 350, supplying more than 450,000 litres per day and meeting 80 per cent of factory demand. Ford also expanded Tatura Milk’s product range to cream cheese for domestic and international markets, milk powder, and a dairy calf supplement.

Ford led Tatura Milk for more than two decades, building the business and fending off the rampant Murray-Goulburn group’s takeover bids of the 1970s so that the company remained a locally administered and independent plant. This benefited the wider Tatura community, with Ford later recalling that ‘if you removed the factory from the town, you closed the town … it was a time for Tatura to retain community leadership’ (Godbold 1989, 169). As late as 1989, Tatura remained the only single-factory dairy cooperative in Victoria.

In both military and civilian life, Ford maintained that he just ‘did a job’ (Carey 1998, 14), which was the reason he gave for declining both military and civil honours. Widely respected in the Tatura community, he was a member of the Freemasons and of Rotary, a justice of the peace, and chairman of the Goulburn Valley Football League tribunal. He served as president of the Victorian division of the Australian Dairy Institute in 1968 and was awarded the Dairy Industry Association of Australia’s J. I. Scarr gold medal for outstanding service in 1987.

Retiring in 1983, Ford continued to live close to the factory he had modernised and protected from takeover, and he enjoyed flying both British and French flags at his home on special days. Having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he died on 11 October 1998 at Tatura. His wife and their children, Susan, Paul, and Tony, survived him. After cremation, his ashes were scattered at the farm at Kialla East where his uncle Joe Hillier had lived. Joe Ford Drive in Tatura and a wing of the Moyola Lodge aged care hostel were named after him.